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Post by tolworthy on Jul 14, 2021 6:32:49 GMT -5
Hi guys! A couple of years ago I posted a thread about Thor, using just the art and not the dialogue. Over the years I've posted various weird theories like that to various corners of the Internet, and several people said I should put it all in one place in a book. So here it is:
Basically I take forty well known stories and reverse engineer them to see what Jack dropped onto Stan's desk each month. One of the theories has been confirmed by a collector who asked not to be named: the original origin of Dr Doom is legit. The other theories are "judge for yourself". The book is aimed at hardcore nerds who already own the comics (or can find access to them), so there are very few images. but I do include two complete Blue Bolt stories so I can show what makes a Kirby story different. I am not planning to make any money on this so if you just want the original digital files for free then PM me. But it does look better on paper. Lastly, I am off to work in ten minutes, so if I don't reply until tonight I apologise for being rude. Enjoy!
Bonus chapter: how all of Kirby's stories fit together into a single universe, spanning 1938 to 1993. Full chapter list:
The lost Fantastic Four stories
The lost Ant-Man stories
The lost Black Widow origin
The lost Hulk stories
The lost Spider-Man
The lost Thor stories
The lost Iron Man stories
The lost X-Men stories
The lost Dr Strange origin
The lost Nick Fury
The lost Captain Marvel
The lost New Gods ending
The lost Atlas stories
Rejected titles
How the stories fit together
How to recognise a Kirby story
The biggest section (over 60 pages) is on the Fantastic Four, The Spider-Man section is very short, so don't get too excited about that one - I basically just quote Jim Shooter on seeing Jack's original plans, and then I speculate about what a Kirby Spider-Man would have been like. The most controversial part is probrably where I argue that Ditko's Dr Strange evolved from Kirby's Dr Strange, but feel free to ignore any theories you think are too off the wall. Enjoy!
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Post by profh0011 on Jul 14, 2021 6:54:29 GMT -5
Having read chunks of this, I did appreciate a lot of the ideas included... and, yes, I did find some of them "TOO" off-the-wall. But, this is what happens when you have two people NOT collaborating at all. One creating, and the other spray-panting graffitti over the just-completed clean wall.
Readers were ROBBED of a decade of what should have been MUCH-better stories.
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,707
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Post by shaxper on Jul 14, 2021 7:20:11 GMT -5
I am very excited for you, my good man!
Now we know where you've been all this time 😉
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jul 15, 2021 22:29:37 GMT -5
Congrats on the book Tolworthy! I haven't always agreed with your theories, but I do love to read them... they're always well considered and thought provoking.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 15, 2021 23:14:04 GMT -5
Congrats Tolworthy!
-M
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Post by berkley on Jul 15, 2021 23:43:24 GMT -5
Congratulations on the publication of your book, Tolworthy. It's a subject I find fascinating and I look forward to reading it, whether or not I agree with your conclusions in each and every case.
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Post by coinilius on Jul 20, 2021 6:10:02 GMT -5
Wow congratulations and good work - while I don’t always agree with your theories, I love the passion you bring to them all and always enjoy reading them!
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 23, 2021 16:49:21 GMT -5
I got my print copy in the mail today and I'm really digging it! Most of the deductions I've gotten to so far have either aligned with my own theories or have been refreshingly plausible or entirely convincing. Glad to have a print copy of this excellent detective work!
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Josh
Full Member
Posts: 111
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Post by Josh on Jul 24, 2021 12:00:57 GMT -5
My copy arrived as I was headed out the door. Not sure when I’ll get a chance to start it, but I’m excited.
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Post by speakerdad on Jul 30, 2021 16:04:48 GMT -5
Just ordered, looking forward to digging into it!
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Post by berkley on Jul 30, 2021 17:39:18 GMT -5
Just ordered my copy. I probably won't read it all the way through until I re-read the Kirby FF issues, which I hope to start doing sometime in the next year or so, but looking forward to it!
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Post by markm on Sept 26, 2021 14:09:39 GMT -5
From the Lulu ordering page description: "Because Jack's editor thought his stories were too difficult for young readers."
This. In a nut shell.
Congrats on doing this!
