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Marvel editors attacked Kirby whenever they could [ Editor's note: Patrick does not back up hs claim with many examples, so I will add this one, from artist Steve Bissette's Facebook page (18 Jan 2019): "The hostility and disdain for Kirby in the Marvel offices during the 1970s was there for any freelancer (like myself) to see, pasted up on office windows and tacked up on office walls. It was disgusting and despicable." ]
Patrick Ford 1 July 2016 From the Kirby-List (Nov. 19, 1996) An exchange between Michael Vassallo and Mark Evanier. MV: To Mark Evanier : You mean to tell me that some disrespectful moron at Marvel actually said to Jack personally that his writing was "shit"? You'd better keep his name a secret Mark. This is one livid Sicilian here!! Even 20 years after the fact I'm appalled. Low-life scum! ME: It's true and there were some worse incidents than that. Jim Van Heuklon: wow. Too bad the names have been withheld to protect the monumentally stupid. Patrick Ford: It was pretty much all of them. To this day people who were working for Marvel at that time disparage Kirby's work whenever they have the chance. They frequently happen to be the same people who were stealing Kirby's original Silver Age artwork. Steve Meyer: Are the Kirby-L archives available online somewhere? I learned a lot of from lurking there for years. Tim Bateman: Patrick occasionally puts up excerpts from the archives, so may be able to answer this one. Michael Hill: They are not. Rand Hoppe must still have a copy of the archive, but since it was not a public group (membership was required to read or post), possibly members' permission would be required to publish. Patrick Ford: Many of the members mentioned in posts that anything they posted could be distributed on the Internet. People who specifically said that include: Mark Evanier, Michael Vassallo, Stan Taylor, Jim Amash, and Rich Morrisey. Several others said they considered their posts private and did not want anything they posted to be distributed outside the list. Bob Ingersol and Tony Isabella are two that I recall saying they didn't want anything they said posted elsewhere. Patrick Ford: I'd add that Ingersol and Isabella very rarely had anything to say concerning Kirby. There were a number of people who flocked to the forum because it was active and had professionals participating and a lot of them seemed to feel the place was just a general comics forum where they could talk about all sorts of things having nothing to do with comics. Michael Hill: I have never felt compelled to share any of Isabella's posts. Patrick Ford: I began skipping his posts because they were almost all about TV shows. food, the PTA at his kids school, or DC and Marvel comic books from the '80s and '90s. There were a whole lot of people on the page who viewed the group as a social club where they could chat with their pals. That sort of thing makes trying to follow the List a real chore. Steve Meyer: For a long time, I guess in the mid- to late-90's, I learned a lot from lurking. At a certain point, as I recall, the "signal to noise" ratio seemed to drop substantially. Patrick Ford: The first few years were fairly good. Fantastic compared to the rest. It began as a Kirby group comprised mainly of people whose tastes ran towards Kirby's work prior to and after Marvel. The group began to be infiltrated by general interest comics people who wanted to talk about John Byrne and the '90s era Fantastic Four. Or who just wanted to hang around an active group with pro participation. Then a few people showed up who were openly hostile towards Kirby. One person in particular (Mark Lubeker) even asked if the group was only for fans of Kirby, because he was not a fan and had a lot of things he wanted to say, but was not saying because he felt his comments would not be welcome. For reasons I will never understand he was not instantly told to go fuck himself by the moderator. From the moment I saw that post I have wondered what on Earth was going through the mind of the group moderator. If I had been the groups moderator I would never have replied to that post. I would have instantly removed it and removed the person who posted it. Instead this jackass set himself up as a 24hr a day troll and in the space of a couple of years had driven everyone close to the Kirby's off the list. Tim Bateman: Well said, Mike!

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