“I Guess Ditko and Jack are The Only Two Guys Who Know That…” A Brief Oral History of Stan Lee’s Responses To Kirby’s Creator Claims

(This has been compiled for the purposes of research; it is by no means complete. However, it contains the bulk of Stan Lee’s recorded public statements/responses to Jack Kirby’s claims of being the primary creator of the Marvel Universe. You will see at times that Lee is consistent in his narrative and repeats talking points. Most of these instances involve friendly interviewers or Marvel employees asking the questions. The 1987 radio exchange between Kirby and Lee is not included nor is the 1987 coverage of the Kirby case by the Village Voice.)

1981/INTERVIEW with LEONARD PITTS JR:

Q: Let’s start with the picture he paints of his contribution to Marvel. As he puts it, “I saved Marvel’s ass.” He says when he walked in for his first meeting with you, you had your head down on the desk crying because Marvel was to be closed. You were in despair, an emotional wreck, and he came and told you, “Look, we can do this, we can do that, and we can revolutionize comics.”

LEE: Well, that’s his remembrance. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I’ve had my head on the desk crying. You’re meeting me now; I don’t think I come across as an emotional wreck. I really don’t know what he’s alluding to at all.

Q: Also, he says every character that’s credited as a Stan Lee character is a Jack Kirby character, including Spider-Man, which he says he passed to you and you passed to Ditko.

LEE: (SIGH) Jack has his own perception of these things, and I think I understand the way he feels. It’s really a semantic difference of opinion, because it depends what you mean by “creating” something. For example, the first book we did was Fantastic Four. I came up with the idea of the Fantastic Four. I wrote it down. I still have the outline I wrote- the whole outline for the story.

And I called Jack and I said, “I’d like you to draw this. Here’s the outline, these are the characters I want,” and so forth. Jack then took it and drew it. Now, Jack did create the characters in the sense that he drew them. I didn’t draw them. I wrote them. He created the way they look.

“Jack also contributed quite a lot as the series went on in ideas, in plot. Jack is wonderful at story. He’s very imaginative. He’s the most talented guy in the business as far as I’m concerned, as far as imagination goes. He contributed a great deal. We worked as partners, but the creation of the characters, it seems to me… like with the Hulk: I said to him one day, “I want to do a hero who will be a monster. I think that would be great.”

And then we would discuss it, and I’m sure Jack contributed a few ideas, too. But it seems to me that the person who says, “I have this idea for a character“, that’s the person who created it. I could’ve given it to anybody to draw. Jack was the best. I gave them to Jack.

I have never tried to deny Jack’s great contribution in all of these, but for him to say he created them all… He’s not the one who came to me and said, “Let’s do the Fantastic Four or let’s do the Hulk.” (note: correct- that would be Martin Goodman who came to Lee and said that) I said, “I want to do a god. Let’s do the god of thunder- Thor. Nobody has ever done Norse mythology before. They’ve done Norse mythology before. They’ve done Roman gods and Greek gods. I want to play with Norse mythology, and I think they idea of Thor would be very dramatic.” So, if that doesn’t give me the right to say I created it, I don’t know what does.”
(note: Kirby had done Thor in comics in both the Forties and the Fifties, sans Lee’s involvement)

Q: Jack claims that he did the writing you got all the credit for, and he also said he left Marvel that first time because he felt he was creating in you the kind of character he didn’t want to create. Can you tell me what he’s talking about?

LEE: No, I really don’t know what he’s talking about. But I don’t know much of what Jack is talking about these days. I mean, when I listen to these things he says, I just feel I’m listening to the mouthings of a very bitter man who I feel quite sorry for. I don’t know what his problem is, really.

As far as him doing the stories, Jack never felt that the script itself, the dialogue I wrote, was part of the story. Very often, Jack would make up the plots. We would discuss a story before it was done, and I’d say, “Let’s bring Dr. Doom back. Let’s let him capture Reed Richards or do this and that.” Jack would say okay, and I left most of the details to Jack.

