Stan, Jack, and Steve - The 1960's (1963) Butting Heads, Unexpected Success and Not Expected Failures! 3 3

[The humble Watcher lurking]

On 6/26/2023 at 7:12 PM, Silver Surfer said:

I have to watch this again but he the telephone conversation between them was painful to listen to. Jack seemed to be trying to stay polite and guarded with his replies but Stan was peppering him “ but you never read the finished stories, didn’t you”. It was an unfortunante exchange. 

I heard that on YouTube. I felt bad for Jack Kirby. He was hit by a surprise and did his best to be gracious. 

[The humble Watcher lurking]

On 6/26/2023 at 2:41 AM, Steven Valdez said:

I believe Ditko was brought in to do Spider-Man because Kirby already had more than enough on his plate, which Kirby is on record as saying. I stil think Kirby designed Spidey's wbe costume, but I realise that's the minority view. There's still the Ben Cooper costume mystery around it all, which will likely never be resolved. Ditko was very defensive when he was asked about that.

I would love to know more about that Ben Cooper costume mystery. Wish someone good dig into that more. 

Edited June 26, 2023 by The humble Watcher lurking

[Larryw7]

Here's a little bit of info on the Ben Cooper costume.

http://hero-envy.blogspot.com/2012/10/1963-ben-cooper-spider-man-halloween.html

[Steven Valdez]

On 6/27/2023 at 9:52 AM, The humble Watcher lurking said:

I would love to know more about that Ben Cooper costume mystery. Wish someone good dig into that more. 

This vid's worth watching. It starts off with Ditko's weirdly defensive quote when he was questioned about the matter.

 

[Prince Namor]

On 6/26/2023 at 6:54 PM, Steven Valdez said:

Don't forget, the Romita years also brought us Man Mountain Marko, the Kangaroo and the Gibbon.

LOL, yeah I was just putting the A-listers out there...

[Steven Valdez]

John Romita: The only thing he [Stan] used to do from 1966-72 was come in and leave a note on my drawing table saying “Next month, the Rhino.” That’s all; he wouldn’t tell me anything; how to handle it. Then he would say “The Kingpin.” I would then take it upon myself to put some kind of distinctive look to the guy. For instance, if it’s the kingpin of crime, I don’t want him to look like another guy in a suit who in silhouette looks like every other criminal. So I made him a 400-pound monster; that was my idea. I made him bald, I put the stickpin on him, I gave him that kind of tycoon look.

- Comic Book Artist #6  Fall 1999

[Dr. Haydn]

On 6/27/2023 at 12:54 AM, Steven Valdez said:

Don't forget, the Romita years also brought us Man Mountain Marko, the Kangaroo and the Gibbon.

And who could forget the Schemer?
 

By the way, the Prowler story included John Romita Jr’s first comic book credit (for suggesting the name to his dad).

[Mmehdy]

Please add this article as I need your help , it is a  Roy Thomas reply  to Neil Kirby's reaction in the hollywood reporter as a guest column.....entitled "Roy Thomas, former marvel editor , addresses debate over new Stan Lee Douc".. on 6/26/2023..if somebody could upload that and hopefully tear it apart limb by limb.......be prepared to get angry!!!!!!

[The humble Watcher lurking]

On 6/27/2023 at 1:28 AM, Larryw7 said:

Here's a little bit of info on the Ben Cooper costume.

http://hero-envy.blogspot.com/2012/10/1963-ben-cooper-spider-man-halloween.html

So according to this article the King did have something to do with it. Wow! I guess we will never really know as all those big players Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko,Martin Goodman,Stan Lee and Ben Cooper are all long gone. Very fascinating either way. 

[The humble Watcher lurking]

On 6/27/2023 at 5:16 AM, Steven Valdez said:

This vid's worth watching. It starts off with Ditko's weirdly defensive quote when he was questioned about the matter.

 

So cool video. That Ben Cooper 1954 costume would be a holy grail to me, but don't think my girlfriend would be too happy me laying down the big bucks for it. Ha ha.

[Steven Valdez]

On 6/28/2023 at 6:28 AM, The humble Watcher lurking said:

So according to this article the King did have something to do with it. Wow! I guess we will never really know as all those big players Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko,Martin Goodman,Stan Lee and Ben Cooper are all long gone. Very fascinating either way. 

Yep. I think it's undeniable that somebody based the design of the 1962 Spidey on the Ben Cooper costume, which had been around for 8 years by then.

