Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe Read Free Book Online Page A

Goodman. Lee would later say that, if things had gone differently, he might have quit Marvel to go work with Maneely on other projects. But one Friday in June, after drinks with a handful of other Timely alumni, Maneely—who’d lost his glasses earlier in the week—fell between cars of his commuter train. He was thirty-two. A devastated Lee lost not only his friend and collaborator, but also one of his most prolific employees.
    That week, in need of new material for Goodman’s science-fiction and fantasy titles, a still-shaken Lee got in touch with two artists who’d taken assignments a couple of years earlier, briefly, right before Timely lost its distributor and work dried up. Steve Ditko, a quiet thirty-year-old who’d recently recovered from tuberculosis, got a phone call at the midtown studio he shared with fetish artist Eric Stanton. There was work again; did he want to come back?
    Lee also spoke to Jack Kirby. Their paths had taken them in vastly different directions since Kirby left Timely for DC in 1941 with Joe Simon. World War II brought Kirby to Omaha Beach less than two weeks after D-Day, where bodies were still lying in heaps; to the edges of the Siege of Bastogne; even, he’d later recall, to the liberation of a small concentration camp. After the war, a reunited Simon and Kirby moved into houses across the street from one another in Long Island, and bounced around from publisher to publisher, working in the various genres that flitted in and out of vogue. * They did westerns, crime tales, and space adventures; with Young Romance , they invented the romance comic book, and when Marvel revived Captain America, they produced The Fighting American , a pointed rip-off of their earlier creation. * In 1954, they launched their own comics company, called Mainline—perfect timing for a small publisher to be wiped out amid the furor over comic-book delinquency. Simon & Kirby then ended their fifteen-year partnership, and Kirby went back to DC and cranked out Green Arrow and an adventure feature called Challengers of the Unknown . By the time Stan Lee was looking for material in 1958, Kirby was also starting work on a syndicated science-fiction comic strip called Sky Masters . He was flush with work, but, never having shaken the habits of an impoverished youth, Kirby always wanted to line up more.
    The six- and eight-page tales that populated interchangeably finger-wiggling titles like Journey into Mystery , Tales of Suspense , and Tales to Astonish were pure Twilight Zone in their twist-ending moral lessons. They featured contributions from several of Lee’s longtime stable of artists, but it was the collaborations with Ditko and Kirby that held clues about what was to come. Kirby delivered large-scale visions of awe-inspiring alien technology and brutish monsters, while Ditko depicted jittery, ambitious outcasts humbled by the consequences of their hubris and imprisoned by their own psyches. In both of their work, men endured excruciating scientific transformations and traumatic gains of knowledge that permanently separated them from the civilizations to which they’d once belonged.
    Shortly after Strange Worlds and Tales of Suspense premiered, though, Kirby’s career hit obstacles. The DC editor who’d arranged the Sky Masters comic strip deal sued Kirby for not paying him the percentage that the contract stipulated. Although Kirby continued work on Sky Masters while the lawsuit played out, there would be no more work from DC. Joe Simon gave Kirby a few assignments when he edited a superhero line for Archie Comics in 1959, but after only a couple of months, Simon turned to advertising gigs for a steady paycheck. Kirby did not follow. “Jack never liked the advertising field,” said his wife, Roz. “I’m sure he could have gone into it, but he never liked it. His heart had always been with comics.” That left Kirby dependent on Stan Lee, his onetime errand boy, for work.
    Throughout the 1940s and 1950s,