I honestly think the reason I’m back is because I wanted to be back. I’m home. And being among the people of Marvel is good ground to be on. They’re good people.
—Jack Kirby, “Kirby Speaks,” FOOM #11, September 1975
Fortunately for Stan Lee, whatever Marvel was becoming in 1976, it seemed that the company still deemed it crucial that he remain a significant part of the picture.
And that picture included not just Jack Kirby—back at Marvel Comics, where he (twice) swore he’d never return. It now included the guy who’d seduced Kirby away in 1970. Yes, Carmine Infantino was back in the trenches as a freelance artist—not at DC, where, aside from being the boss, he’d also done his most well-known work—but at Marvel, where he’d last worked in the 1950s.
At the same time, a new set of laws called the Copyright Act of 1976 was working its way through Congress. The act, which would be signed by President Gerald Ford on October 19, would potentially open the floodgates for comic book creators (and those in other fields, as well) to claim ownership of the freelance work they’d done for media corporations. But the act would not go into effect until 1978, so no one, at the time of the its signing, seemed to be giving it much thought.
As for Stan Lee, with the dependable Archie Goodwin installed as editor in chief, he was able to pay more attention to promoting Marvel (and Stan Lee), which included extending its reach in Hollywood, although he still showed up regularly at the company’s Madison Avenue offices to make global decisions affecting editing and publishing.
Nonetheless, he and company president Jim Galton had embarked on their mission to save Marvel by licensing its characters as material for movies and TV shows. And indeed, there would be media successes, including, especially, the Lou Ferrigno-Bill Bixby–starring Incredible Hulk series, as well as the less successful Nicholas Hammond–starring Spider-Man series, and (in 1978) a Fantastic Four Saturday morning animated series, on which Lee would team with Roy Thomas to write scripts for which Jack Kirby would do storyboards.
Marvel’s mid/late ’70s comics lineup would change in makeup—always with a core of superheroes—but with horror and monster titles, too, as well as martial arts–related titles, and a line of black-and-white magazines—not beholden, for a variety of reasons, to the Comics Code—indeed emulating the success of Warren Publishing’s output. And there was always room for idiosyncratic comics, especially those with a Hollywood or show business angle, notably—harking back to the days when Timely/Atlas published TV and radio tie-ins—adaptations of other companies’ movie and TV properties. The profusion of adaptations existed largely thanks to one decision that publisher Lee was convinced to go back on: Star Wars.
Lee had rejected “The Star Wars” as a property to adapt in 1975, going with his experience-born belief that science-fiction comics just didn’t sell. But Star Wars creator George Lucas and the film’s publicity director, Charles Lippincott, didn’t give up. They felt that having a comic out before their movie was released would be great for building interest in the film. They approached Roy Thomas, by then a freelance writer and editor for Marvel, who at first—given Lee’s initial declining of the project—said there was nothing he could do. But upon being shown stills and the script for the production-in-progress, Thomas realized that Star Wars wasn’t hard science fiction but more of a “space opera”—a story that depended more on characterization, humor, and emotion than on real science. In other words, it was very similar to a Marvel comic. Thomas’s enthusiasm—and the fact that Lucas would be giving the comics rights to Marvel for free; no upfront licensing fee was required—convinced Lee and Galton to green-light the comics adaptation, which debuted several months before the Star Wars movie opened.1
The Star Wars comic, by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin, which took six issues to adapt the movie, and then continued as an ongoing series with new, Lucasfilm-approved stories, was a massive hit. It’s often credited with saving Marvel, if not from extinction, then from severe cutbacks. Its success led Marvel to take on many more licensed properties—Shogun Warriors, Micronauts, and so on.
