Stan, Jack, and Steve - The 1960's (1964) The Slow Build 5 5

[Steven Valdez]

On 9/18/2023 at 2:03 AM, Zonker said:

Kirby began to conceive his new comic books when he was still at Marvel, but felt he might not get enough editorial autonomy. He left his $35,000‐a‐year job at Marvel and took his new books to National.

Thanks for the validation. I note in that same article Stan is quoted as saying, "The thing I hate most is writing plots. '.

[Zonker]

On 9/17/2023 at 12:08 PM, Steven Valdez said:

Thanks for the validation. I note in that same article Stan is quoted as saying, "The thing I hate most is writing plots. '.

Yes, my own view is that is the real origin of the Marvel Method.  While I'm more sympathetic to Stan than most of the posters here, these threads have reinforced for me the idea that Stan was not a white-sheet-of-paper kind of guy.  If he said he was too busy to write full scripts, I think that might be true if one also considers maybe he was too slow to write something starting from that imposing blank sheet of paper.  But give him the penciled work of a Ditko or a Kirby, and that would prompt him to do his thing ("like working a crossword puzzle" he used to say).

And I'm still agnostic over how much he contributed to pre-artwork plotting conferences with Ditko or Kirby in the earlier years.

[Prince Namor]

On 9/17/2023 at 12:23 PM, Zonker said:

Yes, my own view is that is the real origin of the Marvel Method.  While I'm more sympathetic to Stan than most of the posters here, these threads have reinforced for me the idea that Stan was not a white-sheet-of-paper kind of guy.  If he said he was too busy to write full scripts, I think that might be true if one also considers maybe he was too slow to write something starting from that imposing blank sheet of paper.  But give him the penciled work of a Ditko or a Kirby, and that would prompt him to do his thing ("like working a crossword puzzle" he used to say).

And I'm still agnostic over how much he contributed to pre-artwork plotting conferences with Ditko or Kirby in the earlier years.

It's difficult to know if he had any real skill at writing stories at all. His Western work was very generic, his Dumb Blonde work was repetitive... when he started working with Ditko for the Amazing Adult Fantasy stories, they were very thin, simplistic gotcha tales that according to some of the more advanced historians, he took the basic concepts of from unused (and sometimes used) stories he bought from Writers Digest throughout the 50's and from guys like Carl Wessler and Hank Chapman who did a lot of the sci-fi writing for Atlas. 

Kirby claims they didn't really have story conferences, and considering he had 20+ years of experience writing and plotting out his own stories, very successfully, while Stan really had no success... it's strange there are still people who would even doubt that. In the Marvel vs Kirby deposition (which was heavily redacted), Larry Lieber talks about those Hulk pages - Jack bringing in the story and Stan wanting so many changes - Jack getting frustrated and tearing the pages up and leaving... If Stan and Jack were having story conferences and Stan was 'writing' up synopsis' for him - why was there a disconnect? 

The truth is he WASN'T for Jack.

The early conferences with Ditko, according to Ditko, devolved into disagreements very early - he was constantly correcting Stan and aiming things in a different direction to the point where Stan refused to even speak with Ditko. Ditko says early on he'd get a short written synopsis of what they talked about early on and then... nothing.

And really... those were the stories that mattered the most. The one's he really didn't have much to do with. 

[Steven Valdez]

Stan was very inconsistent regarding his own contributions to the comics ... he often admitted that Steve and Jack (or John Romita, Buscema or Gil Kane) would plot and draw the stories based on a sentence or just the name of a villain. Gil Kane said it was his own idea to do the drug story in Spider-Man, but Stan has always claimed credit for that.

 

[Prince Namor]

ON NEWSSTANDS MARCH 1964

Monsters to Laugh With #1 - by Stan Lee

It's amazing to see the amount of clues right in front of our faces as to who Stan Lee was as a 'writer'. Again, here, he takes someone else's creations and captions them with smart alec sayings, again using Martin Goodman's Magazine Division to do something outside of comic books. For someone who made this period in his career out to being some sort of creative awakening, it's very telling by just how uninspired this whole production is. 

But this is what Stan was good at. Creating cheap, shallow entertainment and promoting it as outstanding, with little regard to those who did the actual creative part. All so he could financially benefit from it. 

Part ONE

[Prince Namor]

ON NEWSSTANDS MARCH 1964

Monsters to Laugh With #1 -

Part TWO

[Mmehdy]

WOW...I bought that off the rack when it came in...I have seen it for50 years or so and still remember some of the images, I think I remember buying another one.  Thanks for the recollection from the past!!!!

Edited September 18, 2023 by Mmehdy

[mrc]

On 9/18/2023 at 5:52 PM, Prince Namor said:

It's amazing to see the amount of clues right in front of our faces as to who Stan Lee was as a 'writer'. Again, here, he takes someone else's creations and captions them with smart alec sayings, again using Martin Goodman's Magazine Division to do something outside of comic books. For someone who made this period in his career out to being some sort of creative awakening, it's very telling by just how uninspired this whole production is. 

