Text adapted from the visual presentation at the New York Comic Con panel, Saturday, October 15th, 2011.<\/p>\n
The recent court loss for the Jack Kirby estate in its battle with Disney, Marvel\u2019s corporate owner, over copyright\/ownership of the Marvel characters, revealed Stan Lee\u2019s testimony as being the usual lynchpin in deciding the case in his, and Marvel\u2019s, favor, that testimony essentially promulgating the same misconception that he, not Kirby, was the true author of the Marvel Universe by dint of his salaried role as editor and writer, and Kirby\u2019s professional status as a work-for-hire employee. This misconception ignores the actual role Kirby played in the actual creation of those seminal comic books, as the auteur\u2014author in French\u2014of their stories. \u201cAuteur\u201d in the way Franco-cinemaphiles in the 1950s\u2014first Francois Truffaut in the journal Cahiers du Cinema, and then American counterparts like The Village Voice\u2019s film critic Andrew Harris\u2014postulated their Auteur Theory of Film, that a film\u2019s director, and not the screenwriter, as was previously thought, was a film\u2019s true author.<\/p>\n
So too can the Auteur Theory of Film be accurately applied to the \u201cMarvel Method\u201d of comic book authorship, innovated by Lee, who gave his artists (originally and primarily Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) anything from a typed synopsis of a story to a verbal springboard of an idea\u2014the equivalent of the screenplay in film\u2014and the artists drew out\/plotted\/staged\/paced the story visually to fill the page count given, using two-dimensional versions of the same tools and devices a movie director uses to craft a film: casting, editing, lighting, sound, choreography\u2014after which Lee would add the dialogue and captions to the artists\u2019 work.<\/p>\n
Stan\u2019s interviews from the \u201860s, which stand in contrast, and somewhat of a contradiction, to his testimony in this case, were submitted in documents\u2014eventually thrown out by the judge\u2014during the testimony of Kirby experts John Morrow (publisher of The Jack Kirby Collector) and Mark Evanier (Kirby\u2019s biographer); here\u2019s an example:<\/p>\n
\u201cI would tell Jack the main idea that I wanted, and then we would talk about it, and we\u2019d come up with something. I would give him the outline for the story. As we went on, and we had been working together for years, the outlines I gave him were skimpier and skimpier. I might say something like: \u2018In this story let\u2019s have Dr. Doom kidnap Sue Storm, and the Fantastic Four has to go out and rescue them. And in the end, Dr. Doom does this and that.\u2019 And that might have been all I would tell him for a 20-page story. If the book was 20 pages long, I\u2019d receive back 20 beautifully drawn pages in pencil which told a story. Jack would just put in all the details and everything. And then it was\u2014I enjoyed that. It was like doing a crossword puzzle. I get the panels back, and I have to put in the dialogue and make it all tie together. So we worked well together that way for years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ergo it was the artists who were the actual storytellers, not \u201cjust\u201d the artists, with Lee, of Marvel Comics, like the directors of films have been considered the true authors of their films for over 50 years now, entitled to the benefits of credit and copyright protection of their films.
