http://www.tcj.com/a-96th-birthday/


Here's an interesting and lengthy piece from THE COMICS JOURNAL on Kirby, with a lot of behind-the-scenes photos of Kirby, going back to his World War II days, and with his children in the 1950's and 1960's.

But it mostly discusses the issue of character creation, plot and story credit not given to Kirby by Stan Lee for the creation of Silver Age Marvel.

It gets pretty down and dirty in the viewer comments after the article. I think it's pretty beyond dispute that Kirby did a lot more than he was given credit for, and on a lot of pencil pages, in the side margins Kirby supplied plot and dialogue, much of which was used verbatim by Stan Lee, while Lee took credit for the writing.

The wildest for me is that when Martin Goodman suggested to Lee (as Lee himself describes in ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, 1974) Goodman suggested that JLA was a big seller for DC, and persuaded Lee to do a similar superhero group for Atlas/Marvel in 1961. But in ORIGINS OF MARVEL, Lee says that he came up with all the characters and concepts, and then gave it to Kirby to draw.

But as detailed here, Lee apparently wanted to do another revival of Sub-Mariner, Captain America and the Human Torch (which previous revival had failed miserably in 1954-1955) and it was Jack Kirby and Sol Brodsky who had pushed Lee that it would be better to use new characters, that gave us the FF.