Lee & Kirby: The Provenance of STRANGE TALES #103

Lee & Kirby

I believe that it’s inarguable that, when it comes to the creation of the early stories and characters of the Marvel Universe, Jack Kirby was for many years denied his rightful due, reduced to the level of a mere penciler of other people’s stories and ideas. Clearly, Kirby was more than that–he was an equal partner in everything he worked on, and often the major contributing force in the stories, particularly the longer time went on. These are facts which should be reiterated whenever possible. However, there are some Kirby enthusiasts these days who are not happy with according Jack a majority of the credit, they need for him to have 100% of it if not more. Their vision of Stan Lee is of a talentless man who did nothing, produced nothing, but only destroyed Kirby’s work due to his abiding and long-lasting jealousy of the King. To make Kirby the hero, they need Lee to be the villain. And so this has led to some analytical pieces that strive mightily to prove this already-arrived-at conclusion. Recently, I was challenged to read one of these pieces by a well-meaning Kirby supporter. “If only I would look at the evidence that is so clearly laid out here,” they opined, “my eyes would be opened and I would see the truth clearly.” So I did review the material in question, and I found it to have some interesting thoughts and insights about what might have gone down. But I also found its results skewed by confirmation bias, beginning with its conclusion and then interpreting the facts to fit that conclusion. I really did try to go into this thing with an open mind, but I remain unconvinced by some of its arguments. But one of them made me study this issue of STRANGE TALES a little bit more closely. And so I want to share my observations and conclusions with you all, in the hope that will provide a bit of additional texture. I don’t know that I can legitimately recruit every claim that is being made about this issue–it’s not really possible to prove a negative. And I don’t know that my version here is correct. But let me show you what I see.

First off, the Human Torch story in STRANGE TALES #103, despite the fact that it was the third story to be published, was apparently the first one produced. This is made clear by the job numbers on the splash pages of STRANGE TALES #101 (the first Torch solo story) and #103 respectively. These codes were used for accounting purposes to track stories in production, so the earlier the number, the earlier the work was produced (or at least begun.) We can see that the STRANGE TALES #101 story has a job number of V-846, whereas two issues later, STRANGE TALES #103’s story carries the earlier number V-823. It is possible and even likely that the story in STRANGE TALES #103 was produced as a sort of pilot for the series, a proof of concept, and that it was set aside in favor of the two other stories that came before it, which set the Torch in a more grounded world.

This story, however, is more fanciful and epic. It involves the Torch investigating houses that are disappearing within his home town of Glenville and discovering that they are being destroyed by aliens from the Fifth Dimension so as to keep people away from the entryway to their universe until they are ready to invade Earth and conquer it. There’s an evil warlord, Zemu, a deposed king and his beautiful daughter, and a ton of Kirby’s super-machinery and alien cityscape vistas. So it’s certainly a story that Jack left his fingerprints on in a bit way. The bone of contention, though, seems to be the credits, which indicate that Stan Lee came up with the plot, Larry Lieber provided the script, and Jack Kirby did the art (penciling.) Looking at the few examples of the original artwork to this story that have surfaced in the years since, people have observed that the captions and dialogue were written on the boards in Kirby’s hand. This has led some to believe that Jack not only illustrated this story, he also scripted it, and his finished dialogue was used but was credited to Larry Lieber. Typically, this is presented as Lee stealing Jack’s money as well as his credit–I don’t entirely understand how that’s meant to work if it was Larry who would have been paid for the dialogue, maybe they figure that Lieber kicked it all back to his brother. And in all honesty, I can’t prove that that isn’t what happened. But I don’t think that it is.

Looking through my files and across the Internet, I was only able to turn up images of two pages from this story, and the second one is relatively useless for the purposes of study, both being framed behind glass, photographed at an angle and matted in such a way to obscure any border notes or edges there may be. But the other page was a bit more interesting when I boosted the gain on it.

