BLUECHIPCOLLECTIBLES

Spoke with him on the phone a few times and had pleasant conversations each time. Seemed like a nice guy

I look at all of it as damage and try to disregard whether the damage made it prettier. I wouldn't care a bit whether the damage was done intentionally or unintentionally, but I know that makes a massive difference to people, so -- I would not pay more than the market bears for something even if I think the market is behaving irrationally. But if I want to keep something, or I think the market may behave more rationally in the future, I will seek out things that have been damaged intentionally if it's clear they are selling for much less than they should be, compared to things that have sustained much more damage but are currently considered far more valuable because the damage is considered unintentional or otherwise acceptable.

Yeah. Though, I think it's technically a prelim

Many different versions from 1954 through, I think, 1958 or so. Depending on the point you're hoping to make, you can either 1) show one costume that looks the least like the Marvel Spider-man, and say they're totally different, or 2) you can show one of the variations that look much closer to the Ditko costume and say they're darn close. Or 3) you can take elements from the costume variations and photoshop them together to come up with a costume that looks, at a glance, nearly identical.

JR also described pitching out stories with Stan leaping on tables and doing voices, and I recall him talking about pitching out a story with Stan during a car ride. So which is true. To some degree, both and neither. Unless you're "cherry picking" exclusively the most exaggerated claims.

I did not say I "cherry-pick" anything. That is an invented characterization and is contradictory. A person is not "cherry picking" only the parts they agree with if they are actively countering the arguments they disagree with. You can do one or the other but not both. I have heard and read the arguments from others including some who were a lot closer to Lee and Kirby. And I have seen enough flat-out name-calling in these posts to justify that some people here are, indeed, hate filled. The only narrative I have put forth here is that people who work creatively very often disagree about how much they contributed, and that people here are not just doing exhaustive research but also doing a fair bit of cherry-picking in that they ignore written anecdotes which indicate Kirby or Ditko may have contradicted themselves or exaggerated or misspoke or lied or borrowed or stole ideas that came before them. Not once have I ever said that Lee did none of those things, just that some people employ double standards and mind-reading and embrace contradictions if they suit a narrative that Kirby did no wrong, and that makes everybody look silly

Directions and even dialogue in the margins do not always and by necessity mean there was no writer involved in the process prior to that. The same sort of margin notes appear on pages that were drawn by Kirby and by others which we know were done from detailed outlines which included dialogue and/or following a verbal pitch session. And, yes, an outline written by the writer and given to the artist also is not proof that the artist was not involved prior to that. Lee himself said Ditko insisted on doing it by himself a couple years in. And he said that Kirby and he reached a point where Kirby and he would talk out a story and Kirby would come back with something different. Or that sometimes he'd give Kirby just an idea (or that Kirby would volunteer an idea and Stan would say go with it). All of that, and endless variations on it, is a typical part of a collaboration process like they had in Marvel and which has become the norm in movies and TV where an idea floats around the room passing through multiple minds and morphing into all sorts of things before the person in charge says it's ready to be committed to paper (or to ones and zeroes in somebody's laptop). All that said, I know you might get what I am saying but that the most persistent people posting here and elsewhere on the interwebs glossed over what I wrote (if they read it) and screamed invectives about Lee from begin to end.

I'm not really sure what it is you "disagree" with, because the post was not about whether you have an "open mind" but about whether other people don't. I believe you and I could have a conversation regarding Stan and writing credits and we'd both come away feeling the other was reasonable. But there are people here whose agenda is so bare and so filled with vitriol that they can't abide the slightest indication that Stan Lee did any writing at all or that he even "read books". There's some reasonable discussion here but the main drivers behind this thread have about the same objectivity as Ahab talking about the White Whale

I read very quickly and I have scanned the posts out of curiosity but they get very extremely repetitive and as I noted, they accept any quote or factoid which can be used to say that Stan is the Devil even when the quote or factoid contradicts other quotes and factoids. There's a vast difference between 1) blindly accepting an easy narrative (which you allege) and 2) being willing to spend the time required to counter somebody who's clearly willing to devote a very large portion of their life to repeating the same arguments endlessly in the hopes of overwhelming any information that goes against their narrative. If somebody wants to use up that much of their life on some Ahab-like quest, so be it. And if you want to characterize my desire not to waste as much as my life as he's wasting of his as if it's tantamount to accepting an easy narrative, that's unfortunate. But I know that even if I were to do what you imply I should do that I would end up spending some equal amount of time refuting Ahab's endless efforts, locked in an endless battle of the keyboards, while life passed me by. I have some interest in the way people latch onto hate-filled narratives, seeing how it permeates the internet. And I look for patterns. One that I've observed is what you just did, which is to imply that anyone who wants to be taken seriously must be willing to engage in the argument endlessly. I was curious to see when that notion would be raised.

