Jack Kirby’s Son, Neal Kirby Responds to Stan Lee Disney+ Documentary

Posted in: Avengers, Comics, Disney+, Marvel, Marvel Comics, Stan Lee, TV, X-Men | Tagged: disney, jack kirby, stan lee

This week Disney+ broadcast a new documentary about Stan Lee. The following is a statement from Neal Kirby, son of the late Jack Kirby.

Jack Kirby co-created Captain America with Joe Simon in 1940 for what would become Marvel Comics, also creating the romance comics genre after fighting in World War II. In the sixties, he co-created the majority of the Marvel Universe with Stan Lee, namely the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, Ant-Man, Thor, Iron Man, the Black Panther, and many, many more. Falling out with Marvel over a lack of credit, pay and returned artwork, he switced to DC Comics, where he created Darkseid, Th Fourth World and the rest of the New Gods, before returning to Marvel to create Moon Boy & Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man and more. before moving into animation, and creator-owned comics such as Captain Victory, Destroyer Duck, Silver Star and more . He died of heart failure in 1994 at the age of 1976.

Jack Kirby by Susan Skaar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The level of his creation of the Marvel Universe as opposed to Stan Lee has been a much debated one. A lawsuit against Marvel and new owner Disney from his family represented by Marc Toberoff, saw Disney settle for what is believed to be over $30 million.

This week Disney+ broadcast a new documentary about Stan Lee, which initially uses Lee’s own narration, telling his life story over the decades. It has been criticised for being “a lame infomercial” by Rolling Stone Magazine, while Decider says that it is “meager in its insights into Lee’s highly publicized disagreements with Kirby and Ditko”. It does, however, have an 88% critics rating and a 100% public rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

As released to social media, the following is a statement from Neal Kirby, son of the late Jack Kirby, regarding the Stan Lee documentary/biography released earlier this week on Disney+. It was posted by Neal’s daughter and Jack Kirby’s granddaughter, Jillian Kirby,

The 13th-century Islamic poet/scholar Rumi said, “The Ego is a veil between humans and God.” In the Disney+ documentary bio of Stan Lee, the veil is lifted. Presented in the first person with Lee’s voice providing a running narrative, it is Stan Lee’s greatest tribute to himself. The literary expression of ego is the personal pronoun “I.” Any decent English or Journalism teacher would admonish their students not to overuse it. So, the challenge is extended to anyone who wishes to count the number of “I’s” during the 86-minute running time of Stan Lee.

I (000ps!) understand that, as a “documentary about Stan Lee,” most of the narrative is in his voice, literally and figuratively. It’s not any big secret that there has always been controversy over the parts that were played in the creation and success of Marvel’s characters. Stan Lee had the fortunate circumstance to have access to the corporate megaphone and media, and he used these to create his own mythos as to the creation of the Marvel character pantheon. He made himself the voice of Marvel. So, for several decades he was the “only” man standing, and blessed with a long life, the last man standing (my father died in 1994). It should also be noted and is generally accepted that Stan Lee had a limited knowledge of history, mythology, or science.

On the other hand, my father’s knowledge of these subjects, to which I and many others can personally attest, was extensive. Einstein summed it up better; “More the knowledge, lesser the ego. Lesser the knowledge, more the ego.”

If you were to look at a list and timeline of Marvel’s characters from 1960 through 1966, the period in which the vast majority of Marvel’s major characters were created during Lee’s tenure, you will see Lee’s name as a co-creator on every character, with the exception of the Silver Surfer, solely created by my father. Are we to assume Lee had a hand in creating every Marvel character? Are we to assume that the other co-creator never walked into Lee’s office and said, “Stan, I have a great idea for a character!” According to Lee, it was always his idea. Lee spends a fair amount of time talking about how and why he created the Fantastic Four, with only one fleeting reference to my father. Indeed, most comics historians recognize that my father based the Fantastic Four on a 1957 comic he created for DC, “Challengers of the Unknown,” even naming Ben Grimm (The Thing) after his father Benjamin, and Sue Storm after my older sister Susan.

Though the conflict between Lee and my father concerning creator credit gets glanced over with little mention, there is more attention paid to the strife between Lee and Steve Ditko, with Lee’s voice proclaiming, “It was my idea, therefore I created the character,” Ditko’s rebuttal being that his art and storyline is what brought life to Spiderman. In 1501, the Opera del Duomo commissioned a 26-year-old Michelangelo to sculpt a statue of David for the Cathedral of Florence – their idea, their money. The statue is called Michelangelo’s David – his genius, his vision, his creativity.

I was very fortunate. My father worked at home in his Long Island basement studio we referred to as “The Dungeon,” usually 14 – 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Most of the artists, writers, inkers, etc. worked at home, not in the Marvel offices as depicted in the program. Through middle and high school, I was able to stand at my father’s left shoulder, peer through a cloud of cigar smoke, and witness the Marvel Universe being created. I am by no means a comics historian, but there are few, if any, that have personally seen or experienced what I have, and know the truth with first-hand knowledge.

My father retired from comic books in the early 1980s and of course, passed away in 1994. Lee had over 35 years of uncontested publicity, much naturally, with the backing and blessing of Marvel as he boosted the Marvel brand as a side effect of boosting himself. The decades of Lee’s self-promotion culminated with his cameo appearances in over 35 Marvel films starting with “X-Men” in 2000, thus cementing his status as the creator of all things Marvel to an otherwise unknowing movie audience of millions, unfamiliar with the true history of Marvel comics. My father’s first screen credit didn’t appear until the closing crawl at the end of the film adaptation of Iron Man in 2008, after Stan Lee, Don Heck, and Larry Lieber. The battle for creator’s rights has been around since the first inscribed Babylonian tablet. It’s way past time to at least get this one chapter of literary/art history right. ‘Nuff said.

Jillian Kirby also liked the Rolling Stone review…

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