nascent Marvel Comics, "writing stories for Jack [Kirby] to draw", referring to the artist who had co-created Captain America for the company in 1940 and had recently returned for a long, exclusive stint in which Kirby would co-create many signature Marvel characters in the Silver Age of Comics. At this point in the late 1950s, Kirby was drawing science fiction / fantasy stories followed by giant-monster tales in what collectors and historians call "pre-superhero Marvel" comics, primarily Journey into Mystery, Strange Tales, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish. As Lieber recalled of those creature features, Lieber's earliest, tentatively confirmed pre-superhero Marvel script is for the six-page Don Heck-illustrated "I Am the Beast-Man" in Strange Tales #77 (Oct. 1960), and his first confirmed is the 13-page "I Led the Strange Search for Manoo", penciled by Kirby and inked by Dick Ayers, in Amazing Adventures #2 (July 1961). Marvel superheroes and the Rawhide Kid Under Stan Lee plots, Lieber would go on to script the debut origin stories and other early appearances of the superheroes Thor (co-created with artist Jack Kirby) in Journey into Mystery, Iron Man (co-created with Kirby and Don Heck) in Tales of Suspense, and Ant-Man (co-created with Kirby) in Tales to Astonish. This included creating the names of their respective alter egos: Don Blake, Tony Stark, and Henry Pym. His first superhero work, the first appearance of Marvel's Thor in Journey into Mystery #83 (Aug. 1962), introduced one of the mainstays of the Marvel Universe, the mystical metal "uru", of which Thor's hammer Mjolnir is made. As Lieber recalled, "I kind of liked it; it was short. It's easy on the letterer; they're going to be using it all the time. I don't know where the hell I came up with it. I used to get names out of the back of the dictionary, from the biographical section where you have foreign names, Russian, this and that. I used to go to it and gets parts of names to put together." As Stan Lee recalled, in his trademark jocular style, in 1974, Lieber in 1999 remembered circumstances less hyperbolically: "Thor was just another story. I didn't think about it at all. Stan said, 'I'm trying to make up a character,' and he gave me the plot, and he said, 'Why don't you write the story?'" Under Lee's plotting, Lieber's eight Thor stories also introduced the Marvel characters