\nAt the same time, this is not to deny Lee\u2019s co-authorship and creatorship of Marvel Comics\u2014he deserves exactly 50% of the credit, for his absolutely crucial contributions as editor\/writer\/art director\/salesman and spokesman\u2014but not a percent more or percent less. The sad fact of the matter is that Lee has successfully campaigned throughout his post-working relationships with Kirby and Ditko to create the perception\u2014and therefore the \u201creality\u201d\u2014that he was the 100%, primary, sole creator of the Marvel Universe, relegating Kirby, specifically, to the historically demeaning role of the artist as merely a \u201cpair of hands,\u201d a \u201cwrist\u201d who robotically drew up Lee\u2019s scripts, the only \u201ctheory\u201d\/process of comic book creation the judge was presented with.<\/p>\n
(Comic creators like Will Eisner and Jim Steranko, who both write and draw their own work, are not germane to this discussion; they\u2019re already 100% creators of their works. The Auteur Theory in both film and comics, as I\u2019m applying it, pertains to those directors and comic artists who did\/do not write their movies or comics, but collaborate with screenplay writers or comic writers; by dint of the act of directing a film, and drawing a comic book story, the director and the artist are the true authors\/auteurs of their respective final product. The comic book works of writers like Alan Moore and Harvey Kurtzman are trickier to evaluate; for who is the auteur of Moore and artist Dave Gibbons\u2019 Watchmen? Who is the auteur of Two Fisted Tales\/Frontline\/Mad? Because both Moore and Kurtzman functioned as much as art directors as writers\u2014Moore verbally with his notorious panel descriptions and Kurtzman visually with his layouts\u2014they\u2019re legitimate exceptions. The overarching concept of the Auteur Theory of Comics is that it applies to any artist who does the visualizing of a comic book story, because the act of illustrating a comic book script\u2014whether old-school full-script \u201cDC style,\u201d \u201cMarvel style,\u201d or whatever style\u2014makes that artist a de facto auteur of the final \u201cproduct\u201d and therefore a de facto 50\/50 co-creator of the work.)<\/p>\n
The Marvel Method comic-creation working relationship of Lee & Kirby operated, in actuality, more like the Beatles\u2019 Lennon & McCartney songwriting team; just as the early Lee\/Kirby Fantastic Fours were closer to true 50\/50 collaborations (see Lee\u2019s 1960\u2019s interview recollections and typed script\/synopsis for FF #1), so too were Lennon\/McCartney\u2019s initial songs together. But as the years went on, Beatles songs became more often de facto solo projects, like McCartney\u2019s \u201cYesterday,\u201d or his \u201cHey Jude,\u201d in which Lennon\u2019s lyric, \u201cThe movement you need is on your shoulder,\u201d is his sole contribution\u2014essentially no different than Lee suggesting to Kirby in \u201965 to have the FF fight a really big villain, and Kirby coming up with the entire Galactus\/Silver Surfer trilogy (as in penciling the entire story out, and writing dialogue bits and notes in the margins). Since every Beatle song could never be perfectly quantified as to who did what, John and Paul decided early on to credit their Beatles songs to an across-the-board 50\/50 split, \u201cLennon & McCartney,\u201d making it easier to share in the real world of publishing credit and royalties. That\u2019s how Lee should\u2019ve worked with Kirby, who did the heavy lifting of actually \u201ctelling\u201d the stories so that Lee could \u201cwrite\u201d multiple comics\u2014the practical, economic imperative behind perhaps the greatest storytelling breakthrough in comic book history.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat whole thing that he and Jack started was strictly for expediency because he didn\u2019t have the scripts ready. That\u2019s the reason. It was not done out of any stroke of genius, it was done out of expedience. Jack would call up and say, \u2018Stan, I didn\u2019t get the story yet, or the script\u201d and Stan would say, \u201cOk, what I\u2019m going to do is describe the first five or six pages in action for you, do them without words and when you send them in I\u2019ll put the words in.\u2019 That\u2019s how it grew into the Marvel method of art first and script second. It was like sunlight had come into the room because this was a visual medium that had become a verbal medium for fifty ears, and suddenly it was the visual medium that it had intended to be in the first place. I think that the biggest thing Stan and Jack contributed to the industry was that. Visual first was a huge step forward; it was like a quantum leap.\u201d
\n\u2014John Romita<\/p>\n
