Y
Es cierto que Lee no era el mejor guionista de comics del mundo,
Si te quieres divertir un rato, siempre puedes hacerlo con la polémica de que Shakespaere es Sir Francis Bacon u Homero un churro formado de diferentes poetas, estilo Marvel. Existe una legendaria entrevista a Kirby en la que afirma que todo Marvel sesentero fue obra suya, y la teoria de que hasta los dialogos son de Kirby está ahí fuera. (la entrevista es laaarga y muy detallada, pero merece la pena:
http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/)
GROTH; When did you meet Stan Lee for the first time?
KIRBY: I met Stan Lee when I first went to work for Marvel. He was a little boy. When Joe and I were doing Captain America. He was about 13 years old. He’s about five years younger than me.
GROTH: Did you keep in touch with him at all?
KIRBY: No, I thought Stan Lee was a bother.
GROTH: [Laughter.]
KIRBY: I did!
GROTH: What do you mean by “bother”?
KIRBY: You know he was the kind of kid that liked to fool around — open and close doors on you. Yeah. In fact,once I told Joe to throw him out of the room.
GROTH; Because he was a pest?
KIRBY: Yes, he was a pest. Stan Lee was a pest. He liked to irk people and it was one thing I couldn’t take.
GROTH: Hasn’t changed a bit, huh?
KIRBY: He hasn’t changed a bit. I couldn’t do anything about Stan Lee because he was the publisher’s cousin. He ran back and forth around New York doing things that he was told to do. He would slam doors and come up to you and look over your shoulder and annoy you in a lot of ways. Joe would probably elaborate on it.
GROTH: When you went to Marvel in ’58 and ’59, Stan was obviously there.
KIRBY: Yes, and he was the same way.
GROTH: And you two collaborated on all the monster stories?
KIRBY: Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write the stories just like I always did.
GROTH: On all the monster stories it says “Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” What did he do to warrant his name being on them?
KIRBY: Nothing! OK?
GROTH: Did he dialogue them?
KIRBY: No, I dialogued them. If Stan Lee ever got a thing dialogued, he would get it from someone working in the office. I would write out the whole story on the back of every page. I would write the dialogue on the back or a description of what was going on. Then Stan Lee would hand them to some guy and he would write in the dialogue. In this way Stan Lee made more pay than he did as an editor. This is the way Stan Lee became the writer. Besides collecting the editor’s pay, he collected writer’s pay. I’m not saying Stan Lee had a bad business head on. I think he took advantage of whoever was working for him.
GROTH: But he was essentially serving in a capacity as an editorial liaison between you and the publisher?
KIRBY: Yes, he wasn’t exactly an editor, or anything like that. Even as a young boy, he’d be hopping around — I think he had a flute, and he was playing on his flute.
GROTH: The Pied Piper.
KIRBY: Yeah. He’d come up and annoy me, and I told Joe to throw him out.
GROTH: Stan wrote, “Jack and I were having a ball turning out monster stories.’’ Were you having a ball. Jack?
KIRBY: Stan Lee was having the ball.
GROTH: You turned out monster stories for two or three years I think. Then the first comic that rejuvenated superheroes that you did was The Fantastic four. Can you explain how that came about?
KIRBY: I had to do something different. The monster stories have their limitations — you can just do so many of them. And then it becomes a monster book month after month, so there had to be a switch because the times weren’t exactly conducive to good sales. So I felt the idea was to come up with new stuff all the time — in other words there had to be a blitz. And I came up with this blitz. I came up with The Fantastic Four, I came up with Thor (I knew the Thor legends very well), and the Hulk, the X-Men, and The Avengers. I revived what I could and came up with what I could. I tried to blitz the stands with new stuff. The new stuff seemed to gain momentum.
GROTH: Let me ask you something that I think is an important point: Stan wrote the way you guys worked — and I think he’s referring to the monster stories specifically here — he wrote, “I had only to give Jack an outline of the story and he would draw the entire strip breaking down the outline into exactly the right number of panels. Then it remained for me to take Jack’s artwork and add the captions and dialogue which would hopefully add a dimension of reality to sharply delineated characterization.” So he’s saying that he gave you a plot, and you would draw it, and he would add the captions and dialogue.
ROZ KIRBY: I remember Jack would call him up and say it’s going to be this kind of story or that kind of story and just send him the story. And he’d write in everything on the side.