[Dr. Haydn]

On 6/27/2023 at 8:18 PM, Steven Valdez said:

Yep. I think it's undeniable that somebody based the design of the 1962 Spidey on the Ben Cooper costume, which had been around for 8 years by then.

Of the people involved, we know that Kirby had Halloween-age children in 1954 (Susan was almost 9, Neal was 6). Neal, as we know, is still around--has anyone asked him about the Ben Cooper costume?

Edited June 28, 2023 by Dr. Haydn
correcting factual error

[Steven Valdez]

On 6/28/2023 at 4:32 PM, Dr. Haydn said:

Of the people involved, we know that Kirby had Halloween-age children in 1954 (Susan was almost 9, Neal was 6). Neal, as we know, is still around--has anyone asked him about the Ben Cooper costume?

Anyone have Neal Kirby's email???

[Larryw7]

Perhaps Mark Evanier would know.

[Prince Namor]

Roy Thomas, Former Marvel Editor, Addresses Debate Over New Stan Lee Doc (Guest Column)

The prolific writer and former Marvel editor-in-chief looks at the Disney+ documentary 'Stan Lee' and the question of credit for creating the Marvel Universe.

 

Roy Thomas was hired by Stan Lee in 1965 and succeeded him as Marvel editor-in-chief in 1972 when Lee became the publisher. Here, Thomas examines Stan Lee, the new documentary on Disney+ that has sparked debate over who deserves primary credit for the success of the Marvel Universe and its heroes — Lee or close collaborators such as artists Jack Kirby,whose son Neil has expressed disappointment in the documentary’s sidelining of his father’s contributions. 

“Stan Lee was his own greatest creation.”

That’s a line that’s often tossed around these days — the more so since Stan died in late 2018 and isn’t around to respond in person to it —

(Oh please. There's no one who was in fear of saying it, who wasn't on a Marvel contract forbidding them from it.)

 

and there’s an argument to be made for it, as anyone who watches the new David Gelb documentary Stan Lee, now streaming on Disney+, can testify.

 

After all, a young Stanley Martin Lieber (though around age 18, not 16 as he misremembers early in the doc) did coin the name “Stan Lee” as a pseudonym with his very first story, written for Captain America Comics No. 3 around the end of 1940.  

Then, beginning in the 1960s when the new “Marvel Comics Group” and its heroes erupted on the scene and gained pop-culture traction, he increasingly turned “Stan Lee” into a spokesman for comics in general, for Marvel in particular, and arguably for himself even more in particular.  Stan Lee, as I knew him from mid-1965 till the end of his long life, was not a man with a fragile ego.  Or, if fragile it was, it was far better shielded behind that winning smile and glib tongue than Tony Stark’s heart is behind Iron Man’s armor. 

The real question, I suppose, is whether he deserved his status as the major creator of the so-called Marvel Universe.

Gelb’s documentary wisely lets Stan himself narrate his story from start to finish. Virtually the only voice we hear during its 1½-hour length that speaks more than one or two sentences in a row is Stan’s, in extended sound bites harvested from a host of TV appearances, comics convention Q&A sessions, award ceremonies, previous documentaries, and radio guest shots — enlivened by the occasional deathless line of dialogue from one of his many late-life movie cameos.  

This is a refreshing way to encounter Stan the Man, and Gelb and his producers (which include Marvel Studios) are to be congratulated for letting him tell his own tale his way. By and large, the effort is successful and entertaining … and, so far as I can tell from my long association with him (which includes writing a humongous “career biography” of him for Taschen Books in the 2010s), it presents a reasonably accurate portrait of the man as he saw himself, and as the world came to see him:

As arguably the most important comicbook writer since Jerry Siegel scribed his first “Superman” story back in the 1930s…

(Except, Stan didn't actually WRITE the stories...)

As the creator (or at the very least the co-creator) of a host of colorful super-heroes and related comics characters…

…And as the creator (or at least the major overseer and guiding light) of a four-color phenomenon that became known as the Marvel Universe, and which formed the underlying bulwark of the now-even-more-famous Marvel CinematicUniverse, the most successful series of interconnected motion pictures in the history of that medium.

But of course he didn’t do it alone … and that’s where all the mostly ill-considered criticisms of Stan Lee’s life and work begin to kick in.

