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

[Prince Namor]

On 2/16/2023 at 5:31 PM, Zonker said:

Indeed a puzzler.  I could speculate that Independent News, as a subsidiary of National Periodical Publications (i.e. DC Comics), had a lower profit margin for distributing someone else's books, than did the parent company for producing its own books.  And, speculating again that Martin Goodman had a reputation for flooding the newsstands with product if it served his interests (as he did in the 1970s with all those Marvel reprint books).

On the other hand, what benefit is gained from some made-up fiction about only 8 or 11 titles being allowed?  

Stan never told the story of how Marvel was about to be shut down. It makes him look bad.

His version is, he did everything in the 50's (which is a lie) and then Martin made a bad decision involving distribution (which is true) that caused them to be able to only print 8 titles a month (which has never been proven, yet repeated as fact for decades).

He then heroically keeps it all together as comics are doing terrible business (which is a lie, DC and Dell and Archie were doing spectacular numbers), until he suddenly becomes a creative genius overnight and creates the entire Marvel Universe (after 20 years of not creating a single, lasting character), which IS, of course a lie.

If the truth is known... and I even debate this with pro-Kirby people*... that Goodman limited Stan to 8 titles because he planned to shut it all down... (and there's a French writer who has done some massive research - JL Mast - and has a book coming out soon that actually shows documented proof that Goodman WAS going to sell it...)

...Then it opens the door to Kirby's version that says HE showed up one day and they were shutting it down and HE went in and told Goodman he could make him some books that would sell. 

Well, we know he DID... the month after they shut down he brought out Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish... and those books carried the whole line of comics for a few years... (also the reason they've made up the Larry Lieber was the scripter nonsense - they have to discredit Kirby as a 'creator' and a 'writer'.)

The myth of 8 makes STAN's story more believable... to show it isn't true, shines a light on JACK's version...

[Prince Namor]

On 2/16/2023 at 5:09 PM, Zonker said:

Oh, I'm a Kirby supporter, don't get me wrong.  I think it is clear that 95% of the ideas came from Kirby.  I'm just trying to be fair in not over-demonizing Stan in the process.  Particularly since the true Stan Lee partisans are either entirely boycotting or else blocked from contributing to these threads.  The Jack-always-did-it-all theory is an extraordinary claim, and so it needs extraordinary evidence.  If we are just going to have competing camps of Jack-did-it-all versus Stan-did-everything-but-hold-the-pencil-for-Jack, then each side will stop listening to the other, and that's no good.

No one is saying Jack did it all and Stan did nothing.

Quite the contrary - it's STAN, who for the last two decades of his life said HE created it all and simply assigned the artist to it he felt was best suited. He said it under oath in a Federal Court.

Again... try showing what Jack does and it's demonizing Stan.

Stan can claim the BS above, but no one ever says he's demonizing Jack. 

On 2/16/2023 at 5:09 PM, Zonker said:

  My biggest problem with the Jack-did-it-all approach is the lack of Kirby's idiosyncratic dialogue style in the Atlas monster stories and the early Thors and Human Torches.  The style that he used in his 1970s DC and Marvel work, as well as the Fantastic Four #6 issue discussed in the previous thread.

As someone who read Lord of the Rings at a young age, and the Robert E. Howard Conan's after originally discovering the comics, and Shakespeare in High School and College... loved original language movies in Japanese, Italian, French, etc.... I just never found Kirby's syntax all that strange. I picked up on it's rhythm almost immediately upon first reading it. 

And I certainly didn't find his monster stories to have any sort of weird nuances - I saw that as the height of his dialogue style. 

But people tend to focus on that 70's period because he was trying to do something that was contemporary - forgetting that all of the young writers at Marvel did the same kind of strange phrasing if you looked hard enough - Gerry Conway's "The Teardrop Explodes!", or the dialogue in those Curtis magazines from the Kung Fu guys or Steve Englehart's poor excuse for 'black speak' in Hero for Hire - or the worst of it - Stan's over emotive nonsense in his Silver Surfer series. 

Sorry... I'll take New Gods over THAT drivel any day. 

[Prince Namor]

You think this Kirby splash page is dialogued as weird as the Lieber one?

[Prince Namor]

You see the Kirby panel's involving the love interest worded as strange? In preference to Lieber's?

 

 

 

Edited February 17, 2023 by Prince Namor

[Prince Namor]

You see similarities in the way Kirby's Thor puts ideas together and Lieber's does???

 

 

 

Edited February 17, 2023 by Prince Namor

[Zonker]

On 2/16/2023 at 7:24 PM, Prince Namor said:

You think this Kirby splash page is dialogued as weird as the Lieber one?

Well, no.  But now you're comparing the best of the early Thors to the worst (that we've seen so far).  I said at the time JIM #83 might be close to all-Kirby, given Kirby's previous interest in Norse mythology.  (Not to mention Stan's account of the creation of Thor being prompted by a radio interview Stan supposedly granted in those pre-1962 days.  As if.) 

