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Hello BC readers, it’s been a while. I’ve been off working on comics (The Freeze Vol 1 trade from Image Comics/Top Cow is in stores now…) but after
Posted in: Comics | Tagged: jack kirby, john lennon, Marvel Comics, Paul McCarthy, stan lee
Were Stan Lee And Jack Kirby The Lennon And McCartney Of Comics?
Over on the Kirby Museum page Steve Brower has done up a nice article about some of the myths surrounding Jack Kirby and sets the record straight. He talks about whether or not Stan Lee made Jack famous, if Jack inked himself or if Jack was only a penciller. This one stood out to me as it's very different from the "Bullpen Bulletins" version of the House of Ideas. Check out the Kirby Museum for the full article and check out the rest of the site while you are there.
3. Lee and Kirby were the Lennon and McCartney of comics.
While this analogy is used ad nauseam, nothing could be further from the truth. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were teenage friends and band mates who grew up together in Liverpool. Over they years they collaborated on hundreds of songs, sitting side by side, as is typical of songwriting teams.
Jack Kirby was a freelancer who worked at home during the Marvel years. The recent court ruling notwithstanding (which hopefully will be overturned), Kirby was an independent contractor. The myth of the Marvel Bullpen, propagated by Lee in his "Stan's Soapbox" on the letters page, simply did not exist. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Lee worked on his own in the Marvel offices, and was later joined by Sol Brodsky as production manager. All other artists, writers, inkers, letterers worked freelance elsewhere, until later that decade. Kirby never joined them.
According to Kirby himself, "There were no scripts. I created the characters and wrote the stories in my own home and merely brought them into the office each month." 7
As evidenced by the research of comics historian Mike Gartland in his ingoing series "A Failure to Communicate" in The Jack Kirby Collector (Twomorrows Publishing) and here on the Kirby Museum site, the work Kirby and Lee did was often at odds with one another, a far cry from Lennon/McCartney.
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