The Four Color Media Monitor

Veteran writer and editor Thomas, once a close colleague of Lee's at Marvel, penned a Hollywood Reporter article where he's addressed the issues Jack Kirby's son has with the documentary aired on Disney Plus:

As recorded in the film, simply because he often (not always, but often) fails to credit the artists he worked with, Stan often seems to be claiming full credit for milestones, be they the powerful Hate Monger yarn in Fantastic Four No. 21 or such concepts as the Hulk and the X-Men. This is partly just a verbal shorthand, yet it is also in accordance with his expressed belief that “the person who has the idea is the creator,” and that the artist he then chooses to illustrate that concept is not. In L.A. in the 1980s (admittedly, at a time when I was not working for him), I argued that very point with him one day over lunch, maintaining that an artist who rendered and inevitably expanded that original idea was definitely a co-creator. I made no headway with my past and future employer. And clearly, when he wrote his celebrated letter, quoted in the doc, that he had “always considered Steve Ditko to be the co-creator of Spider-Man,” he was doing so only to try to mollify Steve and those who might agree with him. Later, he admitted as much.

(The funny thing is that, stretched to its logical conclusion, Stan’s argument could be marshalled to make Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, not himself, let alone himself in conjunction with Jack Kirby, the “creator” of The Fantastic Four. After all, it was Goodman who directed Stan to devise a team of super-heroes to compete with DC’s Justice League of America.)

But surely Steve Ditko, as closely paraphrased by Stan in Gelb’s film, is also wide of the mark when he states that “an idea is only an idea,” and that it was his drawing it that had made Spider-Man real. For, without the idea in the first place, the character and story events would not exist. Surely it took both men, but they are each simply too myopic to see it.

It’s certainly true that Stan doesn’t give his most talented collaborator, Jack Kirby, ample credit in every instance for his contributions to the early days of Marvel, from Fantastic Four onward. In a way, however, that’s only human nature: Stan could best remember the things he brought to the table in 1961 — just as Jack could best recall what he had done. Neither was an omniscient observer of the mind or actions of the other.

One thing is clear almost beyond argument: Lee often gave Kirby credit, both in writing and when speaking, for much that was good about The Fantastic Four and their related co-creations. The documentary records him as saying that Jack often drew a story after a plot conference that covered only the barest essentials of the storyline; in print in the comics themselves, Stan often went even further than that. You can look it up.

One seems to look in vain, alas, for any acknowledgement whatever by Jack Kirby of Stan’s value or contributions to their collaborations. And we can be pretty sure that, had Jack credited Stan thus, David Gelb and his researchers would have tracked them down and included them in the film’s soundtrack, if only to bolster their case concerning Stan’s talents. Instead, the most we get is Jack saying, when speaking of Thor, that Stan gave him the opportunity to do such a feature and that he gave it his all. Where is his admission or even suggestion that Stan’s dialogue and captions (to say nothing of his editorial guidance and his contributions to the storylines) added any value whatever to the feature?

Nowhere, that’s where.

There are some pretty good arguments Thomas' made in his past career, but the reason I'd differ here is because this is a documentary airing on Disney channels, and while the complaints made by Kirby's son don't seem altruistic, this is a company that's been going downhill in its caretaking of classic products it owns, and it's possible they influenced this documentary to the point where Lee's contributors were all but obscured, and the content watered down, all out of regrettable contempt that seems commonplace among today's PC crowd for past creators who worked harder than they did to create the best possible entertainment products in their time. And about Ditko, I vaguely recall reading an article telling that he was mad at Stan for saying he "considered" Steve his Spidey co-creator, and didn't speak to him afterwards. It's really a shame he too, like Kirby, was taking things so hard, but that's real life for you.

Now, Jack Kirby had a right to his viewpoint — that he himself was the major, if not the sole, genius behind the success of the Fantastic Four, Thor, and all the rest. But that does not mean that we need to accept that viewpoint.

What is really called for, clearly, is first a documentary about Jack Kirby and his contributions to Marvel Comics — and then another one about the career of Steve Ditko. Both of those features would be potentially welcome additions to the filmic examination of Marvel. I’d be waiting eagerly in line (and online) to view either or both.

But if/when we do get full-fledged Kirby and Ditko docs, I hope they are at least as fair to the talent, contributions, and legacy of Stan Lee as Stan’s words were to the talents, contributions, and legacies of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Now that's an idea I can get behind. The only problem is, what studios would make such a documentary? If Disney gets the assignment, then based on their current, woke-influenced trajectory, that's why I wouldn't trust them to make the best documentary out there.

Since we're on the subject, Boing Boing also pointed to a video about the industry's history of short-changing creators:

...while it's embarrassing to watch a company like Disney, which has made a fortune off Kirby's contribution to the comic book medium, discount the role he played in Stan Lee and Marvel's collective legacy, they're not first, as the behavior has been a common practice well before the modern superhero movie boom.

Yes, I know that. There's only so many book publishers who hire writers for special assignment who've been unfair to their workers-for-hire, even the Stratameyer syndicate that created the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series. And in comics proper, Bob Kane was unfair to Bill Finger by short-changing him over creators' credits for Batman. And speaking of Finger, when the company that owns his other creation, the Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott, goes so far as to retcon the poor guy into a homosexual (something even Thomas himself agreed was dismaying), isn't that too a form of contempt for a veteran? Why, that's also what DC did when they allowed Thomas' own creation, Obsidian from Infinity Inc, to undergo the same, and all at the hands of a truly awful writer named Gerard Jones, who was instrumental in bringing down the DCU during the 1990s. I sure hope Thomas still realizes he too is not immune to short-changing by the Big Two, and that it's still bound to continue for a long time after these topics have been in current discussion.

I have no doubt a really great documentary about Lee and all these other contributors he's worked with can be made, but it should be produced independently of Marvel/DC and the studios that now own them. After all, if corporate influence could affect the narrative, then how can one expect the best documentaries to be produced about all these famous veterans?

Labels: Batman, dc comics, Fantastic Four, golden calf of LGBT, good artists, good writers, Green Lantern, history, Hulk, Justice League of America, marvel comics, politics, Spider-Man, X-Men