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Post by Outrajs on Oct 18, 2017 5:28:35 GMT -5
...or get Hank Pym slapped for saying this but...Stan Lee is actually more of a marketer than he is a comic book writer/author. True? Not true? (The enemies or the statement...either or).
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Post by Icctrombone on Oct 18, 2017 5:39:42 GMT -5
He's both a great salesman and has written some of the best stories in comics.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Oct 18, 2017 6:48:47 GMT -5
...or get Hank Pym slapped for saying this but...Stan Lee is actually more of a marketer than he is a comic book writer/author. True? Not true? (The enemies or the statement...either or). I’m sure everyone agrees he was a great marketer first. He completely transformed the relationship between comic-book publishers and readers, resulting in the revival of a moribund industry. His writing was a lot of fun too, especially due to his over-the-top style, but a lot of the great ideas we associate with Lee are in large part the fruit of Kirby’s or Ditko’s imagination. The verdict of this court: good writer, fantastic marketer. |
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Post by dbutler69 on Oct 18, 2017 7:24:39 GMT -5
He's both. Come on, he practically wrote everything Marvel did from 1961-1968 or so, including some comics you might have heard of, such as the Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man. I know that Stan bashing has become fashionable and people love to say that it was all Kirby and Ditko and that Stan was just riding their coattails, but I think that's absolute nonsense. Having said that, he was definitely a master marketer and also opportunistic, but you can be that and be a good and very successful writer.
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Post by Outrajs on Oct 18, 2017 7:35:49 GMT -5
...or get Hank Pym slapped for saying this but...Stan Lee is actually more of a marketer than he is a comic book writer/author. True? Not true? (The enemies or the statement...either or). I’m sure everyone agrees he was a great marketer first. He completely transformed the relationship between comic-book publishers and readers, resulting in the revival of a moribund industry. His writing was a lot of fun too, especially due to his over-the-top style, but a lot of the great ideas we associate with Lee are in large part the fruit of Kirby’s or Ditko’s imagination. The verdict of this court: good writer, fantastic marketer. Moribund? You actually used moribund in civilized conversation? You are the MASTER!! |
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Post by Outrajs on Oct 18, 2017 7:37:16 GMT -5
He's both. Come on, he practically wrote everything Marvel did from 1961-1968 or so, including some comics you might have heard of, such as the Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man. I know that Stan bashing has become fashionable and people love to say that it was all Kirby and Ditko and that Stan was just riding their coattails, but I think that's absolute nonsense. Having said that, he was definitely a master marketer and also opportunistic, but you can be that and be a good and very successful writer. I completely agree you can be both. But here's the thing...almost everything I have seen associated with him (and it's not much) has actually been someone else's that he adopted. What can I read that was 100% his? And I am not Stan bashing in the slightest. He has many strengths. |
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Post by Cei-U! on Oct 18, 2017 7:43:45 GMT -5
The whole "heroes bickering" shtick has been a Stan Lee trademark since way back in 1941 when 17-year-old Stanley Lieber broke into the business writing text stories. He owes that to nobody. Try the first five issues of the '68 Silver Surfer series. Probably the best writing he ever did (though unquestionably inspired by the delectable illustrations of John Buscema).
Cei-U!
I summon The Man!
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Post by hondobrode on Oct 18, 2017 7:58:45 GMT -5
Stan is an ok writer, a master promoter and marketer, and his crowning achievement, IMO, undoubtedly, one of the best Editor-in-Chiefs in the history of the business
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Post by Deleted on Oct 18, 2017 8:41:46 GMT -5
Stan Lee is like Ric Flair of the Comics Business and he's the Man that defined Comics and one of the Best Editors of all time.