On the contrary, Topps 1959 You'll Die Laughing & later in the UK, Creature Feature bubblegum cards were hugely popular and successful. I think it was an astute move to try out the same idea in a magazine format.

Amazon review "You will love and laugh when reading this very funny magazine , that also has fantastic photographs from classic Horror movies."

Edited September 18, 2023 by mrc
edit

[Prince Namor]

On 9/18/2023 at 5:24 PM, mrc said:

On the contrary, Topps 1959 You'll Die Laughing & later in the UK, Creature Feature bubblegum cards were hugely popular and successful. I think it was an astute move to try out the same idea in a magazine format.

Amazon review "You will love and laugh when reading this very funny magazine , that also has fantastic photographs from classic Horror movies."

I have no idea the success of it, which I didn't question at all - though 7 issues of it over a 2 year run pretty much answers that question. 

It just isn't funny or especially creative. It's like he bought a 25 cent joke book and inserted the Ines he thought would fit and then had Brodsky put it all together. NOT Modern Day Shakespeare by any stretch. 

Comparing it to those 'bubblegum cards' is dead on. He wrote for children and promoted it as for adults, convincing fanboys they were something special if they read it. 

Pretty much Stan Lee in a nutshell. 

As to if someone's personal taste is in favor of it, that's up to them. 

Edited September 18, 2023 by Prince Namor

[shadroch]

Jack Kirby did not have twenty years working on his own. He was partners with Joe Simon until the mid to late 50s and didn't seem to be able to make a living on his own.  His comic strip failed, and he alienated his bosses at DC.  What would he have done if Stan hadn't thrown him a bone and brought him back?

[Steven Valdez]

On 9/19/2023 at 8:53 AM, shadroch said:

Jack Kirby did not have twenty years working on his own. He was partners with Joe Simon until the mid to late 50s and didn't seem to be able to make a living on his own.  His comic strip failed, and he alienated his bosses at DC.  What would he have done if Stan hadn't thrown him a bone and brought him back?

Jack Kirby was a meanie to you at some point, we get it.

Edited September 18, 2023 by Steven Valdez

[shadroch]

On 9/18/2023 at 3:57 PM, Steven Valdez said:

Jack Kirby was a meanie to you at some point, we get it.

Show me I'm wrong. What masterpieces did he create independently from the time he split with Simon?  Challengers was at least partially a Joe Simon creation.

[Prince Namor]

Joe Simon had nothing to do with the creation of the Challengers of the Unknown. The only person who says he did, is Joe Simon. Kirby says no, DC Comics says no (Simon asked for credit) and they were the only two people there at the time. 

(Simon never made the claim until Jack was dead. It's not in his THE COMIC BOOK MAKERS book, where he tries to Lee-like take credit for everything he can. This all came about after Kirby had died. Same as the Larry Lieber as Kirby's writer nonsense.)

Joe Simon had pre-production work for almost everything that he and Jack worked on that he sold off over the years, including the Silver Spider splash page sketches, letters from publishers about it, pre-production on titles Mainline never even printed. 

ZERO Challengers of the Unknown. 

He had nothing to do with it. 

The real question is... what DID Joe Simon do, once he no longer had Jack Kirby?

Let's see... Kirby with Simon, best selling books. Kirby without - Challengers of the Unknown - top seller for DC, kick starts the Silver Age team books. Kirby with Marvel - some of the biggest comics of all time, Kirby after Marvel - New Gods - still in print 50 years later.

Simon? Nothing. Lee? Nothing.

Lee went over 50 years without creating anything of substance.

Jack created an entire new UNIVERSE of characters, including one of the DC Universe's biggest villains.

And Sky Masters ran from September 8th, 1958 to February 25 1961 - Over 774 dailies and 54 Sundays. Stan Lee could only DREAM of having a newspaper strip that ran that long before Kirby and Ditko created everything for him. 

[jimjum12]

On 9/18/2023 at 8:35 PM, Prince Namor said:

Simon? Nothing. Lee? Nothing.

Simon got into advertising to make more money. Lee continued with Marvel as it evolved into the cultural juggernaut that it is today. I personally enjoy Lee's cameos in the films, as do millions. Jack ? Without Simon ? ...cricketts. Jack ? Without Lee ? ... that melodramatic parade of egotism called "The Fourth World" ? As I recall it was cancelled due to poor sales. One thing I notice lacking from Jack's solo work is humor. After he left Marvel, he never did anything like that again. None of them did for that matter, except possibly Steranko, but then, he basically left comics behind. GOD BLESS...

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)

Edited September 19, 2023 by jimjum12

[Dr. Haydn]

On 9/18/2023 at 11:53 AM, Prince Namor said:

ON NEWSSTANDS MARCH 1964

Monsters to Laugh With #1 -

Part TWO

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...

Edited September 19, 2023 by Dr. Haydn
rewording

[shadroch]

Fumetti was huge in the early 1960s. I guess someone who wasn't around might not appreciate that.  Photocards of Universal Monsters saying funny was the height of sixties humor, along with insufficiently_thoughtful_person and dead baby jokes.

Joe Simon left comics for the far more lucrative advertising world, while Kirby chose to remain in comics.  From a financial point of view, Simon made the right choice.

