bluechip

AIUI (inventing a new acronym for "as I understand it") the origin pages for FF1 do exist and were obtained by a collector who bought them as pages from FF Annual 1. Reportedly some figures were redrawn for that issue directly over the original artwork (!). As for the theory, I tend to favor your conclusion that it's based on too much coffee. That said, I expect it to become the new Great Truth amongst the most ardent Kirby acolytes -- to whom Kirby is not just King but God and Stan is Satan. Upon further examination your theory quickly becomes mind-boggling. Did the FF spring whole cloth from Kirby's head, like (whomever it was; I can't recall) from Zeus? And if so how come Jack never bothered to say he'd just written and illustrated an origin story with no input whatsoever? Shirley, it should have occurred to Him to say so sometime during his later protestations about His creative input? Is it possible he did that... and then forgot?! And if he was capable of forgetting something that big and which he cared about that much, what else might he have forgotten? Such us... that he'd had a conversation with somebody about the story, or had even read an outline. The most fundamentalist Kirbyists will have no trouble reconciling those contradictions, at least in their minds. (And -- of course -- in massive posts on message boards)

That splash blurb is hilarious. When I was a kid I wondered why, sometimes, the captions would seem to make fun of how long a sequence was taking, saying "before you start wondering if you mistakenly picked up a copy of 'Tom Brown's School Days, don't worry, there's web-slinging action coming up!" Later, I realized it was Lee himself getting impatient.

Stan's handwriting is very distinctive and easy to spot once you know it. His notes can be found in the margins and on the backs of many silver age art boards. Kirby's handwriting is also distinctive and easy to spot. Same with Romita Sr, Don Heck, Buscema, et al. Once you clarify it's their handwriting on one piece, you can pretty much spot it on another. Stan's handwriting was apparently the least legible. Much handwriting in the margins ended up getting erased and some was cut off when they trimmed down the boards. A lot can be gleaned from reading the notes. But margin notes alone are unlikely to reveal with any certainty who suggested which pieces of action or sample lines of dialogue in whatever conference or story session may have predated the art itself. Neither can outlines or even scripts, for that matter. Everything was a team effort to one extent or another.

Couple Howard covers in the same auction. Somebody's divesting their ducks. Way it goes Marvel will probably reveal Howard's place in the upcoming multiverse tales the day after his last piece is gone.

Hippie covers are the 60s equivalent of War covers in the 40s and atomic bomb covers in the 50s excuse the non-topic thor page. uploaded by accident and somehow the method by which a post can be edited to delete a photo requires some multi-level passwords and bio-metric security, because I sure as hela can't figure out how to do it

That may be the case in regard to well-funded social media platforms. But the world is also full of people who do hobby-related things for free just because they just like doing it and sharing it don't mind if other people benefit. Examples of that are not just easily found but so ubiquitous they're hard to miss. So anyone who says every attempt at sharing hobby-related info is covering a scam reveals more about their perceptions than about the motivations of the info-sharing hobbyist.

My brother put his initials on the splash page of his comics so there'd be no confusion which were his and which were mine. One of his was a Batman 123 he'd bought off an older collector and then traded to me; I sold that along with many of my books during college and years later, when I was flush and bored I put together a Batman set. I bought a copy of 123 (not sure where) and when I opened it up there were my brother's initials on the splash page.

