Every sixteen seconds on Facebook (it seems), a discussion breaks out on some comic book forum about why on those rare occasions when Jack Kirby was called upon to draw a cover or a panel or anything of Spider-Man, his Spider-Man did not look like the Spider-Man drawn by Steve Ditko or John Romita. Some folks seem to think there must have been a reason apart from the fact that Jack was not Steve Ditko or John Romita. Hey, when Frank Sinatra sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," he didn't sound like Tony Bennett.
A few years ago on an Internet comics forum that no longer exists, I wrote a long post about this and I thought I'd put it up here so from now on when this topic crops up, I can refer people here…
Jack believed that the creation of Spider-Man (or Spiderman) at Marvel began with him walking into Stan Lee's office and saying something like, "Hey, let's do a character called Spiderman!" Whether that's true or not is one of those "my word against his" arguments but I happen to think it's probably true and in private conversations, Stan admitted to me he wasn't sure it wasn't.
But actually, it began years earlier when Jack was working with Joe Simon. A comic was developed called The Silver Spider, who was neither very silvery nor very spidery. There is some question as to how involved Jack was in the project but that's another discussion for another time. The project didn't sell in its original format nor under the name "Spiderman." It did become a comic later when Simon had a deal with the Archie company to develop super-hero comics for them and he suggested Jack adapt The Silver Spider into a comic called The Fly. None of that is really relevant to what I'm discussing here.
Jack drew some presentation drawings of his concept of a Spiderman for Stan. Everyone agreed on what the character looked like and he got the go-ahead to draw the first story. He was five pages into it when he was stopped for reasons that are not, today, clear. This Spiderman was a kid who turned into an adult super-hero the same way Billy Batson turned into Captain Marvel. The character had some similarities to the character we now know as Spider-Man but it was different in that way and others.
There are no known surviving drawings of that Spiderman. None. Any drawings you might've seen of Jack's version of this Spiderman are someone's guesses — or in the case of one done by Steve Ditko, what he remembered decades later. In several cases, someone has taken a Kirby drawing of another character and altered it to look like what they think Jack might have drawn. I have spent years correcting folks who see these drawings and say, "Oh, Jack couldn't draw Spider-Man."
Those are not Kirby drawings and even if they were exactly like what Jack did, he was drawing a different person — an adult, not a teenager named Peter Parker. It's like looking at a drawing of the 1940's Flash and saying, "Hey, that artist can't draw The Flash!" because you were expecting the later, revamped character under that name.
I have written elsewhere of the reasons why I believe Jack's five pages were discarded and Stan started anew with Steve Ditko. When the name and basic premise moved over to Ditko's drawing table, it became a different character in many ways and Jack no longer regarded it as "his," though he resented that his contribution was forgotten or even that it was dismissed as "Kirby made the character too muscular so Stan gave it to Ditko." I don't think was the case even though Stan later said that. Major changes were made in the character at that point. Stan did not just give the same plot to Ditko and tell him to draw the same story but make the character skinnier.
Jack was drafted into drawing the first two Spider-Man covers and some "guest star" stories because Stan (and the readers) liked the idea of every Marvel character meeting every other Marvel character. Jack was even called up to redraw/retouch some of Ditko's drawings and though he had great admiration for Ditko, he also couldn't (or wouldn't) draw like him, just as Ditko did some odd interpretations of some of Jack's characters. Once when Ditko drew Thor in a comic, Stan felt compelled to put a blurb in the comic acknowledging how "different" Ditko's version was.
Stan was editor and art director at Marvel and as such, he often called for art redraws and corrections on everyone's work. Some of these are not obvious in the published books because they were done cut-and-paste, not as redraws. And sometimes, it was Jack redrawing Jack and John Romita retouching the work of John Romita. We rarely spot such changes unless it was one artist "correcting" another. One should not assume that when Stan requested a redraw, it was because the artist had screwed up.
Stan often requested changes (especially on covers) due to whims or out of nervousness. He had a tendency to look at every cover after it was done but before it was sent off to press and ask, "Okay, what can we change on this to make it better?" John Romita, Marie Severin, Herb Trimpe, John Verpoorten and Sol Brodsky all told me that they did art "corrections" on a lot of artwork by everyone they thought was perfectly fine…or even better before "fixing."