As recorded in the film, simply because he often (not always, but often) fails to credit the artists he worked with, Stan often seems to be claiming full credit for milestones,

(Well, that and in a federal court - as well as throughout the last 20 years of his life - he said, "I created it all, and then I would just assign an artist to it. Which is complete nonsense.)

be they the powerful Hate Monger yarn in Fantastic Four No. 21 or such concepts as the Hulk and the X-Men. This is partly just a verbal shorthand, yet it is also in accordance with his expressed belief that “the person who has the idea is the creator,” and that the artist he then chooses to illustrate that concept is not. 

(Who says he was the first one with the idea? When did Stan ever have any great ideas that weren't something Kirby and Ditko BROUGHT to him? What'd Stan create that was worth ANYTHING in the first 20 years of his career? In 1965, when Jack decided to just concentrate on FF, Thor, Cap, and Nick Fury, why did Stan's creativity on 'new ideas' suddenly evaporate? Simple - because he WASN'T the idea man.)

 

In L.A. in the 1980s (admittedly, at a time when I was not working for him), I argued that very point with him one day over lunch, maintaining that an artist who rendered and inevitably expanded that original idea was definitely a co-creator. I made no headway with my past and future employer. And clearly, when he wrote his celebrated letter, quoted in the doc, that he had “always considered Steve Ditko to be the co-creator of Spider-Man,” he was doing so only to try to mollify Steve and those who might agree with him. Later, he admitted as much.

(The funny thing is that, stretched to its logical conclusion, Stan’s argument could be marshalled to make Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, not himself, let alone himself in conjunction with Jack Kirby, the “creator” of The Fantastic Four.  After all, it was Goodman who directed Stan to devise a team of super-heroes to compete with DC’s Justice League of America.)

(Another nonsense story that Stan made up.)   

But surely Steve Ditko, as closely paraphrased by Stan in Gelb’s film, is also wide of the mark when he states that “an idea is only an idea,” and that it was his drawing it that had made Spider-Man real. For, without the idea in the first place, the character and story events would not exist. Surely it took both men, but they are each simply too myopic to see it.

(Considering that Kirby brought the Spider-man idea to Stan from his time working with Joe Simon, and that it was Steve Ditko who changed it and made it into what it became... what'd Stan really have to do with it?)

It’s certainly true that Stan doesn’t give his most talented collaborator, Jack Kirby, ample credit in every instance for his contributions to the early days of Marvel, from Fantastic Four onward. In a way, however, that’s only human nature: Stan could best remember the things he brought to the table in 1961 — just as Jack could best recall what he had done. Neither was an omniscient observer of the mind or actions of the other.

(Considering Stan hadn't ever really had any success creating anything that had to do with Adventure, Sci-Fi or Superheroes in 1961 and Jack Kirby HAD for the last 20 years, I can't see why anyone would believe Lee for moment in what HE says he did.)

One thing is clear almost beyond argument: Lee often gave Kirby credit, both in writing and when speaking, for much that was good about The Fantastic Four and their related co-creations. The documentary records him as saying that Jack often drew a story after a plot conference that covered only the barest essentials of the storyline; in print in the comics themselves, Stan often went even further than that. You can look it up.

(Very, very clever Houseroy. But you know as well as I do that Jack wrote his own material for his entire career. He didn't need a novice writer like Stan Lee or Larry Lieber. Ever.)

One seems to look in vain, alas, for any acknowledgement whatever by Jack Kirby of Stan’s value or contributions to their collaborations. And we can be pretty sure that, had Jack credited Stan thus, David Gelb and his researchers would have tracked them down and included them in the film’s soundtrack, if only to bolster their case concerning Stan’s talents. Instead, the most we get is Jack saying, when speaking of Thor, that Stan gave him the opportunity to do such a feature and that he gave it his all.  Where is his admission or even suggestion that Stan’s dialogue and captions (to say nothing of his editorial guidance and his contributions to the storylines) added any value whatever to the feature?

Nowhere, that’s where.

(And where was Jack's writing credit for the stories or PAY for writing the stories all of those years? Or Ditko's credit and pay for all of those years? Or Romita's? Nowhere, that's where.)

Now, Jack Kirby had a right to his viewpoint — that he himself was the major, if not the sole, genius behind the success of the Fantastic Four, Thor, and all the rest.  But that does not mean that we need to accept that viewpoint.

(Correct. Not everyone follows common sense the same way. Before he worked with Lee, Jack Kirby created AMAZING work. After he worked with Lee, Jack Kirby created AMAZING work. Stan was a nobody in the Golden Age and created nothing after Kirby left. He hired ghostwriters for the rest of his life. YOU were one of them. Common sense.)

