WHAT IF: Stan Lee wasn't working at Marvel/Atlas Comics in 1961? 2 2

[Unca Ben]

If Stan hadn't worked at marvel in the early sixties then the FF would have been a rehash of The Challengers of the Unknown and the Amazing Spider-Man would have been a direct imitation of The Fly.  Just the same stiff dialogue and cardboard characterization that permeated comics at the time.  They would have read just like every other run-of-the-mill super hero comic from National or Charlton or Gold Key.  Same old blandness.  Read the first 10-12 stories of the Challengers and compare them to the first dozen issues of FF.  (and I'm not knockin' the Challs, I'm just sayin' character-wise the FF would have been just more of the same).

No Marvel Age of Comics, no Face Fronting, no 'Nuff Said, no True Believing, no Keeper of the Faithing, no No-prizes, no Bullpen Pages, no Marvel Madmen, no Merry Marvel Marching Society, no funny credit boxes (in fact no credit boxes at all), no Jack "King" Kirby, no catering to the older college-age crowd.  No "Dear Stan and Jack" or "Dear Stan and Steve ", just the impersonal "Dear Editor".

And Spidey would have been like the Fly if Lee wasn't there to veto Kirby's initial attempt at the character and handed it to Ditko, instead. 

Comics are pictures and words.  When I started picking up Marvels after reading DC's, one thing that attracted me (besides the art) were the stories and characters and the way that they were written.  It can be a combination of art and dialogue that sets the tone.
Ben Grimm's dialogue would never be confused with Reed's.  Peter Parker's personality was markedly different from previous teenage superheroes (in fact, the couple of stories drawn by Kirby where Spider-Man appeared were noticeably off-character.  The Spidey-Torch dust up in ASM #8 comes to mind).
The flowery, Shakespearian speech in JIM's Thor and TTA's Sub-Mariner was a welcome change.

I read Ditko's Captain Atom and Blue Beetle and those characters aren't nearly as interesting or fleshed out as Peter Parker and Stephen Strange.  Kirby's Fourth World and some of his clumsy character-names (Mother Box?) and dialogue with all his " "  " " " " just became bothersome (YMMV).  I'd bet Stan would have adjusted "Mother Box" to something much cooler.

And all this while Stan was editing every single book.  What; 9 super hero books, 1 war comic, 3 westerns, and whatever else - over 13 books while writing/scripting  a majority of them.  What does the average comic book editor handle nowadays?  4-5, maybe 6 titles?  With an Assistant(s)?

Stan worked his butt off for Marvel in those formative years.  Without him, comics would have been the same same-old.  There's a reason all those future comic creators like Roy Thomas, Kurt Busiek, and Claremont and Cockrum wrote to Stan back then (as evidenced by the letters pages).  And when all these guys entered comics, did hey write more like Stan Lee or more like Jack Schiff? - No offense to Mr. Schiff intended.

- It was Stan that changed the way comics were written.  Sure they were creative giants, but it wasn't Jack.  Or Steve.   Denny O'Neil's GL/GA stories wouldn't have happened without Stan paving the way (and DC needing to catch up to Marvel's relevance). It was Stan's flair for drama and hipness.

And I firmly believe the comic industry would have taken a different path, or just tromped down the same old path, if not for Stan Lee.

What If:  the FF read like the Challengers and Spider-Man was a copy-cat of the Fly?

I shudder to think.  'Nuff Said.  

 

 

Edited February 21 by Unca Ben

[Unca Ben]

...and I wrote this praise for Stan without having to character-assassinate Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko!

Imagine!

[MattTheDuck]

Professionally, I've always tried to stick with "It's incredible how much can be accomplished if no one cares much about who gets the credit."  I've never felt I was made larger by making someone else smaller.  I knew nothing about this struggle for getting most of the credit while reading these stories as a kid.  The three main antagonists have all been diminished in my eyes by the discussion which I'm sure is the opposite of what those pushing the narrative intended.

