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

[Steven Valdez]

Comic Tom makes some salient points here:

 

Edited July 1, 2023 by Steven Valdez

[Mmehdy]

I just wish I was a fly on the wall.......Your thread here really issue by issue gives us look of the marvel reality...it is paying attention to detail that derails Stan and his co-credit /creator  status. I will give Stan the editor of the year award, even the best promo master of all time when it comes to comic book marketing but keep going forward issue by issue.....the evidence is does not hype or lie...thanks for this thread and every opinion we get including the above video adds to the treasure trove of finding out the truth. I learn something from everything.

[KirbyJack]

Stan does deserve some credit for character development, if not creation. The dialogue over the months and years gave depth and definition to Kirby’s broader, more archetypical leads. 

[Dr. Haydn]

On 7/5/2023 at 4:50 PM, KirbyJack said:

Stan does deserve some credit for character development, if not creation. The dialogue over the months and years gave depth and definition to Kirby’s broader, more archetypical leads. 

I get the sense that Stan took his job a bit more seriously once Marvel began to take off in the mid-60s. His dialog was much snappier from about 1966 onward than we’ve seen so far in this thread.

[KirbyJack]

On 7/5/2023 at 9:59 AM, Dr. Haydn said:

I get the sense that Stan took his job a bit more seriously once Marvel began to take off in the mid-60s. His dialog was much snappier from about 1966 onward than we’ve seen so far in this thread.

Excellent point! 

[Mmehdy]

On 7/5/2023 at 7:59 AM, Dr. Haydn said:

I get the sense that Stan took his job a bit more seriously once Marvel began to take off in the mid-60s. His dialog was much snappier from about 1966 onward than we’ve seen so far in this thread.

when did Roy Thomas come in...same time?

 

[Dr. Haydn]

On 7/5/2023 at 11:31 PM, Mmehdy said:

when did Roy Thomas come in...same time?

 

Thomas had a brief tryout on Millie the Model and scripted an Iron Man story in 1965. He began his X-men and Avengers runs in 1966. Stan was able to cut back from about 10 books a month (assuming he was truly dialoguing all of them) to 5 or 6 books a month.

[Prince Namor]

How much depth did the characters really have?

Again, are we remembering, or are we just following what we've been told, over and over and over again?

Peter Parker grew and changed from the Ditko years into the Romita years, but... was that Lee or was it Ditko and Romita?

How much depth did Tony Stark or Matt Murdoch have - two characters pretty much left alone by Kirby, that Lee had to navigate with less experienced artists (as writers)...

Pretty one dimensional. They weren't fleshed out until others handled them in the 80's. 

Fans and later media all jumped on the idea of the FF with no secret identities and Peter Parker having hangups and actually helped Stan create the idea that HE was on to something - and he took that credit and ran hard with it. 

I used to cringe when I'd hear Stan in interviews say, "Our characters are more real. Spider-man would be fighting Doctor Octopus and then find out he had a bunion!

No. That's NOT it at all. (And that never happened).

We related to Peter Parker because despite his powers, he questioned life - he was unsure of himself - girls drove him nutty - and he had... a SECRET... a secret he couldn't share with the world, out of fear it would destroy everyone around him. THIS is the essence of youth - we all feel like no one REALLY understands us - and no one DOES - not like WE ourselves know ourselves. 

Peter had an inner dialogue that thought out his world of doubt - his world of discovery - that constant kvetching that you didn't read anywhere else. 

Stan didn't create that. He certainly didn't understand that. It was brought out as Ditko began to write the book more and more and then Romita took it and stretched it out even more. 

To give Stan credit - what he'd been doing for years - writing wise mouth dialogue in Millie the Model - made that kvetching go down a lot easier. It made it fun. That's why people don't see it for what it is - constant person_without_enough_empathying and whining. 

When Stan took it serious - and didn't use the humor - he came off as out of touch and boring and... well it sounded like person_without_enough_empathying and whining (see: Silver Surfer. Beautiful art - horrible story and dialogue).

Again, his sense of humor - the ability to take a serious subject and add a humorous take to it - is what made Marvel different from the other comic books. It had nothing to do with creating, he wasn't really a creator of any merit, or nothing to do with writing, because Stan wasn't a writer - and yet it was very important to the uniqueness of what it became. 