The problem with trying to talk to extreme partisans is that they tend to default to writing "NOTHING" and "ALL" (caps theirs), which should be your first first clue they are extremely partisan, and potentially well nigh full of the "venom" they claim so stridently not to be speaking from. Try to have a conversation with Kirby Absolutists and you may quickly find it is very difficult to satisfy them: ("You have to acknowledge Kirby was co-creator!" "Yes, he was co-creator." "How dare you?!?!? He did EVERYTHING!!!) I love Kirby's art, but the only creations or co-creations of his that I have ever thought to be transcendant of the form were those he did with Joe Simon and Stan Lee. I recognize Lee's limitations, but the creations and co-creations he did which I found to be transcendant of the form include his collaborations with not just Kirby, but also Ditko -- and Don Heck, and Larry Lieber, and Gene Colan, and John Buscema... to name just a few of the many folk whose work with others rarely, if ever, reached the same levels of they all did in the period in which they were overseen by and collaborating with Lee. People who've actually been in creative sessions with Lee will, overwhelmingly (meaning with very few exceptions), tell you the man was a meteor shower of ideas (great ones, good ones, okay ones, lame ones and some that downright stank) and knew his way around the mythos and the structure of nearly every genre of story. Only those who never knew him, and/or those with an axe to grind, will shriek in all caps things like "Stan did NOTHING", etc). Some, perhaps, just don't understand how collaborative the creative process is and how very few -- if any -- ideas in a group-generated IP actually come bursting from the head of just one person in the process, while the others merely watch, mouths agape at the genius they could only ever dream to be. It just ain't so. One person says something which sparks a thought in another person, and it goes round and around until the sum of their combined creative energies far exceeds what either, or any in the group, could have done alone. Sometimes, of course, that same process can remind you of "too many cooks" or the old joke that "a camel is a horse put together by committee." The person in charge of the process, be their title editor, director, showrunner, or CEO, is usually X-factor that determines whether you have a classic or a dud. And Lee was the head creative honcho during Marvel's silver age, which is virtually unsurpassed as a creative run. (I have recently seen people attempting to portray Walt Disney as a guy who got lucky with his partners, as if Ub Iwerks was involved not just in the creation of Mickey Mouse but everything (wait, make that EVERYTHING) else. And, as if the company's creative standards didn't, following Disney's death, full suddenly and decisively off a cliff from which it didn't emerge for many years) Curiosity about who did what is one thing. But this unbridled "ALL" or "NOTHING" extremism is tiresome and makes all comic nerds appear to be silly people. And so, too, is any attempt to cherry pick things like an instance wherein one person, or another, wrote or drew a "team" and that meant they, and they alone, created the FF. All of the characters from the FF have precedents in prior comics. Long before them was Plastic Man, Invisible Scarlet O'Neill, the Human Torch and many hapless guys who turned into monsters and hated themselves for it. Stan and Jack together revisited all those tropey characters and made them unique and memorable in a "fantastic" way. Did Stan or Jack or Larry create Thor? He was a Norse God long before any of them, and a comic villain in many issues. He was also, in "Weird Comics #1" -- a book on which none (I'm sorry, I mean NONE) of those guys worked. There were numerous "Spider Man" characters before Peter Parker. One of them appeared in a Centaur comic (which became Timely which became Marvel) in 1938. And before Ditko created the iconic Spidey suit, there were multiple versions of kids' Halloween costumes in the 1950s. Take elements from several versions of that costume and photoshop them together and you'd have something which the casual civilian on the street would swear is an image of Peter Parker's alter ego. But none of that (Sorry... NONE OF THAT) substantially diminishes what either Lee and Ditko created. I could go one with many more similar examples but I don't want to, and FFS, neither should I have to. If you can acknowledge and agree that collaborations are the melding of minds, not necessarily one person freeloading off another, and if you can agree that people get similar ideas all the time, and many similar ideas have been expressed by some people at some point in mankind's history... then can we stop with the "here's an image of a panel (MY HERO) did which proves that He alone created (INSERT NAME OF SUPERHERO), with no help from (THE DEVIL INCARNATE)"?

If I was the owner of the front cover with clipped logo I would place it over this cover so it all lined up and looked complete in mylar. No need to glue it down or anything. Just lay it on top.

I like lively discussions, too, but sometimes these things devolve into a question about who is more willing to ignore their family and work obligations to post all day long, and it begins to feel like it does when you're walking away from a barking dog and you know the dog is convinced that you're walking away because, although you wanted to stay and try to out bark him, you just knew you weren't able to.

