shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,707
|
Post by shaxper on Sept 29, 2021 20:51:53 GMT -5
Up until now, this has been the ONE place on the entire web discussing authorship issues between Lee and Kirby without resorting to insults and bad feelings. In the past two hours, one post has already been removed, and others are being evaluated by the moderator team as I type this. Mind your manners and remember this community's Rules of the Road. If you have to be mean in order to be right, then you were never right to begin with.
|
|
|
Post by kirby101 on Oct 2, 2021 16:20:31 GMT -5
Interesting recent post by Mark Evanier. There was a Jeopardy question, and Kirby was the answer.
|
|
|
Post by tarkintino on Oct 3, 2021 14:33:46 GMT -5
Often regarded as one of the most non-BS, honest creatives ever to work in the comic industry, John Romita gave his insider's view of Stan Lee and one of the ways he created stories, from FOOM #18 (June, 1977):
The point being that one of the foundational shoulders of what made Marvel plainly states Lee was creating stories.
|
|
|
Post by kirby101 on Oct 3, 2021 15:04:42 GMT -5
Romita has talked about how inadequate he felt when he took over Spider-Man. He looked at Ditko and Kirby a lot to find his footing. Can you imagine that he checked in to Spider-Man 39 and started drawing AND writing all the stories? Likewise, I would like to see where, Bucema, Colan, Heck, Ayers...said Lee never wrote a story or created anything.
|
|
|
Post by MWGallaher on Oct 3, 2021 22:01:46 GMT -5
Likewise, I would like to see where, Buscema, Colan, Heck, Ayers...said Lee never wrote a story or created anything. I haven't seen where any of those guys spoke in detail about how the plotting of the stories went, exactly what level of detail they were working from when they sat down to the art board. This silence I interpret as them considering that stuff "company business"; if they were doing the heavy lifting on the stories, they weren't going to contradict the boss. Stan Lee, however, did occasionally cop to the fact that the guys credited only as artists were at least sometimes plotting the stories, including not just Kirby, but Heck and Ayers: I hesitate to wade too deep into these waters, since it is a controversial subject, but the impression I had as a consumer of Marvel in the 70's was that Stan implied that he was the primary author of every comic his name was on, that the plot details, the twists, the turns, the revelations, the staging, all were his. My impression of the "Marvel Method" was that the artists were illustrating the plots they'd been given, not contributing significant story ideas. Maybe others had different impressions, but in the 70's, aside from his admission that the Silver Surfer came as a total surprise when he received Kirby's pages, I hadn't seen any indications that Stan wasn't calling all the shots, story-wise. But there were certainly examples in the 60's where Stan admitted his artists were largely plotting the stories, such as in the Bullpen Bulletins excerpt above, and his description of Dr. Strange as being Ditko's idea. And now that comics historians--a field of study that didn't really exist in the 70's, and one that we wouldn't have dreamed would ever exist--have come along, it's not surprising that we are re-evaluating what Stan contributed vs. what the artists contributed to the stories. Did Stan contribute literally nothing? Of course not! Did Stan contribute something somewhat less than what we--or maybe I should just say I--credit him for? I happen to think so...it's just a question of how much less, and in what instances. I think comics fandom's affection for Stan Lee, and their conditioned embrace of Stan's mythology surrounding the Marvel empire colors the reaction to any suggestion that just perhaps the credits are sometimes out of proportion, but the fact is that Stan says in black and white above that Don Heck would "make up all the details", "plotting out the story", and yet, Don Heck never, to my awareness, received formal credit at Marvel as anything other than the artist. We've got to work that acknowledgment, somehow, into our understanding of how these stories came to be, rather than simply fall back on the presumption that Stan Lee came up with all the "good stuff". And if Don Heck was plotting some of his comics, was that occasional, or was that the standard operating procedure? Did Stan usually give artists detailed plots, but now and then he'd let them navigate? Did Stan start with detailed plots, then let the artists take over once it was well under way? Did Stan always let the artists let the artists handle the plotting, then do refining/patching/re-writing after they turned in the work?
