It’s no great secret that the relationship between editor and scripter Stan Lee and artist and plotter Jack Kirby had grown fraught by 1969. Having at least co-invented the characters who ad saved the company and done the lion’s share of the story work that continued to make the Marvel books he worked on shine, Kirby had grown increasingly frustrated by the amount of credit lavished on Stan Lee for their joint accomplishment. Additionally, he’d also found himself sidelined in recent months, pushed off of characters and storylines that he’d initiated, or forced to change the intent and the direction of the stories he was doing. This had most notably happened with the Silver Surfer, whose origin Kirby had been building up to depicting when he was shocked to discover that a SILVER SURFER title had been added to the publishing schedule that he wasn’t working on–and that its first issue would reveal an entirely different origin for the character he had created.
Kirby had already begun to keep himself in check, holding back on creating any new characters or concepts for Marvel in the hopes of being able to negotiate a better deal for himself, either there or at some other rival publisher. Every once in a while, he wasn’t able to help himself and an Annihilus or an Agatha Harkness would show up in a new story, but for the most part, he refrained. In the meantime, he continued to fulfill his monthly commitment to Marvel by revisiting characters and concepts that he’d already put forward. One of those characters was Galactus, who had been introduced in three very popular issues of FANTASTIC FOUR. Kirby had embarked on a sequence of stories involving Thor seeking out the mysterious origins of the planet-devouring titan, but throughout these issues, strange things kept happening. That ongoing quest kept getting sidelined for other business, as though Kirby was being diverted from delivering on what he was trying to do.
Matters all reached a head in THOR #169, the issue in which Galactus’ origin and backstory was meant to be revealed. And it was–though not exactly the way that Kirby had intended it to be. This issue is one of the strangest and most labored in the run. For one thing ,it was being produced right during the time when Kirby and his family were relocating from their longtime home on Long Island to the West Coast in order to bring their daughter to a better climate for her asthma. Additionally, inker George Klein passed away while working on this issue, and so portions of the final book had to be ghost-inked by Bill Everett and John Verpoorten and others. So already it would have been a bit of a patchwork job. But there are a horde of discarded pages intended for this issue, enough to raise some questions concerning what was going on here.
Some of these pages, an elaborate action sequence, concern events transpiring back on Earth. In the previous issue, Kirby had set up a new menace, the Thermal Man, a catastrophically powerful robotic entity created by the Communist Chinese as a weapon against the West. Thor’s comrade Balder had been wounded and left in hospital on Earth a couple of issues beforehand, and here, he’s joined by the Warriors Three as they offer their services to the U.S. Military in the hopes of stopping the Thermal Man’s destructive rampage. (A number of these pages were used as inking samples after they were discarded, which is why some of them are inked here. None of them are were inked for the issue in question.)
At this time, there was a strong push going on at Marvel Comics to eliminate the extended multi-issue stories that had become the firm’s bread and butter. Publisher Martin Goodman had fielded complaints that the haphazard nature of Marvel’s distribution during this period made it difficult for many readers to locate and purchase subsequent issues of a given title. Martin’s response was to tell Stan Lee to get rid of multi-part stories as quickly as possible. This directive would only last a couple of months, but it was going on as THOR #169 was being put together. So I think that one of the factors that resulted in the book being so changed from what Kirby had intended was a push to get the big story beats wrapped up more expediently. In what we can reconstruct of Jack’s version of the issue, much of the action would have revolved around Balder and the Warriors Three confronting the Thermal Man and being unable to defeat him, requiring Thor and Galactus to resolve to journey to Earth and render assistance on the final page. But Lee or somebody wanted the Galactus business wrapped up in this issue, and the Thermal Man story simplified as well. Once Thor does get back to Earth in #170, scant mention is made of Balder or the Warriors Three–it’s treated as very much a straightforward Thor vs Thermal Man fight.
What saw print in the final THOR #169 as Page 19 appears to have originally been drawn as Page 14 of the original story. It’s also possible that something had been excised here from the top of the page in favor of the big establishing shot of the Thermal Man. Ignore the lettering and simply look at the artwork and the story flow, and it appears to fit in perfectly here.
This discarded page, Page 18, was clearly made up of two half-pages that had been taped together, indicating that even before this point, sequences were being modified and changed as part of the production process.
It’s also possible that the top portion of what saw print as Page 20 of THOR #169 was intended to be Page 19 of Kirby’s original version, with the bottom shorn off and three panels of Thor returning to Earth substituted instead. Again, ignore the lettering here and just look at the images and storytelling, and it seems like it flows pretty well.