For a long time, Stan was extremely fussy about how Spider-Man was drawn, more so than any other character. He'd go through periods when he thought all drawings of Spider-Man not drawn by Ditko were wrong. Later, it was all drawings not done by Romita. Since Johnny worked in the office, it was too easy for Stan to take a page on which anyone else had drawn Spider-Man and to walk twenty feet to Romita's drawing table and say, "Here…redraw that panel."
He was not consistent about this. On the cover of Avengers #11, he had Ditko repencil a Kirby drawing of Spider-Man. On the covers of Amazing Spider-Man #10 and #35, he had Kirby (with Brodsky inking) redraw Ditko drawings of Spider-Man. It had a lot to do with who happened to be in the office the day he decided something could be improved.
In late 1965 when it looked like Ditko was on the verge of quitting, Stan worried aloud that no one could replace Ditko, and when Romita appeared to be the probable successor, Stan stuck Spider-Man into the Daredevil comic (which Romita was then drawing) for two issues as a test. Romita passed but he had to redo many Spider-Man drawings, in some cases several times. His working relationship with Stan was somewhat different from the way Stan worked with a guy like Kirby or Colan. They worked in their home studios, only came in every week or two…and weren't on the payroll to do art fixes.
Over the years, Stan's attitude about who could draw Spider-Man changed. He came to love what Romita did with the character but Romita was often falling behind on the comic because there were so many demands on his time in the office. Even with getting other artists (some credited, some not) to help out, it became apparent in Romita's first year that they'd need to commission a fill-in.
Ross Andru was selected and he penciled a story that was to have run in the regular Amazing Spider-Man comic. When Stan saw the finished pencil art, he decided it was too different; that Andru's rendition of Spider-Man didn't look enough like Spider-Man. He shelved the story and later, he had Romita do a lot of redraws on it and Bill Everett fixed it further when he inked it. It ran as a "different" kind of Spidey story in Marvel Super-Heroes #14.
Several years later though, when Romita's workload forced him to give up the main Spider-Man comic completely, Stan was fine with Ross Andru becoming the regular Spider-Man artist for many years…and Andru's work hadn't changed. I thought Ross's work was quite good but the point is that Stan had pretty much given up the notion that any artist could not draw Spider-Man. By this time, they had Spider-Man in three or four comics per month so just about everyone drew him.
As a Kirby Defender, I have no problem with anyone not liking the way Jack Kirby drew Spider-Man but I think folks oughta remember that, first of all, Jack never for a minute thought of himself as the guy who could make someone else's character look the way that someone else drew it. He drew others' characters because he was asked to and he couldn't get out of it, not because he wanted to.
Secondly, he usually only drew them in pencil. Others who drew Spider-Man in pencil (including Ditko and Romita on their own work) often roughed in the webbing loosely or even left it entirely for the inking stage. So when someone else inked the webbing Jack penciled, they were inking webbing that Jack did not intend the inker to follow exactly.
And probably half of the not-that-many Kirby drawings of Spider-Man around are sketches he did for fans. If you got Jack to draw Superman, he'd draw you a Kirby Superman. He wouldn't try to make it look like Curt Swan's. If you asked Jack to do draw Spider-Man, same deal. He'd draw it his way because he'd figure that's what you wanted.
I could understand all the fuss about how Jack drew Spider-Man if he'd ever really drawn that comic but he steadfastly declined to. According to him, he was asked to take it over when Ditko quit or to at least do layouts for the book, working out the stories. He said he refused to and told Stan to give it to Johnny Romita. Stan denied this and you can believe whichever you want.
The point is that Jack didn't want to do characters he considered "someone else's" and he didn't want to have to make his work look like theirs. One of the things I've come to love about his work is that it's Jack being Jack. If you don't like it, fine. There are lots of popular comics out there that leave me cold.
I just don't get it when someone says "Gee, I wish Jack had drawn this more like Ditko did" or "Gee, I love this guy inking Jack because he toned down the Kirby and fixed all the anatomy." To me, that's like saying "I love Jack Kirby work when it doesn't look like Jack Kirby." And it makes me think that for his own sake, any person saying that shouldn't be reading Jack Kirby comics.