A notable licensed property Lee was convinced to take on—by writer Steve Gerber—was the transformation of the then-new band KISS into superheroes with their own one-shot, magazine-format comic, which was promoted as having band members’ blood mixed into the printer’s ink, so everyone buying a copy would get at least a few molecules of authentic KISS blood. (This was, obviously, well before the AIDS epidemic.) Although their music was not, to say the least, his style, Lee attended a KISS concert and even accompanied the band to the Buffalo, New York, printing plant where their blood was extracted and mixed into the ink used in printing the magazine. (Unconfirmed is a rumor that the blood-infused ink was accidentally used on an issue of Sports Illustrated, and not on the KISS comic.) The KISS comic was a huge seller.2
The Star Wars comic series was taken over with issue #11, which appeared in early 1978, by Archie Goodwin as writer and Infantino as penciler. The former DC publisher was now firmly ensconced as a regular Marvel artist, something he hadn’t been for twenty years. He would continue drawing Star Wars—with some breaks—through 1982, as well as a number of other Marvel series.
In 1976, Lee and Romita Sr. started work on a Spider-Man syndicated strip, which debuted on January 3, 1977. While Lee’s other ’70s syndicated ventures, including 1976’s soap opera spoof, The Virtue of Vera Valiant (when soap satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was hot on TV) and the photo-funny-format Says Who!, hadn’t been especially successful,3 the Spider-Man strip proved popular and durable and was published into 2019. Larry Lieber would have the longest stint drawing it, penciling (and sometimes inking) the daily episodes from 1986 through late 2018.
Before getting that assignment, but after the Atlas/Seaboard imbroglio, Lieber had returned to Marvel, this time on staff, as the editor of the company’s British division, which had offices in New York, as well as in London. Lieber was overseeing not just reprint material and new covers prepared in New York for publication in the UK, but also the development of a new character called, appropriately, Captain Britain. Interestingly, Lee himself took a great interest in the British Marvels—which were published on a weekly schedule—perhaps because he had a British wife, or perhaps because, unlike many other Marvel foreign editions, these were in English! (Neil Tennant, later to be a member of the popular band the Pet Shop Boys, worked as an assistant editor in Marvel’s London office during this period. This author did the same in the New York office, having started out his comics career in the British department in July 1977.)
And then there was Kirby.
Jack Kirby, back at Marvel, was working on numerous projects, left—as a condition of his being there at all—on his own, writing, penciling, and editing his titles, choosing his own inkers, and not obligated to tie his stories into Marvel continuity, although they technically took place in the shared Marvel universe.4
In his The Eternals series, for instance—about alien space gods who have come to Earth (when Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, about a similar topic, was popular)—this meant that there was minimal interaction between Kirby’s new characters and his and Lee’s old ones, who supposedly inhabited the same planet. Readers had to pretend that Kirby’s characters—including a number of two-thousand-foot-tall armored entities—would not be noticed by any established characters aside from some newly-created S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. His Captain America and the Falcon series made no note of the previous run of issues, and his Black Panther likewise made no reference to the Panther series that had recently been running.
Whether Kirby’s series would “electrocute you in the mind” was hard to say, but they did indeed have a good number of fans, especially in the growing direct-sales market. As at DC, Kirby did things more or less the way he wanted to, but neither Marvel’s staff nor the buying public seemed to know what to make of these powerful but idiosyncratic works. There were rumors that staffers were deliberately printing a higher proportion of negative letters about Kirby’s titles than were actually received and were making fun of his output with nasty annotated pages of his comics pinned up on the office walls. Whether this was somehow worse than the general level of in-house smart-aleck mockery at the offices is hard to assess. According to Evanier, Kirby was getting anonymous hate mail on Marvel office stationery and felt, overall, that he was being sabotaged from within. Significantly, Lee was an advocate for Kirby’s autonomy. As Evanier recalled:
Stan backed Jack a lot when Jack was an editor [of his own comics] there. He was very supportive of Jack having editorial control of his comics, and he overruled [Marvel’s staff] a few times.5
The thing that might have attracted a significant quantity of readers—Kirby teaming with Lee on Fantastic Four or Thor—was not something Kirby was interested in. And he certainly wasn’t interested in anyone else, besides himself, scripting his stories. Roy Thomas offered to do so, but Kirby would only do it if Thomas wrote a traditional full script. Kirby had no intention of plotting stories for someone else to dialogue.6 Lee promoted Kirby’s books in the Bullpen Bulletins and Soapboxes, but the fan excitement over Kirby’s return never seemed to materialize as much as had been hoped.7
Lee was, of course, continuing to build his personal brand. In 1976, he was well known enough that he found himself a product spokesman, starring in a TV commercial for Personna Double II razor blades. Standing in the Marvel bullpen, he excitedly informed viewers that “the Personna is beautifully designed.… Like they told me, ‘There’s no finer shaving system made.’ I may create a whole new character: Personna Man!”8
The same year, posing in front of posted proofs for the Mighty Marvel Memory Album Calendar 1977, Lee informed magazine readers that “when you create super-heros [sic], people expect you to look like one. I wear Hathaway shirts.” The ad identifies him as: “Stan Lee, Originator of Marvel Comics.”