It’s quite true, a lot of the stories- the plotting of them- he created.

I would give him a couple of words and he did the rest. I’ve never taken that away from him. He was wonderful at that. Then he would bring me the drawings. I would put in all the dialogue and all the captions.

I have a feeling that Jack considers that relatively unimportant. You know, “Anybody can put the dialogue in.” I would like to feel that the style I gave the stories by putting the dialogue in was quite important. After all, the manner of speech is really what gives the character their personality. As a matter of fact, when Jack left Marvel, his stories never read the same again, the ones he did without me. They may have been better or worse, but they were never the same. The stories I wrote with Jack had a certain style, and I think they are greatly responsible for Marvel’s success. I think it is a shame that Jack didn’t stay with us. I think he and I could’ve still done great things together. I have absolutely no idea why he is so bitter.”

1983/COMICS INTERVIEW #5

Q: Speaking of SPIDER-MAN, Jack Kirby has given several interviews lately, in which he has claimed credit for creating SPIDER-MAN…

LEE: I really don’t know what to say about that. I honestly don’t understand it. Years ago, when I wanted to do Spider-Man, I called Jack and told him: “I want to do a character called Spider-Man who sticks to walls, who does this and who does that.” And I told him I wanted him to draw it, how I wanted it done, and I told him I didn’t want it done in his usual style.

I didn’t want the character to look too heroic or too monster-like. I wanted him to look like an average guy. Jack did a few pages. I saw them and said, “No, it is all wrong. Let’s forget it, Jack. It is just not your style.“

I took it away from him and gave it to Steve Ditko. I don’t know whether this is the case or not, but maybe when Ditko did the story, he used the costume that Jack created. I don’t remember. I guess Ditko and Jack are the only two guys who know that. If Ditko is still around, I’d appreciate it if you would ask him and let me know the answer. And if, indeed, the costume is the one that Jack originally drew, that may be what Jack means when he says that he, created Spider-Man.

But in no way, shape, manner or means did Jack Kirby create Spider-Man. I don’t even know how he can dare to say that. It is the one strip that we did that he had virtually nothing to do with at all, except for a few pages that we never used.

Q: I think it was an interview in Will Eisner’s SPIRIT magazine that he said he and Joe Simon had come up with a character called the Silver Spider. Jack went on to say that he was pushing you to do superheroes at Marvel, and you were his vehicle to get it to Martin Goodman and start the Marvel Age of Comics.

LEE: Well, I think that Jack has taken leave of his senses. I have never heard of the Silver Spider. Jack never pushed me to do super-heroes. What happened was, one day, Martin Goodman called me into the office- this is when Jack and I were doing all those monster stories- and Martin, who was publisher at the time, said: “You know Stan, I’ve just seen some sales figures for this DC Magazine“- it may have been the JUSTICE LEAGUE, but I no longer remember- “it is doing pretty well. Maybe we ought to do some super-heroes.“

And I said, “Fine.” I went home and wrote an outline, a synopsis for the FANTASTIC FOUR. And I called Jack, handed him the outline, and said: “Read this. This is something I want to do. And you should draw a team.” Jack, of course, contributed many, many ideas to it. And I would venture to say that Jack and I co-created The Fantastic Four in a way- although the name was mine, the characters were mine, the concept was mine, originally.

But he never pushed me to do super-heroes. Jack was at home drawing these monsters stories, until the day I called him and said: “Let’s do the Fantastic Four.” I think Jack is really- I don’t know what to say, I don’t want to say anything against him. I think he is beginning to imagine things.

Q: I know he did some work on the recent Fantastic Four cartoon series for Marvel Productions. I’m wondering if you ever saw him or worked for him?

LEE: I haven’t seen Jack in a couple of years. Considering all the stuff I hear he is running around saying, it is probably just as well that I don’t see him.