KIRBY: Remember this: Stan Lee was an editor. He worked from nine to five doing business for Martin Goodman. In other words he didn’t do any writing in the office. He did Martin Goodman’s business. That was his function. There were people coming up to the office to talk all the time. They weren’t always artists, they were business people. Stan Lee was the first man they would see and Stan Lee would see if he could get them in to see Martin Goodman. That was Stan Lee’s function.
Y...
GROTH: Can you tell me give me your version of how The Fantastic Four came about? Did Stan go to you…?
KIRBY: No, Stan didn’t know what a mutation was. I was studying that kind of stuff all the time. I would spot it in the newspapers and science magazines. I still buy magazines that are fanciful. I don’t read as much science fiction as I did at that time. 1 was a student of science fiction and I began to make up my own story patterns, my own type of people. Stan Lee doesn’t think the way I do. Stan Lee doesn’t think of people when he thinks of [characters]. I think of [characters] as real people. If I drew a war story it would be two guys caught in the war. The Fantastic Four to me are people who were in a jam — suddenly you find yourself invisible, suddenly you find yourself flexible.
ROZ KIRBY: Gary wantsto know how you created The Fantastic Four.
GROTH: Did you approach Marvel or —
KIRBY: It came about very simply. I came in [to the Marvel offices] and they were moving out the furniture, they were taking desks out — and I needed the work! I had a family and a house and all of a sudden Marvel is coming apart. Stan Lee is sitting on a chair crying. He didn’t know what to do, he’s sitting in a chair crying —he was just still out of his adolescence. I told him to stop crying. I says. “Go in to Martin and tell him to stop moving the furniture out, and I’ll see that the books make money.” And I came up with a raft of new books and all these books began to make money. Somehow they had faith in me. I knew 1 could do it, but I had to come up with fresh characters that nobody had seen before. I came up with The Fantastic Four. I came up with Thor. Whatever it took to sell a book I came up with. Stan Lee has never been editorial minded. It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories. Stan Lee was a guy that knew where the papers were or who was coming to visit that day. Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK? I’m essentially something else: I’m a storyteller. My job is to sell my stories. When I saw this happening at Marvel I stopped the whole damned bunch. I stopped them from moving the furniture! Stan Lee was sitting on some kind of a stool, and he was crying.
GROTH: Now did the success of The Justice League of America over at National have anything to do with creating The Fantastic Four? Did that prompt you to create the F.F.?
KIRBY: No. It didn’t prompt me. I felt an urgency at the time. It was an instinct. Here you have an emergency situation — what do you do? The water is pouring in through a big hole in the wall — you don’t stop to put adhesive bandages around the wall to shore it up. You get a lot of stuff together and slam it against the wall and keep the water out. That’s what I did.
GROTH: Who came up with the name “Fantastic Four”?
KIRBY: I did. All right? I came up with all those names. I came up with Thor because I’ve always been a history buff. I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir, the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high school and I loved it in my pre-high school days. It was the thing that kept my mind off the general poverty in the area. When I went to school that’s what kept me in school — it wasn’t mathematics and it wasn’t geography; it was history.
GROTH: Stan says he conceptualized virtually everything in The Fantastic Four — that he came up with all the characters. And then he said that he wrote a detailed synopsis for Jack to follow.
ROZ KIRBY: I’ve never seen anything.
KIRBY: I’ve never seen it, and of course I would say that’s an outright lie.
GROTH: Stan pretty much takes credit in an introduction to one of his books for creating all the characters in The Fantastic Four. He also said he created the name.
KIRBY: No, he didn’t.
GROTH: The next character, if I remember correctly, was The Hulk. If I remember correctly you drew a six-issue run of that, then it was cancelled for a little while, then Steve Ditko started it in an anthology book called Tales to Astonish. Can you talk a little bit about how you were involved in creating The Hulk?
KIRBY: The Hulk I created when I saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught under the running board of this car. The little child was playing in the gutter and he was crawling from the gutter onto the sidewalk under the running board of this car — he was playing in the gutter. His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear window of the car, and this woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car. It suddenly came to me that in desperation we can all do that — we can knock down walls, we can go berserk, which we do. You know what happens when we’re in a rage — you can tear a house down. I created a character who did all that and called him the Hulk. I inserted him in a lot of the stories I was doing. Whatever the Hulk was at the beginning I got from that incident. A character to me can’t be contrived. I don’t like to contrive characters. They have to have an element of truth. This woman proved to me that the ordinary person in desperate circumstances can transcend himself and do things that he wouldn’t ordinarily do. I’ve done it myself. I’ve bent steel.
