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Did Stan Lee use a ghost writer??
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106 posts in this topic

On 9/16/2020 at 12:16 PM, gunsmokin said:

That is because Kirby WAS extremely well read and had an extensive interest in science fiction and mythology.

If you look up you'll see that sarcasm is flying over your head.   The post you're responding to did everything short of cadging Woody Allen's joke title -- "Shakespeare -- was he four women?"

I love Kirby but he's said things that are extreme and even manifestly wrong, which makes it impossible to take everything as gospel.  Among the bizarre things he said was that Stan Lee didn't even "read things", when it was well known by all, and had to be known by Jack, that Stan was a voracious reader who could talk at great length about authors both famous and obscure, and quote lines and even passages verbatim from his favorite authors and pieces.    

There were plenty of battles between them, but they might well have gotten past their differences if not for the neutron bomb that was the Herald-Tribune article in which a snarky reporter said Kirby looked like (paraphrasing) the night manager of a girdle factory.  I think it may be difficult to overstate how much that hurt Kirby and how much things were never the same after.

Edited by bluechip
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On 10/18/2020 at 4:08 AM, Steven Valdez said:

I knew I recognized your name from somewhere. You're on my eBay 'blocked user' list, and with very good reason. 

"keys collector" is very generic and not my eBay username.  My eBay user id is war_hero with 100% feedback since 2001.  Nice troll attempt though. :eyeroll:

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On 9/23/2020 at 10:21 PM, kustomizer said:

Yes, Kirby's cover for AF#15 is far more heroic and dynamic than Ditko's much funkier version (which is still pretty awesome). But I wonder why Stan went with the more heroic version if that's the image he was trying to avoid?

 

On 9/24/2020 at 4:00 AM, Joe Ankenbauer said:

Alas, we'll never know now.

 

Because Stan knew that covers sold comic-books?  

Folks say a lot of things about Stan but one thing's for sure, Stan Lee was a great comic-book editor.
It sounds like, that if not for Stan, Spider-Man would have just been a rehash of The Fly.  
And under Stan's editorship, Marvel produced many of the most well-regarded and classic covers of the silver age.

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18 hours ago, Unca Ben said:

 

 

Because Stan knew that covers sold comic-books?  

 

The simplest answer is usually the correct one.   

Unless you are working backwards from a premise.  In this case the OP's premise is that Stan is the devil and Jack Kirby did everything at Marvel, including invent Spider-man.  So even the appearance of a 1954 Ben Cooper Spider-man costume has to be considered only in terms of how it proves Kirby created Spider-man.  The fact that Kirby worked in New York City and the Ben Cooper company also was located there -- voila!  Never mind NYC in 50s had tens of millions of people who worked within a few miles of the Cooper office (or any other in manhattan).  Kirby was there so he might have worked there and if he did work there he might have submitted costume ideas.  No, wait, make that Kirby DID work there and he DID submit the Spider-man costume...   

Fact is there were spider man characters in children's books and in multiple comics in 1953-54 appearing at virtually the same time (Marvel, then called Atlas, had one, too).  In fact Centaur (later Timely and then Marvel) had a villain called "the Spider-man" in a comic in 1938.   None of them were, or would have become, remotely as good as the Peter Parker character created, whether a person wants to believe it or not, by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

  

Edited by bluechip
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On 9/23/2020 at 7:37 PM, kustomizer said:

Stan's story about Kirby's Spidey looking too heroic falls apart when you look at the covers he decided to use for both AF#15 and ASM#1.

In a retrospect theory, Mark Twain asked someone to explain it to him.  After Shakespeare's death, he said the will didn't mention about a single --script or sonnet that would inherit to his family.  Did Christoper Marlowe write Shakespeare's plays?  It's an endless controversial for centuries.

Now, did Stan Lee ride on them?  Who knows?  You can wonder forever without proof.  Life has to go on.

Edited by JollyComics
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I'm not interesting in rekindling any further Lee/Kirby/Artist-Plot credit debates but I will add this: on an episode of Cartoonist Kayfabe (I cannot remember which), I was kind of surprised to hear Ed Piskor state that he found out Stan Lee didn't write any of the Marvel Masterworks introductions/forwards he was credited for; apparently Roy Thomas would do all of Stan's necessary obligatory introductions and short quickie comic stories for anniversary issues or whatever, and Stan might add an extra "Hang Loose" or something. This gained more validity when it was publicly revealed that Roy was also ghost-writing the Spider-Man newspaper strip for the past twenty years or so. 

