One of the most notorious cases of “who created what” is the case of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the creation of the Fantastic Four. However, that doesn’t take into consideration that certain partnerships are not 50/50, that certain characters are, for lack of a better term, rip offs of other characters, or that dozens of creators work on a character over its lifetime. People want a simple one or two person creator team that they can hold up as the creative geniuses behind the character. This is the problem with assigning credit in comic books, what I touched on in the article that started this series off. In other words, he put words in the characters mouth. Then how about Roy Thomas? Should he get credit for influencing the design of the character? How about Mike Friedrich? He was scripter on the issue. You don’t agree? I mean, we wouldn’t have a Thanos if it wasn’t for Darkseid, but, okay. So, Jack Kirby deserves credit in creating Thanos. The blue-clad, craggy purple skinned Thanos was a rip of of Jack Kirby’s blue-clad, craggy purple skinned Darkseid. Roy took one look at the guy in the Metron-like chair and said : “Beef him up! If you’re going to steal one of the New Gods, at least rip off Darkseid, the really good one!”. I had all these different gods and things I wanted to do, which became Thanos and the Titans. In my first Thanos drawings, if he looked like anybody, it was Metron. Jim Starlin, writer of that issue of Iron Man, was inspired by Kirby’s Fourth World and in an interview in Comic Book Artist #2, detail how that played into Thanos’ origin: This, of course, did not go unnoticed by Kirby’s old employer, Marvel Comics. See, Jack Kirby created Darkseid in 1970 as part of his “Fourth World” series over at DC. Forget the fact that he wasn’t working at Marvel at the time, let alone writing or drawing Iron Man #55, where the character first appeared. I said that Jack Kirby, the King of Comics, created Thanos.

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