Also that year, Lee would appear in photo-essays in the KISS comic and was continuing to write the Simon & Schuster Marvel Origins book series. But he was indeed still the publisher of the comics and paid a good deal of attention to them, coming into the office five days a week, giving up his longtime schedule of three days (and weekends, of course) working at home.9
According to Jim Shooter, Lee would, as he had been doing all along, go over the printed comics with Goodwin, and later with Shooter himself, who was associate editor under Goodwin, pointing out mistakes that had been made to ensure that they wouldn’t be made again. And no cover could go out to the printer—if Lee was available to see it before it went—without him giving it final approval. Beyond critiquing individual stories and covers, though, Lee seemed to be doing his best to avoid the Sturm und Drang of day-to-day life in the Marvel editorial trenches. To interfere would be a no-win situation, risking either seeming to undermine his head editor or possibly alienating a valuable freelancer. Staying out of things seemed like the best strategy.10
And there was much Sturm und Drang in Marvel editorial. The process of comics being created with little editorial control was continuing apace, simply because there weren’t enough editorial staffers with the authority to vet the comics at every creative stage. (Besides Shooter as Goodwin’s associate editor, there were also several assistant editors on staff, but they had no real authority to compel changes.) And yet, no apparent move to reconfigure the system seemed to be in the works. Perhaps this reflected the attitude of Cadence management—and of Lee, as well—that the future of the company lay less with the comics than with possible success in Hollywood. From that perspective, the content of the comics was less important than the revenue that could be generated through media adaptations of the company’s characters or through the company adapting media properties to comics form. Potential comics sales revenues would stay about the same or keep declining, unless there was a surprise breakout property like Star Wars. The way to save the company—to save everyone’s jobs—would be to achieve success in Hollywood.
At the end of 1977, Goodwin, too, realized that the editor’s job was not for him—and who could blame him? Certainly not Wolfman, Wein, or Conway, who had also been unable to manage the unmanageable job of supervising some forty titles, many of which were self-edited by writers who were not obligated to take any notes or suggestions the company’s editor in chief or his assistants might give. On top of all that, the EIC was expected to deal with a plethora of business considerations, which none of those who’d succeeded Lee had training or interest in.
Goodwin, regarded as one of the top writers and editors in the business, was indeed overwhelmed by the details of the business aspect of his job, as well as by the reluctance of Cadence management to expand his staff and extend his authority or do anything that would make working at Marvel more appealing to artists and writers. This was the contradiction of the era. Young comics creators, who thought of themselves as unique talents, not just cogs in a machine, were insisting on better treatment—and more creative freedom—than their predecessors had received, despite the fact that comics sales were on the decline. And yet these younger creators were the ones whose work hard-core, dedicated fans—who were buying the comics regularly—were most interested in seeing. It seemed like a riddle that couldn’t be solved.
Goodwin resigned at the end of 1977—in a move that was reportedly handled somewhat clumsily by Lee, who impulsively, if well-meaningly, announced the move earlier than he’d promised Goodwin he would—to become a freelance writer/editor (though he’d be back on staff by 1979).11 He was replaced by Shooter, who seemed to thrive on dealing with the minutiae of the business aspects of comic book editing, as well as with matters relating to story and character. Shooter hated that some writers were serving as their own editors. He saw the company, in its present state of disarray, as being in need of a strong, centralized editorial hand. Persuading Lee and Galton of the need for more structure, he set about replicating DC’s system of multiple editorial offices with an editor in chief—him—over them.