What is really called for, clearly, is first a documentary about Jack Kirby and his contributions to Marvel Comics — and then another one about the career of Steve Ditko. Both of those features would be potentially welcome additions to the filmic examination of Marvel. I’d be waiting eagerly in line (and online) to view either or both.

(Well, I would too, but I doubt they'd be fair.)

But if/when we do get full-fledged Kirby and Ditko docs, I hope they are at least as fair to the talent, contributions, and legacy of Stan Lee as Stan’s words were to the talents, contributions, and legacies of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

(Stan Lee doesn't need anymore praise for work he didn't do. What we need is a documentary that helps everyone understand that he STOLE credit and pay from the people who did the work for him.)

My own voice is heard only near the end of Gelb’s documentary, but I modestly suggest that I uttered what could be taken as the final word on the controversy,

(That's extremely pompous)

when I said (referring primarily to Stan and Jack, though it could also refer to Stan and Steve) that “neither of them could have done it without the other.”

(They DID. Their entire careers. They CREATED, with or without Stan Lee. It was HIM, that gave up 'creating' when suddenly he didn't have them around to give him ideas.)

But I also believe, most sincerely, that Stan Lee was the one who had a vision of a Marvel Universe (even if he himself didn’t invent that phrase) of overlapping characters with all-too-human emotions that defined and limited their super-powers. After all, he was not just the scripter but also the editor — the man who had been placed in charge of story and art, to deliver sales for the company that became Marvel Comics. No one else had that responsibility; almost certainly, no one besides Stan was looking at the big picture, from first to last, day in and day out.

(Until Kirby came back, Lee and Goodman were about to run the comics division into the ground.)

Without Stan Lee, there might have been some good stories … some splendid art … but it’s highly unlike that there would have an overarching Marvel Universe.

And David Gelb’s able marshalling of the aural evidence underscores that point.

(This is just the grossest sentence in your entire BS guest editorial)

In the end, then, I suppose I disagree with the quote with which I began this piece.

In my mind, Stan Lee was not the greatest creation of Stan Lee.

The Marvel Universe was.

(Without Stan Lee it wouldn't have been what it became. But without Kirby and Ditko it would've never existed at all.)

 

[Dr. Haydn]

It starts badly with "Neil" Kirby and goes downhill from there.

[Mmehdy]

Classic responses  PN.......my thoughts Roy Thomas goes along with the Hollywood BS....it just continues the wanna be Stan Lee the all mighty....thanks

[Steven Valdez]

On 6/28/2023 at 11:57 PM, Prince Namor said:

Roy Thomas, Former Marvel Editor, Addresses Debate Over New Stan Lee Doc (Guest Column)

The prolific writer and former Marvel editor-in-chief looks at the Disney+ documentary 'Stan Lee' and the question of credit for creating the Marvel Universe.

 

Roy Thomas was hired by Stan Lee in 1965 and succeeded him as Marvel editor-in-chief in 1972 when Lee became the publisher. Here, Thomas examines Stan Lee, the new documentary on Disney+ that has sparked debate over who deserves primary credit for the success of the Marvel Universe and its heroes — Lee or close collaborators such as artists Jack Kirby,whose son Neil has expressed disappointment in the documentary’s sidelining of his father’s contributions. 

“Stan Lee was his own greatest creation.”

That’s a line that’s often tossed around these days — the more so since Stan died in late 2018 and isn’t around to respond in person to it —

(Oh please. There's no one who was in fear of saying it, who wasn't on a Marvel contract forbidding them from it.)

 

and there’s an argument to be made for it, as anyone who watches the new David Gelb documentary Stan Lee, now streaming on Disney+, can testify.

 

After all, a young Stanley Martin Lieber (though around age 18, not 16 as he misremembers early in the doc) did coin the name “Stan Lee” as a pseudonym with his very first story, written for Captain America Comics No. 3 around the end of 1940.  

Then, beginning in the 1960s when the new “Marvel Comics Group” and its heroes erupted on the scene and gained pop-culture traction, he increasingly turned “Stan Lee” into a spokesman for comics in general, for Marvel in particular, and arguably for himself even more in particular.  Stan Lee, as I knew him from mid-1965 till the end of his long life, was not a man with a fragile ego.  Or, if fragile it was, it was far better shielded behind that winning smile and glib tongue than Tony Stark’s heart is behind Iron Man’s armor. 

The real question, I suppose, is whether he deserved his status as the major creator of the so-called Marvel Universe.