Reisman was paid for his takedown-that's-"not-a-takedown" and you are clearly willing to spend far more of your life bolstering the takedown than I will ever be willing to spend of my going back and forth and jumping through textual hoops like a circus dog giving you examples of this or that. Or responding to statements that make no sense about kind of comics Stan worked on from 1941 to 1961, when Timely/Atlas did everything from the continuing super hero comics to crime and detective comics, westerns, horror, science fiction, romance, true stories, Bible stories, and many others, as Stan himself was quoted describing how they copied every trend that came along. You seem unwilling to give Stan credit for his work in those genres even as you want, in another breath, to can label him a hack for copying the latest trends). I'll venture a guess that you are one of those who will eagerly accept every assertion made by Ditko and Kirby, including the claims both make that they created Spider-man. To the never-Stans of fandom, neither Ditko nor Kirby are lying, because the important part, the only part that apparently matters, is that they both say Stan didn't do it. In the words of the rabbi in Fidder on the Roof, "they can't both be right." So, I will not engage. You can, and most likely will, bury what I wrote under a mountain of additional posts, which, if the usual pattern of the never-Stans takes its usual shape, will increasingly contradict the assertion in your original post that you didn't set out to read that book, or comment on here, with a predetermined agenda. Life is short. So, I won't try to dig out from under that mountain and, to paraphrase Forest Gump, that will probably be all I have to say about that.

