Review of According to Jack Kirby

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Michael Hill’s title here—the subtitle especially—tells you much of what you need to know about this book. This self-published study is evidently a labor of love by a self-identified Kirby fan, and it wears its admiration of Kirby on its sleeve. Hill’s contention is straightforward and clear: the history of Marvel Comics, certainly the official Marvel history, exaggerates Stan Lee’s role and criminally downplays Kirby’s in the creative explosion of the early 1960s from which most of Marvel’s major characters emerged. I think it is fair to say that Hill’s is an uncontroversial position; certainly, I have believed Kirby was the primary architect of Marvel’s early superhero line for decades—and indeed, Hill relies on interviews that are decades old as the basis of much of his argument. Two features make this book stand out. First, it takes a fairly absolutist view of the question, essentially accepting both Kirby’s claims to have created almost everything and Kirby’s dismissals of Stan Lee. Second, it offers a comprehensive tour through an enormous number of interviews with Kirby and others to make its case. One key point Hill makes, and demonstrates, is that Kirby’s story remained consistent across decades, whereas Stan Lee’s did not, which one can easily see as damaging Lee’s credibility. Hill also lands hard on two financial arguments. First, he argues, persuasively, that the so-called “Marvel Method,” whereby artists produced pages from plot summaries rather than from full scripts, really meant that the artists actually did most of the heavy lifting on the books. Hill cites artists other than Kirby who assert that Lee often provided no actual plot at all, leaving the artist to create the story; Lee then took the writing credit, leaving the art credit only for the artist. Hill’s argument is that this practice allowed Lee to exploit the artists by claiming not only the writing credit but also the payment for writing. Second, he argues, perhaps somewhat less persuasively, that Lee’s shift to asserting that he was the creator of all the early Marvel superheroes coincided with the takeover of the company so was part of a scheme to confirm company ownership of all of its lucrative characters. These are arguably the book’s core points, and they are good and important ones. They are not, however, news to those already well-versed in this long-standing controversy. Many other commentators have largely accepted Kirby’s claims, though not as thoroughly as Hill does, as is evident from Hill’s critiques of earlier researchers in this area.

Furthermore, the book suffers from limitations. First of all, Hill’s criticisms of the hagiographic way Lee has been viewed may sound valid given that Kirby has been so overlooked, but they also seem ironic, as Hill is engaged in his own hagiographic depiction of Kirby. This is not an academic study, so its fannish style is to be expected, but Hill’s strongly anti-Lee perspective, understandable (and valid, in my opinion) as it may be, means that he is unlikely to win over anyone not already on his side of the debate. His decision to give Kirby the same benefit of the doubt that he argues has always been given to Lee’s claims leads him not to question Kirby’s own claims, thereby correcting (from his point of view) the different standards of credibility Lee and Kirby have received in the past, but also thereby letting all of Kirby’s claims go essentially unchallenged. The critical consensus is that Kirby did indeed play a far greater role than the partisan official history grants him, but it also and legitimately recognizes that Kirby’s own claims need to be evaluated rather than simply accepted. Interestingly, Abraham Josephine Reisman’s biography of Stan Lee, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, also published in 2021, essentially supports Kirby’s claims over Lee’s, without Hill’s propensity for partisanship in Kirby’s favor.

Second, and more problematically, the book’s structure is confused and repetitive. The book consists of two sections. Part one is derived from Hill’s chronological examination of the Lee-Kirby controversy for the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center’s web page in 2015, produced because a promised treatment of the same subject in the magazine The Jack Kirby Collector had been cancelled. As Hill reports, that special issue “was quietly added back to the schedule” (x) for the magazine after his piece appeared. Part two of this book comprises Hill’s point by point and exhaustive response to that special issue. Consequently, part one and part two cover much of the same territory, and in a great many instances say essentially the same thing, even using the same quotations. Multiple quotations appear twice (or more) in the book, and many repeat the same information. While documenting different occasions on which Kirby said essentially the same thing does support Hill’s argument that Kirby’s story stayed consistent, the extensive repetition of information, whether verbatim or in multiple similar quotations, unnecessarily pads the book and weakens its coherence. Hill could have combined his two separate accounts into one linear narrative, though doing so would have required considerably more reshaping of the material than has evidently been done.

Those unfamiliar with the Kirby side of the story, and even Kirby enthusiasts, might find value here, the uninitiated simply because the book provides a corrective to the Marvel version, and enthusiasts because Hill’s thoroughness means that many difficult-to-find interviews are referenced and cited, and because other rare documents are also reproduced. However, this book does need to be read with a critical lens, and those interested in the long history of the Lee vs Kirby argument would do well to consult other sources, perhaps especially those Hill cites and criticizes. Unfortunately, though, Hill does not provide a bibliography of works consulted, only an index of the interviews referenced. Comprehensive comics libraries might want to add this book, but more selective collections can pass it by.

Dominick Grace is the author of The Science Fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb: A Critical Reading and of numerous articles. He has co-edited several books covering topics such as comics, television, and Canadian speculative fiction.