He just wasn't satisfied with that level of credit or pay, so he stepped on everyone else to take it.

[Mmehdy]

Let's keep going on the issue by issue posting....it is great!!!!!! thank you

[Prince Namor]

From Facebook...

Rob Imes:

In the early 1990s, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were invited by Mort Todd to contribute remarks about the monster-fantasy comics that Marvel published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their responses would be published in the first three issues of MONSTER MENACE, the reprint series that Todd edited for Marvel. It's funny to see how the personalities and perspectives of each man shines through in their responses.

Stan Lee's column appeared in Monster Menace #1 (Dec. 1993) and is typical of his jokey banter without saying much of substance, makes no mention of Kirby, and concludes his commentary with plugs for current Marvel product. "Well, today we've gotten a bit more sophisticated; so, instead of offering you 'Gorgoom, the Creature that Ate Milwaukee,' we've been gifting you with such tasty concoctions as Ghost Rider and the Midnight Sons, not to mention the outlandish output of horrormeister Clive Barker and his spine-chilling ilk!"

[Prince Namor]

From Facebook...

Rob Imes:

Jack Kirby's column appeared in the next issue, #2 (Jan. 1994), makes no mention of Lee, and focuses more on the connection between the "pre-Marvel" monsters and the superheroes that would later replace them, in a far more sober and serious manner. If Lee sounds like a high school teacher trying to relate to his students by kidding around and dropping current pop culture references, Kirby sounds like a plain-speaking working-man grappling with big ideas, needing to get them down on paper in order to come to terms with them. (The Kirby column was printed against a blue background in the comic, so I have turned it B&W here and boosted the contrast, to hopefully make the text easier to read on screen.)

[Prince Namor]

From Facebook...

Rob Imes:

Steve Ditko's response appeared in issue #3 (Feb. 1994). Ditko had contributed new illustrations to this series, including providing the front covers of issues #2 and #3. So, his depiction of a bottle of india ink being thrown through the door at the editor should not be misunderstood as hostility on Ditko's part. Although Ditko sometimes wrote essays for small-press publications about his viewpoints on various matters, he generally preferred to let his work speak for itself. ...The implication of Ditko's response is that he had better things to do with his time than reminisce about the old days -- but still took the time to create a page of new artwork in response to Mort Todd's request.

[shadroch]

Amazing how many times Kirby uses the word "I" in his response, compared to Stan and Sterve. 

[Steven Valdez]

On 7/8/2023 at 12:43 PM, Prince Namor said:

From Facebook...

Rob Imes:

In the early 1990s, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were invited by Mort Todd to contribute remarks about the monster-fantasy comics that Marvel published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their responses would be published in the first three issues of MONSTER MENACE, the reprint series that Todd edited for Marvel. It's funny to see how the personalities and perspectives of each man shines through in their responses.

Stan Lee's column appeared in Monster Menace #1 (Dec. 1993) and is typical of his jokey banter without saying much of substance, makes no mention of Kirby, and concludes his commentary with plugs for current Marvel product. "Well, today we've gotten a bit more sophisticated; so, instead of offering you 'Gorgoom, the Creature that Ate Milwaukee,' we've been gifting you with such tasty concoctions as Ghost Rider and the Midnight Sons, not to mention the outlandish output of horrormeister Clive Barker and his spine-chilling ilk!"

Being 'turned on' by monsters is called hentai, I believe.

[Prince Namor]

Jack would've been 75-76 years old.

It's also interesting to note that there is no mention of Larry Lieber whatsoever. 

When Stan originally lied and said that he and Jack did the monster books together in the Origins of Marvel Comics, it was easy to refute because Stan never signed a single Kirby monster story. This was a major hiccup in the 'Kirby wasn't a writer' BS that Stan needed to push to help make it seem as if he himself created everything.

Kirby passes away in 1994.