Shooter would take drastic measures to ensure the survival of Marvel’s comics. In doing so, he put a lot of noses out of joint. The chaotic, freewheeling atmosphere—which had proven unable to sell enough comics—would end (which is not to say that no fun was to be had), as Shooter instilled structure and regularity to the Marvel line. When he would come down harshly on Marvel veterans—for instance, Lee’s old colleague and creative partner Gene Colan—Lee would try to smooth things over, but would not overrule his chief.12
And there was much conflict generated when young, hip writers felt suddenly persecuted. For instance, Steve Gerber, the writer of the KISS comic, was also the cocreator of the offbeat Howard the Duck character, who was starring in his own popular series. But Gerber ended up in a dispute with Marvel over ownership of the duck and would soon be gone—ironically, to the animation business, where he would eventually work with Kirby on various features, as well as on Destroyer Duck, a comic created to finance Gerber’s legal battle against Marvel.
Besides Kirby, two of Lee’s other favorite and most reliable artists, John Romita Sr. and John Buscema, were still around and busy. Unlike Kirby and Ditko, they seemed to enjoy their association with Lee and to admire and respect him, even if they did grouse about some of his decisions from time to time. With Romita, who had helped increase Spider-Man comics sales when he took over the art and co-plotting from Ditko, Lee was doing the ongoing Spider-Man daily and Sunday syndicated newspaper strip, which, at its height, was seen in around five hundred newspapers and which long outlasted such other Marvel strips as Howard the Duck and Conan the Barbarian.13 In addition, Romita was on staff as art director, where he shared an office with his wife, Virginia, who served as his assistant and who would become traffic manager a few years later. Their son, John V. Romita—better known as John Romita Jr., or just JR—had started drawing for Marvel in 1976 and would become one of the company’s top artists.
Buscema, ensconced in his studio on Long Island, was a prolific penciler who seemed to, like Romita, understand what Lee (and subsequent editors) wanted and to give it to him. The regular penciler on titles like The Avengers and especially the Conan the Barbarian comics, Buscema ran a comic art school where Lee guest lectured. Their rapport was so good that, together, they produced the 1978 book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, followed by a video of the same name in 1986. (While it’s clear from their awkwardness on the video that neither Lee nor Buscema were professional actors, their stiff performances were somehow endearing.) The book version, still in print after forty years, is considered one of the standard texts on how to draw superheroes.
During this period, Lee was also consulting on the live-action Spider-Man and Hulk TV series, although frustrated that the producers didn’t take many of his notes. While he felt the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Hulk series generally took an intelligent approach to the character, he was less fond of the Spider-Man series. As he said in a 1978 interview with SunStorm magazine:
The people writing the Spider-Man show keep writing one bad script after another. So we’re either going to have to drop the show or go with bad scripts—I don’t know which is worse. The writers are all a bunch of hacks—the best of them—used to writing TV series with interchangeable plots. The problem is, our characters need specialized plots—they’re unique.14
Still based in New York, Lee was spending more and more time in Los Angeles. As had been true from 1961 through the end of his life in 2018, the name Stan Lee could open doors and get meetings, and that is what he spent the second half of the ’70s doing.
When Kirby’s contract was approaching its end (it would expire in 1978), he was offered a renewal, but one that contained a clause saying he would never claim ownership of any of the characters he’d worked on.15 That was unacceptable to Kirby, who elected to let the contract lapse—but not before one last hurrah with Lee.
Lee had signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a certain number of books. Kirby had signed a contract with Marvel to do a certain number of pages. To fulfill both obligations, it was decided that they would work together—as Lee had declared in the December 1975 Soapbox—on a “gigantic special edition of—you guessed it—THE SILVER SURFER!”
