Jack Kirby's Son Slams New Stan Lee Documentary for Glossing Over His Dad's Marvel Involvement

"It’s way past time to at least get this one chapter of literary/art history right," Neal Kirby said

Jack Kirby's son claims the new documentary about Stan Lee's importance in the history of Marvel Comics "glanced over" his dad's contributions.

Following the 2023 Tribeca Festival premiere of the documentary, which is titled Stan Lee, Neal Kirby released a statement via his daughter's Twitter account, in which Neal described the movie as "Stan Lee's greatest tribute to himself" for its reliance on Lee's own narrative of his life and career.

"I understand that, as a 'documentary about Stan Lee,' most of the narrative is in his voice, literally and figuratively," Neal wrote. "It's not any big secret that there has always been controversy over the parts that were played in the creation and success of Marvel's characters."

In his statement, Neal said Lee's ultimate positioning as "the voice of Marvel" was more due to the late writer and editor's relationship with media outlets and long life — Lee died in 2018 at 95, well after the Marvel Cinematic Universe had grown into one of pop culture's most prominent franchises.

Neal also asserted that "most comic historians" recognize Jack Kirby's prominent role in creating the Fantastic Four, although Lee is listed as a co-creator of the superhero characters.

Disney+, Stan Lee production company Supper Club, and reps for the film's director David Gelb did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's requests for comment.

Related: Marvel Legend Stan Lee's Life in Photos

Neal said in his statement that the film pays more attention to Lee's separate conflict with another Marvel comic book artist, Steve Ditko, over who deserves more credit for the creation of Spider-Man before pointing to his own childhood spent watching Jack work during Marvel Comics' heyday.

“I am by no means a comics historian, but there are few, if any, that have personally seen or experienced what I have, and know the truth with firsthand knowledge," he wrote, adding his belief that Lee's "over 35 years of uncontested publicity" following Jack's death in 1994 has displaced his father's importance in Marvel's history.

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While Lee made cameo appearances in a significant number of Marvel movies and television shows in the last decades of his life, Neal noted that Jack's "first screen credit didn’t appear until the closing crawl at the end of the film adaptation of Iron Man in 2008, after Stan Lee, Don Heck, and Larry Lieber.” 

“The battle for creator’s rights has been around since the first inscribed Babylonian tablet," Neal concluded. "It’s way past time to at least get this one chapter of literary/art history right.”

Related: Tom Holland Recalls Stan Lee Gave Him 'the Entire History' of Spider-Man Before He Died

Jack Kirby himself appeared to view Lee's impact on Marvel's history as negligible during his own lifetime. In a 1990 interview with The Comics Journal, he said the Fantastic Four and Thor characters were his idea and said Lee was "essentially an office worker" in his capacity as as an editor at Marvel during the '60s, when many of the company's character were first created.

Marvel's website credits Kirby as the "penciler" of the first Fantastic Four comic, while Lee is credited as the story's creator.

The documentary utilizes archival material obtained solely from Lee's personal archives to examine his life and career, according to a Disney+ synopsis for the film.

Stan Lee is streaming on Disney+ now.

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