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From The Jack Kirby Collector #18, 1/98 by Jim Amash |
ROY : I only worked for DC for a couple of weeks in 1965, and I jumped ship to Marvel when Stan offered me a ob, because I was unhappy working for Mort Weisinger. Of course, people didn't come into the office that much, and at Marvel, much less than DC. Marvel didn't have much in the way of offices; just three or four little rooms.....so people just brought in their work. Ditko and Stan weren't speaking by that point. So Ditko would come in, deliver his stuff to Sol, Sol would take it in to Stan; it was a very weird, strained atmosphere.....the original credit in F.F. #1 was only for ''J. Kirby,'' and Stan Lee had his whole name credited. Jack's name got abbreviated for some reason.
TJKC : We see a lot of that. We saw a lot of ''S. Ditko'' too. (laughter)
ROY : .....Ditko wasn't a great surprise, because after all, they weren't speaking, and one day Steve walked in and just told Sol he was quitting. Sol was sitting there with a memo on his desk to give Steve a raise of $5 or so a page, or whatever they could afford, so it wasn't a matter of the money. He just wanted to quit.
TJKC : Ditko demanded credit as plotter and got it. Do you think if Jack had insisted on something like that, he would have gotten it?
ROY : I don't know. He might have.....who can remember who came up with this or that? Unless you remember that you did it. (laughter) It's like all the mish-mash about Spider-Man, where everybody from Joe Simon to C.C. Beck seems to have created him, because they all created something on the road to Spider-Man. I saw Spider Spry in the Fly comic years ago, and then you see this other stuff by Beck. As I once said, ''Everyone who didn't create Bugs Bunny created Spider-Man.''
TJKC : What stories did you work with Jack on?
ROY : .....Jack did a couple of those Ka-Zar lead-ins in Astonishing Tales. Again, I dialogued one of those. I'm listed as writer, but it was really his plot, just like the couple of Dr. Stranges I did with Ditko. They're really Ditko's plots, not mine; it's just the way we did it, and we didn't question it at the time. Neither did Jack or Ditko.
TJKC : Should the Marvel characters be equally considered co-creations of Stan and Jack?
ROY : It's hard to divide things and say ''equal.''.....These guys were so talented and so valuable to the company; it's really a shame some of these things had to happen. They were both indispensible. I don't think Stan would've created Marvel Comics - and certainly it would not have been created in the same way or taken off the way it did - without Jack being there to realize these early stories; Ditko too, but especially Jack. On the other hand, there's no evidence Jack would've done this by himself either. It was a collaboration.
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