I don't think it's too far fetched that it went in the trash. Larry Lieber, in his deposition, testified to picking up some early Kirby Hulk pages from the trash at the Marvel offices, where Kirby put them after Stan Lee rejected them and refused to pay for them.

If unused pages were saved back then, it was usually because someone was a fan of the artist in question (like Lieber) or because they wanted to use the back of the paper.

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Extraordinarily naive, for one who has been floating around the business for as long as Steve.

"But the people saying Kirby was employed by Marvel so Marvel owns everything are making bad assumptions. Employees aren’t paid on a piecework basis. Employees have taxes deducted from their checks. My agreements with Marvel and DC make it very clear that I’m _not_ an employee, but a “supplier.” The work-for-hire provisions of those agreements have nothing to do with the idea that I’m an employee (I’m not) but with specific contract terms spelled out and agreed to in advance — stuff that, we’re told, has to be signed before work commences because otherwise DC and Marvel don’t own the WFH material we do. And no such agreements were apparently signed before Kirby commenced his various Marvel works.

"This isn’t as simple as “they paid you money so they own everything forever.” That’s not how copyright works in the US (and most other places). In the absence of an agreement that says differently, if you get paid money for the publication rights to something you wrote or drew, the guy who paid gets first-printing rights in English, and nothing more.

Rob Ocelot: "The minute the Ditko Spider-man character took off you would think they'd hang onto what technically is a prototype of the character, if not for historical purposes then at least to recycle the costume design or the character as a villain."

The problem is that "the minute [the] character took off" was probably four months after the pages were tossed...

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There wasn't.

Or is the title of this thread too subtle for some people?

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Over the years, attending conventions, I have found myself the target of all manner of fan ire that had nothing at all to do with myself or my work. (In one extreme case a guy started lecturing me most intensely about the way Gil Kane drew NOSES, and how much the guy didn't like it!) It has to do with who's available -- and for some of these people, I happened, at that moment, to be the only one available, so I got all their complaints about Marvel, or DC, or the industry, or anything else that was bugging them.

By making himself such a visible representative of Marvel -- the face of Marvel, if you will -- Stan has of course opened himself to attack from the microbrains who are unable to distinguish between the system and someone who works within the system. And it should never be forgotten that Stan, for much of his career, was the latter. He did not create the system, he worked within the system. Just like Jack Kirby.

Years ago, Peter Sanderson summed it up best, when he pondered what might have happened if it had been Stan who left Marvel, and Jack who stayed. Who then, Peter asked, in the minds of the fans, would be "good Marvel daddy," and who "bad Marvel daddy?"

(Keeping in mind, yet again, that Kirby had run his own company according to the extant rules of the system, so we have no reason to believe that sweeping reforms would have come to Marvel under his watch, any sooner than they did under Stan's.)