The thing is, none of these excised pages have much to do with the origin of Galactus at all, The shift away from them seems to be much more about Lee or somebody not wanting to spend this much real estate on Balder and the Warriors Three rather than the book’s main character. And indeed, in what we can see here, Thor spends a huge portion of this story standing around and watching television with Galactus for some reason. It’s clear that the Thunder God and the World-Devourer have reached some manner of accord, but exactly what form it was to take is a bit shrouded in mystery.
There are also a couple of pages in the final version of THOR #169, such as this one, that feel like empty calories, time-wasting, in which the central plots and conflicts aren’t materially moved forward. No doubt, some of these pages exist to fill out the necessary 20-page length after it had been decided to discard a huge chunk of the back half of Kirby’s original draft and to attempt to wrap up the Galactus material in this one issue.
But getting back to the crux-point of what changed in terms of the Galactus origin, it helps to have an understanding of what Kirby had in mind all along. In Galactus’ first appearances in FANTASTIC FOUR #48-50, he has an established relationship with the Watcher. The two know one another and are familiar with one another, but the exact nature of this relationship is treated as a mystery. This is because Kirby’s concept was for the origins of these two giants to be inexorably linked. But that idea ran afoul of Marvel continuity and was the fulcrum upon which certain changes had to be made to the Origin of Galactus.
Kirby had mentioned to his assistant of the period Mark Evanier that he’d recycled an extended sequence with the Watcher that related to the origin of Galactus into an issue of THOR. I believe the page above was one of those pages, and there are a few more to follow. There are some indications that the figure that Thor is speaking with in these sequences wasn’t originally Galactus at all, but rather the Watcher. In the printed book, there’s one small panel where Galactus strangely is wearing the Watcher’s cloak, as though somebody forgot to remove it when making changes, and a number of close-up shots of Galactus narrating his origin has been Watcher heads initially, such as on the page below. The impression given is that it was the Watcher who is narrating the origin of Galactus to somebody (not necessarily Thor in the original version of these pages)–an origin that he’s well aware of because it’s also his origin as well.
Galactus is wearing the Watcher’s cloak in Panel 4 here, and that was likely the Watcher in Panel 1 originally. The Galactus head that narrates in the final panel was also originally drawn as the Watcher–there’s the remnant of a border note on this scan indicating that the face should be changed to that of Galactus.
And here we get to the crux of the matter. because Kirby’s version of the origins of Galactus and the Watcher are linked. In Jack’s version, Galen of Taa (Nirak in Jack’s version) had been transformed by cosmic radiation. The Watcher, then a mere scientist, happened upon the being’s downed spaceship, and used his knowledge to help stabilize this new entity, little realizing that it would go on to become a scourge of galaxies. Because of his great guilt, this is what caused the Watcher to make his vow of non-interference. In Kirby’s mind, the Watcher wasn’t one of a whole race of similar beings, he was singular and unique, and his vow was a reaction to his Samaritan actions having inadvertently caused the creation of a powerful menace.
Here we see a couple pages that ran in THOR #168 the previous month that visually establish the pre-Watcher as merely an inquisitive scientist who comes across the wreckage of Galactus’ ship and realizes that the entity at the center of the carnage has survived by consuming the life force of everything else within the ruins. Lee here scripts this as though a plague was responsible, but that’s him making a different choice than what Kirby had intended.
The problem here, of course, is that the origin of the Watcher had already been told, in a comic that Kirby had nothing to do with. It had first appeared in the Tales of the Watcher strip in the back of TALES OF SUSPENSE #53 several years earlier. I can’t say whether Jack was simply unaware of this fact, or if he’d forgotten it, or disregarded it, but it definitely hasn’t penetrated his consciousness. His conception of the Watcher had been the same all along. Lee’s origin, though, revealed that there was an entire race of almost-identical Watchers, and that they’d taken a communal vow of non-interference after their attempts to raise up the people of an underdeveloped world instead caused those beings to annihilate themselves. The original story had been written and drawn by Larry Lieber, reputedly from a plot concept by Lee.
And where had that story recently been reprised? Why, SILVER SURFER #1, of course, the same release that Kirby had been left in the dark about and whose origin of the Surfer severed his emotional connection with his creation. In the back of that issue, Lee and artist Gene Colan produced an expanded version of that story from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53. It was recent, so it would have been fresh in the minds of the Marvel staff members who may have been looking over pages of THOR as they were coming in. So this was a second way in which the publication of SILVER SURFER #1 impacted on Kirby’s story plans.
