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Really? REALLY?? Must this always be trotted out? Kirby the house style? When also at the company were the very artists you named. Did they all draw like Kirby? Were they asked to?

Please, let's kill this myth. I've been fighting it for more than forty years!!

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The notion of Kirby's art as "house style," I think, comes from people misunderstanding stories of Stan asking Kirby to do layouts for artists to get them acquainted with the new Marvel dynamism. These artists work was always their own, but the dramatic Lee-ordered layouts by Kirby were certainly an inspiration and yardstick for comparison.

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But is it interesting? :)

Let's say it was a modest success...not as great as what Stan and Jack could do together...but good enough to launch some more super heroes....Thor, Iron Man, etc. (again...all without Jack).

And then Amazing Fantasy #15 comes out by Stan and Steve.   

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Remove Kirby from the equation, and this whole sequence doesn't happen.

One can debate as much as one like the "importance" of Jack Kirby in the history of Marvel, but when engaging in "speculation" of this kind it must be remembered that Stan's favorite artist thru the Fifties was Joe Maneely. If he had not been killed in a subway accident in 1958, it would almost certainly have been him who Stan called upon to illustrate that first FANTASTIC FOUR issue, and most likely Maneely who was also called in, as Kirby had been, to provide the art for the first Spider-Man story.

And unlike what happened with Kirby, Stan might have liked Maneely's version of Spider-Man, and Ditko would not have come into the picture.

(Incidentally, for those who sometimes wonder about my war on Wikipedia, a friend sent me this from their article on Maneely: "Talented and well-respected, he died in a commuter-train accident shortly before Marvel's ascendancy into a commercial and pop-cultural conglomerate."

(1958 was three years before the publication of FANTASTIC FOUR 1, and decades before Marvel could be considered a "conglomerate.")