The author says he was objective and I believe that he believes he was objective, but by journalistic standards he just isn't He editorializes often, based in large part on his personal opinion about the quality of Stan's work versus Jack's work sans each other and post Marvel's silver age. One can easily and reasonably disagree, but he treats his opinion as an objective fact, and fails to recognize that he's comparing apples versus oranges when you're talking about non-comic projects (TV, movies, etc). The core of his assertion that Jack did it all starts with period quotes from Stan himself saying Jack was a "co-writer" (or "practically the co-writer). After using that as proof of Jack's dominance, he points out that Stan later soft-pedaled Jack's contribution, which he did. But Reisman's response to those quotes, and others, follows the same logic time and again. Stan is presumed to have been lying 100% whenever he bragged or said other things Reisman liked, and presumed to be telling the truth 100% whenever he praised Jack or said other things he liked). He picks apart inconsistences in Stan's stories, no matter how small, but glosses over the inconsistences in Jack's accounts (and Jack's accounts were not just occasionally big lies but sometimes even bizarre, such as claiming that Stan "never wrote anything" or even "read books" or "knew anything" about history or mythology. Anyone who knew Stan or even saw him on TV could easily tell you that Stan was very well read and could quote many long passages from books, and had an impressive knowledge of history and theology and mythology. Jack, and the book's author, claim Stan never wrote "any" complete scripts from scratch, completely ignoring the two decades Stan spent writing literally thousands of scripts prior to the implementation of the "Marvel method". He reluctantly admits that both Stan and Jack misrepresented things and then says, at one point, we should not discount the possibility that "one of them" might be lying 100% (and you can practically hear the author saying: "hint, hint, wink, wink, I mean Stan, in case you couldn't tell"). How can both men be lying, by his own account, and yet one of them is lying totally, while the other is telling the truth, totally? In discussing the creation of the FF, he discusses the treatment/outline/whatever you wanna call it and also recounts that Stan and Jack and Martin Goodman met and discussed the plot and characters at some point. Reisman says, try and follow this... that if Jack was not part of the discussion before Stan wrote the outline, that Jack is entitled to at least 50% of the credit (and probably more). IF, on the other hand, Jack did attend a meeting with Lee and Goodman, prior to the writing of the outline, then Jack is entitled to 100% of the credit for the creation of the FF. Read that again, and read it in the book. If Stan and Martin Goodman discussed the FF prior to the writing of the outline, and Jack was in the room, then, Reisman concludes that Jack was and is entitled to 100% of the credit. Not half the credit, with Stan. And not 1/3 of the credit, split between Jack, Stan and Goodman. Jack is presumed to have made 100% of all the creative things said in that room. Reisman presents it is an unassailable fact that the other men simply could not, would not and did not contribute anything. Any. Thing. I could go on about how that conversation may have followed one solely between Stan and Goodman, or about how there's all kinds of reasons to believe Goodman wanted a "Human Torch" character because Marvel already owned one. And how all those men were aware of Plastic Man and Invisible Scarlet O'Neill, and how Timely had been doing stories about men being turned into monsters by accidents or exposure to chemicals, spores, rays and everything else (and how that was being done before Jack rejoined the company in 1958). And I could go on about many other examples where Reisman strayed far over the line to editorialize and cherry-pick facts in such a way that it's clear he began the book with his conclusions in mind, and was swayed by that conclusion every step of the way. As I said, I truly believe he thinks he was truly objective. But in the end... he just wasn't. The author says he was objective and I believe that he believes he was objective, but by journalistic standards he just isn't. He editorializes often, based in large part on his personal opinion about the quality of Stan's work versus Jack's work sans each other and post Marvel's silver age. One can easily and reasonably disagree, but he treats his opinion as an objective fact, and fails to recognize that he's comparing apples versus oranges when you're talking about non-comic projects (TV, movies, etc). He quotes Stan as being the first and most prominent person to say Jack was a "co-writer" and, after using that as proof of Jack's dominance, says that Stan lied when he later soft-pedaled Jack's contribution (in other words, Stan is presumed to have bee lying whenever he said things the author liked, and presumed to be telling the truth whenever he said things the author liked). He picks apart inconsistences in Stan's stories, no matter how small, but glosses over the inconsistences in Jack's accounts (and Jack's accounts were not just occasionally big lies but sometimes even bizarre, such as claiming that Stan "never wrote anything" or even "read books" or "knew anything" about history or mythology. Anyone who knew Stan or even saw him on TV could easily tell you that Stan was very well read and could quote many long passages from books, and had an impressive knowledge of history and theology and mythology. Jack, and the book's author, claim Stan never wrote "any" complete scripts from scratch, completely ignoring the two decades Stan spent writing literally thousands of scripts prior to the implementation of the "Marvel method". He reluctantly admits that both Stan and Jack misrepresented things and then says, at one point, we should not discount the possibility that "one of them" might be lying 100& (as the subtext screams: "hint, hint, wink, wink, I mean Stan, in case you couldn't tell"). How can both men be lying, by your own account, and yet one of them is lying totally, while the other is telling the truth, totally? In discussing the creation of the FF, he discusses the treatment/outline/whatever you wanna call it and also recounts that Stan and Jack and Martin Goodman met and discussed the plot and characters at some point. Reisman says, try and follow this... that if Jack was not part of the discussion before Stan wrote the outline, that Jack is entitled to at least 50% of the credit (and probably more). IF, on the other hand, Jack did attend a meeting with Lee and Goodman, prior to the writing of the outline, then Jack is entitled to 100% of the credit for the creation of the FF. Read that again, and read it in the book. If Stan and Martin Goodman discussed the FF prior to the writing of the outline, and Jack was in the room, then, Reisman concludes that Jack was and is entitled to 100% of the credit. Half half the credit, with Stan. Not 1/3 of the credit, split between Jack, Stan and Goodman. 100%. He presumes, unabashedly (and editorializing to the moon and back) that the other men simply could not, would not and did not contribute anything. Any. Thing. I could go on about how that conversation may have followed one solely between Stan and Goodman, or about how there's all kinds of reasons to believe Goodman wanted a "Human Torch" character because Marvel already owned one. And how all those men were aware of Plastic Man and Invisible Scarlet O'Neill, and how Timely had been doing stories about men being turned into monsters by accidents or exposure to chemicals, spores, rays and everything else (and how that was being done before Jack rejoined the company in 1958). And I could go on about many other examples where Reisman strayed far over the line to editorialize and cherry-pick facts in such a way that it's clear he began the book with his conclusions in mind, and was swayed by that conclusion every step of the way. And I could lay out how his conclusion was foregone and apparently made well before he started researching the book, because he'd made that conclusion in an article for Vulture which provided the origin story for this book. I could point out how he references that article, with obvious pride, as something that he'd heard Stan was irked by. I could point out how he says repeatedly he wasn't looking to do a takedown, then would say a short time later that it was goal to point out "there are no superheroes" and, more importantly, to get people to reassess Stan's legacy. Much of the journalistic work is well researched and sourced, and well written. And, to repeat, I truly believe he thinks he and the book are truly objective. But in the final analysis... they just aren't.

