Over at his fabulously-fun website, Ain't It Cool, Harry Knowles is expressing shock and dismay at reports that the forthcoming Incredible Hulk movie will carry no creator credit for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I'm not sure why Harry is surprised by this. The comic books carry no such credits and with the exception of the short-lived Silver Surfer cartoon show, I can't think of any Marvel TV or movie adaptation that has said "created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby" on it. Certainly, the first X-Men movie did not. Stan was, of course, credited as one of the Executive Producers. Jack's name was buried very deep in the end credits with a kind of unspecified acknowledgment like you'd give to a location that allowed you to film on its property. A lot of folks probably didn't notice it at all. At the screening I attended, I was literally the only one left in the theater by the time Jack's name rolled past in the smallest typeface.
Marvel has a long history of not crediting Jack Kirby for his contributions, and often not crediting Stan in a creator or co-creator capacity. This history has endured through many regime changes at Marvel and while many execs have talked about "doing the right thing," they have a way of leaving the company before they can make it happen. That credit on the animated Silver Surfer series was authorized by a gentleman named Joseph Calamari who was then the President of Marvel. He personally assured me that this was the new policy; that henceforth all Marvel movies, TV shows and even comic books would carry creator credits, such as DC routinely does on its key books and the adaptations of them. And soon after that, for reasons I assume were unrelated to that decision, Joe Calamari was no longer at Marvel. Well, at least he got one credit placed before he was out. Some of the others who've said they wanted to institute creator credits didn't even manage that.