Continuing from my previous posts, here is the third part of Jack Kirby's amazing pencil storyboards for the 'Fantastic Four' Animated Series from 1978. Again, all boards are from the seventh episode 'The Olympics of Space', scripted by Roy Thomas.
First though, here's an extraordinary radio interview with Mr. Kirby himself by J. Michael Straczynski and Larry DiTillio (creators of the TV series 'Babylon 5') on April 13, 1990 on Mike Trudell's Hour 25, KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles, talk radio show. Uploaded in seven parts by Rob Steibel (from Kirby Dynamics), I have collected all of them in a playlist, so you can easily listen to the entire hour and a half conversation. For a little more background info on the animated series I welcome you to enjoy the previous two blog posts.
Just a tip: feel free to click and thus enlarge the storyboards below. Doing so while listening to the interview however, will leave you without the audio connection. In this case it's better to open the artwork by right clicking it and choosing 'open link in a new tab'.
If you still want more after that, I recommend you read Gary Groth's amazing interview with Jack from February 1990, just four years before he died, which was posted in it's entirety over at The Comics Journal. In both interviews, Jack clearly states he not only drew, but also wrote all comic stories by himself, without Stan Lee's collaboration, something which is not part of Marvel's official company history. (Below are several excerpts from Groth's interview with Jack about the creation of his comics for Marvel:)
"Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write the stories just like I always did."... "If Stan Lee ever got a thing dialogued, he would get it from someone working in the office. I would write out the whole story on the back of every page. I would write the dialogue on the back or a description of what was going on. Then Stan Lee would hand them to some guy and he would write in the dialogue. In this way Stan Lee made more pay than he did as an editor. This is the way Stan Lee became the writer. Besides collecting the editor’s pay, he collected writer’s pay. I’m not saying Stan Lee had a bad business head on. I think he took advantage of whoever was working for him."
"Remember this: Stan Lee was an editor. He worked from nine to five doing business for Martin Goodman. In other words he didn’t do any writing in the office. He did Martin Goodman’s business. That was his function. There were people coming up to the office to talk all the time. They weren’t always artists, they were business people. Stan Lee was the first man they would see and Stan Lee would see if he could get them in to see Martin Goodman. That was Stan Lee’s function."
"I came in (to the Marvel offices) and they were moving out the furniture, they were taking desks out - and I needed the work! I had a family and a house and all of a sudden Marvel is coming apart. Stan Lee is sitting on a chair crying. He didn’t know what to do, he’s sitting in a chair crying - he was just still out of his adolescence. I told him to stop crying. I says. “Go in to Martin and tell him to stop moving the furniture out, and I’ll see that the books make money.” And I came up with a raft of new books and all these books began to make money. Somehow they had faith in me. I knew I could do it, but I had to come up with fresh characters that nobody had seen before. I came up with The Fantastic Four. I came up with Thor. Whatever it took to sell a book I came up with. Stan Lee has never been editorial minded. It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things - or old things for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories. Stan Lee was a guy that knew where the papers were or who was coming to visit that day. Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK? I’m essentially something else: I’m a storyteller. My job is to sell my stories. When I saw this happening at Marvel I stopped the whole damned bunch. I stopped them from moving the furniture! Stan Lee was sitting on some kind of a stool, and he was crying."
Wally Wood ('Mad' and 'Daredevil') had this to say from his experiences: 'Did I say Stanley had no smarts? Well, he DID come up with two sure fire ideas… the first one was “Why not let the artists WRITE the stories as well as draw them?”… And the second was … ALWAYS SIGN YOUR NAME ON TOP …BIG”. And the rest is history … Stanley, of course became rich and famous … over the bodies of people like Bill (Everett) and Jack (Kirby)'. More about that on the web here.
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