Dr. Haydn

That seems to be the timing, however we want to explain it. From Timely-Atlas Comics, December 8, 2018. "Stan Lee (1924-2018) - The Timely Years," by Michael Vassallo. Worth quoting at length. On June 7, 1958, in the midst of drawing the Two-Gun Kid, Mrs. Lyons' Cubs, and rendering most of the non-teen, non-romance covers, Joe Maneely, Stan Lee's fastest, top artistic collaborator, and friend, died on the way back home by train. Stan must have been shell-shocked. The very last thing Joe drew was the splash above to Two-Gun Kid #45, #T-67, cover date Dec/58 and published on September 2, 1958. Jack Davis would finish the rest of the story, John Severin would ultimately take over the book and later give way to Al Hartley. Pause.... The very first story Jack Kirby did when he returned to what used to be called Atlas, was #T-76 Strange Worlds #1's "I Discovered the Secret of the Flying Saucers!", cover date Dec/58, published around September 3, 1958. So these two stories, Joe Maneely's last and Jack Kirby's first, were assigned and published almost simultaneously. The Kirby story is assigned within one or two days of Maneely's death. That is a fact. Ayers once gave me the date of a western story he did, with a number a few digits from Kirby's story, and it was assigned the Monday after Joe's death. So what are some of the possibilities of what may have happened? Jack Kirby is on record that he talked Stan Lee into pursuing new ideas, science fiction and ultimately superheroes. Kirby claimed on more than one occasion that they were "carrying out the furniture" when he arrived, and alternately, that he "found Stan Lee crying", because they were going to shut down the comics. Let's parse this further. The Atlas implosion a year earlier certainly would have led Stan to think Goodman was going to shut down the company. Was Jack talking about that? I don't know. The death of Maneely, his friend and collaborator, would have left Stan "also" thinking there was now no future in the comic books, and that Martin Goodman may well shut down the comics division. Plus, if he arrived at Stan's office the next day, Monday, he would quite possibly have found Stan Lee in tears, not because of his job, but because of Joe's death. Additionally, how did Jack get to Stan's office, out of the blue, the Monday (or Tuesday) after Joe's death over the weekend? The only way is that Stan called him. Don Heck, in an interview with Will Murray, stated that Stan called him up immediately after Joe died, telling him that there was work open. Heck had not worked for Stan since the implosion in the Spring of 1957. Heck was also in that first issue of Strange Worlds, on a story with a job #T-77, the number immediately after Jack's story.

"Kirby said he approached Marvel on his own. Without Kirby, Marvel would've shut down. According to Kirby he told Lee to go in and tell Goodman to hold off and that he'd make some books that would sell. And he did." Maneely died early on a Saturday morning. If I remember correctly, Kirby showed up at Lee's door on Monday. Was this a coincidence, or did Kirby read the obituary, see a work opportunity and take it (a bit ghoulish for him!), or did Lee contact him?

How to build something good: (1) Assemble the best people available. (2) Stay out of their way. (3) Give credit where credit is due. We can debate 50-60 years after the fact about how well Stan Lee did these three things, but when the people who were there were asked for their opinion, a pattern emerges.

It would seem (based on Michael Vassallo's research) that Kirby returned to Atlas/Marvel to pick up the slack immediately following Joe Maneely's untimely death in 1958 (Don Heck returned as well), probably due to Stan contacting them directly. I gather that Colan and Buscema came back to Marvel at Stan's instigation as well, as did Romita Sr. A good nucleus to build upon, absolutely!

I believe Romita (Sr.) was quoted as saying the Spidey three-parter (reprinting Spectacular Spider-man Magazine #1, kinda/sorta) was meant to get them ahead of schedule, but there was so much redrawing involved that it didn't help. Romita only lasted one more issue anyhow (the first part of the Spider-man/Hulk donnybrook of #119-120) before turning it back to Gil Kane.

Stan certainly made the trains run on time. It surely helped that he had workhorses like Kirby, Colan, and John Buscema who routinely did three books a month. It's hard to get too far behind if your best artists can turn out a book in a week and a half. That's the difference between having experienced professionals instead of talented newbies running the operation.

FF 154 was part reprint, with a 6-page framing sequence by Len Wein and Bob Brown around a Thing/Torch Strange Tales story. I was just getting into Marvels during this era, so the reprints were all stories I hadn't seen before. I can see how it would bother a long-time fan, though.

By the mid-1970s, they had 3-packs of comics sold at a discount, with the covers defaced by a black pencil. (My copy of Giant-Size X-Men #1 was like that--which I regrettably no longer have. Oh well.) I suppose that was the equivalent of ripping off all/part of the cover, as they were supposed to do with unsold copies back in the 1960s?

Bob is still active on other Facebook groups. I wonder what he would have to add to the current discussion? He was there when a lot of the shady stuff was going on, in the late Silver Age.

Stan and Steve are beginning to fire on all cylinders, that's for sure! I think Stan is finally finding a balance between his usual jokey dialogue and a more serious tone when Steve's artwork demands it. Peter P. was downright nasty to Betty on page 5!