There were a number of full page splash images that Kirby produced while working on the origin of Galactus issues that wound up discarded along the way. Jack would frequently plot and pencil entire multi-page sequences and then shuffle them around as needed, building each issue as we went. Discarding a splash image to reach the necessary page count was sometimes necessary–the splash was often the simplest thing to jettison since it didn’t move the story ahead in a meaningful manner.
As can been seen on the surviving border notes on this page from THOR #169, Galen/Nivak’s flight to the stars and transformation didn’t happen in response to a plague sweeping the galaxy, but rather the aggression of a hostile alien armada armed with a weapon that absorbed the life force of its target. Kirby’s border note at the upper right of this page reads THE WAR (cut off) FAR GALAXIES
And that adds some context to this sequence from THOR #162. This alien fleet that’s approaching the planet before which Galactus’ Incuba-Cube floats is the very one that has been causing such devastation throughout the universe. But the newly-emerged Galactus casually destroys this threat with a wave of his hand. (I wonder if that splash page of Galactus emerging from the Incuba-Cube was meant to fall between these two pages originally.)
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Thank you, Mr. Brevoort, for this fascinating piece. It was these kinds of insights into the early years of Marvel that got me reading your blogs in the first place. I still reread your revelatory tales of the creation of the FF, the Hulk, Spider-Man etc. in the 60s, which have such a feel of being the almost definitive truth that they cast Stan Lee’s essays in “Origins of Marvel Comics” etc. into the realms of fiction! I always wondered why the “Origin of Galactus” sequence in Thor hadn’t been told in a single issue but had instead begun and then been sidelined for awhile before finally being completed in a later issue. It was only when the pieces were assembled and reprinted together in a 1996 special “Origin of Galactus” issue with bridging material by John Byrne that it worked as a story. This article about the creation of Thor #169 explains a lot about the process of creating this issue (AND Silver Surfer #1, which surely deserves one of your analysis, too) complete with interesting, unseen art (always one of the best things in your articles). As much as I love reading your reminiscences about the comics you were buying as a fan back in the day, can we please have more of these types of blogs, too? They would be much appreciated…
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While I like the origin for the Silver Surfer in The Silver Surfer#1 (August 1968 ), I am curious if Jack Kirby ever wrote down what his origin for his creation was or told someone. Maybe it could have been used for that Herald of Galactus known as The Fallen One. I do wonder what other characters would have turned out different had Kirby had his way. TAA if you remove one of the A’s you get TA ( ancient Egyptian word for land or earth ).
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The Official Handbook made the Watcher who found Galactus the father of Uatu, but it sounds like here it is Uatu.
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I thought the same thing. I’m not sure why someone later retconned that it wasn’t Uatu.
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@frasersherman I gotta wonder what the pay incentives were, back then. Did somebody realize that by inserting their own retcon they could get paid extra? Or maybe it was just to have a fingerprint on comics history?
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I seem to recall reading somewhere that Jack Kirby’s idea for the origin of the Silver Surfer would have been that Galactus created him out of pure energy.
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…which is why he didn’t know about love and being human and all that stuff that he discovered in the Galactus Trilogy.
The origin Stan gave him forgot all that.
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If Jack Kirby was planning the Silver Surfer to be created from energy by Galactus, then he got to do that with Ardina [ The Silver Surfer#1 ( 1978 ) ].
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I stand corrected: The Silver Surfer#1 ( 1978 ) – Galactus says,”In fashioning Ardina, I looked with favor upon the Zenn-La female Shalla Bal, who once had won my herald’s heart! The cloning was routine! The DNA manipulation child’s play for my genetic devices! Like I suggested already, maybe Jack’s Silver Surfer origin could be given to the Fallen One ( ADDING THIS: and that is the reason he moved on to recruiting living beings as heralds and not just the empowering by using dark energy ).
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As much as Kirby vs Lee is very heavily in Kirby’s favor, this issue of Thor and the background to its creation does demonstrate why Kirby needed a collaborator and/or an editor. The bloat and self indulgence wipes out the work of even the most gifted artist, even a storyteller artist like Kirby. Kirby had he lived in the time of Image’s formation would have been a superstar artist, with enough vague oversight and inspiration to keep him on track but unfortunately he left us before that approach really took hold.
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He was a superstar artist.
And I think what you’re calling bloat and self-indulgence here is the result of having his story torn apart and muddied up, caused by editing, rather than something that needed editing.
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I wish Kirby’s versions could have seen print, rather than that need to control him after all he had created for them. I’m sure readers of the era would have enjoyed the new stories. Today, they’d be part of a “multiverse.”
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Bookmarking this for when I can really pay close attention.
While some of Lee’s changes to Kirby’s ideas improved them, I like the idea of the Watcher as a singular entity (I noticed when rereading Hulk’s visit to the Watcher’s world that it comes off very much like there’s nobody else but Uatu there.
