Nick Stuart wrote to ask…
I've often read that at Marvel during the 1960s, Stan Lee deliberately crafted a house style for the artwork modeled on the work of Jack Kirby. In some instances, I've even seen people give the impression that there were a bunch of artists working at Marvel during that time who were nothing more than Kirby clones.
While Kirby's influence on the look of Marvel during those years is fairly evident, I also felt there was quite a bit of variety in the artistic styles of the Marvel artists of the time, more than was sometimes given credit for. To what extent do you feel other artists were told to "draw like Kirby", so to speak?
People get confused about this. The best way for me to explain this is to make clear that Stan did not tell artists to do work that a layperson would mistake for Jack Kirby artwork. He was not looking for forgers. What he did want was for everyone else to pick up on Jack's way of staging action: The "camera" angles, the way of cutting between long shots and close-ups, the techniques of making even scenes of two people standing in a room and talking interesting.
He wanted them to look at how Jack posed his figures and exaggerated emotions and anatomy; how he framed shots so that the characters related to one another in the same shot. If John was falling in love with Marsha and vice-versa, he didn't draw one panel of John and then another panel of Marsha so that their dialogue balloons could convey how each felt about the other. He drew them in the same panel with the proper body language and expressions to tell us how they felt about each other.
I remember Jack once giving a critique of the art samples of an aspiring artist. He said, "Your people never look at each other."
A number of artists came to Marvel after working for other companies — or Stan's in earlier times — where they were given a full script. In a full script, the writer decided how many panels should be on each page, what was shown in each panel and all the lettering — dialogue, captions and sound effects — had been composed. There were a number of variations in how the famed "Marvel Method" worked but they usually involved the artist, not the writer, deciding what to show in each panel and then the copy was written later.
Stan thought Jack was the master of this. You could look at one of his penciled pages with no lettering on it and understand, if not the plot then at least the dramatic tensions in the scene.
So to make clear: He didn't want his other artists to draw hands like Jack drew or faces like Jack drew. He wanted them to lay out the pages and tell the story the way Jack drew. Sol Brodsky, who had a lot to do with who drew what at Marvel in the sixties, told me that Stan would often turn down an applicant for penciling work by saying, "Too DC!"
That generally meant he thought their staging was dull. If he thought someone had promise, he'd either assign them to work over Kirby layouts, at least for a few jobs. After Jack refused to do that kind of work anymore, he'd tell them to study the way Jack "told" a story in pictures. Some got it, some didn't.