This is the opening splash page to the story, and with the contrast turned way up, you can see Kirby’s handwritten balloons clearly in the top panels (especially if you zoom in on the page.) Also apparent is that, in the large splash image, either Kirby himself or inker Dick Ayers changed the position of the Torch’s right arm–the original version can still be made out faintly. And that pretty well conclusively indicates that this story was produced after FANTASTIC FOUR #1, rather than before as some have theorized. Because that erased arm is of the Torch in his later Carl Burgos-styled design, the one that was adopted mid-production in FANTASTIC FOUR #3, rather than Kirby’s earlier blob-of-fire incarnation that was used in FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and #2. This indicates to me that this story was conceived and drawn no earlier than FANTASTIC FOUR #4. (The job number of FF #4 is V-643, an easier way to check that, really. FANTASTIC FOUR #6 was V-835, which means this story would have been started between FF #5 & #6.) It wasn’t done as a pre-FANTASTIC FOUR HUMAN TORCH pilot, as some have theorized.

Here’s a closer look at a portion of Johnny’s altered arm position.

And a pair of examples of Kirby’s handwritten text. That’s definitely Kirby’s handwriting, identical to his later border notes.

Again, more Kirby-lettered text in the pencils.

It looks to my eye that the original title was erased and changed to a title that editor Lee liked better. The bits of lettering that we see here are in Stan’s handwriting and similar to other places where he comped in title or blurb copy on a cover or splash page.

This round Human Torch blurb seems to have been indicated in Stan’s hand as well.

Now, here’s the interesting bit. There’s lettering for the credits as well, and the handwriting on those credits doesn’t appear to be Lee’s. In fact, they look more to my eye like Kirby’s–though it’s difficult to say that 100%–might have been somebody else’s, such as Sol Brodsky. But if it was Jack’s handwriting, why would he be inscribing credits that were incorrect and robbed him of the authorship of the story?

I think there’s perhaps a key piece of this whole mystery hidden in, of all places, an interview that Kirby gave to Will Eisner that saw print in THE SPIRIT Magazine #39. Talking about the manner in which stories would be produced, Kirby indicates that, wherever possible, he would rough in the balloons before doing any tight drawing, just as he learned in the Eisner & Iger shop when he was first starting out. In other words, the balloons needed to be accounted for as a part of the composition, assuming they could be, plus there was wasted effort if something got drawn and then was covered up by a lot of balloons. We can see that Jack follows this method all through his later self-written work on the Fourth World books and all the way up to his final days.

So what do I think? Well, Larry Lieber has indicated on multiple occasions that when he was producing stories for Kirby (or stories that wound up being illustrated by Kirby in any event) he would always produce a full script. Again here, the Kirby partisans point to the fact that these statements on the part of Lieber have only turned up in the last twenty years–as if anybody was talking about this stuff in such minutia prior to that. (On a personal note, I’ve spoken to Larry directly and privately a number of times over the years about questions just like that one, and he consistently indicated to me that he wrote his stories for Kirby full script. No way to prove that that’s what he told me–but that’s what he told me, and I believe him.) Reading over the actual copy in this Human Torch story, it’s pretty clear that it isn’t Stan’s. It’s a bit more stiff and formal, and while it employs some of the wiseacre humor that Lee was simultaneously employing, here it feels a bit more like an artifice. It also doesn’t read anything like Kirby’s copy. In recent years, a case was made that Jack scripted FANTASTIC FOUR #6 as well as penciling and largely plotting it, and a close reading of the text in that story makes that fact apparent. There are several instances of phraseology and turn-of-phrase that echo Kirby’s later solo efforts. The stylistic similarity is easy to detect.

Lee & Kirby: The Mystery of FANTASTIC FOUR #6

But none of that can be detected in this story–indeed, in any of the Torch stories that Kirby drew whose scripts are credited in the books to Larry Lieber. Whose work do they sound like? Larry Lieber’s. Comparing them to contemporaneous stories that Larry scripted over his own pencils or those of others makes it clear that the approach and syntax is similar.