When asked, in Marvel’s self-published fan magazine, FOOM #11 (dated September 1975), if he was working on the Surfer project, Kirby replied, “No. I haven’t heard from Stan about it.… If SILVER SURFER comes up I’m sure Stan will discuss it with me and we’ll work it out. I haven’t heard a thing yet.” Lee himself mentioned the project again in an interview with David Anthony Kraft (probably done in late 1976) printed in FOOM #17 (dated March 1977). And by January 1977, the duo was, indeed, working together—at Kirby’s L.A. home—on the Silver Surfer project. This wasn’t going to be just a single twenty-page story or even a forty-page story in a thicker-format annual. This was going to be a hundred-page Surfer saga, published in book format. It was called The Silver Surfer: The Ultimate Cosmic Experience! on the cover, and simply The Silver Surfer in the book itself. But, especially since it was published in 1978, the same year as Will Eisner’s groundbreaking A Contract with God graphic novel, it has come to be known as The Silver Surfer Graphic Novel.
In the book’s preface, Lee wrote:
After all these years, Jolly Jack and I actually managed to complete the one book we’ve always been threatening to foist upon a stunned and startled public.… the Silver Surfer seems to have a special meaning to us both.
Ever eager for a trip out west, I bravely journeyed to Jack’s idyllic aerie high in the hills of southern California. There, during a fateful visit, we hammered out the main elements of the phantasmagoric parable soon to unfold before your bedazzled eyes.16
The story involved Galactus trying to convince—really strong-arm—the Silver Surfer to once again become his herald. Like the rest of the work Kirby did in this period at Marvel, the story stood outside regular Marvel continuity. In fact, part of it told of the initial arrival of Galactus on Earth, but without the presence of the Fantastic Four—so prominent in the original 1966 telling—anywhere in the story. Even more oddly, the copyright on the book is not to Marvel but to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Regarding these details, Evanier recalled:
The Silver Surfer had been optioned for a movie, but the option did not include the Fantastic Four, so it wasn’t really possible to do the Galactus Trilogy. So they [the producers] tried to come up with a story line for a Silver Surfer movie … and they couldn’t come up with a plot.
So at one point [producer Lee Kramer] went to Stan and said, “Why don’t you and Jack come up with a plot?” Stan went to Jack and suggested the two of them work up a pitch for a story. But Jack thought, “Hey, Hollywood writers get paid well. Why don’t they hire us to write the movie?”
Stan couldn’t make that happen, though. So the compromise was—Stan came up with this idea—he was doing those Simon & Schuster books, and one of the publishers had said to him, “Hey, why don’t we do an original story?” So he went to Jack and said, “Look, why don’t we do a Silver Surfer graphic novel that could be the plot for the movie? I can arrange it so that we hold the copyright … so we get paid for doing the story as the graphic novel, and if they want it for the movie, they have to buy it from us at movie industry prices.”
That sounded good to Jack, because he wanted to get out of Marvel at that point, and he had to use up the [contractually obligated] pages anyway.… Jack wrote an outline, which he registered with the Writer’s Guild.… Jack’s the one who put it on paper … he wrote an outline of the plot and then wrote [on separate typed pages] what he would otherwise have put in the margin notes [of the art]. But nobody wanted to turn it into a movie, and that was the end of [Stan and Jack doing the movie].17
The correspondence, found at Lee’s University of Wyoming archives, regarding the Silver Surfer graphic novel is probably the most complete view we have of the Lee-Kirby working process. In a personal letter to Kirby a few weeks after their January meeting, Lee wrote:
Just a line to tell you how much I enjoyed seeing you in Los Angeles. I am sorry we didn’t have more time to spend together, but at least we did have a chance to talk awhile. I hope everything we discussed is clear and agreeable with you and that all will work out well. Keep rolling along on the SURFER—it is bound to be the “All the President’s Men” of 1977!18
The correspondence gives a sense of the nuts and bolts of how the story was constructed. Taking off from their California conference, Kirby proceeded to break the story down into pages and panels, which he submitted to Lee in batches, and he accompanied the art with typed-out notes—the equivalent of the margin notes he used to provide Lee with during their earlier collaborations. It was as if Kirby wanted to be sure that his thoughts on the pages literally could not be erased.
But even that documentation seems open to interpretation.