Q: Getting back to Spider-Man, you’re still working on the syndicated strip, right?

LEE: Yeah, well, Jack will probably claim he does that, too.

1986/ “MARVEL THEN AND NOW PANEL”, SAN DIEGO COMIC CON

LEE: “You know, it’s like when somebody says, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ (laughter) I don’t really want to get into any hassle with Jack, because I gotta tell you I’m probably Jack’s biggest fan. I mean, I’ve worked with Jack for a million years. I don’t know of any finer talent in this business. I don’t know of any guy who’s more imaginative, more creative. He’s a decent guy, a hard-working guy. I’m a great admirer of Jack Kirby, and I’ve enjoyed working with him, and all he knew is that we worked together.

I don’t really know what Jack means by creating a character. I guess maybe it’s a semantic discussion, and we have to decide what the word ‘creating‘ really means. As far as I can remember these things happening, I was the editor and the headwriter at Marvel, and Jack was an artist who worked for us. One day my publisher, Martin Goodman, said to me, ‘You know, Stan’- we didn’t have any super-heroes at that time.

Jack and I were doing a million horror stories, monster stories, ‘Groo, the monster that devoured Newark‘, things like that- and one day Martin Goodman came to me and said, ‘Stan, I’ve noticed DC’s magazine Justice League‘- or Justice Society, I could never remember which it was- ‘is selling very well and that’s a group of super-heroes. I think we ought to do a group of super-heroes.‘

I said, ‘Great, I’ll make one up.’ And I wrote an outline for some characters called the Fantastic Four… I decided it would be fun to make it a little more realistic than the other super-heroes. I thought instead of just four handsome heroes, I’ll make one of them a monster, but I just knew he’d end up being the most popular one of all.

I wrote like a one-or-two page outline of what it should be, and then I called the guy whom I thought was the best artist we had, Jack Kirby, and I said, ‘Jack, I’ve got this idea for a Fantastic Four, and I’d like you to draw it.‘ I showed him the outline, we discussed it, he went home, and brought back the story drawn up. I did not give Jack a script. The actual interpretation of the outline was Jack’s. Jack is a really good writer in the sense that you can tell Jack a few words of a plot, he’ll draw the whole thing up, and there’ll be a lot of ideas in the panels that you never even thought of. He comes with them as he’s drawing.

But as far as him saying that he presented the whole thing- I mean, I told him, ‘Let’s do a Fantastic Four, and here’s what the Fantastic Four should be.’ Now Jack certainly created the characters in the sense of the fact that he drew them. I didn’t draw them. I told him that I wanted the Thing to be a real powerful, big, monstrous-looking guy. Now the Thing could have been drawn a million different ways, and any other artist would have drawn it differently, Jack drew him the way he did, so Jack created the visual image of the Thing and all of the other characters.

In Hollywood and let’s say television, if Stephen Cannell says, ‘I want to do something called the A-Team, and I want it to be four characters named so and so’, and then he gives the idea to a scriptwriter, and then they hire actors and so forth, Stephen Cannell is considered the creator. The scriptwriter isn’t; the actors aren’t, and the drector isn’t; the cameraman isn’t. It seems to me that the person who says, ‘This is the idea that I want done‘, is the person who created it. (note: so… again… the GOODMAN RULE says that Martin Goodman created the F.F., thanks Stan)

Now I did that with the Hulk, and with Spider-Man, and with the Fantastic Four, and with Thor, and with all the ones I did. I have never denied that they were drawn by the people who drew them. I have never denied that Jack, and Steve Ditko with Spider-Man, and John Buscema, when I worked with him on many scripts, had a lot to do with the actual plotting.

Sometimes I was so busy I would say to Kirby or Ditko or Buscema or Gil Kane or Gene Colan or Don Heck or whoever it was, I’d say, ‘Look, let’s bring back Dr. Doom, and he kidnaps Sue Storm, and I dunno, the Fantastic Four rescues her at the end and blah blah‘, and give him a couple details and he’d go off and draw it.