So at this point, I lean on Occam’s Razor: if Lieber claims that he wrote his stories for Kirby full script and Jack lettered copy on the pages, then the natural conclusion is that he took that copy from Lieber’s full script, roughing it in first before doing his tight drawing in the manner that had become second nature to him. He certainly may have taken liberties along the way–Simon and Kirby were known to do that any time a script was given to them by whatever publisher they were working on, and the same is reportedly true for Jack’s work at DC on Green Arrow and other features in the late 1950s. And Kirby definitely brought his visual A-game to the spectacle of this story. But I don’t believe that only Jack Kirby could have come up with “invaders from a next-door dimension sink houses to prevent their discovery.” If anything, that does sound like a Stan Lee plot–one for any number of the short 5-page mystery/suspense stories that he’d been overseeing for years.

But all that said, I don’t know for certain. I can’t 100% rule out even for myself that Kirby may have written this story as well as illustrated it. I just don’t believe the evidence that I see proves that out. And I certainly don’t believe that Lee miscredited this story so he could somehow himself pocket the scripting cash that rightfully belonged either to Jack or to Larry. None of these people were cartoonish super-villains, in 1962 especially they were all working men who were trying to put food on the table and to provide for their families. Nobody back then thought for an instant that anybody would give a whit about this stuff more than sixty years later.

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41 thoughts on “Lee & Kirby: The Provenance of STRANGE TALES #103”

  2. “…destroyed Kirby’s work due to his abiding and long-lasting jealousy of the King. To make Kirby the hero, they need Lee to be the villain.”

    With respect, I believe this is the most misleading and recurring argument that occurs if anyone defends Kirby- who thinks Stan Lee was “jealous”- the point was receiving the plotter’s pay, plain and simple. It wasn’t anything emotional such as jealousy, it was motivated by professional ambition and surely Lee wanted to keep Kirby happy as he was the main generator of stories and content.

    No one needs to “make” Kirby OR Lee anything than what they were. Applying terms like hero and villain shows a dramatization that is not necessary, and complicates something that is simple to understand. Stan Lee deserves a lot of credit; we don’t have what we have today without his curating and cultivating. Again, the point that people miss is that Stan gets credit for what he DIDN’T do and it continues to be enabled.

    As for Kirby’s contributions, his story notes in the margins and above the panels… yeah, that’s significant evidence. No need to vilify anybody.

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    1. I’m not saying everyone and I’m not saying you, Sinner. But in that book that I was talking about, there must be six references to Stan’s jealousy, hatred and lack of understanding of Kirby’s work. So there are certainly those who believe that and prosletise that. On the matter of plotting payment, as I’ve pointed out in the past, Marvel’s accounting had no provision whatsoever for paying for what we’d now call plotting until the very early 1979s—and when instituted, it was a flat $25.00 fee. Writing was defined, rightly or wrongly, as putting the words on the page. So Lee didn’t get any less money for a job that was plotted by Steve Ditko or anyone else, and he didn’t get more. That was the way the outfit conducted business, it definitely put the onus on the artists, but that was the deal for everyone walking in. Stan certainly wanted the credit as a means of job security and potentially as a way out of a dead end situation, and he was certainly not fair in his accreditation with Kirby and others. But this wasn’t a kickback scheme at all, not really. That’s people who don’t understand how the business worked back then letting their lack of understanding deceive them.

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      1. Thank you for a fair response. I would like to stress though that I think taking exception to six references to Stan’s jealousy is a minor issue compared to the generational and half century long campaign- most of it largely driven by sentimental nostalgia and emotion rather than logic (I don’t mean Tom Brevoort but I do mean, say, former Marvel Editors that wrote biographies about Lee) to keep proper credit- I didn’t say “total” credit- from Kirby, Ditko, etc.