For instance, in a letter dated January 24, 1977, Kirby spent four typed pages describing for Lee an overview of the plot to the graphic novel. The letter opened:
Stanley,
Just in case a little reiteration is needed in view of our discussion, I believe that the over-riding points of the story lie in the Galactus-Surfer relationship and our own helter-skelter position in the universe. It’s the Surfer’s story, of course, and his experience should be dominant (his love story—his life among Earth people—his decisions). However, I believe the reader will clearly be intrigued by the larger question of his own vulnerability in the scheme of things.
The rest of the letter veers between discussing specific images and overall themes. But are these images and themes Kirby came up with and is unveiling for Lee, or are they “reiteration in view of our discussion”?
Kirby’s cover letter for a batch of pages, dated March 14, 1977, read:
Stanley,
This is the second batch of continuity for the “Surfer” book. If you can overlook an occasional typing error, you’ll find the pages explained in what I feel is the proper perspective in consideration of realistic rendering and dramatic value. Of course, it’s all done within areas we discussed and I hope it comes across. I’ve also tried to cover all loose ends and set the stage for the Surfer’s life among the humans.19
One can read whatever one wants into the correspondence and notes on file regarding the Surfer book. Clearly, both men agree that they did indeed talk out the story to some degree, certainly in more detail than they seemed to in the last couple of years of their previous collaborations. Yet, based on his notes (and on Evanier’s recollections), Kirby seemed to again be doing the plotting details mostly on his own. He provided panel-by-panel art descriptions, along with some dialogue suggestions. But as in their ’60s collaborations, there weren’t dialogue suggestions for every panel, and the ones that are there were quite rough.
For instance, Kirby’s notes for the three-panel here read:
Page Six
Panel One—The Surfer glides in among the towering buildings. The noises from the streets below reach him.
Panel Two—As he swoops lower, the Surfer catches his first sight of humans. There are faces in the windows, all showing reaction to this stranger among them.
Panel Three—Then, at street level, the Surfer finds himself involved with the life and noise of the city.
For the same page, Lee’s script accompanying the art was this:
PAGE 6
1. SS [Silver Surfer]: There are primitive structures, simple dwellings, and basic machines of every sort!
SS: It is an early culture, groping and stumbling its way towards a dimly-sensed maturity!
2. SS: Yet, the very AIR seems to throb with a sense of LIFE! There is ENERGY here—there is SPIRIT—there is VITALITY such as I have never known!
3. SS: The sudden sight of me causes PANIC in the streets!
SS: They have yet to learn—only the SAVAGE fears what he does not understand!20
Knowing he was on the way out the door, Kirby’s attitude in the Surfer correspondence was friendly and collegial (although calling Lee “Stanley” can be seen as, simultaneously, a term of endearment as well as a way of reminding the publisher that he was once the pisher who was not then Kirby’s boss, “Stan,” but his flunky and the boss’s relative, “Stanley”).
Without too much of a stretch, the story can be looked at—whether the creators were aware of it or not—as a metaphor for Kirby’s last go-round at Marvel. The company—and Lee?—could be seen as Galactus, devouring whatever it wants, including the embodiment of compromised innocence that is the Surfer (who can be seen as Kirby). And—as in the four-part Fantastic Four “Worlds Within Worlds” story where the Surfer rejoined Galactus—here, too, after deluding himself into thinking he could be free of Galactus and still possess a clear conscience, the Surfer realizes that his fate is with Galactus, if only so that he might protect the universe from his master’s depredations. And despite his saying in the FOOM interview that “the reason I’m back is that I wanted to be back,” Kirby’s return to Marvel was, in reality, made with great reluctance, as was the Surfer’s return to Galactus.
The story seemed to say, essentially, that Galactus and the Surfer are fated to be together—like Kirby and Lee/Marvel? But was the message Lee’s, ennobling the Surfer’s decision to pragmatically ally with the predatory giant? Was the message Kirby’s—a warning of a fate to be avoided, a fate he might have, at least temporarily, succumbed to?
Was it wishful thinking on Lee’s part, maneuvering Kirby toward cocreating a story about idealism compromising with overwhelming power, power that is beyond good and evil? Was it Lee’s way of trying to get Kirby to see that sticking around with him and Marvel was all for the greater good? You tried DC, and that didn’t work out so well, did it?