I mentioned this on another site, but to reiterate for this group: DC's ill-fated experiment with 25 cent oversized books began in the summer of 1971, and the consensus was that they took a major financial hit from this decision. It doesn't surprise me that their sales were down across the line. I know that in the 1970s, I cut back on comics every time the price went up. The sales figures do beg the question: if DC had multiple titles that outsold Marvel's best as late as 1970, why did they think they needed Kirby?

I caught the tail end of Marvel's resurgence in 1985. Fortunately, the direct market had made it to my city, so I was able to pick up a lot of what I missed from the back issues bin, for a modest surcharge. The Claremont-Byrne X-men was great; Miller's stuff, Michelinie and O'Neil on Iron Man, Roger Stern's solid Avengers run... Then, most of the good writers were scared away, and I turned to DC. The British Invasion writers (Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, etc.) were doing some great stuff! Stan always CLAIMED he was writing for adults. Those gentlemen actually did it! ...and all of this without overwritten dialogue and captions. Alan Moore writes three words--"Just say uncle!" and I'll bet anyone who read his Swamp Thing run will immediately remember the story and the context.

When I was focusing on Marvel's main titles in the 70s (probably due to the hype), I missed out on some great stuff in the second-line books (Starlin's Captain Marvel, Gerber's Howard the Duck, McGregor/Buckler's Black Panther, etc.) I guess it was like DC in the 1960s: the Superman books carried the company, but most of the truly creative stuff appeared elsewhere in the "lesser" titles.

I suppose Barry Smith as well (he arrived in 1968). Is there really no one else left?

The concept has potential. It's essentially a fumetti book. If it's well done, it can be quite amusing and entertaining. (I think Al Jaffee did a Snappy Answers to stupid questions where he used stock photos or classic paintings--I forget exactly--and added his dialogue shtick. IIRC, there was a famous painting of Napoleon's defeat in Russia, with the following dialogue: "Are we retreating from Moscow, mon General?" "No, we're advancing on Paris, mon Idiot!" Classic stuff.) I think I smiled at a couple of these, but by and large, I didn't find it funny. Maybe it's just me...

P. S. I tend to think it was Jack that wrote the name of the ship on the bow. (Stan ignores the name in his dialogue). Artie Simek, the "meritorious letterer," seems to have misread a D for a P (hence "Skipbladnir" instead of "Skidbladnir"). As the legends attest, the ship is pocket-sized when not in use (page 2, panel 1)--a nice visual touch on Kirby's part.

In case anyone wondered enough about the name of the ship to look it up, here's what they would find (courtesy of Wikipedia): Skíðblaðnir (Old Norse: [ˈskiːðˌblɑðnez̠], 'assembled from thin pieces of wood'), sometimes anglicized as Skidbladnir or Skithblathnir, is the best of ships in Norse mythology. It is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and in the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, both written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson. All sources note that the ship is the finest of ships, and the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda attest that it is owned by the god Freyr, while the euhemerized account in Heimskringla attributes it to the magic of Odin. Both Heimskringla and the Prose Edda attribute to it the ability to be folded up—as cloth may be—into one's pocket when not needed.

I think Kirby took a couple of weeks' vacation during the Larry Lieber kerfuffle in early summer 1962, but based on the volume of work he was putting out, it doesn't appear he took many days off otherwise.

I don't think anyone denies that Kirby was paid well for the time (my dad was earning $5000 a year in the mid-60s, which was a decent, middle-class wage back in the day, enough to support a house, a family, and an annual vacation). However, if your employer is making a pile of money off your labor, it seems appropriate to get compensated accordingly. Maybe $20000 a year seemed adequate to Kirby at the time (he didn't complain about his salary, to my recollection--his main beef in interviews was the lack of control over his ideas) but getting a larger piece of the pie in his retirement years, when Marvel really took off financially, would have been a nice touch. Kind of like how Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster eventually got some recognition from DC (if belatedly).

Thanks--that was the one with Daredevil losing the coin flip for the future of the earth?

I really enjoyed this when I saw it in a mid-1970s reprint (an issue of Giant-Size Defenders, perhaps). I wonder if the scoffing spectators was Stan's idea or Steve's? Their skepticism contrasts nicely with the life-and-death mystic battle going on inside the house.

Back in the day when Bobby Drake was seen as a lady killer!

Panel 1: Artie Simek, Letterer Supreme, invents a new word (ixnax). I guess he couldn't read Stan's handwriting? Plus, Artie obviously had forgotten his pig Latin!

Yeah, this was not a whole lot of work to dialogue. Jack's visuals carry the story just fine.

Yeah, I should have specified that it was mid-80s onward that I was looking for back issues and TPBs to fill that gap. I think the Dark Phoenix storyline was available fairly early on. DC started to put out Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman's Sandman by the early 90s, but I don't recall seeing any of their Bronze Age highlights until much later.