Stan Lee holds the art for the cover of Strange Tales #151, 1966.

After a few months of drawing over Kirby’s layouts, Steranko was handed the reins—solely generating not just the art, but the scripts as well. For the first time since Wally Wood’s Daredevil, Lee allowed someone else to write and draw everything in a comic. Jack Kirby, unsatisfied with his own lack of writing credits, took notice.

“I remember the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had drawn a double-page spread in one of the Strange Tales sequences featuring Nick Fury on trial by Baron Strucker and the agents of HYDRA. I had something like a hundred figures in the background, all individual figures. I wrote a note to the colorist, Stan Goldberg, saying, “Stan, color all these men individually.” Stan would probably put a sheet of blue over the whole thing, and that seemed criminal, because—although it might look good—after all I had done all that work putting in all those figures, I didn’t want them all obliterated.

I took the story up to Marvel, and Stan looked at it and said, “I’ve had it, Steranko. Do it yourself. Take it away. I never want to see you again; just take the stuff away and color it yourself.” So I started coloring all my material at that time, at $2.00 per page; later it went to $3 per page. I could only color about ten pages a day, so you can see I was losing a lot of money. I could have just been penciling for two or three times as much; but the strip emerged a more perfect marriage of concepts as a result. So I was willing to take less money, by using that time to color and thereby make the story come out better.”

—Jim Steranko to George Olshevsky, 1977

themarvelageofcomics:

A page from NICK FURY, AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D. #3 by Jim Steranko and Dan Adkins.

Film footage of Jim Steranko drawing from the deck of a ship in 1972.

From left: Dwight Decker, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams, Tony Isabella; 1971.

Walter Gibson, creator of The Shadow, and Jim Steranko, 1975.

Let’s check in on Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko and see what kind of progress they’ve made since last time, shall we?

Jim Steranko and Jack Kirby.

“The teenager Jim Steranko began stealing an arsenal’s worth of guns and a small parking lot’s worth of motor vehicles. In February 1956, Steranko and a partner were arrested for the thefts, committed throughout eastern Pennsylvania, of twenty-five cars and two trucks. (He was careful to avoid criminal activity in his hometown. ‘None of the things we did were done in Reading, maybe one or two. I stole a submachine gun in Reading, but that was all.’)”

io9.com has just posted yet another excerpt from the book—this time, it’s 6500 words about 1966!
http://io9.com/5952658/the-true-story-of-life-at-marvel-comics-in-the-glory-days-of-jack-kirby-and-stan-lee

Original art for rejected Tower of Shadows #1 cover.

Jim Steranko, 1978. Photograph by Tony Frutti.

Blade Runner by Jim Steranko

Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D., 1988

“SOL: CALL ME BEFORE ANYONE MUTILATES THIS”
 
Jim Steranko cover and note to Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #7

Cover art for Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #4, by Jim Steranko.

You’ll want to click to enlarge this one.