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I just found out that Stan Lee only wrote 8 issues of Fantastic Four before Jack Kirby took over
I was reading a detailed breakdown on the Jack Kirby Museum website last night and it blew my mind. Everyone talks about Stan Lee like he plotted every single Fantastic Four story from start to finish, but the site showed that Lee only scripted the first 8 issues directly. After that, Kirby was doing most of the plotting and Lee just added dialogue. Does that match what you all have read about the Silver Age dynamic?
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wadew512d agoTop Commenter
Whoa, hold on, is it really that deep though? I mean yeah, Kirby did a ton of the heavy lifting no question, but I feel like people get way too hung up on who did what like it's some kind of detective case. Lee still had to make those scripts sound like real people talking and he handled all the promotion and the letters pages and all that stuff that kept the book alive. People act like Kirby was being held back when really the guy was cranking out pages like a machine and Lee was just the one who made sure they sold. Is the whole "legendary creator" thing really a scam or just two guys who happened to be good at different parts of the same job?
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wood.faith2d ago
People always forget that Kirby was basically drafting the plots on the fly too. He was doing full page layouts with detailed notes in the margins, and Lee would just put words in the balloons later. There's a reason why Kirby's later work at DC and his own company had the same wild energy, while Lee's post-Kirby stuff like the soap opera issues felt really flat. The real genius of the partnership was that Lee knew how to hype it up and make it sound like one man's vision to sell comics, but the actual stories were 90% Kirby's brain. Ngl, it makes you wonder how many other "legendary" creators got famous by just being the marketing guy for someone else's ideas.
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