Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby? Who's he? Rather, who was he?
He was the creator of some great comic heroes: Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, among others. He worked for Marvel Comics for a salary, not much, no royalties from films, books etc. When he died he left no fortune for his wife and kids. She had to ask Marvel Comics for some sort of pension to see her by.
Comic book artists did not live like song writers who received generous royalties from their words and music.
I don't know if that is the case now but a few years ago I met a writer of stories for comic books and magazines and he looked rather well off.
He attended a "writers' weekend" we held at Abergavenny Adult Education College. Why? Because he had some spare time on his hands while his wife was attending some other function elsewhere; so he thought he might find out what"real writers" did.
In other words he thought he was going to mix with succesful writers who were published everywhere and made loads of money.
You can imagine his surprise to find that only two people, out of 20 or so on the course, had had anything published. Commercially, that is. Most had had poems published in local journals or short stories in unknown magazines. No one there made money out of writing.
"I can't understand it," he told me. "There's all this marvellous talent here going to waste."
He did not understand the writing game and I could not get through to him that most writers like those present were not successful, never had been and never would be.
I think he was paid a lot for what he did - writing captions for comic strips; he was wearing a leather jacket that must have cost a small fortune.
But this man who, he told me - and I believed him - had created Judge Dread could not write a short story to save his life. He tried and failed. His stories had heaps of action but no form. They were constructed like those pictures you see in magazines which tell a story in a series of bubbles.