Gelb’s documentary wisely lets Stan himself narrate his story from start to finish. Virtually the only voice we hear during its 1½-hour length that speaks more than one or two sentences in a row is Stan’s, in extended sound bites harvested from a host of TV appearances, comics convention Q&A sessions, award ceremonies, previous documentaries, and radio guest shots — enlivened by the occasional deathless line of dialogue from one of his many late-life movie cameos.  

This is a refreshing way to encounter Stan the Man, and Gelb and his producers (which include Marvel Studios) are to be congratulated for letting him tell his own tale his way. By and large, the effort is successful and entertaining … and, so far as I can tell from my long association with him (which includes writing a humongous “career biography” of him for Taschen Books in the 2010s), it presents a reasonably accurate portrait of the man as he saw himself, and as the world came to see him:

As arguably the most important comicbook writer since Jerry Siegel scribed his first “Superman” story back in the 1930s…

(Except, Stan didn't actually WRITE the stories...)

As the creator (or at the very least the co-creator) of a host of colorful super-heroes and related comics characters…

…And as the creator (or at least the major overseer and guiding light) of a four-color phenomenon that became known as the Marvel Universe, and which formed the underlying bulwark of the now-even-more-famous Marvel CinematicUniverse, the most successful series of interconnected motion pictures in the history of that medium.

But of course he didn’t do it alone … and that’s where all the mostly ill-considered criticisms of Stan Lee’s life and work begin to kick in.

As recorded in the film, simply because he often (not always, but often) fails to credit the artists he worked with, Stan often seems to be claiming full credit for milestones,

(Well, that and in a federal court - as well as throughout the last 20 years of his life - he said, "I created it all, and then I would just assign an artist to it. Which is complete nonsense.)

be they the powerful Hate Monger yarn in Fantastic Four No. 21 or such concepts as the Hulk and the X-Men. This is partly just a verbal shorthand, yet it is also in accordance with his expressed belief that “the person who has the idea is the creator,” and that the artist he then chooses to illustrate that concept is not. 

(Who says he was the first one with the idea? When did Stan ever have any great ideas that weren't something Kirby and Ditko BROUGHT to him? What'd Stan create that was worth ANYTHING in the first 20 years of his career? In 1965, when Jack decided to just concentrate on FF, Thor, Cap, and Nick Fury, why did Stan's creativity on 'new ideas' suddenly evaporate? Simple - because he WASN'T the idea man.)

 

In L.A. in the 1980s (admittedly, at a time when I was not working for him), I argued that very point with him one day over lunch, maintaining that an artist who rendered and inevitably expanded that original idea was definitely a co-creator. I made no headway with my past and future employer. And clearly, when he wrote his celebrated letter, quoted in the doc, that he had “always considered Steve Ditko to be the co-creator of Spider-Man,” he was doing so only to try to mollify Steve and those who might agree with him. Later, he admitted as much.

(The funny thing is that, stretched to its logical conclusion, Stan’s argument could be marshalled to make Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, not himself, let alone himself in conjunction with Jack Kirby, the “creator” of The Fantastic Four.  After all, it was Goodman who directed Stan to devise a team of super-heroes to compete with DC’s Justice League of America.)

(Another nonsense story that Stan made up.)   

But surely Steve Ditko, as closely paraphrased by Stan in Gelb’s film, is also wide of the mark when he states that “an idea is only an idea,” and that it was his drawing it that had made Spider-Man real. For, without the idea in the first place, the character and story events would not exist. Surely it took both men, but they are each simply too myopic to see it.

(Considering that Kirby brought the Spider-man idea to Stan from his time working with Joe Simon, and that it was Steve Ditko who changed it and made it into what it became... what'd Stan really have to do with it?)

It’s certainly true that Stan doesn’t give his most talented collaborator, Jack Kirby, ample credit in every instance for his contributions to the early days of Marvel, from Fantastic Four onward. In a way, however, that’s only human nature: Stan could best remember the things he brought to the table in 1961 — just as Jack could best recall what he had done. Neither was an omniscient observer of the mind or actions of the other.

(Considering Stan hadn't ever really had any success creating anything that had to do with Adventure, Sci-Fi or Superheroes in 1961 and Jack Kirby HAD for the last 20 years, I can't see why anyone would believe Lee for moment in what HE says he did.)

One thing is clear almost beyond argument: Lee often gave Kirby credit, both in writing and when speaking, for much that was good about The Fantastic Four and their related co-creations. The documentary records him as saying that Jack often drew a story after a plot conference that covered only the barest essentials of the storyline; in print in the comics themselves, Stan often went even further than that. You can look it up.