There's no way I can justify the time to read all the very voluminous posts here about Martin Goodman, but even in the context of this thread's unrelenting crusade to push a Stan-was-the-devil narrative, I would never have expected this ongoing attempt to divine what was going on in Goodman's mind, even though, as usual, the attempt starts with a Stan-bashing conclusion (that Goodman didn't have faith in him). And, as usual, there's contradictions galore. Like when posters declare "Facts are facts" and then make many declarations that rely entirely on reading Goodman's mind sixty years after the fact. Even while deriding Goodman's creative perception as minimal. Repeatedly Goodman's described as someone who was not a good judge of talent or material, even as the posts try so very hard to establish the narrative that Goodman didn't have faith in Lee's work or judgment. Facts only matter if they Slam Satanic Stan. Contradictions are fine if they say Kirby's Divine.

Saying that people embrace conflicting arguments when they wanna make one guy into a hero and the other into a heel. The color of Spider-man's costume provides an interesting example. Steve Ditko never said he had the original idea for Spidey, and that he originally wanted the costume to be orange (or something like that). None of which causes his fans to think any less of him. Contrast that with Bob Kane, who apparently did come up with the original idea and was the original artist, but he admitted he had originally meant Batman's costume to be red, which is jumped all over on by his detractors as proof he was a no-talent d#ck, a thief and did little -- no, make that nothing! --to make Batman what he became. Hard simple facts are often ignored by some people in their choice of whom to defend or demonize. They work entirely backward from some "greater truth" that, for example, Bob Kane was a d#ck (which he apparently was), and readily ignore the facts that do anything but demonize him. Same with Ditko. If the people who worship him did not, and instead thought he was a d#ck, then they would jump on revelations about the Ben Cooper costume, this Spider Queen mechanical web device, or even the fact that Ditko meant for the costume to be another color. All those things would be cited as proof Ditko was not a God but the Devil.

There were MANY "spider man" characters in comics before Peter Parker. Several in 1954 by multiple publishers including Marvel, IIRC. The earliest I ever saw was in a comic by Centaur -- later Timely and then Marvel -- in 1938. I remember those dates because they parallel the intro of Superman and the Ben Cooper costume, an example of which I came across many years ago, prompting a "huh". The 1938 character was a gangster who wore a suit with a web pattern and his name was spelled with a hyphen, which might explain the hyphen (which was added after it was written and drawn) as a directive from legal.

You can say countless times that Lee would have sent the Kirby spiderman story to print if Ditko hadn't told him it reminded him of the fly, but that doesn't make it true. You're still putting thoughts into Lee's head that contradict not only what Lee has said but also what everybody else involved, including Ditko and Kirby, have said. And it requires concluding that Stan Lee would have cared that it was reminiscent of the Fly, even as you might say, in the same breath, that he shamelessly ripped off other publishers. Nobody has ever been quoted saying that Stan Lee liked what Kirby did, and all have agreed that his disapproval was the first step toward making it something different. The tenor of this argument being waged here remains fascinating in the way that some people try so hard to come off sounding like they're coming at it with no agenda, and don't realize their vitriol is glaringly obvious even before they lapse, as they often do, into name-calling. And every argument stems from one guy is God and the other is the Devil. Does the original idea of one guy mean everything regardless of how much another guy changed it? If you're talking about Kirby being the guy with the idea (silver surfer) then yes. Even though he was drawn as one of several minions and, in the original pages, a quickly dispatched one, the fact that Lee turned him into something else is seen as without any consideration whatsoever, and the surfer is deemed "100%" Kirby. But if the original idea is something Stan Lee said, and Ditko did a lot to make it better, than the original idea to be disregarded completely. Even if Ditko had originally placed a huge emphasis on the costume in his claims of creation and it was later revealed that there were halloween costumes on sale years before which, if you cut and reassembled the various versions, you could "create" one that was virtually identical to Ditko's. When talking about how Stan Lee would collaborate on stories, some of the guys who downplayed, or disregarded completely, his contribution, are the same guys who mocked the way he would assume voices for characters and jump on tables enacting fight scenes. Like so many things, as the rabbi said in "Fiddler", they can't both be true. But people want to operate from some perceived larger truth -- that the guy they like is a God and the guy that don't like is the Devil, so all facts that support those conclusions are accepted, even when they contradict each other. The fact is that in comics, and in every form of entertainment, everybody steals from what has come before and when people collaborate they often don't realize how much their own thoughts were sparked or changed by things other people said. Ultimately, the team becomes a thing in itself, and in some cases it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

I read here that this sort of thing is worth 2% of the published version, but because I like this so much I will gladly pay you 3% of the published version value, which means you will make a cool 50% on your investment. But act fast before I come to my senses.

I'd love to see the A-list prelim covers you are selling for 2-5%

Great page. Sets up the premise, etc. Much more important and appealing imo than the #1 page, which I believe went for more. As a character the duck has so much unrealized potential. High on the list of the best as yet unexploited by the MCU.