"A Conversation between Stan Lee and Roy Thomas" is published in COMIC BOOK ARTIST #2 (Summer 1998). In an article by Roy Thomas the same issue (flip side ALTER-EGO V. 2 #2. ) publishes what is claimed to Lee's original typed synopsis for FANTASTIC FOUR #1. There is no mention of Larry Lieber writing the "monster books." Thomas speaks as if Lee wrote them all and proposes that Lee must have been using the Marvel Method earlier than FF #1.

But the question still remains - Lee never signed a single Kirby monster story - The real internet sleuths begin to come out and showing facts and disputing Lee's lie.

Roz passes away in December of 1998.

Oct. 13 1999. ALTER-EGO Vol. 3 #2 publishes "A Conversation with Artist-Writer Larry Lieber". Conducted & Edited by Roy Thomas. In it Larry first asserts he wrote the scripts for Kirby on the monster stories (based on Stan's plots), giving Lee, what I guess him and Houseroy think is a loophole. This lie has been repeated for the last 24 years.

[Steven Valdez]

On 7/8/2023 at 9:17 PM, Prince Namor said:

Jack would've been 75-76 years old.

It's also interesting to note that there is no mention of Larry Lieber whatsoever. 

When Stan originally lied and said that he and Jack did the monster books together in the Origins of Marvel Comics, it was easy to refute because Stan never signed a single Kirby monster story. This was a major hiccup in the 'Kirby wasn't a writer' BS that Stan needed to push to help make it seem as if he himself created everything.

Kirby passes away in 1994.

"A Conversation between Stan Lee and Roy Thomas" is published in COMIC BOOK ARTIST #2 (Summer 1998). In an article by Roy Thomas the same issue (flip side ALTER-EGO V. 2 #2. ) publishes what is claimed to Lee's original typed synopsis for FANTASTIC FOUR #1. There is no mention of Larry Lieber writing the "monster books." Thomas speaks as if Lee wrote them all and proposes that Lee must have been using the Marvel Method earlier than FF #1.

But the question still remains - Lee never signed a single Kirby monster story - The real internet sleuths begin to come out and showing facts and disputing Lee's lie.

Roz passes away in December of 1998.

Oct. 13 1999. ALTER-EGO Vol. 3 #2 publishes "A Conversation with Artist-Writer Larry Lieber". Conducted & Edited by Roy Thomas. In it Larry first asserts he wrote the scripts for Kirby on the monster stories (based on Stan's plots), giving Lee, what I guess him and Houseroy think is a loophole. This lie has been repeated for the last 24 years.

Marvel Method = "You do all the work Jack. Just remember I'm related to the owner and you're lucky to have a job at all."

[Dr. Haydn]

On 7/7/2023 at 6:21 AM, Prince Namor said:

How much depth did the characters really have?

Again, are we remembering, or are we just following what we've been told, over and over and over again?

Peter Parker grew and changed from the Ditko years into the Romita years, but... was that Lee or was it Ditko and Romita?

How much depth did Tony Stark or Matt Murdoch have - two characters pretty much left alone by Kirby, that Lee had to navigate with less experienced artists (as writers)...

Pretty one dimensional. They weren't fleshed out until others handled them in the 80's. 

Fans and later media all jumped on the idea of the FF with no secret identities and Peter Parker having hangups and actually helped Stan create the idea that HE was on to something - and he took that credit and ran hard with it. 

I used to cringe when I'd hear Stan in interviews say, "Our characters are more real. Spider-man would be fighting Doctor Octopus and then find out he had a bunion!

No. That's NOT it at all. (And that never happened).

We related to Peter Parker because despite his powers, he questioned life - he was unsure of himself - girls drove him nutty - and he had... a SECRET... a secret he couldn't share with the world, out of fear it would destroy everyone around him. THIS is the essence of youth - we all feel like no one REALLY understands us - and no one DOES - not like WE ourselves know ourselves. 

Peter had an inner dialogue that thought out his world of doubt - his world of discovery - that constant kvetching that you didn't read anywhere else. 

Stan didn't create that. He certainly didn't understand that. It was brought out as Ditko began to write the book more and more and then Romita took it and stretched it out even more. 

To give Stan credit - what he'd been doing for years - writing wise mouth dialogue in Millie the Model - made that kvetching go down a lot easier. It made it fun. That's why people don't see it for what it is - constant person_without_enough_empathying and whining. 