        In regards to these specific Strange Tales stories, a wise person pointed out that you only need look at the Torch stories Kirby drew and compare them to the ones Ayers drew. And that’s not taking anything from the wonderful Dick Ayers, but you understand what I’m saying.

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  3. Tom, All you have to do is read Journey Into Mystery #90, the first story in the series that Larry’s name is used that DIDN’T also have Kirby as the artist.

    That and the following issue (also without Kirby), pretty quickly ended Larry’s superhero work. Just like that, he’d been exposed.

    The writing is horrible. It’s NOT the same scripter as the previous issues. It’s a novice – which is what Larry was at the time.

    And he’d never have another credit with Kirby again – and his superhero work for the time was suddenly over.

    The idea that this guy wrote FOR Kirby is just silly. He was a no one at the time. And it was hidden away for 40 years and suddenly unveiled in 1999-2000?

    Makes no sense.

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    1. I don’t know about “hidden away” and “suddenly revealed”, Chuck. I think it was more “nobody gave a damn” and “Hey, people are still talking about these ancient stories.” I haven’t done a deep dive into Journey Into Mystery #90 and #91, haven’t really looked at them in years. But my guess is that their syntax and sentence structure and sense of language are very much in line with the issues before that. The difference, of course, is that Jack wasn’t there using his storytelling muscles and his design chops and sense of the dramatic to help elevate the material. I have no doubt that Kirby likely messed around with whatever the script was for Strange Tales #103. But as I spent a bunch of time writing up, I’m also pretty sure that that isn’t his copy either. Since Kirby lettered that copy into his pages, that indicates that the copy had to come first. And if it’s there and isn’t Kirby’s, whose could it possibly be? Perhaps the person credited for it on the first page?

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      1. Read JIM #90 and #91. The syntax is off, the sentence structure is off, they are written by a novice. THESE are the issues Larry wrote. Without Kirby its glaring.

        How can you do a comparison unless you use all the facts available to you?

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      2. Chuck, you only brought up JIM #90 and #91 last night, it really isn’t fair to be demanding that I immediately scrutinize them, reach the same conclusion that you have and return to Mrs culpa and tell you you’re a genius. I have put them on my list to examine, but that’ll likely happen after I looks at the early Kirby Rawhide Kid stories more closely, as those too are being put forward as examples of Jack writing without getting credit or pay due to him having placed pencil copy on the boards, and I want to see if there’s anything to that. For the moment, I’m happy to stand pat on yesterday’s observations, at least until somebody convinces me they are in error.

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    2. Just for the sake of discussion, if you believe that Lieber’s scripting abilities were not good enough for this story, why does it follow that Kirby MUST have scripted it? Hypothetically, wouldn’t it be possible that Lieber’s brother (and credited plotter here) helped him out with a few scripts? Either as a favor, or combined with some mentoring along the lines of what Lee was looking for in terms of “voice” in these stories. An idea that “Lee had an uncredited hand in some scripts that are solely credited to Lieber” strikes me as pretty mundane over a more far-fetched “Lee took what should have been Kirby’s credit and gave it to Lieber” (again, I’m not asserting that the former actually took place, only that it seems a more reasonable conjecture than the latter).

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    3. Don’t want to get into any fights but it should be pointed out that Larry Leiber has stated he preferred the westerns to superheroes, which may be why he drifted away from them. Also he did some Superhero work after JIM 91. He did the scripts for two Spider-man’s annuals (plot credited to Stan of course) and a retelling of Spider-Man’s origin in the first spectacular Spider-Man.

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      1. >>>Don’t want to get into any fights but it should be pointed out that Larry Leiber has stated he preferred the westerns to superheroes, which may be why he drifted away from them. <<>>Also he did some Superhero work after JIM 91. He did the scripts for two Spider-man’s annuals (plot credited to Stan of course) and a retelling of Spider-Man’s origin in the first spectacular Spider-Man.<<<

        He didn't write those, he just did the pencils.