(Very, very clever Houseroy. But you know as well as I do that Jack wrote his own material for his entire career. He didn't need a novice writer like Stan Lee or Larry Lieber. Ever.)

One seems to look in vain, alas, for any acknowledgement whatever by Jack Kirby of Stan’s value or contributions to their collaborations. And we can be pretty sure that, had Jack credited Stan thus, David Gelb and his researchers would have tracked them down and included them in the film’s soundtrack, if only to bolster their case concerning Stan’s talents. Instead, the most we get is Jack saying, when speaking of Thor, that Stan gave him the opportunity to do such a feature and that he gave it his all.  Where is his admission or even suggestion that Stan’s dialogue and captions (to say nothing of his editorial guidance and his contributions to the storylines) added any value whatever to the feature?

Nowhere, that’s where.

(And where was Jack's writing credit for the stories or PAY for writing the stories all of those years? Or Ditko's credit and pay for all of those years? Or Romita's? Nowhere, that's where.)

Now, Jack Kirby had a right to his viewpoint — that he himself was the major, if not the sole, genius behind the success of the Fantastic Four, Thor, and all the rest.  But that does not mean that we need to accept that viewpoint.

(Correct. Not everyone follows common sense the same way. Before he worked with Lee, Jack Kirby created AMAZING work. After he worked with Lee, Jack Kirby created AMAZING work. Stan was a nobody in the Golden Age and created nothing after Kirby left. He hired ghostwriters for the rest of his life. YOU were one of them. Common sense.)

What is really called for, clearly, is first a documentary about Jack Kirby and his contributions to Marvel Comics — and then another one about the career of Steve Ditko. Both of those features would be potentially welcome additions to the filmic examination of Marvel. I’d be waiting eagerly in line (and online) to view either or both.

(Well, I would too, but I doubt they'd be fair.)

But if/when we do get full-fledged Kirby and Ditko docs, I hope they are at least as fair to the talent, contributions, and legacy of Stan Lee as Stan’s words were to the talents, contributions, and legacies of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

(Stan Lee doesn't need anymore praise for work he didn't do. What we need is a documentary that helps everyone understand that he STOLE credit and pay from the people who did the work for him.)

My own voice is heard only near the end of Gelb’s documentary, but I modestly suggest that I uttered what could be taken as the final word on the controversy,

(That's extremely pompous)

when I said (referring primarily to Stan and Jack, though it could also refer to Stan and Steve) that “neither of them could have done it without the other.”

(They DID. Their entire careers. They CREATED, with or without Stan Lee. It was HIM, that gave up 'creating' when suddenly he didn't have them around to give him ideas.)

But I also believe, most sincerely, that Stan Lee was the one who had a vision of a Marvel Universe (even if he himself didn’t invent that phrase) of overlapping characters with all-too-human emotions that defined and limited their super-powers. After all, he was not just the scripter but also the editor — the man who had been placed in charge of story and art, to deliver sales for the company that became Marvel Comics. No one else had that responsibility; almost certainly, no one besides Stan was looking at the big picture, from first to last, day in and day out.

(Until Kirby came back, Lee and Goodman were about to run the comics division into the ground.)

Without Stan Lee, there might have been some good stories … some splendid art … but it’s highly unlike that there would have an overarching Marvel Universe.

And David Gelb’s able marshalling of the aural evidence underscores that point.

(This is just the grossest sentence in your entire BS guest editorial)

In the end, then, I suppose I disagree with the quote with which I began this piece.

In my mind, Stan Lee was not the greatest creation of Stan Lee.

The Marvel Universe was.

(Without Stan Lee it wouldn't have been what it became. But without Kirby and Ditko it would've never existed at all.)

 

Roy Thomas... NOT remembered for his bland runs on Avengers and X-Men with Don Heck.

[Mmehdy]

This was to come out on June 16th on Disney...I do not have DISNEY...has anyone seen this on the boards yet??? your impression?...REVIEW of this Stan Lee tribute??????

Edited June 30, 2023 by Mmehdy

[Zonker]

On 6/30/2023 at 11:45 AM, Mmehdy said:

This was to come out on June 16th on Disney...I do not have DISNEY...has anyone seen this on the boards yet??? your impression?...REVIEW of this Stan Lee tribute??????

There's quite the thread on this in Comics General.  Buckle up!