When Stan took it serious - and didn't use the humor - he came off as out of touch and boring and... well it sounded like person_without_enough_empathying and whining (see: Silver Surfer. Beautiful art - horrible story and dialogue).

Again, his sense of humor - the ability to take a serious subject and add a humorous take to it - is what made Marvel different from the other comic books. It had nothing to do with creating, he wasn't really a creator of any merit, or nothing to do with writing, because Stan wasn't a writer - and yet it was very important to the uniqueness of what it became. 

He just wasn't satisfied with that level of credit or pay, so he stepped on everyone else to take it.

This kind of proves the point that the artists were the pilots of the Marvel juggernaut. When Kirby and Ditko (and later, Romita and others) were on their game, the stories were (arguably) better than anything else out there at the time. Lee couldn't create depth on his own--he could only enhance what the artists brought him.

There's one of those moments coming up soon in Avengers (issue 7, I think?), when Rick Jones puts on Bucky's costume and shows himself to Captain America. Cap's extreme reaction in this powerful scene was already present in Jack's pencils. Thankfully, Stan didn't try to dilute the moment with his customary levity, and to my eyes, the scene works beautifully as Jack choreographed it: a rare serious moment that transcends what the stories of the Comics Code era generally attempted.

Edited July 8, 2023 by Dr. Haydn
added tentative issue number

[Mmehdy]

On 7/8/2023 at 12:41 PM, Dr. Haydn said:

This kind of proves the point that the artists were the pilots of the Marvel juggernaut. When Kirby and Ditko (and later, Romita and others) were on their game, the stories were (arguably) better than anything else out there at the time. Lee couldn't create depth on his own--he could only enhance what the artists brought him.

There's one of those moments coming up soon in Avengers (issue 7, I think?), when Rick Jones puts on Bucky's costume and shows himself to Captain America. Cap's extreme reaction in this powerful scene was already present in Jack's pencils. Thankfully, Stan didn't try to dilute the moment with his customary levity, and to my eyes, the scene works beautifully as Jack choreographed it: a rare serious moment that transcends what the stories of the Comics Code era generally attempted.

cant wait to see it here!

[Steven Valdez]

Was scrolling the news on my phone when I woke up this morning. Came across an appraisal of the Silver Age of comics ('The Downsides To Reading Silver Age Comic Books' by David Harth) and was pleasantly surprised by this content towards the end of it:

*The Truth About Stan Lee*

'Stan Lee was massively influential in the Silver Age. Lee and Marvel spread his legend, making it seem like he was a creative genius behind the greatest comic characters ever created.

The truth is much darker.

Artists like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, John Romita, and more did the lion's share of the creating, with Lee mostly editing and sometimes writing dialogue for the characters.
Lee wasn't the creative force that he and Marvel made him out to be.

Reading Silver Age Marvel comics that are emblazoned with Lee's name while the artists did most of the work is an uncomfortable thing. While Romita kept his job at Marvel, many other artists weren't willing to play along with Lee and left the publisher.

Kirby and Ditko, the creators most responsible for Marvel's early successes, never got the recognition they deserved. Judging by the recent Disney+ Stan Lee doc, Marvel is still interested in spreading a false narrative about the Silver Age.'

[sfcityduck]

On 7/7/2023 at 4:21 AM, Prince Namor said:

 

Again, his sense of humor - the ability to take a serious subject and add a humorous take to it - is what made Marvel different from the other comic books. It had nothing to do with creating, he wasn't really a creator of any merit, or nothing to do with writing, because Stan wasn't a writer - and yet it was very important to the uniqueness of what it became. 

 

Here's where we disagree: Comics are a unique medium. The story is told in both art and words. Even with a "full --script" by the writer, the artist will still be contributing significantly to the creation of the story by providing the visuals. We all know the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" and, while overblown, it does have truth in the comic book context.  Every comic artist is a co-creator to some degree in every story they touch.