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  4. One can also find examples of Kirby roughing in balloons with dialog from other writers’ full scripts in the penciled pages of his last works for DC around 1975 (when he needed to illustrate stories by writers such as Gerry Conway or Denny O’Neill in order to fulfill his contract before returning to Marvel).

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  5. When I was a member of the Yahoo Timely-Atlas group that Doc Vassallo ran, we came to a well-argumented conclusion that the job numbers were not only entered to keep track of the production line, they were very specifically entered at the moment the script was delivered. This fits completely with what is know from personal records by writers and artists, it explains how certain scripts in the late forties and late fifties were used a long time after they were bought and numbered and it explains why Stan Lee himself always has several job numbers in a row on one of the two days a week he came into the office after writing at home. Unfortunately the listings at Atlastales stop around 1962, so we can’t really have a look to see what the rhythm of Larry Lieber was as a writer, bit I bet you could probably see him turn in his scrips with some sort of regularity.

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  7. I have a hard time accepting Lee was getting freelance fees for plotting or scripting. I know he premised a lawsuit that reportedly got him an eight-figure settlement on that claim, and repeated it in subsequent sworn statements. But it needs to be remembered that he had a large financial interest in that assertion. (I also find it quite ironic that the Kirby idolaters who believe pretty much every word from Lee is a bald-faced lie are firmly convinced that particular claim is God’s honest truth.) The reason I’m skeptical is because accountants consider self-dealing by an employee a major no-no, particularly if said employee has vouchering authority. There’s too much potential for embezzlement. Martin Goodman’s operation was nothing if not accountant-managed considering how it was structured. His accountants would have been throwing fits if Lee was vouchering himself for freelance work. I find it much more likely that he was given a budget, and took on the writing work, such as it was, in order to maximize what he could pay the artists. Lieber was thrown an occasional freelance bone because he was a Goodman relative. Goodman also might have been willing to let Lee hire Jerry Siegel and others to lessen the workload after he saw the sell-throughs on the new superhero books. But allowing Lee to do freelance work himself? I think Goodman would have been much more likely to increase Lee’s salary than pay him freelance fees. I’m sure that’s what his accountants would have recommended in any case.

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    1. The reason people believe it is because in THIS instance, the information is backed up by the artists, and later the other writers who were there at the time. Even Roy Thomas backs it up. And it’s an instance, where it doesn’t make Stan look GOOD in hindsight – because that money is actually being stolen from the artists who actually wrote the stories.

      Stan Lee had a collection of Rolls Royce’s by the start of the 70’s. He didn’t get that from just an Editorial salary.

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      1. I doubt the amount of money one could get from grabbing scripting payments would amount to a VW Beetle, much less even one Rolls Royce. Stan Lee realized the big money was in TV and movies. There’s no mystery there.

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      2. Marvel was printing 10 or more comics a month in 1962. Stan, in having the artist’s write the stories was credited as the writer on ALL of those pages. 10 comics – 23 pages each – 230 pages at… let’s say $6 a page. That’s $1380 EXTRA a month. Using the Inflation Calculator that would be like today making $13, 780 EXTRA a month.

        Marvel put out 154 books in 1964 (12.83 a month) – at 23 pages per (though some were Annuals) – that’s 3542 pages – even at $5 a page freelance, that’s an EXTRA $17,710 per year he could’ve made. EXTRA on top of his Salary.

        In 1965 the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow debuted at around $8,300

        He could’ve very much afforded it.

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      3. I don’t see how Kirby or Wallace Wood, the artists who have complained about non-payment for plotting work, would know what Lee was getting paid one way or the other. They didn’t work in the office, and I seriously doubt Lee was discussing it with them. People don’t discuss their pay with colleagues who aren’t their supervisor. Thomas might know, since he worked in the office and could have seen the vouchering in question. Could you point me to what he’s said about it?

        Does Lee’s claim he was taking these freelance fees make him look good? No, but a $10 million cash settlement hinged on the claim. So he had the choice of looking good to the handful of comics fans who actually care about this, or $10 million. I think his choosing the $10 million was understandable.