That Kirby splash page might be leftover concept art from the "blitz" he was said to have done for Lee & Goodman.  JIM #83 isn't credited to Lieber (or anyone for that matter), so maybe it is all Kirby, or maybe this is an instance from Kirby's TCJ account of Lee handing Jack's work off to "some guy," "someone working in the office" to write the dialogue into the balloons based on the notes Jack provided.  

[Prince Namor]

On 2/16/2023 at 8:06 PM, Zonker said:

Well, no.  But now you're comparing the best of the early Thors to the worst (that we've seen so far).  I said at the time JIM #83 might be close to all-Kirby, given Kirby's previous interest in Norse mythology.  (Not to mention Stan's account of the creation of Thor being prompted by a radio interview Stan supposedly granted in those pre-1962 days.  As if.) 

That Kirby splash page might be leftover concept art from the "blitz" he was said to have done for Lee & Goodman.  JIM #83 isn't credited to Lieber (or anyone for that matter), so maybe it is all Kirby, or maybe this is an instance from Kirby's TCJ account of Lee handing Jack's work off to "some guy," "someone working in the office" to write the dialogue into the balloons based on the notes Jack provided.  

The Jane Foster scenes are JIM #89 vs #90... supposedly Lieber wrote both!

The action sequence is JIM #87 vs #90...  supposedly Lieber wrote both!

[Zonker]

On 2/16/2023 at 8:38 PM, Prince Namor said:

The Jane Foster scenes are JIM #89 vs #90... supposedly Lieber wrote both!

 

 Yes, exactly.  

 

Quote

The action sequence is JIM #87 vs #90...  supposedly Lieber wrote both!

Maybe: The overall commies plot seems to me quite Stanley-ish for the times.  The odd use of Thor's powers indeed might be Larry's contribution.  Wouldn't Jack just have Thor call down some lightning to accomplish the same effect?

[Prince Namor]

On 2/16/2023 at 8:59 PM, Zonker said:

 Yes, exactly.  

That's Jack Kirby humor. Long time pre-Marvel Kirby readers could spot that a mile away. And the mobsters? Puh-leeze. Jack had his heroes fighting mobsters all the way back to Blue Bolt in 1940. 

On 2/16/2023 at 8:59 PM, Zonker said:

Maybe: The overall commies plot seems to me quite Stanley-ish for the times.  The odd use of Thor's powers indeed might be Larry's contribution.  Wouldn't Jack just have Thor call down some lightning to accomplish the same effect?

Stanley-ish???? Pre-Kirby returning to Marvel, when did Stan EVER use plots with communists? Using commies is again, as normal to Kirby as mobsters. 

[Zonker]

Mobsters have been go-to comics villains since even before Crime Does Not Pay and its many imitators.  As far as the commies, I don't know about pre-1958 (when Stan himself said he was just hacking it out), but a recent example you showed us was that Lee / Ditko story where the made-in-America factory came alive to turn against the Communist-sponsored "labor agitator."  

[Prince Namor]

On 2/16/2023 at 9:45 PM, Zonker said:

Mobsters have been go-to comics villains since even before Crime Does Not Pay and its many imitators. 

Jack had a mobsters story in pretty much every hero he ever did... including the 'Maggia' in Fantastic Four. 

On 2/16/2023 at 9:45 PM, Zonker said:

As far as the commies, I don't know about pre-1958 (when Stan himself said he was just hacking it out), but a recent example you showed us was that Lee / Ditko story where the made-in-America factory came alive to turn against the Communist-sponsored "labor agitator."  

The pro-worker slant of that story sounds a lot more like something Ditko would come up with, than anything Lee would think up.

[Dr. Haydn]

On 2/16/2023 at 9:56 AM, Prince Namor said:

Well here's why... because it's a bunch of bull crud. THIS is the smoking gun that proves Larry hadn't spent 4 years writing those monster stories for Jack Kirby.

ON NEWSSTANDS JANUARY 1963

Journey Into Mystery #90 - Jack Kirby cover, but Stan Lee plot, Larry Lieber --script and Al Hartley art. 

I give you... what is maybe the worst comic of the Marvel Silver Age (and the first Thor that Lieber does without Kirby)...

Daniel Greenberg recently dissected and skewered this story in painful detail in The Marvel Method. A well-deserved fate for a genuine stinker of a tale!

[Prince Namor]

On 2/17/2023 at 1:11 AM, Dr. Haydn said:

Daniel Greenberg recently dissected and skewered this story in painful detail in The Marvel Method. A well-deserved fate for a genuine stinker of a tale!

Okay, let's take a look at it. 

This is a nearly panel by panel breakdown from Facebook by Daniel Greenberg, who does an amazing job showing us not only how poorly this issue was written by Larry Lieber, but how poorly it was plotted and EDITED by Stan Lee. And Al Hartley gets a few shots too. 

[Prince Namor]

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