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Post by codystarbuck on Oct 18, 2017 9:22:37 GMT -5
The whole "heroes bickering" shtick has been a Stan Lee trademark since way back in 1941 when 17-year-old Stanley Lieber broke into the business writing text stories. He owes that to nobody. Try the first five issues of the '68 Silver Surfer series. Probably the best writing he ever did (though unquestionably inspired by the delectable illustrations of John Buscema). Cei-U! I summon The Man! Except that was hardly a unique trait, in literature. The pulps were filled with it, especially Doc Savage, where Ham and Monk would go at it constantly. Like any writer, Stan is a product of his time and the writers he devoured and he was definitely a fan of the pulps (as he said he was a fan of The Spider, resulting in using the name for Spider-Man). Stan was a great promoter; but, he wasn't always that way. If you look at Timely and Atlas, when it was under Stan, it's not the same level of bombast. That comes with Fantastic Four and the new Marvel line. It was probably as much a result of the desperation of the enterprise as anything else. Accounts vary more than a little; but, most agree that Martin Goodman wasn't raking in the money and was possibly looking at closing down (or being forced to). Inspired by DC (whether the golf game story is true or not) they tried superheroes again. This was Stan's livelihood and he went to town to sell it. And, it worked! Stan stuck with it and went even further with it. Stan was a good writer; and, when working with the right collaborator, a great writer. He is strongest with an artist who was a plotter and storyteller in his own right; most notably, Kirby and Ditko. With other artists, he was still putting out good stories; but, they weren't quite at the same level. Stan could elevate their work, to a certain degree; but, he really seemed to raise himself up when he had a Kirby or Ditko. To Crusader's analogy, Stan could have a good match with Don Heck or Werner Roth; but, he needed a Ricky Steamboat, like Kirby or Ditko, to have a 5-star classic match. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Oct 18, 2017 9:39:47 GMT -5
As comics history has become more and more a legitimate "thing", I think we are now getting some interpretations of the "Marvel Method" that conflict with how comics fans understood it when Stan was using it (and that understanding was mostly based on Stan's own explanations). At the height of Marvel's Silver Age, Kirby and Ditko were clearly doing the majority of the plotting and staging of their work. Knowing that does diminish, for me, Stan's role in the collaborations, because he did what I think was the "easiest part" of the writing job. I'm not saying I could have done anywhere near as well, but if I were handed a Kirby story with no lettering but with his margin notes, I think I could turn out a publishable final product by scripting the dialog and captions. But I couldn't have come up with a detailed plot and stick figure thumbnails that would have led to anything like what Jack or Steve produced. So the point of argument is what the artists started with. I wish we had a better understanding of what John Buscema or Don Heck or Gene Colan or John Romita contributed to the plotting of their collaborations with Lee. Was Stan relying on all of his artists to do the heavy lifting of plotting and staging, or did most of them work, as we all probably assumed, from detailed plots? I think we could learn a lot from studying the work of Heck, Colan, Buscema et. al. as "writers" rather than "artists": looking beyond the visual composition and technique to see if there are characteristics in the storytelling that reveal a "Heck plot" or a "Colan plot."
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 18, 2017 9:39:50 GMT -5
Sometimes there's nothing like a great Stan Lee story. Non-stop action, hilarious dialogue, spot-on character touches, heroism, romance, and an occasional wink to the reader that this is all great fun.
When he was in his Marvel heyday, which off the top of my head, was from 1964-68, there was nobody as good at writing snappy patter, balancing action and melodrama, and pushing open the flap of the comic book envelope. He left the DC writers in the dust in those days; nobody there (with the exception of Arnold Drake) created the kinds of super anti-heroes that Stan seemed to churn out in his sleep. Certainly nobody besides Drake could approximate the self-aware irreverence that Stan brought to Marvel. And of course, he had enormous help from Kirby and Ditko in particular.
Inevitably, though, he ran out of steam. Nick Fury sounded like Ben Grimm, who sounded like Hawkeye. Dr. Doom took up virtually permanent residence at the Baxter Building. Aunt May cheated death more than all four Challengers of the Unknown. There was only so much melodrama he could wring from his characters, whose popularity was dooming them to the kind of stasis that afflicted DC's characters. There was only so much change he could bring to Marvel, which had become as entrenched and commercial an enterprise as DC, whom Stan had always taunted as the symbol of staid and boring comics.
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on Oct 18, 2017 10:06:14 GMT -5
Outside of Silver Surfer, I've never found Lee's writing all that appealing. Maybe Surfer was the perfect character for him to write. Even when he went back and wrote him with Moebius 30 years later it was still solid. But damn is he not a promoter, entrepreneur, innovator, advertiser and hell of a salesman for Marvel. As Richard would say to Tommy, in Tommy Boy about Tommy's dad ... "He could sell ketchup popsicles to a woman in white gloves." Anyone remember Just Imagine .... titles? DC couldn't even say no to Stan Lee's take on their own characters. That's a sales pitch. |
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Post by hondobrode on Oct 18, 2017 10:47:32 GMT -5
Which brings up the point being, how successful or good have Stans's efforts or products been post-Silver Age ?
The Just Imagine series sold mostly on gimmick of modern day artists working with Stan on his version of D.C. characters; mostly gimmick.
I'd never heard or considered his other artists contributing plots like Kirby and Ditko. I wonder if in fact they did to some degree, according to the Marvel method, which would make Stan a co-writer / scripter.
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Post by Cei-U! on Oct 18, 2017 11:03:57 GMT -5
In the course of my research, I've learned that the earliest known use of the "Marvel method" in comic books was in the Fox titles edited by Abner Sundall in 1941-42. Sundall bought plot outlines, gave them to artists who made most of the storytelling decisions, then gave the penciled pages to the writer to dialogue.
Cei-U!
That's the facts, Jack!
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