When the artwork came back there were five million things there that I’d never mentioned because the artist put them in. They were the artists’ own ideas. I never denied that, but what I would do is put the dialogue in and the captions, and I would try and do it in such a way to give the whole thing some cohesiveness, to give it the correct personality, the correct characterization, and let it all dovetail into the series so it seemed to belong.

That’s really all I can say, and I don’t want to sound as if I’m downplaying Jack’s contribution. Those of you who have read the Origins of Marvel Comics or Son of Origins– and shame on you if you haven’t (laughter)– I’m sure will remember reading in the books that I’ve said, I’ve spelled out in chapter and verse, what the artists’ contributions were.

(note: It’s worth noting that Lee later discounted the accuracy of the Origins book series during his 2010 testimony, saying that he wrote falsehoods because he knew Kirby would be reading and “wanted to make him feel good”)

I’ve always said that we all co-created these things. I think that I’ve been very generous ’cause, as I say, anywhere except in the comic book business the artist would not be considered a co-creator, because it’s the guy says ‘Let there be a Hulk’ and, lo, there was a Hulk. The guy who says it, he’s the creator. The guy who drew it is just drawing it after the creator told him to draw it.

I hope somebody was making notes ’cause I think this is probably the last time I’ll be mentioning this again and thank you for your attention.”

1991/ GRAPHIC MOGUL BY ALASTAIR MABBOTT

“I think Jack was wrong.” The affable Lee suddenly turns very abrupt.

“He felt we didn’t want to give him back his pages. We were very happy to give him back his pages. Most of the pages had been lost. It all got stolen or we threw ’em away. We never saved that stuff in the beginning. Then we did have some pages, but Jack was making weird claims, like he created Spider-Man and that he created this, and he created that. So, our lawyer said, ‘We’re not gonna give you back your artwork unless you admit that you didn’t create those things, because you didn’t.“

Finally, he signed some sort of a statement saying he wouldn’t make claims on things he didn’t create and we gave him back his artwork. That was the end of it.”

Not quite. So “very happy” was Marvel to return Kirby’s artwork that it had taken them five years’ legal pressure, a publicity campaign, and a petition signed by 150 comic professionals to do it. Eventually, Marvel backed down and gave Kirby 2,100 pages out of an estimated 13,000 that he had drawn for them over the years (refusing to pay the $800 insurance freight).

Marvel retained the lucrative copyrights. Kirby felt he had a right to be bitter and gave a lengthy interview to The Comics Journal in 1990, disputing Lee’s claim that he, Smilin’ Stan, had created all of Marvel’s greatest characters. “I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything,” Kirby maintained. “If Stan Lee ever got a thing dialogued, he would get it from somebody working in the office.“

“That was when I called the lawyer,” Lee recalls, “and I said, ‘Should we sue him?’ He said we could, said it’d cost a lot of money, but Marvel could afford it, and it’d cost Jack a lot of money to defend it. I said, ‘Well, forget it, I don’t want Jack to go broke.’ Because most of the people who have read it have written to me and they said, ‘Look, we know it isn’t true, we’ve worked with you, we know what stories you wrote.’

“He had a lawyer call me months after that, saying, ‘You know, Jack would really like to make up, what do you say?’ I said, ‘It’s fine with me. All Jack has to do is write a letter to The Comics Journal which says that the things he said weren’t true, and I’ll be happy to make up.’ But how can I make up with him now? If I’m friendly with Jack, it’ll sound like he was telling the truth. Like I’m not angry about it. So I never heard from the guy again.”

2012/MOVIEFONE INTERVIEW WITH STAN LEE FOR “WITH GREAT POWER…”

Q: Fans of Jack Kirby are concerned that his name appears nowhere on the credits of “THE AVENGERS“. What’s your take on their concern?