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Post by kirby101 on Sept 27, 2021 8:57:32 GMT -5
I read the part about FF #1. Let's say it is accurate. We have a Kirby story about nuclear waste with a team of Richards and his two kid sidekicks. But Stan changed it into the Fantastic Four. Was Kirby's story more coherent and straightforward? Sure. But what Stan did made it the worlds greatest comic magazine and ushered in the Marvel Universe. You can try to bash Stan all you want for "not creating" anything and merely being an editor. But he was the scripter and here he made the story and the series stronger. Sure, "Reed and the Kid Science Gang" would have been another fun Kirby series. But the Fantastic Four is an unsurpassed book.
I am all for giving Kirby all the credit he deserves. But the idea that Stan did nothing is just as bad as Stan did everything.
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Post by lhosmond on Sept 27, 2021 23:03:12 GMT -5
I read the part about FF #1. Let's say it is accurate. We have a Kirby story about nuclear waste with a team of Richards and his two kid sidekicks. But Stan changed it into the Fantastic Four. Was Kirby's story more coherent and straightforward? Sure. But what Stan did made it the worlds greatest comic magazine and ushered in the Marvel Universe. You can try to bash Stan all you want for "not creating" anything and merely being an editor. But he was the scripter and here he made the story and the series stronger. Sure, "Reed and the Kid Science Gang" would have been another fun Kirby series. But the Fantastic Four is an unsurpassed book. I am all for giving Kirby all the credit he deserves. But the idea that Stan did nothing is just as bad as Stan did everything. You are cherry picking Mr. Tolworthy's writing and ignoring other points relevant to the first FF. I don't see this is as a "Stan did nothing" situation either. He clearly did plenty, very obviously "ushered in the Marvel Universe", albeit through his editorializing and promotional ways. The real takeaway in Tolworthy's writing should be that it is Jack Kirby's ideas and concepts that are all there in the art and storytelling, which were simplified and altered, at times egregiously so, by Stan Lee. Who, from what I've seen plenty of times from various "Bullpen Bulletins" and lettercols, is the guy that told readers that he respected their intelligence. Yet, as Tolworthy points out, right there in that first issue, Lee has Reed Richards call a seismograph a "radar machine". And those kinds of errors don't stop there. The worst, even remotely comparable example I can think of from Kirby, within FF, is including the Thing at the start of a (much later) issue when he wasn't even with the rest of the group at the end of the previous installment. And Lee didn't even try to write around that, now that I think about it. But I digress. Even if this had been a different concept at first from Kirby, can you truly say that Lee "changed it" into the Fantastic Four? Do any of us really know that? It's a fact that Kirby had a history of making comics starring kid gangs, generally if not always with about four members, in various premises and settings. If anything, the Fantastic Four can be seen as a more grown up variation on that same theme. For the record, having read his book, I don't completely buy much of Tolworthy's theorizing about how the first story came together, and find a fair amount of his other "lost" Kirby story ideas to be quite a reach, if not still intriguing, particularly with strong evidence to back up his observations (eg. the lost Dr. Doom origin). He himself says so within the book that he probably took some of his theories too far, that it's pretty much up to the reader to decide what may or may not be true. For FF #1, I can see how it may have begun as a one-off story for one of the anthologies, of a man and two young assistants without any super powers, with no Thing, that got reworked into the fuller story we all know today. But history has obscured this possibility too much and retroscripting the story as it is can't really verify, just provide imaginative theories. What I do value in Tolworthy's writing are the points he makes, such as what is visible in Kirby's artwork and storytelling, the context of the time these stories were made in (and how observant and knowledgeable Kirby himself was in what he put into his stories) and how much of that is or isn't reflected in the finalized versions under Stan Lee's scripting and editing. It probably helps that I'm not a fan from back then, but a 30 year old guy who only just started looking at these particular comics about 2 years ago, having liked and enjoyed various superhero properties and junk, Marvel characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men particularly, as a kid. I've maintained an affection towards comics that has only really blossomed as of late. I am clearly not old enough to have any nostalgia for the original 60s comics, or much of anything from the 20th century beyond adaptational versions of those old comics (movies, cartoons, etc.). I am coming to them as fresh as can be and l am always considering alternatives to the accepted and frequently repeated viewpoints about Lee and Kirby, or any other major figure in this medium's history as well.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Sept 28, 2021 5:41:06 GMT -5
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