Yet despite this grand recollection, Stan always took full writer\u2019s pay, while artists like Romita were never remunerated for their co-plotting and de facto writing. The most egregious example of this practice taken to an absurd degree is the famous Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #1 (June \u201968) opening sequence written and illustrated by Jim Steranko, whom Stan didn\u2019t want to pay as a writer because, according to Steranko, \u201c\u2026there were no words on the pages\u201d! This myopia of Lee speaks not only to the primacy of word over image in both the lay public\u2019s and the average comic reader\u2019s\u2014and creator\u2019s\u2014minds, but to the misunderstanding of the entire process of visual storytelling in comics, where the artist has control over sound as well as lighting and staging of a writer\u2019s words; If he feels a sequence in the story can best be told silently, as in film or television, he has that paint in his palette. Theoretically, if Stan himself had written that SHIELD story\u2014even traditionally, in full-script, with the dialogue he would\u2019ve preferred\u2014the auteurship of that sequence would still be Steranko\u2019s!<\/p>\n
Because the artist in comics has always been the auteur of the comic book reading experience, due primarily to the primacy of the visuals themselves; or, as artist Gil Kane put it once: \u201cThe only thing that makes comics worth reading is the art.\u201d And Gene Colan said: \u201cEvery story I ever drew was like being the director of a film.\u201d These simple statements are part and parcel of the Auteur Theory of Comics, the elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge: that in the verbal\/visual medium known as comic books, the visual creation of a story is a de facto act of co-creation (and therefore morally and ethically entitled to all the legal benefits of co-creatorship).<\/p>\n
Take the origin story, probably the most important component establishing the legal provenance of a comic character. Lee has always maintained, in court and out, that he created the character concepts first, and thus \u201ccreated\u201d them fully. But there was a little-known \u201ccharacter concept\u201d bandied about for 15 years, called \u201cSpiderman,\u201d that didn\u2019t become a copyrightable\/trademarkable\/successful character until artist Steve Ditko put pencil to paper and created the \u201cSpider-Man\u201d we know of, of stage, screen, comics, merchandise and de facto logo of Marvel, as the mouse ears are to Disney. As Ditko\u2019s iconic Spider-Man \u201cself-portrait\u201d implies, a comic book \u201ccreation\u201d isn\u2019t fully \u201ccreated\u201d until an artist visualizes his own or a writer\u2019s idea\/synopsis\/script. Which begs the question: was Stan Lee\u2019s verbal origin story of Spider-Man more \u201cimportant\u201d in the overall\/eventual success of the character than the greatest costume design in the history of comic book superheroes by Steve Ditko?<\/p>\n
Are Gaines\u2019 and Feldstein\u2019s overwritten captions and word balloons to those classic EC Comics more \u201cimportant\u201d to their renown than the golden-age-of-illustration artwork that conformed to their prepared panels?<\/p>\n
Are Bob Haney\u2019s great 1968-69 Brave & Bold stories more \u201cimportant\u201d than the auteurism of Neal Adams\u2019 artwork\/storytelling, in which he changed all of Haney\u2019s daytime scenes to night, just as a director of a film might alter the screenplay to more effectively work on the screen, not the printed page as the screenwriter wrote it?<\/p>\n
Are Marv Wolman\u2019s Tomb of Dracula concepts\/writing\/dialoguing more \u201cimportant\u201d to that \u201870s success story than the auteurist, atmospheric artwork\/storytelling of Colan\/Palmer?<\/p>\n
When I was reading those Batman reprints from the \u201850s in those eighty-page annuals during the \u201860s, I was entertained by a raft of reprints, all uncredited, as was the DC policy then. So why did the stories illustrated by (we later found out) the great Dick Sprang stand out from the surrounding hackwork of Bob Kane ghosts? Because, despite working from complete scripts and tight editorial control (just like that of the Hollywood movie studios) Sprang\u2019s confident, direct, exaggerated qualities that we came to love about Sprang made every story he illustrated a \u201cDick Sprang story,\u201d no matter whether Edmond Hamilton or Bill Finger or whomever wrote them, because Sprang was the auteur of those Batman stories\u2014just as the great film directors Hitchcock, Hawks and Ford, who worked from others\u2019 screenplays within an extremely collaborative\/edited\/oft-censored medium, with producer control no better or worse than comic book artists had to deal with (and are still dealing with), were later declared auteurs of their films by the French film theorists.<\/p>\n