LEE: I don’t know how to answer that because in what way would his name appear?

Q: His name isn’t mentioned anywhere in the film production as a co-creator.

LEE: Well, it’s mentioned in every comic book: it says, ‘By Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.’ …you’re talking to the wrong guy because I have nothing to do with the credits on the movies. I’m credited as one of the executive producers because that’s in my contract. But Jack was not an executive producer. So I don’t know what he’d be credited as. Again I know nothing about that, I have nothing to do with the movie’s credits. You’d have to talk to whoever is the producer of the movie.

Is there anything you want to ask me about the documentary because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be talking about.

2012/TOLDEO BLADE:

Q: Talk about your relationship with Jack Kirby. There are some who say he didn’t get enough credit for what he did at Marvel.

LEE: I don’t know what to say. I had a wonderful relationship with him, I was his biggest fan. There was never a time that I wrote my name when his name wasn’t as big. Everything said “By Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” I’m the guy that gave him the name “King Kirby.” If people feel he didn’t get enough credit, I don’t know what additional credit he could get. He was great, he was the best artist I ever worked with, he had a great story sense. He made everything that we did look better than anybody else could have made it look. I have only the highest praise for him.

Q: Some have suggested your partnership was like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and that neither of you were as potent once you quit working together.

LEE: Well, I hate to say this, but he really never had a hit when he left Marvel and went to DC. He never had another Fantastic Four or Thor or anything, I mean, he did a lot of books, but they weren’t great successes. In my case, I’ve still done … (pause). I don’t want to act as if I’m competing with Kirby, I don’t like this subject. I think we were a great team, and I think I’m very proud of what Jack and I did together.

• Note that Lee begins to respond with what he did after Kirby left Marvel before pausing, as he likely realizes it wasn’t much. I don’t say that with any snark; Lee famously creates nothing of worth and eventually stops ‘writing’ altogether.

2014/PLAYBOY INTERVIEW

Playboy: One issue dogs you and affects your legacy- the perception that you get too much credit for characters you created with artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. You have gone out of your way to acknowledge their contributions and authorship, but the controversy lingers. Can anything be done to settle the situation and do right by these guys once and for all?

LEE: I don’t know what you mean by doing right by them. I always tried to show them in the most favorable light, even in the credits. There was never a time when it just said, “by Stan Lee.” (note: see the covers of ORIGINS of MARVEL COMICS and SON of ORIGINS- just saying) It was always “By Stan Lee and Steve Ditko” or “by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” I made sure their names were always as big as mine.

As far as what they were paid, I had nothing to do with that. They were hired as freelance artists, and they worked as freelance artists. At some point, they apparently felt they should be getting more money. Fine, it was up to them to talk to the publisher. It had nothing to do with me. I would have liked to have gotten more money too. I never made an issue of it. I got paid per page for what I wrote, the same rate as the other writers- maybe a dollar a page more.

If you ask me, should they have been paid more? Then you have to say, shouldn’t have John Romita have been paid more? Shouldn’t Gil Kane have been paid more? Shouldn’t John Buscema have?

(this is where having a more informed interviewer- or a more bold one, at least- would have been beneficial, as they could have pushed back and reminded Lee that Romita, Kane, etc. didn’t create what Kirby and Ditko created. Also, the Marvel Method makes it questionable that Lee “wrote” at all)

I used to marvel at the way Jack drew. He would draw something as if it had appeared in his mind and he was just tracing what he had thought of already. “Come work with me, Jack,” I said. But he said no. He didn’t want a staff job. With him, as with Ditko, I don’t see where they were unfairly treated.

I’ve had a happy life. I don’t want anyone to think I treated Kirby or Ditko unfairly. I think we had a wonderful relationship. Their talent was incredible. But the things they wanted weren’t in my power to give them.”

With thanks to the respective journalists who conducted the interviews these quotes are culled from.