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I may be coming in late to Tom’s discussion of The Watcher, since he may have said something about FF #13 in another post. That issue introduces the race of the Watchers, at least as far as the average Marvel reader was concerned, because Stan’s captions are unambiguous that the Watcher encountered by the FF and the Red Ghost belongs to a race of similar distanced onlookers. However, as I glance over the published pages, Kirby’s art doesn’t actually show more than one Watcher. I guess it’s possible that way back then, Kirby meant Watcher to be one immortal scientist who’d gained phenomenal powers as a result of his technology and/or psychic advancement. It seems unlikely, because I’ve always thought that the basic Watcher scenario sounded like a lot of the classic SF movies that KIrby *almost* surely saw, like THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, with humanity’s fate being decided by a more advanced alien race. The 1957 flick THE 27TH DAY also might’ve influenced Lee and/or Kirby, given that movie’s sorting out of democracy and Communism. Did I miss something, anyone?
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Yo, Tom. This entry ranks right up there as one of your very best, ever. The sheer, raw power of Jack Kirby, images likely many of us had never seen before.
That thunderous “establishing shot” of the Thermal man. Immediately brings to mind similarly styled images by some of my favorite post-Kirby artists like Mike Mignola, Jason Armstrong, Neil Vokes, Dan McDaid, and others. As well as other Kirby-impacted pros like Erik Larsen. The influence is obvious.
That explosive location splash page instantaneously shows me where the great Steve Rude was inspired by Jack.
And many other pages here are vibrantly echoed in much later works by Mike Allred (perfect choice for your Silver Surfer run written by Dan Slott) and Paul Pope (“Battling Boy”, among many other stellar stuff).
I wonder if Galactus or the Watcher have ever been drawn as a cameo as frozen figures in the 4th World’s Source Wall…
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FWIW I did look at all the posts here tagged “Fantastic Four” for comments on FF #13.
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I want to talk about the WATCHERS SUICIDE PACT ( WATCHERS’OATH )[ Tales of Suspense#54 ( June 1964 ) page 2 panel 3 — “Alas, my son, we cannot undo this tragedy! But as an atonement, I vow that my ENTIRE CLAN ( entire Race? ) shall nevermore interfere with the destinies of other planets! From this moment on, we shall be a race of WATCHERS! We shall roam the galaxies — observing –studying–but taking NO PART in the vast cosmic drama! WE SHALL NEVER INTERFERE WITH OTHER RACES! ] — WHICH APPARENTLY INCLUDES DOING NOTHING TO SAVE THEMSELVES [ Quasar#19-25 ( Feb-Aug 1991 ) MAELSTRON threatens to DESTROY THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE ] & [ The Infinity Gauntlet#1-6 ( July-December 1991 ) THANOS WIPING OUT HALF THE LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE ]. What was Marvel’s CRISIS ON INIFINITE EARTHS CALL ( Where the Multiverse was collapsing in on itself and Reed Richards saved it not THE WATCHERS/CELESTIALS or ADVANCED ALIENS ].
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Plus surely stopping THANOS from destroying star systems [ Avengers Annual#7 ( 1977 ) ] using his Star Gem is something that they could interfere in ( How could that lead to them destroying themselves through the Watchers? If they destroy themselves they would have done it without Thanos destroying their Sun ).
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I am always struck by how detailed Kirby’s pencils were, and how much texture there was in them.
I recall an article I saw in the Kirby Collector in the 1990s where Chic Stone said, Lee always wondered if there was something you could do to just print Kirby’s pencils
I’ve also read things by Joe Sinnott saying how happy he was that Kirby acknowledged how hard Sinnott worked to translate effects Kirby could get with a pencil into inks, a different (if related) medium,.
Seeing Kirby’s pencil work made me see, why Neal Adams was such a (surprisingly) good inker for Kirby. (I kind of wonder how Giordano or Palmer would have worked.
I think Kurt Busiek makes an excellent point about Kirby, I
‘m reminded of an old US Army expression (that Kirby was probably aware of from his time as an 11 Series): “You are better off with people you have to hold back by the belt than ones you have to kick in the rump.”
Kirby was clearly the former,
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You can find a Kirby/Giordano example in the “Mister Miracle” page from the DC WHO’S WHO series, reprinted in multiple Kirby collections since.
Kirby/Palmer, I don’t think that ever happened.