[Unca Ben]

On 2/21/2024 at 2:13 PM, MattTheDuck said:

 I've never felt I was made larger by making someone else smaller. 

...but you will get less clicks, nowadays.

Edited February 21 by Unca Ben

[gunsmokin]

On 2/21/2024 at 3:33 PM, Unca Ben said:

...and I wrote this praise for Stan without having to character-assassinate Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko!

Imagine!

Couldn’t really disagree with you more, especially in regards to your opinions on the 4th world. If Stan was such a gifted writer, then why hadn’t he succeeded previously while Simon and Kirby created the romance and war genre? If you were 8-12 years old, I’m sure you loved Stan’s “writing”. Kirby’s writing was for a slightly older audience. At best, Lee added a dialogue that worked for characters created by others. To each his own. The dialogue changed drastically over the first two years. The X-men in particular had rather childish dialogue. I’m biased because I came upon the silver age a little later in life. I’m 58 and by the time I started accumulating them, it was all about the art and not the stories. It still is.

[frozentundraguy]

I came up with this "dialogue" due to having a copy of What If (the Hulk had the brains of Bruce Banner) that I bought, and the desire to have a bit of fun with it.

I suppose it's at least an example of stuffy and stilted writing. 

[Unca Ben]

On 2/21/2024 at 4:13 PM, gunsmokin said:

Couldn’t really disagree with you more, especially in regards to your opinions on the 4th world. If Stan was such a gifted writer, then why hadn’t he succeeded previously while Simon and Kirby created the romance and war genre? If you were 8-12 years old, I’m sure you loved Stan’s “writing”. Kirby’s writing was for a slightly older audience. At best, Lee added a dialogue that worked for characters created by others. To each his own. The dialogue changed drastically over the first two years. The X-men in particular had rather childish dialogue. I’m biased because I came upon the silver age a little later in life. I’m 58 and by the time I started accumulating them, it was all about the art and not the stories. It still is.

I don't know about the measure of success, but Stan did keep Timely /Atlas going throughout the 50's.  I even stated that Jack and Steve were creative giants.  
If Stan wasn't a gifted writer, why did Kirby and Ditko enjoy the most success while working with Stan?  Why did ASM readership increase after Ditko left (and according to Romita, Stan did plenty of plotting for his run on ASM). 
As a side note, Ditko's ASM run is my favorite run of books along with Jack's FF (both with Stan - and both which I read as they came off the stands except for the earliest stuff.  I was just a couple years too young).

" At best, Lee added a dialogue that worked for characters created by others."   ...so are you saying Stan did not co-create any of those characters?  I disagree.

I loved Stan's writing at 8-12 years old, and I love it now. 

Kirby's 4th world dialogue was clumsy and he should be "kept away" from the "parenthesis" "keys" on a "typewriter".  As for Kirby's stuff being more adult, it was written almost ten years after the FF started and the Comics Code was much more relaxed by then.  Much of Kirby's 4th World subject matter wouldn't have made it past the code in 1961.  And it was Stan who championed writing comics for an older audience which is why Marvel became ubiquitous on college campuses way before the 4th World stuff was even written.

Before Stan, in popular culture comic books were portrayed as juvenile and read only by adult folks with limited intelligence (I'm reminded of the old Andy Griffith show where it was kids like Opie Taylor or characters like Gomer Pyle and Goober who read comics while being gas station attendants).  Then Stan's Marvel hit and you started having popular culture portraying comic books being read by not only children, but by college kids, soldiers, and regular adult characters.
It was articles like the 1969 one in EYE magazine that documented comics -specifically Marvel- being brought into the adult mainstream.  This article being just one of many.

-from someone who was there while it was happening. 

  

 

Edited February 22 by Unca Ben

[gunsmokin]

I don’t know who wrote the article and it doesn’t really matter as far as I’m concerned. Let me ask you this… did Stan deserve to be paid the full writers pay or should it have been shared with his plotters/artists?