One thing seems certain: both men saw the Silver Surfer as more than just a vehicle for making action-filled comic book stories with no message that they wanted to convey. So in this, their final combined statement on the character, which creator’s message—whatever that message is—would dominate? While Lee would, as writer and publisher, have the literal final word, Kirby’s visual storytelling had a power above and beyond words. Ultimately, each reader would have to determine for him- or herself what message the story contained.
On his way out the door the following year (1978), there would be one last chance for Kirby to both honor and tweak Lee. Roy Thomas was freelance-editing a series called What If?, whose concept was what it sounded like: depicting alternative outcomes to significant Marvel stories. The premise provided to Kirby by Thomas for issue #11 (dated October 1978) was “What If … the Original Marvel Bullpen Had Become the Fantastic Four?”
The story was to depict Lee, Kirby, Thomas, and Flo Steinberg as having become the FF at the time of the team’s creation. When Kirby’s pencils came in, though, Kirby had chosen to replace the Roy Thomas of the story—who in it becomes the Human Torch—with Sol Brodsky (who, by ’78, was a Marvel VP).21 Irked that Kirby had deleted him from the story, Thomas realized that it actually did make more sense to have it be Brodsky, who was one of the original bullpen, whereas Thomas was not.22 Nonetheless, Thomas gave the scripting of the story, which he originally intended to dialogue himself, to Kirby.
While Kirby was, in the story’s dialogue and captions, reasonably complimentary toward Lee—who, in the story, became team leader Mr. Fantastic—Kirby would come to believe that Thomas—or someone—had altered the dialogue he’d written for Sol, Flo, and Stan, to make it seem more “natural,” but had left the Thing—the avatar Kirby had assumed for himself in the story—speaking in a more uneducated vernacular, making him seem cruder than the others. Thomas has no recollection of changing Kirby’s script, although he does recall Lee insisting that every reference to him as Stanley be changed to Stan.23 Even this departing Kirby story, intended as a nostalgic memento, couldn’t go out the door without conflict.
After the What If? story, and without the drama of 1970, Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics to go into animation, including working on storyboards for the DePatie-Freleng studio’s Fantastic Four series (on which Lee was a producer).24 Marvel was no longer the threadbare skeleton of a company Kirby had rejoined in the late ’50s, and it wasn’t even the chaotic free-for-all to which he had again returned in 1975. The company for which his presence and sensibilities had been so key had grown into something else. Kirby and Lee (and Ditko) had been the right people at the right place at the right time in 1961. Now, in 1978, they were two among dozens of Marvel creators and—though they had established the foundations of the company’s present and future successes—were not perceived as creators with commercial heat. The entity they had birthed had in many ways outgrown them.
But the public taste for the types of stories they did seemed, if anything, stronger than ever. The Star Wars comics and the comics that Marvel was making from other licensed properties—Rom: SpaceKnight, Battlestar Galactica, Micronauts, Godzilla, and so on—were proving to be profit centers for the company. And at the end of 1978, the first Superman movie’s great success proved that a comic book sensibility—played mostly straight—could be popular. (And there had even been something of a happy ending—if not an end to lawsuits—for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Neal Adams’s, Jerry Robinson’s, and others’ efforts had resulted in DC granting the two aging creators modest pensions and “Superman created by” credits in the movie.) The future for people with skill sets and experience like Kirby’s and Lee’s seemed clearly to be in TV and movie properties, specifically in Hollywood. Kirby had already gone west. Lee would soon be there, too.
As he told reporter Ira Wolfman in a 1978 interview in Circus magazine: “I should have gotten out of the business [comic books] 20 years ago. I would have liked to make movies, to be a director or a screenwriter, to have a job like [TV producer] Norman Lear or [network programmer] Freddie Silverman. I’d like to be doing what I’m doing here, but in a bigger arena.”25
According to Wolfman, the Circus interview had been initiated by Lee via a publicist.26 So perhaps the Marvel publisher was using the journalist to help spread the word that Stan Lee was, more than ever, interested in, and available for, Hollywood opportunities, either for Marvel or—like his partnership with Alain Resnais—on his own behalf.
He was fifty-five years old. There was no time to waste.