But so too is the writer of the dialogue that accompanies the pictures. A picture without words can depict a scene, Bernie Krigstein proved that in the early 1950s, but a wordless story can only very very rarely depict characterization better than dialogue. Dialogue tells us much about the background, intelligence, inner feelings, attitudes, and actions of the characters, amongst many other things. Dialogue is essential. Dialogue is what conveys most of the character of the characters - especially for superheroes who wear costumes which cover their facial expressions.

Which is why in the movie business the folks who write dialogue are referred to as writers even when those writers were working off of a "full --script" in the form of a book. They call that an "adapted screenplay." That's why Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, & Peter Jackson each have an Academy Award for making a fairly faithful adaptation of someone else's story. The art they brought to the process was taking someone else's dialogue and adapting it. That scripting of disalogue is rightly viewed as the very important role of "writing" in the movie industry, despite that the Director and actors and countless others are responsible over the look and sound of the overall film.

Worth noting that many works share the same basic plots. Often one of the key things that distinguishes good implementation of a plot from bad impletmentation is the dialogue.

So yeah, even a guy who only writes the dialogue is a writer and is a co-creator of the story told in a comic book.

Which gets us to the question of whether Jack Kirby "wrote" the dialogue for the stories he did with Stan Lee.  Jack claimed he did in a rather infamous 1990 interview by Gary Groth published in the Comics Journal.

It wasn't a good day for Jack or Groth. Groth was trying hard to fan the flames between Kirby and the publishing industry and Kirby was disappointing him with his answers, especially earlier in the interview. Jack was also feeling rather pugnacious, repeatedly telling stories about the physical altercations he had as a kid and boasting that he'd "bent steel." Jack was also suffering from a number of memory lapses and both Groth and Jack's wife Roz had to repeatedly correct him. it's a strange interview. And it led to some of Kirby's most outrageous claims. This was one of them:

Quote

KIRBY: Yes. I’d come in, and I’d give Stan the work, and I’d go home, and I wrote the story at home. I drew the story at home. I even lettered in the words in the balloons in pencil.

 

That claim was so outrageous that Roz felt the need to correct him:

Quote

ROZ KIRBY: Well, you’d put them in the margins.

But were those margin notes really the "dialogue" for the stories? Nope. They were mostly just layout notes. Certainly evidence of Kirby's very significant contributions to the visuals for the story and its pacing, as well as the contents and plot of the story, but not the actual dialogue.  An example from the Kirby Museum website:

Kirby's margin notes often read as directions to himself, not Stan, regarding the topic of the story. This is supported by other examples in which the margin notes provide nothing but an explanation of the visuals, not dialogue at all.  This is in line with the method Kirby stated in the interview he used when working on the stories. Kirby contradicted himself on whether he had a plot in mind when he started work on a story. At various times he claimed he did develop a plot and that he and Stan had cursory discussions about. At others he claimed he never had a plot before he sat down at the drawing board. Regardless of what you think about that massive contradiction, what does have the ring of truth is that Kirby came up with the story layout and pacing on the fly. He most likely visualized a page, layed out the panels, and then made margin notes to remind himself what to put in those panels. Still, I'm sure they also were a great help in ascertaining what the gist of the dialogue should be.

When you contrast the margin notes with the actual dialogue, you see that the dialogue is radically different. The dialogue captures the subjects character, their emotions, and generally expands greatly on the thought in the margin note's sketch. The dialogue is far from verbatim of the margin note. The comic would have been an unreadable mess if the margin note was the dialogue. Not sure how anyone can view this contrast as evidencing mere "editing" and not writing. The evidence is clear and this example proves the dialogue is essential to the story.

Personally, I think the solution that Roz favored for assigning credit was the right one.  I don't agree with her comment that taking a writing credit is the same as taking "all of the credit" when it comes to a comic book, far from it, but the best solution would have been this:

Quote

 

ROZ KIRBY: Can I say something? It bothered me a lot when it said Stan Lee this and Stan Lee that. If they wanted to be fair, they could have said, “Produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” But he didn’t have to say, “Written by —.” He didn’t have to take the entire credit. He’d put down drawn by Jack "King" Kirby and all that stuff.

 

To her credit, Roz did admit that "Every so often he’d [Stan Lee] put down, “Produced by." But she was right it would have been better if used consistently.

Edited July 9, 2023 by sfcityduck