I know we've most likley all heard the story of how Stan Lee came up with the Spider-Man concept a million times, he saw a fly climbing on a wall thought that would be a great power for a Super-Hero, ran down the list of insect names until he came to "Spider-Man". He took the idea to Jack Kirby who did several sketches that Stan thought were too powerfully built, so he went to Steve Ditko and history was made.

But.....does anyone know if Jack's original Spider-Man concept sketches survived? And if so were they ever published in any format? I've often wondered what Kirby's "Spider-Man" looked like, if Ditko designed the costume of the Spider-Man we know, what did Kirby's Spider-Man look like? (Makes you wonder if a Lee/Kirby Spider-Man would have become the runaway hit the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man became.)

Looks like it, but that's Ditko's Spider-Man design. I was wondering what Kirby's original costume designs looked like.

I don't have a reference handy but Ditko responded to the "Who created Spider-Man" question by mentioning that Kirby had a first crack at it. Apparently Kirby drew 3-4 pages of stoty establishing that Peter lived with an elderly couple.

In the article, Ditko re-drew Kirby's Spider-Man costume as he remembered it. It looked to me like a standard Kirby trunks-on-the-outside job with a holster to carry a web-gun and a half-face mask.

Sounds like one of the "Spider-Man" costumes seen in this issue of What If?

That Ditko drawing of Kirby's version of the costume has been posted to this Forum before. Anybody know where to find it?

While looking on the net for Kirby's Spider-Man I found this article about Kirby & Spider-Man

http://rodrigobaeza.blog-city.com/jack_will_probably_claim_h e_does_that_too.htm

It's a bit different from how Kirby described it, which was (I think- I don't have the books to hand) that he had an idea about a spider-named or -themed hero which was a bit like Captain Marvel in that he was a kid who transformed into the Hero only using a magic ring. This was something left over from his collaboration with Joe Simon many years previously.

So Jack Kirby pitched a "spider-man" or "spider-something" to Stan Lee which was rejected, and a while later Lee approached  Ditko with a different "spider" idea that they developed together.

This might include a scenario where Lee came to Kirby first in order to develop the new idea, but the gist of it is that the characteristics that make Spider-man stand out were part of Lee and Ditko's development process.

In the article it says

QUOTE: STAN: Well, I think that Jack has taken leave of his senses.

I wonder if in his later years Jack truly believed he had created most of Marvel's characters himself or if it was just a ploy to garner attention for himself?