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Jack Kirbys Storyboards for Fantastic Four 1978 III

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Continuing from my previous posts, here is the third part of Jack Kirbys amazing pencil storyboards for the Fantastic Four Animated Series from 1978. Again, all boards are from the seventh episode The Olympics of Space, scripted by Roy Thomas.

First though, heres an extraordinary radio interview with Mr. Kirby himself by J. Michael Straczynski and Larry DiTillio (creators of the TV series Babylon 5) on Mike Trudells Hour 25 talk radio show on KPFK 90.7 FM, from April 13, 1990. Uploaded in seven parts by Rob Steibel (from Kirby Dynamics), I collected all of them in a playlist, so you can easily listen to the entire hour and a half conversation. For a little more background info on the animated series I welcome you to enjoy the previous two blog posts.

Just a tip: feel free to click and thus enlarge the storyboards below. Doing so while listening to the interview however, will leave you without the audio connection. In this case its better to open the artwork by right clicking it and choosing open link in a new tab.



If you still want more after that, I recommend you read Gary Groths interview with Jack from 1989, published in February 1990, just four years before he died, posted in its entirety over at The Comics Journal. In both interviews, Jack clearly states he not only drew, but also wrote all comic stories, without Stan Lees collaboration, something which is not part of Marvels official company history (Stan Lee by the way, is Martin Goodmans nephew, who was the founder of Timely Comics, aka Marvel Comics today).

Although there have been complaints Kirby was exaggerating, more artists have come forward with similar stories, claiming Stan Lee contributed minimal efforts, but took home all of the pay, and dont forget, were talking Millions here. Lets just conclude it wont hurt Marvel a bit that Lee still takes full credit for all stories and characters, making sure none of the surviving familie members or authors can sue for back payments.


Marvel Characters, inc. Versus Kirby.

In October 2012 Kirbys family served Marvel with Termination Notices concerning the property rights in 262 works published by Marvel between 1958-1963. Marvel filed suit seeking a declaration the family didnt have termination rights. In August 2013, It was concluded that "the district court did not err in determining as a matter of law that the works at issue were "made for hire," made at Marvels instance and expense, and that the parties had no agreement to the contrary". If youre interested, you can read the entire document online at Justia.com.

Below are some excerpts from Groths interview with Jack:

"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."... "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."

"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 I 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."

Also, from the comments section on Groths interview, theres some pretty good stuff there too:

Wally Wood (Daredevil) on his experiences with Stan Lee: Did I say Stanley had no smarts? Well, he DID come up with two sure fire ideas… the first one was “Why not let the artists WRITE the stories as well as draw them?”… And the second was … ALWAYS SIGN YOUR NAME ON TOP …BIG”. And the rest is history … Stanley, of course became rich and famous … over the bodies of people like Bill (Everett) and Jack (Kirby). More elaboration on this on the web here.