Jack and Stan: My take.

When Stan Lee died last year, I got sick of the hagiography pretty quickly.

Polite people, of course, prefer not to speak ill of the dead, especially when the dead is still warm, but it's silly to ignore the fact that Stan was a personal wrecking crew to some very talented people, a glory hog, and before being rescued by Disney movies, his Marvel Comics stock was tanking and the company was in danger of falling apart. It had bounced back from its debt-ridden depths, and Lee was not the man behind the worst of the financial shenanigans, but if the Mouse had not stepped in to snap up the works in 2009, Marvel might have sunk without trace in a quagmire of unreadable comics and bad Sony movies.

The thing that irked me most, though, were several cartoons of Jack Kirby (who died in 1994) welcoming Stan into heaven. When I heard Kirby speak in the eighties, he sounded like a guy who would have been promising St. Peter a great action-packed portrait if he could arrange to keep the gates closed when Stan the Man showed up.

It was a long time ago, and I was a kid, so I don't remember the Kirby event very well. I certainly don't recall Kirby sitting on the panel complaining "Stan Lee is a bastard" and such. But he gave Stan as little credit as possible for any of their supposed collaborative efforts. Jack explained how he had created the Fantastic Four, for example, and detailed meticulously how he came up with the Silver Surfer, whom he imagined as an angelic herald from the Bible, and how that led to Galactus -- because you can't have an angelic herald without a god. Jack gave Stan no credit for any of this.

When Kirby jumped ship to DC Comics, he created a minor toupee-clad character named Funky Flashman, a fast-talking promotional jerk, as a sort of foil to escape-artist hero Mister Miracle. It was an obvious and unflattering portrayal of Stan. So there was clearly not a lot of love.

I don't know if Kirby and Lee ever made up, but I doubt it. The irreplaceable Mark Steyn had this bit of information in his obit for Lee:

With the exception of Spider-Man, almost all of Lee's household-name heroes were drawn by a fellow called Jack Kirby, who never enjoyed the star cameos Stan did in the Marvel movies. Kirby lived modestly in Irvine, California, and spent his days sat on "an old, straightback kitchen chair parked in front of the crummiest old drawing table you ever saw". He ought to have died the wealthiest guy in Irvine. Instead, his widow had to beseech Marvel for a modest pension sufficient to cover her mortgage, groceries and medical bills.

Stan was worth $50 million when he died.

The biggest names in the Avengers movies were all Kirby creations, if you asked him: Captain America (with Joe Simon), Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Ant-Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye -- even Groot started life as a Kirby monster. Oh, but not Spider-Man and Dr. Strange -- Steve Ditko created them. I'm not saying Stan Lee had no part in the creation of these characters; other people would know better than I. I'm saying that neither Kirby nor Ditko would give Stan much credit. Something about Stan Lee, at least in the sixties, was not inspiring a lot of love among the artists.

At DC, Kirby had a gigantic creative explosion, a pile of "Fourth World" books that seemed to contain every idea he'd ever wanted to use at Marvel, maybe some he shouldn't have. He started proudly by reforming DC's lowest-selling title, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen; people are amazed to hear that it was in Jimmy Olsen's book that the great villain Darkseid of Apokolips was first seen. (Darkseid was totally ripped off when Jim Starlin created Thanos, a bad guy currently causing some fuss in the Avengers movies.) At DC, Kirby set himself a workload as artist and writer that was probably more than even he could handle, fountain of crazy ideas that he was. The books New Gods, Mister Miracle, Forever People, and even Jimmy Olsen were really wild, unlike anything seen before in DC or maybe anywhere else.

But, to be fair to Lee, Kirby needed a good editor, and DC didn't give him one. Letting Kirby go his own way gave us some truly bad ideas, including the infamous Don Rickles series in Jimmy Olsen.

Yes, that Don Rickles. Benton Grey, who's been running a great series on Bronze Age DC comics on his blog, summed it up neatly:

Apparently Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman, Kirby’s assistants, were huge fans of then popular insult-comedian Don Rickles, and they thought it would be fun to have him appear in a comic for a few panels and insult Superman. They wrote up some dialog and showed it to Jack, who loved the idea. He, in turn, took it to Carmine Infantino, who never met a gimmick he didn’t like. The editor got permission from Rickles and decided that this needed to be promoted and made into a two-issue feature. Then, out of the unfathomable, beautiful madness of Kirby’s mind came what followed. Apparently, Rickles himself was none-too-pleased with the final result, and I can’t say I really blame him.

The problem was, Kirby was a lot better at writing ponderous operatic hero fantasy than stand-up comedy, and his assistants weren't much help (and I say this as a guy who loved Evanier's work on Blackhawk and other DC properties).

Amazingly, the series continued publication for three more years, but Kirby left a year after this storyline.

Kirby and Lee were probably better together, even if all Lee did was prevent Jack's excesses and sillier ideas from running amok. I have always felt that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were much better together than apart for the same reason, curbing each other's worse impulses. Possibly the same was true with Ditko, judging by his work with DC. What happened to Kirby was like if John Lennon had kept the rights to all the music and Paul was stuck begging for work. Guest starring Steve Ditko as George Harrison.

So I don't quite see Stan Lee as saint material, no.

(Fair warning: This deep dive into dorkitude continues tomorrow, on a different but equally dorky topic....)