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Stan always talked about the newspaper strip as something he was proud of. But Roy really did the work?

Stan is starting to sound a little bit like his close friend Bob Kane.

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On 8/15/2021 at 11:37 PM, bob jr said:

:whatthe: WOW ......I'm new to the hobby but taking a shot at STAN " the man " LEE like that , dude you must have some big balls 

Shots at Stan are pretty common among collectors. 

It's a long and complicated conflict which centers around how much Stan actually created vs how much he marketed and took credit for. 

There are many books on the topic and spirited threads here.  

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On 8/21/2021 at 6:32 AM, KCOComics said:

Shots at Stan are pretty common among collectors. 

It's a long and complicated conflict which centers around how much Stan actually created vs how much he marketed and took credit for. 

There are many books on the topic and spirited threads here.  

o.k. , thanks I'll have to check those out (thumbsu

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Stan absolutely did NOT have a ghost writer. In fact, in addition to his comic book achievements, HE was a Ghost writer for others. Do you remember F Scott Fitzgerald ? ... that was Stan. Ernest Hemingway ? ... that was also all Stan. Most people don't know that. GOD BLESS...

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)(thumbsu

 

... JD Salinger ? ... I hate to be the one, but that was Stan as well. 

Edited by jimjum12
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On 8/15/2021 at 8:37 PM, bob jr said:

:whatthe: WOW ......I'm new to the hobby but taking a shot at STAN " the man " LEE like that , dude you must have some big balls 

It's what all the kool kids do these days.  It's the modern equivalent  of smoking in the boys room. 

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On 8/15/2021 at 10:37 PM, bob jr said:

:whatthe: WOW ......I'm new to the hobby but taking a shot at STAN " the man " LEE like that , dude you must have some big balls 

It doesn’t require some big balls, just research and some common sense. Lee blatantly ripped off his artists in terms of creatorship. I’ll actually give him some writing credit since he butchered Jack’s original stories so badly that it is hard to tell what Kirby really wanted to say. FF 8 is the perfect example of this. “Read” it with out the dialogue and see how it plays out. Alicia was never intended to be blind for starters.

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See @bob jrlook what you started lol. 

I'm a big supporter of Stan. Now, Jack and Steve certaintly deserved more credit and money than they received. No doubt or argument from me. 

But as much as we can speculate about who created what, the truth is Marvel doesn't become marvel without the promotion and marketing of Stan. And that side of the business was a one man show. 

I think people are quick to understate the business acumen required to take Martin Goodman's failing company and change the world. And Stan was all over that. From hiring decisions, to budgeting, editing, writing, marketing and touring. 

And none of that is to take away from Kirby's tireless contribution.  It's just to say without "Funky Flashman", we would all be talking about our coin collections right now. 

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On 8/21/2021 at 8:21 AM, KCOComics said:

See @bob jrlook what you started lol. 

I'm a big supporter of Stan. Now, Jack and Steve certaintly deserved more credit and money than they received. No doubt or argument from me. 

But as much as we can speculate about who created what, the truth is Marvel doesn't become marvel without the promotion and marketing of Stan. And that side of the business was a one man show. 

I think people are quick to understate the business acumen required to take Martin Goodman's failing company and change the world. And Stan was all over that. From hiring decisions, to budgeting, editing, writing, marketing and touring. 

And none of that is to take away from Kirby's tireless contribution.  It's just to say without "Funky Flashman", we would all be talking about our coin collections right now. 

As a kid, I cherished the early Marvel books for the stories. As an adult, I cherish them for the art and perhaps that is why I find it easier to side with Kirby and Ditko in terms of history. Reading the early X-men books is almost painful in terms of dialogue. The one point that I won’t back down from though is that Jack was the idea guy who was well read in science fiction and Greek and Norse mythology. With the exception of Dr. Strange and possibly Spider-Man, these were 100% his concepts. 

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