Jack Kirby and Stan Lee By Jeet Heer National Post (October 11, 2003). Review of The Comics Journal Library: Jack Kirby edited by Milo George and Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon. For artistic collaborators, no less than for romantic couples, breaking up is hard to do. When two artists who have worked closely together separate, the resulting recrimination and bitterness can rival the aftermath of a nasty divorce. In pop music, the classic case of a bad break-up is the 1970 dissolution of the Beatles, which led to years of ill-will and back-biting interviews from the two major participants, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In the less glamorous but equally contentious world of comic books, the fruitful teaming between writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby rivals the Lennon-McCartney relationship as a saga of an immensely creative relationship that went awry. Working closely together in the 1960s and aided by a few lesser lights, Lee and Kirby co-created the Marvel Comics universe, a densely-imagined fictive realm whose stars (the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four) are now mainstays of global pop culture. Yet despite its many large and healthy off-springs, the Lee-Kirby partnership was poisoned by accusations of mistreatment and dishonesty. The story of how these erstwhile colleagues remade American poplar culture but ended up as sullen foes is told in two superb recent books, an in-depth biography of Lee and a coffee-table book devoted to Kirby's art. As befits the future creators of super-heroes, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby both started their careers by fashioning secret identities. Born to a poor Jewish family in New York in 1922, Stanley Martin Lieber fell into comic book world by happenstance as a teenager. His cousin-in-law, Martin Goodman, was an upstart publishing mogul, whose firm Timely Publication specialized in pulp magazines and such offshoots as comic books, which were a hot new craze in the late 1930s. Timely was such a low-rent operation that much of the staff consisted of Goodman's extended family. Within this nepotistic environment, the young Lieber thrived and by the early 1940s was a leading writer for their extensive comic book line. At first, Lieber had little regard for the stories he wrote, seeing it as hack-work. Disdaining the schlock he was churning out and dreaming of fame as a novelist or playwright, Lieber adopted a pen-name for his comic book work: Stan Lee. Jacob Kurtzberg had an immigrant Jewish childhood that was even more downscale than that of his future associate, Lee. Born in the slums of the lower east-side of New York in 1917, Kurtzberg grew up in a teaming tenement neighborhood where the only social order was provided by rival gangs. Although he took part in his share of street fighting, Kurtzberg found relief from his dismal surroundings by reading pulp science fiction novels and watching adventure movies. Blessed with a quick drawing hand and a prodigious visual imagination, Kurtzberg escaped from his ghetto surroundings in the late 1930s by becoming a cartoonist, working briefly in animation and then entering the burgeoning comic book field. Like other aspiring cartoonists, the young Kurtzberg decided this new field required him to adopt a jazzier moniker: Jacob Kurtzberg became Jack Kirby. During the 1940s, while Lee toiled as a faithful minion of the Goodman publishing empire, Kirby enjoyed his first period of artistic success. In 1940, working with childhood chum Joe Simon, Kirby created the super-hero patriot Captain America. Much more-so than earlier crime-fighters like Superman and Batman, Captain America had a decided political edge: with America's entry into World War II imminent, Captain America was clearly a nationalist icon designed to fight foreign foes, especially the Germans. Kirby's art made Captain America an immediate hit and reshaped the field of comic books. Earlier comic book artists had looked to the staid illustrational model of newspaper comics, where heroes posed with stately restraint. Kirby realized that the comic book page was a canvas that allowed for a much more vibrant approach. In panels bursting with energy, Kirby drew battle scenes that were as rough and uncontrolled as the street fights of his youth. The fact that drawing these comics allowed the Jewish Kirby to show Captain America beating up on Nazis gave his art an extra vim. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the war stopped being simply a comic book matter to both Kirby and Lee. Serving in the combat infantry, Kirby took part in the Normandy invasion. In latter life Kirby was sometimes reticent in talking about his war years, but the military campaigns he witnessed seared his imagination no less than his ghetto upbringing: the big booming machines that would loom so large in Kirby's post-war art were created by someone who had seen mechanized warfare at close hand. Lee also did wartime service, designing posters warning soldiers of the dangers of venereal disease. This advertising work also left an impression: Lee's chief skill as a writer would always be in the pitchman's art of coining catchy blurbs. After the war, Lee and Kirby both returned full-time to comic book field, but they found their profession had greatly changed. Superheroes were fading in popularity and savvy publishers were trying to find new genres, notably westerns and horror comics. Always innovative, Kirby reunited with Joe Simon and pioneered an array of fresh approaches: among other things, the two men more or less invented the romance comic as a genre. Meanwhile, Lee continued to work in the Goodman empire, still a second-tier publisher the specialized in flooding the market with facile imitations of more successful companies. The 1950s were are a difficult decade for comics. Outraged by grisly horror comics, parents groups and do-gooders launched extensive campaigns to clean up the industry, leading to both self-censorship by the publishers and dramatically lower sales. Atlas comics, which Lee managed in his corner of the Goodman firm, cut back production and staff. Lee found himself as both the editor and chief writer of eight monthly comics. Meanwhile, Kirby's longtime partner Joe Simon left the comic book field, feeling that his prospects were stronger in advertising. It was in the scaled-back and economically precarious comic book world of the late 1950s that was the background for the Lee-Kirby collaboration. Needing to put out as many comics as he could with a minimal staff, Lee turned to the veteran industry