[frozentundraguy]

It should also be pointed out that Stan was able to weave story lines into multiple books, which had the effect of not only making them more relevant to each other, but also increasing sales for those readers who wanted to follow the full story arc across multiple titles.

[gunsmokin]

On 2/21/2024 at 7:07 PM, frozentundraguy said:

It should also be pointed out that Stan was able to weave story lines into multiple books, which had the effect of not only making them more relevant to each other, but also increasing sales for those readers who wanted to follow the full story arc across multiple titles.

You didn’t answer my question. As far as weaving stories, he occasionally forgot characters actual first names. Characters he claimed he created. This whole argument really starts and ends with  Lee claiming sole ownership and creatorship or the characters in his fireside origin books. 

Edited February 22 by gunsmokin

[frozentundraguy]

I had not read your post when I wrote mine.

[Unca Ben]

On 2/21/2024 at 5:04 PM, gunsmokin said:

I don’t know who wrote the article and it doesn’t really matter as far as I’m concerned. Let me ask you this… did Stan deserve to be paid the full writers pay or should it have been shared with his plotters/artists?

It probably depended upon each individual issue.  As a sweeping generalization, I'd say Stan likely deserved the writers pay during the first couple or so years of Marvel and as things progressed and the "Marvel method" became streamlined, guys like Kirby and Ditko and perhaps to some degree Heck and Ayers and perhaps, at least on occasion, Colan and Buscema and Romita likely deserved a share of the writing pay.   Or dividing the writers pay into subdivisions of plotting and / or scripting, which would of had to been done, generally speaking, on an issue-by-issue basis.  But Stan was not going to take a pay cut because his method proved to be successful. 

Al this ignores the reality of what was happening with Marvel at the time.  It was a small group of creators as say compared to the main competition that was the behemoth DC that had multiple editors and writers along with the pencillers, inkers and letterers.  And I'd bet DC's production dept. and support staff was huge compared to Marvel's.   

Like a start-up company competing with a well-established firm.  (which I've experienced). 

In a start-up, workers end up wearing many hats.  And they don't often get paid for all the hats they wear, but paid just for the job description under which they were brought on.  It's the way the company survives and competes - or else no one has a job.  If folks don't like it, then go work for Lockheed or Westinghouse or Cisco.  But when companies like Yahoo! or Google first started, workers whether they were permanent or temp had to do lots of tasks that they weren't being paid for.  Or else no one would have a job.
Now, once the company grows and staff and support departments are added, things can be different.

During the sixties (or at least the early to mid sixties) Marvel was like that start up.  That's mostly the period of time we're discussing, here. 

As Marvel grew Kirby was offered a full time position as art Director and he turned it down.  It was then given to Romita.

Ditko appeared to have a personality conflict with Stan; the issues he has raised in his self-published works revolved around the creation / co-creation of Spidey and Stan receiving credit  for what Ditko thought was his.  I have not ever read Ditko complaining about Stan "stealing" money from him.  Plotting credit, yes.  it's also on record that Ditko didn't feel marvel should return the art he did while under work-for-hire for marvel.  And Ditko being Ditko - would not have refrained from all this if he had felt otherwise.

[Unca Ben]

On 2/21/2024 at 5:13 PM, gunsmokin said:

You didn’t answer my question. As far as weaving stories, he occasionally forgot characters actual first names. Characters he claimed he created. This whole argument really starts and ends with  Lee claiming sole ownership and creatorship or the characters in his fireside origin books. 

You are cherry picking.  In a few letters page at the time, Stan said Ditko create Dr. Strange and brought it to Stan.  In other letter pages and in Bullpen Bulletins, Stan gave plenty of credit to guys like Kirby and Ditko.  He has said this many many times.

Are you basing your claim on  a single source or sources while ignoring all the times that Stan claimed otherwise? 

I just read an early story where Spider-Man was referred to as Superman.

I would cite this as evidence as to how busy Stan was during this period. 
Making a mistake during a creative mess (a creative mess - as opposed to tidy idleness) is not evidence that Stan had nothing to do with character creation.  He co-created so many characters in a short period of time it was hard to keep track given how busy he was, along with the dreaded deadline doom, and editing his own work.