Kirby went to DC where his " masterpiece" Fourth World quickly became a hot mess that was canceled. Reading them now shows Kirby's inability to follow through with his own ideas. Plots and subplots are introduced, then ignored. The characters are cardboard, with no character development and personalities that shift from issue to issue. Fifteen years after his creation, Darkseid only appeared in comics produced to sell toys. Kirby was producing comics for ten-year-olds. It took another generation of writers to make him into the villain we know today.

I challenge anyone to read the first six issues of Jimmy Olsen that Kirby did and not shake their head.  Can anyone explain what or who The Black Racer was supposed to be?  A crippled Vietnam vet who is paralyzed, but somehow can ski across the sky each night? Why does he ski? Because surfing was already taken?  Kirby felt Superman was too full of himself, so he brought in Don Rickles as a foil.

Does anyone want to discuss the KIrbyverse?  Devil Dinosaur?

 

[Prince Namor]

On 9/18/2023 at 10:02 PM, jimjum12 said:

Simon got into advertising to make more money.

You mean after he tried to get Archie heroes going and Kirby decided not to continue with him there and he couldn't do it on his own?

Yes, without someone to do all the work for him in comics, Simon went into advertising.

Then he came back to comics 10 years later and gave us... Prez? Brother Power the Geek?

In other words... nothing.

On 9/18/2023 at 10:02 PM, jimjum12 said:

Lee continued with Marvel as it evolved into the cultural juggernaut that it is today.

He did? Seems to me, all he did was milk it for a lifetime contract. Comic Book sales stagnated for years. Stan spent 2 decades failing to get any movies going. Meanwhile DC put out 4 Superman movies, 4 Batman movies and started a REBOOTED Batman movie series before Marvel could even get started into something decent. 

And it took someone from OUTSIDE the Marvel bubble to make all that happen.

Stan was a cameo act for the movies because... well because he had nothing else to offer.  

On 9/18/2023 at 10:02 PM, jimjum12 said:

I personally enjoy Lee's cameos in the films, as do millions. Jack ? Without Simon ? ...cricketts. Jack ? Without Lee ? ... that melodramatic parade of egotism called "The Fourth World" ?

The Fourth World Omnibus has printed new editions 4 times since 2007. It sells far superior to anything Lee created without Kirby and Ditko, COMBINED. I get that, for many Marvel fans, it doesn't explain everything that's happening in each panel and it makes it hard for them to follow, but I'm pretty sure there's a short list of 53 year old creators in the history of comics who were able write and draw an entire new UNIVERSE of characters and juggle 4 books at once, much less in 1970.

It wasn't fumetti. 

On 9/18/2023 at 10:02 PM, jimjum12 said:

As I recall it was cancelled due to poor sales.

Paul Levitz already dispelled this myth, but I suspect you'll keep repeating it. 

[Prince Namor]

At 53 years of age, in 1970, Jack Kirby created the Fourth World. 

Who in the history of comics, over the age of 50, writing and drawing, has ever taken on an ambitious task like this?

An entire UNIVERSE of characters. 

DC Comics kept interfering, asking Jack to put Don Rickles in a story and to insert Deadman into a story... they just didn't get it.

For years, Stan Lee suck ups, led by Houseroy, had to paint the picture that it was a sales failure, to protect their precious little ego's. "How can anything be better than Stan??? Boo hoo hoo!"

 

Much like Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil's Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Barry Windsor Smith's Conan the Barbarian, the New Gods suffered severely from the rampant affidavit fraud, brought on by fanboy speculation.

Publishers got lazy and newsstands took advantage of it. They dropped off those books and took newsstands AT THEIR WORD how many copies they sold, and billed them based on that. The days of tearing off the label and sending back unsold copies to PROVE those numbers was long gone. 

So for books that didn't 'sell very well', there sure are a TON of copies out there of all of those books. 

 

People can debate all they want - all of those books were a huge part of the history of great comics.

Stan Lee without Kirby or Ditko was no longer anywhere NEAR that conversation. He had NOTHING.

Joe Simon without Jack Kirby was no longer anywhere NEAR that conversation. He had NOTHING.

Stan Lee was all about making himself rich off the backs of fanboys too clueless to see he was playing them for a fool.

Guys like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko just wanted to make comics.

And it shows. 

Over their entire LIFE, it shows.

[Steven Valdez]

On 9/19/2023 at 7:36 PM, Prince Namor said:

Much like Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil's Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Barry Windsor Smith's Conan the Barbarian, the New Gods suffered severely from the rampant affidavit fraud, brought on by fanboy speculation.

X-Men got cancelled because of that... despite featuring some of the most incredible superhero illustration of all time by Neal Adams. The books were being pilfered by the truckload, making it seem that official sales were poor.

[jimjum12]

On 9/19/2023 at 5:18 AM, Prince Namor said:

Paul Levitz already dispelled this myth, but I suspect you'll keep repeating it. 

Yeah, right ... it was making money and yet they cancelled it. Keep drinking that Kool-aid. GOD BLESS... 

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)