workhorse, Kirby. Kirby became the cornerstone of the Atlas line for a number of reasons: he was fast, his art was always solid and, most importantly, he could turn out stories with minimal script assistance. Since Lee had to write almost all the Atlas books, he didn't have time work out detailed stories. Instead, he developed a method whereby the artists did the primary plotting and Lee would simply add in the dialogue. Later known as the "Marvel Method," this technique had a beneficial side-effect, since it gave priority to dynamic visual storytelling. On the downside, however, it made the question of authorship extremely murky: if the artist came up with both the plot and images, could Lee really be seen as the sole author of his work? In their earliest collaborations, Lee and Kirby stuck to the basics: mystery and monster stories, often involving giant Godzilla-like creatures. Yet by 1961, the team was ready for something bolder. Hearing that their competitor DC Comics was doing well with superheroes like the Flash and Green Lantern, Martin Goodman wanted his cartoonists to get back into the masked avenger game. Lee and Kirby were happy to comply, but they added a twist to their boss's familiar demand that they imitate the industry leader. Atlas Comics re-branded itself as Marvel Comics but the comics they produced were different from any superheroes that existed before. Fantastic Four #1, which premiered in the fall of 1961, was the first shot out of the Lee-Kirby cannon. Starting as an origin story, this comic had many of the familiar tics of the superhero comic. Bombarded by "cosmic rays" during an experimental rocket flight, the four chief heroes gain remarkable powers which allow them to fight crime: looking like a moving pile of rocks, Ben Grimm has the strength of many men; Reed Richards found he could stretch his body like a rubber-band; his fiancé Sue Storm had the power turn invisible while her brother Johnny could become a human fireball. Yet even in their first appearance, the Fantastic Four gave off an odor of oddness: with his mutated body, Ben Grimm looked more like monster than a hero and his behavior sometimes matched his form. He and the other members of the Fantastic Four would often bicker, with the rancor of a genuine family dispute. Reed Richards tried to control the group, but his paternalistic stance usually caused the others to snap back at him. Sue Storm would occasionally be tempted to leave her intended husband Reed while her younger brother had all the surliness of a teenager. The soap opera group dynamics of the Fantastic Four owed much to Kirby's earlier work in romance comics, but Lee's skills as a writer of snappy dialogue gave the comic added depth. Lee and Kirby would replicate the Marvel formula (flawed superheroes fighting crime while worrying about their personal lives) in a host of other volumes: Captain America was brought back while new comics featured the adventures of the Hulk, the X-Men, the Mighty Thor, the Silver Surfer, and the Black Panther. To this day, the comic book industry and Hollywood are mining the gold found by Lee and Kirby. Since commercial comics are a collaborative medium, other cartoonists also contributed their share. In particular, artist Steve Ditko played a crucial role in conceptualizing and developing Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. If Lee and Kirby were like Lennon and McCartney, then Ditko was the George Harrison of the operation: not as prolific, but still an important player with a distinctive voice. Yet Lee and Kirby were undisputedly the chief architects who built Marvel Comics, a company that would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Lee's trademark breezy banter set the tone for Marvel Comics while Kirby's unstoppable visual imagination populated his comics with literally hundreds of distinct characters and settings, which became increasingly cosmic and psychedelic as the 1960s progressed. Kirby's imagination was like a tropical jungle: a hothouse of vitality and unexpected life-forms. Entire worlds seemed to flow out of his pen. Alas, the Lee-Kirby team-work couldn't last. As Marvel Comics became more popular, the firm increasingly used Lee as a figure-head and spokesman. With his family ties and managerial position, Lee became the public voice of Marvel Comics. In innumerable interviews with journalists, Lee often made it sound as if Marvel comics sprang spontaneous from his imagination, with artists like Kirby and Ditko serving merely as hired hands who carried out his vision. Equally galling was the fact that Lee would receive a sizable salary, comparable to that of a top CEO, while most of artists who worked with him drew a meager free-lancers salary, often without health benefits or a pension. Lee's credit-hogging and relentless self-promotion proved too much for Kirby, who left Marvel Comics for greener pastures in 1970, the very year that the Beatles broke up. In interviews, including the ones collected in The Comics Journal Library volume, Kirby disputed Lee's version of the creation of Marvel comics. With wounded pride, Kirby downplayed Lee's importance in creating Marvel comics, insisting that "Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything!" (On other occasions, Kirby could be more generous in acknowledging Lee's importance and regretted the harsh words he uttered in this interview). The two men became such bitter foes that when Kirby died in 1994, Lee wasn't sure whether he would be welcome at the funeral. Only a personal request by Kirby's widow convinced Lee to attend, although he stayed in the back and quickly slunk out. The great virtue of these two new books is that they allow us to transcend the bitterness of the Lee-Kirby dispute and see their joint accomplishments with fresh eyes. In their nearly perfect new biography, Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon carefully weigh the competing claims of Lee and Kirby and come to a judicious conclusion, emphasizing Lee's skills as and editor and writer without downplaying the Kirby's ability to generate ideas and give them shape. The importance of Kirby as an artist, and his long career before and after Marvel comics, is amply illustrated in the coffee table book edited by Milo George. In addition, this book has three lengthy interviews where Kirby gives his version of history. The two men, it becomes clear, did their best work in a state of artistic synergy, making art as a team that was better than anything they could do apart. Like Lennon and McCartney, Lee and Kirby created something special together, which even years of enmity cannot erase.