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Who wrote the dialogue?
Patrick Ford
24 October 2016
Page nine from the Thor story in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #86, Nov. 1962.
https://whatifKirby.com/gallery/comic-art-listings/journey-mystery-issue-86-page-9
The plot is credited to Stan Lee with the script credited to Lee's brother Larry Lieber. This is the fourth Thor story. Upon close examination it appears to me that there is penciled lettering in the balloons by both Lee and Kirby. There is far more Lee than Kirby evident on the page. The balloon reading, "I am the real Thor" in panel three clearly contains Kirby's penciled lettering. Almost all of the other penciled lettering on the page looks to be in Lee's hand.
Lee has either rewritten Kirby's script. Or Kirby has penciled in a script by Larry Lieber and Lee has rewritten a lot of that.
Visit the Tom Kraft site and "ZOOM" the image to get a good look.
Ferran Delgado: You can tell that Stan erased Kirby's writing by the lack of rulers in that zone.
Patrick Ford: Why would Lee erase Kirby's lettering after the letterer had inked the final lettering?
Ferran Delgado: I think that Lee erased Kirby's writing to add his correction before it was lettered. And Simek lettered it with almost no rulers.
Ferran Delgado: In first panel writing by Kirby matches with lettering.
Ferran Delgado: It looks like Lee did a correction in the first balloon, but the second seems to match, too.
Ferran Delgado: Corrections by Lee.
Ferran Delgado: Kirby's writing corrected by Lee.
Ferran Delgado: Now that I think about it, the letterer had to xerox the page when the script is written directly on the board. Now imagine if Simek kept them in a closet... This would be a real find! But Simek passed away in 1975.
Patrick Ford: How would the letterer be able to xerox something that large? Maybe Marvel made stats for them?
Ferran Delgado: I don't know, but he probably (almost sure) couldn't letter it without a copy.
Patrick Ford: Why wouldn't the letterer just letter straight from the penciled lettering? I wonder what Ben Oda did in the '50s when working with Kirby pages? Or if Michael Royer used xeroxes?
Ferran Delgado: Because sometimes he couldn't read the text if he lettered it above it. I recall reading that Royer xeroxed the pencils to work more comfortably. Although I suppose that it was more difficult to xerox anything in the 60s than the 70s.
Ferran Delgado: Take the second panel as example. The penciled text is shorter than the lettering. When he's a about to letter the last line, the text is already covered. Not difficult to memorize, but if you have a xerox, you don't risk to forget it.
Patrick Ford: Ferran Delgado, Mike does have his own sets of xeroxes and they might be superior to the ones Kirby made. I think Mike used a Disney xerox machine to make his copies.
Ferran Delgado:
TJKC: Did you xerox the pencils before you inked them, in case they got destroyed?
MR: No, Jack made the production copies. The machine that Jack had for years is like the old thermafax copy machines. If you were to tack one of those copies on the wall, in a couple of years it's turning brown. The ones I've got are stuck in a box somewhere. I've got a couple of pages from my very first Mister Miracle with copies of how Barda looked when I made her look pretty, before Jack said, "Don't ever change the faces!" and changed them back himself.
Ferran Delgado: http://twomorrows.com/Kirby/articles/04royer.html
Ferran Delgado: I'm not sure if Simek did them, but I'd do it if I were in his shoes.
Patrick Ford: Ferran Delgado, I guess it was only later that he made his own copies. Maybe not until the '80s. He told me on the UNDERGROUND page that he made copies of the HUNGER DOGS pages using the Disney machine.
Patrick Ford: Ferran Delgado, Which suggests that someone at DC may have made copies of all the FOURTH WORLD pages inked by Colletta.
Ferran Delgado: His daughter, Jean Simek/Izzo, started to work in 1969 and passed away in 2012. Imagine that the xeroxes are hidden in a closet...
Ferran Delgado: Jean's chronological work: http://www.comicbookdb.com/creator_chron.php?ID=1675
Ferran Delgado: http://comicscommentary.blogspot.com/2012/01/rip-jean-simek.html
Patrick Ford: Without a script by Lieber it's going to remain impossible to determine whose words Kirby was penciling onto the pages.
That would also apply to the early RAWHIDE KID stories credited to Stan Lee. A clear look at all of Kirby's penciled lettering (prior to it being erased by Lee or lettered over by Simek, would certainly help.
Patrick Ford: Here's another curiosity. On this splash from RAWHIDE KID, at the bottom margin Lee has written most of the text for the caption. However, if you look at the lettered caption you can clearly see Kirby's hand lettered "Our story begins..."
So what is Lee doing there? A last moment change? Then why didn't he do so in the caption space as he usually did?
https://whatifKirby.com/gallery/comic-art-listings/rawhide-kid-issue-20-3rd-story-page-1
Ferran Delgado: How about Lee wrote the text to fill the void and Kirby repeated later to calculate the room it'd cover to avoid drawing in that area?
Patrick Ford: Highly unlikely Lee was writing on blank art board. If so one would expect that to be the rule not an odd exception. The balloons would be more an issue than captions.
Ferran Delgado: Maybe the sequence was this one: The page is drawn but that zone is blank. Lee writes the text at the margin and Kirby repeat it as indication to the letterer? I don't know for sure, just speculation.
Patrick Ford: If there was a pattern of those notes on pages that would be a possibility. It's very unusual though. I have seen a few others. And they follow no pattern. Sometimes it's a single balloon. I've always felt they are corrections.
Patrick Ford: Also if Kirby was working from a Lee script then he would already have penciled in the caption just as he did in the RAWHIDE KID #18 caption. That is assuming there was a Lee script. Which I doubt.
Ferran Delgado: Maybe Lee didn't write this caption at the beginning, he looked at the art and felt that it was too void, and wrote a text to fill it?
Patrick Ford: Possible. Kirby's first line of text (the only one we can read) isn't in Lee's note in the margin though.
Ferran Delgado: Then probably it's a correction.
Patrick Ford: "Our story begins..." is not part of Lee's note.
Patrick Ford: On the splash page with Lee's caption note look over at the boy's dialogue, "Paw look at the way..." It's penciled in the balloon by Kirby.
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