You ever make mistakes that you didn't catch?

[gunsmokin]

There are at least two very good books regarding Kirby’s side of the story that you should consider reading. You seem to believe only what the corporate employee had to say on the matter. 

[Unca Ben]

On 2/21/2024 at 5:41 PM, frozentundraguy said:

I had not read your post when I wrote mine.

Oops. sorry.  that happens on here.  

[gunsmokin]

Our opinions on the matter are so different on the matter, it really seems pointless to argue about it with you. I’ll let Chuck carry the flag from here on out.

[Hschwartz]

Thanks for writing this Unca Ben. I agree with virtually all of the points you made. The biggest problem in these debates is people taking their opinions and saying they are facts. I love Stan's writing and think that he is the main reason Marvel was this successful in the sixties. He could get you into the characters heads in ways that neither Kirby or Ditko could in their dialogue without Stan. They could never really get inside the character and create the sense that you were Matt Murdoch, Peter Parker or Tony Stark. Now having said that let me reiterate it is my opinion not fact. Many people love Kirby's dialogue in New Gods etc. and prefer it to Stan's. That's fine it's their opinion and they should express it. However the problem develops when they try to say their opinion is right and everybody else is wrong. Stan created the whole feeling of Marvel as a place that really cared about the reader and treated him/her as adults when they wrote letters. The letters page and bulletin page were just as important to creating the Marvel family feeling as the great comics were. You truly got the sense that Stan was directly talking to you and not at you in these pages. I love Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. Spider-man and Fantastic Four could not have been nearly as successful with anybody else doing the plotting and artwork. This was truly an amazing collaboration and should be seen as such but in my opinion Stan's ability to make you feel for the characters is what made Marvel special. 

Now having praised Stan I will criticize his willingness to take all of the credit when obviously all of these great characters were co created with the artists. Both Ditko and Kirby deserved extra money for plotting out these stories. They were both comic geniuses and should be given plotting credit for all of their stories. The "Marvel Method" was a total rip off to these artists who had to plot out the stories as well as draw them. Just as an example compare the Al Feldstein EC stories that were given to the artist fully written and all the artist had to do was draw what was in Feldstein's descriptive captions. For Daredevil Wally Wood had to create a whole story as well as draw it. He resented it and quit fairly soon. He was right that he wasn't properly compensated for the plotting as well as the drawing. However this method was the only way that Stan could dialogue so many stories each month and stay sane. Now having said this I disagree with people who say that this plotting meant that they wrote most of the story. It's the words that Stan wrote that brought these characters to life and he was the most important reason they were such great comics. That's my take on it and once again I will add that this is my opinion and not represented as fact.

 

 

[Unca Ben]

On 2/21/2024 at 6:00 PM, gunsmokin said:

There are at least two very good books regarding Kirby’s side of the story that you should consider reading. You seem to believe only what the corporate employee had to say on the matter. 

which books? I have a Kirby Ditko Marvel library.  I probably have those books and have already read them. 

side note: just read the introduction to an old Marvel Masterpieces by either Colan or Heck, I think.  I can't recall exactly.  but the artist mentions receiving lots of plots from Stan, ranging from a few pages to a couple notes.

[Unca Ben]

On 2/21/2024 at 6:02 PM, gunsmokin said:

Our opinions on the matter are so different on the matter, it really seems pointless to argue about it with you. I’ll let Chuck carry the flag from here on out.

Okay.  but I'd like to know which books you were referring to, since you think that I haven't read them.

[gunsmokin]

On 2/21/2024 at 8:05 PM, Unca Ben said:

Okay.  but I'd like to know which books you were referring to, since you think that I haven't read them.

I’d start with this one. The other was given to another boardie. Both written by Michael Hill. I’d also read Dr. Michael Vassolo’s blog regarding Timely/Atlas/Marvel. I’d consider Doc to be the preeminent expert and still some unbiased.