“If You’re Going To Pay Kirby, You Should Use Kirby The Way He Is” JA: Obviously, if Stan didn’t like his work, he wouldn’t have hired him in the first place. ROMITA: That’s what I said, but Don was saying, “Stan gives me jobs, but he asks me to be somebody else.” And, you know, even Jack Kirby used to feel the same way. Whenever we had to make a change, I used to explain to Jack I wasn’t changing anything because Stan didn’t like the way it looked. I changed it because Stan said, “I want a smile on this girl. I don’t want her frowning.” He would change the meaning of a story by changing the characters’ reactions. Jack would have a calm look on a girl’s face or a frown, and Stan would decide to make a joke in that panel to lighten the mood, so he would ask me to put a smile on the girl’s face, which made Jack angry. I remember Jack saying, “If you’re going to pay Kirby, you should use Kirby the way he is.” I understood what he meant, but I told Jack the change was done because Stan was changing the thrust of a certain scene to get either humor or more emotion into it, or less emotion into it. But I couldn’t quite reach Jack, because he didn’t like the idea of anybody changing his stuff. But when he worked with Joe Simon, I think Joe used to make him make changes, which was one of the reasons they didn’t stay together. Joe Simon used to constantly ask him to change this, change that. And when Jack worked with Stan, Stan was always making little suggestions that bothered him; then, when he went to DC, they did the same thing. They had people changing his Superman faces. I didn’t talk to Jack for about three or four years while he was at DC, except for the time he asked me to go over and draw one of his features for Surf’s Up! the Fourth World. I was really very tempted Romita’s own version of The Silver Surfer, in a layout also featuring Dr. Doom and a nameless android. Thanks to do it, but I was too chicken. Actually, if he to Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] had stayed in New York, instead of moving that DC had this mindset that they were doing comics like history to California, I might have done it, because I really admired him. I books. And the editors had nothing else to do but to criticize. Almost would have loved to work with him. every DC editor I knew criticized just for the fact that they could I think I asked Stan this once. I said, “Stan, if I had gone with Jack criticize, and they felt that, this way, they were earning their money. and had helped him out doing penciling, one of those books or maybe Stan wasn’t like that: most of the time, he accepted stuff from artists two of those books, do you think it might have changed the reaction like Jack. But the same kind of editorial attitude they gave Kirby... this from DC?” And he said he didn’t know. He said he wondered, is what Don Heck was tired of hearing, because he had the same because DC was very critical of Jack. They never seemed to accept criticism at DC at times. Jack for what he was. Only Stan Lee would have accepted The Silver Surfer. If you took One reason he left Challengers of the Unknown [in 1959] was The Silver Surfer to a DC editor, he would have laughed at you. Who that the DC editors were brutal to him. They used to criticize little can believe that a guy could take a surfboard, and travel through space things. He did a Western for them once, and they criticized him on it? I used to tell Stan that, if I had enough imagination to come up because he had the Indian getting on the wrong side of the horse. He with that idea, I would have discounted it. I would have thought, said, “No kid cares what side an Indian gets on the horse!” I told him “Naw, that’s too silly.” I also said, “It’s not only a tribute to Jack
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