While Stan Lee (and everyone else at Marvel mentioned here) did contradict himself sometimes, it is not a contradiction to retell a story without including mention of a golf game, or to say it might've been the JLA. People do that kind of stuff all the time. Seizing on minor discrepancies like that and declaring them proof of a lie is to show an extreme bias and working backward from a conclusion -- especially if all minor discrepancies and contradictions are ignored when they're made by the people you're supporting. Kirby's work is amazing and he got too little credit, but the leaps that people take are sometimes astonishing. And if you want to hear bizarre comments one creator made about another, Kirby gives you perhaps the best examples of extreme insults when he claims Stan was somebody who had no interest in mythology and "never read" anything, let alone wrote. He's talking about a guy who devoured as many books as he could and could quote long passages off the cuff from epic poems like the Bhagavad Gita. There's no way Kirby wasn't exposed to some of that, but his hurt feelings led him to ignore what he'd seen and pepper his genuine complaints with nonsense. I see similar thought patterns in arguments on his behalf and I read them in passing when I am procrastinating. But even now I am not thinking this or anything I say will influence people. I'm not saying this in any hope of influencing the argument because I know there's no way I will ever spend one percent of one percent as much of my life arguing this as some people here have demonstrated they are willing to spend. But I am interested in the patterns of thinking people engage in when they start with a conclusion and work backwards from that, refusing any details that challenge the pre-conceived conclusion in even the very slightest way. That's especially so when the conclusion seems to be that one person is 100% perfect and the other is 100% evil.

There was a Thor in Weird Comics in 1940 who was not only a Norse God but a normal guy who was given the power to change into a Norse God. Neither Stan nor Larry were involved. But neither was Jack (though he was the only one working in comics at the time). I'm curious to see how, of the three men who claimed credit for the 1962 Thor, the existence of a 1940 Thor will be cited as proof that only two of them are plagiarists or liars.

A great talent and a very pleasant guy who seemed totally content with his place in the world.

This was the comics industry's version of "The Best Years of Our Lives"

Superman's first two-part story in 1938 made precisely your point. He put a stop to a war in Europe and even demanded that the warring leaders fight each other instead using their armies, then made them admit they were only fighting "to sell munitions". I do not disagree with your point about wars in general, but WW2 was IMV an exception. Had we not done nothing and sat back to let the Nazis and Imperial Japan divvy up the conquered lands (with who knows what crumbs Hitler and Tojo would've let Italy control), Germany might well have developed nukes first in order to keep all that and expand its control over the Americas, too. So that war, more than any in recent memory, really was about preventing a greater evil. Now, what led us to that was indeed all about conflicts largely engineered by and for corporate interests allied with their governments (which is a core tenet of fascism, though to this day, people seem not to realize that; so maybe its definition has evolved into something more akin to "any government I don't like")

"Fun" is important but even if it's all about the Benjamins I think it's not unreasonable to ask people not to give you a straight-up lie about why they're buying something or how much they value it at. Guy talked me out of a page going on and on about how he would keep it forever, specifically and unequivocally and insistently saying he understood how much it was worth in the market and how much he just wanted it and would keep it forever. Then got it from me and immediately put it on ebay for ten times what he paid me. Same guy bought a book, paying half the money promising to pay the rest after it was certified. It came back with removable rice paper noted and he didn't want to pay what we'd agreed. I said fine you can send it back for a full refund. He refused to send it back or to send the rest of the money. Just insisted that the rules of the market were not only that a "restored" book was worth less but that the buyer could also demand the seller take whatever the buyer said it was worth and had no right to keep the book rather than sell it for that price. I finally took him to small claims court and he cross-filed a claim that he had "lost money" because, after refusing to return it for a refund, he'd resold it for less than he'd hoped to get for it (even though he admitted he'd sold it for substantially more than he'd paid me. His position was that as a dealer (which was not how presented himself to me) he should expect and demand an even higher return. As it ended up I got the money he had agreed to pay in the first place, but only after months of sheer insanity, throughout all of which he not only spun numerous lies and staked ridiculous positions but also seemed to feel like he was absolutely justified, even righteous. He'd made a lot of money buying stuff from me prior to this for much less than it was worth, and could have continued to do so, if he'd only been honest with me and hadn't treated every deal as if it was the last one he'd ever make and made every statement to me as if it need not bear any resemblance to the truth.

I don't know how said it is. I think some of those old-time artists grew up in a period of such censorship that it may have been fun for them to, at long last, draw naked women for publication instead of just doodling them on their own time. I remember seeing prelim pages Wood did for an early 60s Marvel comic and I noticed that the main female character was drawn without clothes. I presume in the final version she had clothes on. Look at ebay today and see how many horny artists are cranking out "comic art" that is basically fan-fiction porn.

A bunch of manila file folders appeared back in the day labeled as from Bill Finger's files. They'd clearly been in a cabinet for decades and probably since the 40s. Never heard a story as to how they came to light

I'm glad it ended up in a home where it's appreciated. I bought that issue off the stands as a kid with a hard earned quarter and the story was so compelling that I remember much of the dialogue to this day. It was one of several that Marvel did which made me feel that good stories can flourish in any format and maybe just maybe someone is affected by them to be a better person than they might have been without it.