Like film, comics are a synchronistic collaboration of words and pictures, ergo any form of a verbal script is only half of the art form known as the \u201ccomic book\u201d\u2014whether it\u2019s as brief as Lee\u2019s capsule directives to Kirby, or as extensively detailed as Alan Moore\u2019s panel exegeses for Gibbons to follow in Watchmen.<\/p>\n
To those who still damn Gibbons with faint praise for Watchmen\u2019s success because, to one online poster, \u201ca raccoon could have drawn that story and it would have been awesome,\u201d Watchmen is, indeed, a 50\/50 collaboration no matter how you parse Moore\u2019s and Gibbons\u2019 individual contributions, and good luck to you if you\u2019re going to try\u2014it\u2019ll always be purely subjective. Moore\u2019s Watchmen script is only worth what someone\u2019s willing to pay to read it in its original form, just like screenplays to films are available to those who want to read them\u2014but neither are complete artistic entities on their own. Moore himself would be the first one to admit that all of his comic book collaborations, with a who\u2019s who of artistic greats like Eddie Campbell, Brian Bolland and Bill Sienkiewicz are equivalent in their contributions of words and pictures (hence Moore\u2019s equitable sharing of both the legal and financials of each property). And to further diminish the line of \u201creasoning\u201d that Gibbons\u2019 \u201ccontribution\u201d to Watchmen was somehow minimized by Moore\u2019s gargantuan talent, imagine what a less-cerebral 2000 AD artist than Gibbons would\u2019ve done with Moore\u2019s Watchmen scripts\u2014or what an average Marvel artist like Don Heck would have done with Lee\u2019s \u201cHave the FF fight a really big villain\u201d idea, or what kind of costume artist Larry Lieber would\u2019ve designed for Spider-Man!<\/p>\n
There is a reason that Alan Moore gets more credit from the general public for Watchmen than Gibbons does; it\u2019s why Stan also gets more credit than Jack. Literary criticism far outweighs visual\/art criticism in terms of both column inches and overall impact and ubiquity, with far more literature courses taught in universities than art history. And because the graphic novel and serious criticism of comics as a visual\/literary hybrid are still relatively recent\u2014and even then, because most comics fans are not visually literate enough to actually discuss the artistic merits (and faults) of comic book art to the same degree that they discuss story\/character, comics criticism pretty much follows the standard story\/characters discussion, with a backhanded compliment of the \u201cart chores\u201d usually falling to the penultimate paragraph of most comics reviews. Combined with the fact that both the lay and comic audiences know far more about traditional \u201cart\u201d\u2014painting and sculpture, and now computer graphics\u2014than they know about how comic book art is actually produced, and you have the current situation, in which Stan Lee is thought of as both the writer\/creator and the artist of Marvel Comics! Want proof? From a recent issue of Comic Shop News (#1259), by Cliff Biggers & Ward Batty in cooperation with newsarama.com:<\/p>\n
\u201cComics icon Stan Lee, creator of the Mighty Marvel Universe and characters such as Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, X-Men, and Iron Man\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Think of this Auteur Theory of Comics being the testimony in defense of Kirby that could have\/should have followed Lee\u2019s entirely self-serving testimony, enlightening the court, the media covering the trial, comic book readers and the general public to truly understand, maybe for the first time, the role of the artist in the de facto co-creation of a comic book work, and to the truth of the Marvel Method in actual practice, asserting an artist of the magnitude of Jack \u201cKing\u201d Kirby his morally and ethically rightful place as the auteur of the Marvel Comics Universe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Text adapted from the visual presentation at the New York Comic Con panel, Saturday, October 15th, 2011. The recent court loss for the Jack Kirby estate in its battle with Disney, Marvel\u2019s corporate owner, over copyright\/ownership of the Marvel characters, revealed Stan Lee\u2019s testimony as being the usual lynchpin in deciding the case in his, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[148,216,63,73],"tags":[255,258,385],"class_list":["post-4363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-148","category-odds-ends","category-topic","category-z-archive","tag-arlen-schumer","tag-auteur-theory-of-comics","tag-jack-kirby"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3uriT-18n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/simonandkirby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}