GROTH: Was the child caught between the running board…?
KIRBY: He wasn’t caught. He was playing under the running board in the gutter. His head was sticking out, and then he decided he wanted to get back on the sidewalk again. But being under the car frightened his mother. He was having difficulty crawling out from under the running board, so his mother looked like she was going to scream, and she looked very desperate. She didn’t scream, but she ran over to the car and, very determined, she lifted up the entire rear of that car. I’m not saying she was a slender woman, [laughter.] She was a short, firm, well-built woman — and the Hulk was there. I didn’t know what it was. It began to form.
ROZ KIRBY: You also said the Hulk reminded you of Frankenstein.
KIRBY: The Hulk was Frankenstein. Frankenstein can rip up the place, and the Hulk could never remember who he formerly was.
GROTH:Well, this is probably going to shock you, but Stan takes full credit for creating the Hulk. He’s written, “Actually, ideas have always been the easiest part of my various chores.” And then he went on to say that in creating The Hulk, “It would be my job to take a clichéd concept and make it seem new and fresh and exciting and relevant. Once again, I decided that Jack Kirby would be the artist to breathe life into our latest creation. So the next time we met, I outlined the concept I’d been toying with for weeks.”
KIRBY: Yes, he was always toying with concepts. On the contrary, it was I who brought the ideas to Stan. I brought the ideas to DC as well, and that’s how business was done from the beginning.
GROTH: Stan also claimed he created the name. “the Hulk.”
KIRBY: No, he didn’t.
ROZ KIRBY: It’s just his word against Stan’s.
GROTH: There was a period between ’61 and ’63 when you were just drawing a tremendous number of books.
ROZ KIRBY: May I make one point? In all these years, when Jack was still creating things, Stan Lee hasn’t been creating things. When Jack left Stan, there wasn’t anything new created by Stan.
KIRBY: Yeah. Stan never created anything new after that. If he says he created things all that easily, what did he create after I left? That’s the point. Have they done anything new? He’ll probably tell you, “I didn’t have to.”
GROTH: Can I ask what your involvement in Spider-Man was?
KIRBY: I created Spider-Man. We decided to give it to Steve Ditko. I drew the first Spider-Man cover. I created the character. I created the costume. I created all those books, but I couldn’t do them all. We decided to give the book to Steve Ditko who was the right man for the job. He did a wonderful job on that.
GROTH: There was a period between ’61 and ’63 when you were just drawing a tremendous number of books.
ROZ KIRBY: May I make one point? In all these years, when Jack was still creating things, Stan Lee hasn’t been creating things. When Jack left Stan, there wasn’t anything new created by Stan.
KIRBY: Yeah. Stan never created anything new after that. If he says he created things all that easily, what did he create after I left? That’s the point. Have they done anything new? He’ll probably tell you, “I didn’t have to.”
GROTH: Can I ask what your involvement in Spider-Man was?
KIRBY: I created Spider-Man. We decided to give it to Steve Ditko. I drew the first Spider-Man cover. I created the character. I created the costume. I created all those books, but I couldn’t do them all. We decided to give the book to Steve Ditko who was the right man for the job. He did a wonderful job on that.
GROTH: Can you explain how you worked? I think according to Stan he would give you a plot, you would draw it, and he would write it. Now would you dispute —
ROZ KIRBY: [Stan] would say that he needs the story, and I think they talked two minutes on the phone, and then Jack would go off and write the story on the side of the art.
KIRBY: Stan didn’t know what the heck the stories were about.
GROTH; I’ve seen original art with words written on the sides of the pages.
KIRBY: That would be my dialogue.
GROTH: You would talk to Stan on the phone — what was a typical conversation like when you were plotting the Fantastic Four: what would he say and what would you say?
KIRBY: On The Fantastic Four, I’d tell him what I was going to do, what the story was going to be, and I’d bring it in — that’s all.
ROZ KIRBY: [Stan Lee] would always say “great.”
KIRBY: And that’s all Stan Lee would say, “great.” [Laughter.]
GROTH: Did he ever have criticisms of your storylines — would he ever say, ‘“I think you should go in a different direction’’ or anything like that?
KIRBY: No, no, no, he took them verbatim. If Stan Lee had ever done that I’d’ve been over to DC in about five minutes.
Y Alan Moore está de acuerdo.
ALAN MOORE - talks about Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko - YouTube