Dr. Haydn

Not one of their better efforts. Judging from page 7, Jack must have been on board with the Don Blake-Jane Foster romance--however reluctantly.

The box on the left is in a different hand--perhaps it was added later?

The Vanna then got a long-term gig turning letters on Wheel of Fortune.

Is this the first time Pepper's real first name was mentioned? Also, do we know Happy Hogan's real name yet?

DeZuniga, Redondo, and Talaoc were the first wave in 1971 (per Wikipedia). I believe Carmine Infantino convinced them to relocate to the US, once he realized there was a motherlode of untapped talent over there.

Orion looks like he was supposed to be bald (previous page, second to last panel--see below). But then the following panel (and the three on the final page), it seems that the colorist wasn't sure what to do.

Flo Steinberg was on staff by then, I think...it sounds like a task that would be delegated to her. Stan's joking tone would be easy enough for her (or anyone else) to mimic, I expect.

Jack was still doing the (bimonthly) Avengers and X-men series in addition to FF and Thor for most of 1964, I believe. However, doing the equivalent of (only!) three full books a month probably felt like a mini vacation for him.

#6 has been a favorite of mine for years!

Electro's mundane dialogue contrasts nicely with the lofty tone of the narrative box at the top of the panel. (I imagine William Conrad's voice when I read it!)

Didn't we recently see a scene like this in an issue of Spider-man?

The Marvel Method itself isn't the problem. If the artist is a solid storyteller (a "visual writer") like Kirby or Ditko (Wood, Romita Sr, the Buscema Brothers, Steranko, Trimpe, Neal Adams later on), the result can be superior to what can be done full script, where the artist follows the writer's pacing and sequence of events (whether or not they translate well visually). Not all artists seemed comfortable working Marvel Method, though. Don Heck struggled, as did Dick Ayers. Gene Colan's work, as beautiful as it looked, often suffered from problems of pacing. Also (a separate issue, as Ditko's article articulates), how do you write the credits to acknowledge the artist's expanded role? In Ditko's last year or so, it was Lee script (and edits), Ditko plot and pencils. By the mid-1970s, when I started reading Marvel Comics, the credits usually read "Writer-Co-plotters-Artist(s), (or Writer-Artist-Storytellers) for the creative team, which seems to describe the division of labor more accurately.

This Ditko guy could write!

In two sentences, Steve Ditko cut to the heart of the problem with the Marvel Method, as it was practiced in the 1960s.

Yup. I think we're at the beginning of Marvel's first peak here. It'll get even better when continued stories become the norm in 1965, giving Kirby and Ditko more room to stretch...

And, finally: as Kitty Pride would so eloquently phrase it 20 years later: Professor X is a JERK!

Mastermind is a smoker! That would rank a parental advisory or two in 2023. Wasn't there a famous panel with Mastermind pursuing his smoking habit in the Dark Phoenix Saga, a decade and a half later?

X-men #5 was a nice, fun, early Silver Age action issue with some interesting character bits for heroes and foes alike. A few random thoughts: So, telekinesis has a plural form! I wonder if Stan realized this when he dialogued this panel?

A bit of minutiae here: When John Costanza did the lettering during this era, he always arranged for the page number on page 13 to have white numbers on a black background. You can see it in the early 70s Kirby stuff, as well as the O'Neil-Adams Green Lantern-Green Arrow series.

I always got an unintended chuckle out of O’Deadly. It makes Darkseid sound Irish.

Apparently Fly girl has helium breath as a never-before-revealed superpower!

Ah yes--the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog! That would have made for a more interesting story (unless the Comics Code Authority had objected)!

Some decent inking from Don Heck, especially on the splash page.

Back when the earth truly had a frozen north. Stan's dialogue doesn't spell out the nature of the threat, though. (I wonder if there was anything in the margin notes about catastrophic flooding?)

I wouldn't take this to be a sign of the superiority of Dennis the Menace over Marvel's best titles (maybe if Hank Ketcham had still been involved, I'd have a different opinion), but it seems that now-defunct companies such as Fawcett, Gold Key, Dell, and the like, understood the comic-reading audience in the mid-1960s better than Marvel did.