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      4. “Marvel was printing 10 or more comics a month in 1962. Stan, in having the artist’s write the stories was credited as the writer on ALL of those pages.”

        Not exactly. Marvel was publishing around 8 comics a month, and not all stories were credited to Stan Lee: you had stories written by Larry Lieber, Don Rico, Robert Bernstein, and Jerry Siegel before the younger generation of writers came along (Roy Thomas, Denny O’Neil, Gary Friedrich, etc.).

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      5. No, he had a Rolls Royce by the Fifties. This is documented in interviews by Lee himself, Ken Bald’s daughter tells a genuinely fun story about her riding it in when she was around ten (which was in the fifties) and so forth. In the recent documentary, Lee alludes to how he afforded such luxuries simply by taking on more assignments. Chuck Rozanski wrote about how, in 1980, he picked Lee up for a signing and Lee remarked he hadn’t driven any car except for a Rolls Royce in years (since Rozanski’s car lacked A/C).

        Not begrudging Stan for having these things, btw- just giving you context that this existed long before the seventies.

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      6. Rodrigo, Chuck is correct (he counted). It was 10 or more by 1962. Goodman increased beyond eight as soon as he could and people have simply repeated the myth.

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    2. Martin, there is really no question on this point. When Stan scripted (dialogued) a story, he was paid for writing that story freelance. He did get the whole payment, since there was no accounting function at the time to subdivide the work into smaller increments. As to why Martin allowed this to happen, I would guess that with the division on the verge of shutting down anyway, he didn’t really care. It wasn’t an Earth-shattering amount of money in the first place, and it may have been easier for him than to increase Lee’s guaranteed salary and get the same amount of writing work out of him.

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      1. Is there no question about this because there’s documented proof, or is there no question because no one has questioned it? There’s a lot of BS comics lore that’s the latter.

        Should I have just accepted the comics lore version of Steve Gerber’s conflicts with Marvel when I was researching my article about it? No. My training in historiography didn’t allow for that. So I spent several hundred dollars of my own money getting copies of the court records, and those painted a very different picture of what happened. The comics lore version was a combination of ignorance, taking Gerber’s dishonest accounts at face value, and jumping to false conclusions based on prejudices about the legacy comics publishers and key staffers such as Jim Shooter.

        As far as I know, the only proof of Lee taking freelance fees are his statements in court filings. As these were sworn statements, they deserve a degree of credence. But that doesn’t make them true. Lee had enormous financial incentive to lie about this, and he knew Marvel couldn’t disprove it. (Marvel has very little extant paperwork from the ’60s.) Going on my own experience and knowledge, I know businesses do not as a rule permit what he claimed. As such, I offer my skepticism.

        Maybe someone has proof of the situation that I’ve missed. I welcome it.

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      2. RSMartin, I spoke with people at Marvel including the late Millie Shuriff who worked in Marvel’s accounting department beginning in the mid-1960s. And while I never asked her directly whether Stan was paid for his work freelance, that is my summation of the impression of our discussions. That’s only hearsay, I know, but I feel confident in its accuracy. Others such as John Romita and Roy Thomas and Marie Severin who were around certainly indicated that Stan was getting paid for his writing, though nobody ever got into those sorts of specifics.

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  8. “In an article printed in THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #61, a writer by the name of Michael Breen…”, hi, sorry, that was me – hi, everyone! I was quite pleased when I saw Tom discuss my original article (in his post back in 2019), and I’m glad my argument is still being considered as valid today, as far as FF#6 goes. That said, I would agree with what Tom has said about this story – nothing suggests Jack Kirby dialogued (or plotted) this issue. I also agree with what RS Martin has said, and (sorry, RS) that doesn’t happen very often when you talk about Jim Shooter. No disrespect here – I remember my own and Tom’s expectations of civilized debate rather than slanging matches, so I don’t want to get into that digression. I may be one of the people who believe Jack Kirby usually did rather a lot more than he was ever given credit for, but I think the only credit he deserves for this particular story is as artist par excellence.