Not to mention you'd owe taxes on 1K of profits you didn't actually receive

Hard to say. Of course, as a kid, like all fans I sought out books based primarily on whether they had not been cleaned and pressed. Later, as an adult, I came to see that comics also had some (admittedly limited) appeal for being the original source material for immensely entertaining and enlightening characters.

They look like different pieces. The OA is clearly an ASM 68 cover homage completely redrawn while the one on the lunchbox looks like a stat from the cover with added inks on top of the original image.

This sparked more of a debate than I'd anticipated. But I feel anyone's pain about creating the schedule with sales from ages ago and once had an accountant call me to ask if I really had saved a receipt for a Silver Surfer book which I had listed as costing me 25 cents. I told him I did not have a receipt but believed I'd bought if off the stands and 25 cents was the cover price, and yes that actually led to a discussion about whether tax could be included, and mileage to the store could not be factored in because I had ridden my bike. The conversation was mostly joking, I think. I hope. There's no way that the money can save meticulously calculating expenses on books like that (even stacks of books like it) is worth more than just throwing up your hands and paying the tax as if you got it free. I haven't sold much on ebay in the last few years, so when my son asked me to list some of his old video games I was below any threshold where a government would care so I said "why not?" only to find that now I may have to account for and pay taxes on things I bought for him 10-15 years ago and which we're now selling to get back maybe a fraction of their original cost. It would bug me less if I didn't know people with nine figure bank accounts who pay lower rates than I do.

If the Post Office, a branch of the federal government, delivered it to him that must prove he is the one and only Superman.

I do not own this because I failed to bid on it, but some years back Heritage sold Jack Kirby's bound copies of Cap 1-10 with cap and red skull artwork on the binding papers.

Oh. So now working families desperate to keep the lights on will have to pay taxes on the money they get for old toys and video games, unless they have saved all the old receipts and are willing and able to spend many hours accounting for each item in order to prove they sold for a loss.

They said I couldn't list anything until I "registered" with some new service, which asked for my SSN or ITN. Me no likely, Is this a new thing? Since when?

That's what made it work so well. Goodman wanted to use the characters they owned from the Golden Age. The Human Torch was simply reinvented. Brand new guy. If they had done the same with Cap it is doubtful it would have worked nearly as well. A soldier getting super powers and wearing a spandex USA flag during the Vietnam era? Hard to imagine twisting that into something as poignant as the silver age Cap we know. It's a real tough thing to pull off. The Sub-mariner retcon (that the destruction of Atlantis left him with amnesia), allowed them to use the same character, but it never felt essential to his character in any meaningful way. Subby could easily be put into the MCU with or without it. But the Capsicle story made for such an interesting psyche that I doubt he could have been such a nuanced character in the films without it.

Some of the earliest stories were very atmospheric and cool, seeming influenced by Sherlock Holmes and Grand Guignol as much as, if not more than, patriotic stuff. But the character himself was just as shallow as any golden age generic guy in spandex. Had he been resurrected as the same character, with a modern origin story, it would have likely not been nearly as compelling. The whole man-out-of-time aspect made him in many ways an entirely different character from the golden age. Some golden age characters were retconned nicely (such as Captain Marvel/Shazam) but they remained essentially the same person with different backstory. More than any other comic hero I can think of, Cap was essentially "created" twice by two teams of people -- Simon and Kirby in 1940 and Lee and Kirby in 1964.

Published on the day Hitler invaded Russia, and just like that the USSR went USA from enemy to ally.