Disproving The Marvel Sole-Authorship Theory

The team came from a team.

Who created Fantastic Four #1?

The Four may not be Marvel’s most successful characters today, but they were the first who could be called “Marvel superheroes.” The approach found in their comics was almost an instant success, and it informed everything Marvel produced after that—including almost all its name-brand characters.

The official answer is that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were co-creators. But that’s a diplomatic attempt to paper over a long-simmering debate.

A few facts, nobody argues. Kirby drew the issue, as he drew many of the formative Marvel Comics from the 1960s. Stan Lee is credited as scriptwriter, as he is on the first page of every foundational Marvel comic. And he was clearly the media favorite, despite his admission that he didn’t write traditional scripts by the time “Marvel” was getting under way.

Rather, he talked out story ideas with the artists, who then went off to break things down into artwork, and then added dialogue to the results. How much he even did that is a matter of dispute. After their collaborations had ended, Kirby would claim credit for just about everything they did together. According to him, Lee only really wrote one thing—his name on other people’s work.

It’s undeniable that Kirby was a font of ideas and that he came up with some for which Lee would get credit—especially after 1964 or so, when the two stopped having regular meetings. But there are numerous documents that suggest things weren’t as simple as Kirby would have them be either—notes on original artwork in Lee’s handwriting, correspondence with Lee’s own boss. And the most important of those documents is Fantastic Four #1 itself.

Comic-book stylometry isn’t as advanced as the text-based kind, but artists who produce a lot of work develop notable tics. Jack Kirby had produced comics artwork for over twenty years by the time Fantastic Four #1 arrived. In several places in that issue, the tics just aren’t typical Kirby, which suggests someone asked for changes.

Consider the Thing’s transformation as seen above. By the time we get to his first close-up, he’s already halfway a monster—and in his second and final close-up, he’s all the way there. But this isn’t how Kirby usually handled scenes of transformation or dramatic change. It’d be far more typical for him to include another close-up before the other two, to emphasize what Ben looks like before the change kicks in.

Here’s another story Jack did a year later, involving someone changing from a monstrous form (Tales of Suspense #22). Note how the middle tier starts with the unchanged closeup, then goes to a changing one, then a fully changed one.

There’s another truncated sequence of just two panels, when three would be more Kirbyish, at the end of the Fantastic Four’s origin story, the “all for one and one for all” laying on of hands. There’s even a theory that the original version of this tale had not four characters, but three, just like the Three Musketeers, with the Human Torch absent. Note that the Torch is nowhere on the first page reproduced here.

Also look at the fourth panel below: the composition would be more balanced without him—and that’s not the only such panel in that opening issue.

I owe most observations in this post to Tom Brevoort: see his posts here, here, here and here for more.

Tomorrow: a progress report on the Journal, which I’ll be sending out for contributors’ review then!