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THERMAL MAN ( robot created by Communist Chinese ): I have wondered if the nuclear-powered robot created by an Asian country that resembled Brimstone seen in Justice League Unlimited episode “Initiation” was inspired by the Thermal Man. Circe in Justice League Unlimited episode “This Little Piggy” was dressed in a Marvel ( Jack Kirby ) inspired Sersi outfit and Amazo resembled the Super-Adaptoid in Justice League episode “Tabula Rasa” & Justice League Unlimited episode “The Return” & “Wake the Dead” — that WB series was like seeing the DC heroes as Marvel Heroes or in the Marvel Universe ( Justice League 3-part episode “The Savage Time” – after flying through a Nazi warplane Superman looked like the Original Human Torch when the fuel ignited ).
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There was also the JLU episode “Wake The Dead,” which pays homage to Marvel’s Defenders with an informal group comprised of Doctor Fate (Doctor Strange), Solomon Grundy (Hulk), Aquaman (Namor), Shayera Hol (Nighthawk and/or Valkyrie) and Amazo (Silver Surfer). Also, those Kirby pages are amazing! He was truly one of a kind!
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You are right about Kirby’s pages. I know someone here complained about Jack doing work that needed to be cut back on to fit and issue or story ( But put it in an annual or special I say ), but to me it must be like getting a glimpse inside of that incredible mind of Jack “The King” Kirby. On Wake The Dead, at the time I saw Amazo in his gold colour as the Silver Surfer homage too ( minus a board ) — I left him out of the Ways DC Referenced Marvel.
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fascinating stuff.
Hope you do a post on the Surfer and get into what Kirby’s ideas were about his origin. The posts above make perfect sense if he was originally intended to be created from pure energy, knowing nothing of emotion as he shows in his first appearance.
Thanks for posting.
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With the benefit of hindsight also comes great frustration. Jack Kirby was interviewed many times over the years and, as a result, we fortunately know a great deal about him and his work. In particular, we have very detailed accounts of his frustrations with Marvel/Lee. At the same time, though, there are so many seemingly obvious questions concerning the creation of his Marvel characters/strips that could/should have been asked. Unfortunately, they weren’t, so we are often left with occasional second-hand memories of private conversations, lots of speculation and (if we are really lucky) some original artwork with vital clues.(I suppose, in this case at least, only a few people were aware of the unused pages during his lifetime and the potential story behind them. And you’ve done a great job of presenting what we do know).Lately I’ve been thinking about Larry Lieber…who is still with us and recently finished writing his first novel. He is the last creator alive from the very early days of Marvel, yet I haven’t seen him interviewed in years, which seems incredibly bizarre to me. There’s so much we could ask him. E.g. how far ahead was ASM Annual #5 started, given the first pages are in large-size art and the storyline was already announced a year earlier in #4? Who plotted the issue (given the scans of original art reproduced in the Epic Edition clearly shows notes from someone – Stan? – criticising the story?). Given Heck’s recollections about working from a synopsis, is it possible Larry didn’t do a full script for TOS #39 as he’s recalled previously? Etc, etc. No doubt many fans will be very sorry one day when they look back and realise we just didn’t take the opportunities to ask more while we could. I’m not even sure that anyone has ever bothered doing a long video interview with him!Tom (or anyone else) – is this something that we could address before it is too late?
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With the benefit of hindsight also comes great frustration. Jack Kirby was interviewed many times over the years and, as a result, we fortunately know a great deal about him and his work. In particular, we have very detailed accounts of his frustrations with Marvel/Lee. At the same time, though, there are so many seemingly obvious questions concerning the creation of his Marvel characters/strips that could/should have been asked. Unfortunately, they weren’t, so we are often left with occasional second-hand memories of private conversations, lots of speculation and (if we are really lucky) some original artwork with vital clues.
(I suppose, in this case at least, only a few people were aware of the unused pages during his lifetime and the potential story behind them. And you’ve done a great job of presenting what we do know).
Lately I’ve been thinking about Larry Lieber…who is still with us and recently finished writing his first novel. He is the last creator alive from the very early days of Marvel, yet I haven’t seen him interviewed in years, which seems incredibly bizarre to me. There’s so much we could ask him. E.g. how far ahead was ASM Annual #5 started, given the first pages are in large-size art and the storyline was already announced a year earlier in #4? Who plotted the issue (given the scans of original art reproduced in the Epic Edition clearly shows notes from someone – Stan? – criticising the story?). Given Heck’s recollections about working from a synopsis, is it possible Larry didn’t do a full script for TOS #39 as he’s recalled previously? Etc, etc. No doubt many fans will be very sorry one day when they look back and realise we just didn’t take the opportunities to ask more while we could.
I’m not even sure that anyone has ever bothered doing a long video interview with him!
Tom (or anyone else) – is this something that we could address before it is too late?
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