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    1. I tend to side-eye people who agree with me too much. My goal in writing is to say things that should be said that I don’t see other people saying. As such, I’m always courting controversy. As for Jim Shooter, I defend him to the degree I do because I think he’s gotten a ridiculously raw deal from comics commentators.

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  9. I’m not remotely interested in discussing the works of Lee and Kirby with fans WHO WEREN’T IN THE ROOM when these stories were created. I love both men, learned from both men, worked with both men and believe both men considered me a friend. When it comes to Larry Lieber, he is not only a dear friend but a man I have found to be unfailingly honest. I believe he wrote full scripts for Kirby. But I also believe it possible that Jack was allowed to change scripts as he drew them. However, for the most part, most of the Lieber scripts appear to me to be written in Larry’s style. He described the working process many times to me. I believe him. My only complaint is that no one is inviting me to New York events and are thus depriving me of the pleasure of hanging with Larry. He’s one of the best people I know..

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  10. >>>I’m not remotely interested in discussing the works of Lee and Kirby with fans WHO WEREN’T IN THE ROOM when these stories were created.<<<

    But you've made your feelings known about Bob Kane. You weren't in the room when those stories were created. Why is that ok.

    That's hypocrisy.

    And I apologize to anyone offended by me comparing Stan Lee to Bob Kane – Kane only stole credit, he actually paid the artists and writers for the work they did. Stan stole both credit AND pay.

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    1. Chuck, you’re going too far here. I’m going to let this stand but be on notice, around these parts we show respect for the people we’re talking to and talking about.

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  11. While I honestly am not trying to start a “let’s you and him fight” situation, I find it interesting that one of the biggest proponents of the “increment theory”– the idea that somehow, there was a ton of plotting money that Kirby didn’t get– has also abjured any rancor toward Stan Lee. In fact, I won’t even mention the proponent’s name here. I just want to make the point that even other pros can be misled about the accounting realities of an industry as marginal as that of comic books, and I appreciate Tom’s clarification of these obscure matters.

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  12. Pingback: Lee & Kirby & Lieber: Examining JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #89, 90 & 91 – The Tom Brevoort Experience

  13. On the lighter side, the second panel of ST #103 probably ought to read “a fantastic means of TRANSPORTATION” rather than “transformation.” A misreading on Artie Simek’s part?

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  14. I understand that Jack and Steve Ditko received occasional raises in their page rate, and I suspect that this was to compensate them in some way for their plotting contributions. (And perhaps also to prevent them from taking a walk.) Jack and Steve seemingly preferred to do their own thing anyway, whether they got paid for it or not. It was more credit for their story contributions they wanted, at least to begin with.

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  17. Pingback: End of the Year Stats – 2023 – The Tom Brevoort Experience

  18. I can’t comment on the other stories, but this has all the hallmarks of a typical Kirby script from start to finish. It’s very similar to stories he did before working with Stan and stories he did after, especially in Black Cat and Alarming. Lieber’s writing was simply not as esoteric as Jack’s.

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      1. I can’t say about the dialog, Tom, but accidentally stumbling on an interdimensional gateway is a favorite Kirby trope. See Hole in the Wall, Hole in the Sky, the Fourth World, the Night People, any number of FF stories. Even Face on Mars to some extent.

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  19. 40’s and 50’s
    Jack Kirby – 20 years writing and drawing his own stories
    Larry Lieber – 20 years doing… none of that

    60’s
    Jack Kirby – needs to be given scripts to do stories
    Larry Lieber – scripts all of Kirby’s monster stories, creates Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man, etc.

    70’s, 80’s 90’s
    Jack Kirby – 30 more years of writing and drawing his own stories
    Larry Lieber – not really doing anything…

    LOL…. yeah, ok.

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