|
|
|
Post by kirby101 on Oct 3, 2021 22:23:45 GMT -5
For the record, I am simply countering the idea that Stan did nothing but script already done stories by the artists. We know that sometimes the plots were just from Stan telling the story to the artist, and that the artist did a lot of plotting. We also know that both Kirby and Ditko gave in some stories without input from Stan. Stan took way too much credit for creating Marvel. He did a lot, including give Marvel it's voice. So to summarize, Stan did not do as much or create as much as he said he did and was credited with. But he wasn't a passenger along for the ride.
|
|
|
Post by Rob Allen on Oct 3, 2021 23:03:05 GMT -5
I wish I could find this quote, but I recall reading that when Stan wanted to move to the "Marvel Method" on everything, Don Heck didn't want to do it right away, so for a while Stan would give Don a script for the first three pages and the last three pages of a ~20-page story, and Don would fill in the pages between. I have no idea how long this lasted, assuming that I'm remembering correctly in the first place.
|
|
|
Post by berkley on Oct 4, 2021 0:19:03 GMT -5
I'm not basing this on much of anything other than how these comics "feel" to me, but I've always had the impression that Stan did most of the writing on certain things, e.g. Daredevil - and, I would have said until recently on Spider-Man too after Ditko left, but apparently Romita had more input there than I'd thought previously?
And I think you can see that in a certain lack of imagination in, for example, DD's rogue's gallery: he didn't have a Ditko or a Kirby to create original characters that flt fresh and compelling. Out of curiosity, did Spider-Man have many new villains after Ditko left? I remember the Prowler, who I thought was OK. But I have't read the Romita Spider-man as thoroughly as I have most of the other big Marvel series of the 60s.
For me, Stan was great at taking an idea and running with it - but not so great at coming up with the ideas in the first place. For that, he needed help.
|
|
|
Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 4, 2021 6:59:03 GMT -5
(... Out of curiosity, did Spider-Man have many new villains after Ditko left? I remember the Prowler, who I thought was OK. But I have't read the Romita Spider-man as thoroughly as I have most of the other big Marvel series of the 60s. (...) Off the top of my head, there's Kingpin and Rhino (with the former becoming a major adversary long-standing for both Spidey and then DD), and also the Shocker as a lesser but still relatively often used villain. But yeah, there was nothing like the burst of new character creation that marked Ditko's run on ASM.
|
|
|
Post by MWGallaher on Oct 4, 2021 7:01:26 GMT -5
I do realize that most or all of us here recognize and acknowledge that artists often had significant plotting input into those Stan Lee-scripted Marvel stories, I'm just trying to work out some of my own feelings about that. One thing, for example, that gnaws at me is the case of Don Heck. Although comics fandom's general attitude toward his work is today much more positive, there was a period where he was considered a "hack", reportedly to Don's own emotional suffering. "Boy, those early Avengers stories were great, I just wish some better artist had drawn them!" We can now be fairly confident that, had Don Heck broken his arm one month, we might get, say, a Bob Powell-drawn story where the Avengers fight a guy from the future called Kang, but it probably would have been an entirely different story, perhaps one that would have faded into the dustbin of insignificant Marvel stories (like most of the stories Bob Powell did for Stan), rather than one that would eventually inspire major motion pictures. We don't have the capacity now to determine how much Don Heck contributed to those plots, specifically, except to apply the kinds of admittedly speculative forensics that Tolworthy has done with Kirby's work in his book. I'm sure there are indicators of a Heck plot to be found by a sharper analyst than me; I am aware of some Ayers plot indicators, for example, such as his tendency to have to cram a lot into the final few panels to resolve things he'd been more leisurely depicting in the prior pages.
|
|
|
Post by tarkintino on Oct 4, 2021 7:05:57 GMT -5
Out of curiosity, did Spider-Man have many new villains after Ditko left? I remember the Prowler, who I thought was OK. The Kingpin (and his family), Silvermane, the Rhino (for a start), but its all so telling that villains created during the Ditko run became the legends of TASM (and Marvel) after his departure, with the Green Goblin and Doc Ock being at the top of that list. The utterly psychotic, son-abusing, calculating Osborn was a darker direction of writing not typical of Ditko, and certainly not in his time on TASM.
|
|
|
Post by Rob Allen on Oct 4, 2021 11:35:33 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by chaykinstevens on Oct 5, 2021 2:15:13 GMT -5
We can now be fairly confident that, had Don Heck broken his arm one month, we might get, say, a Bob Powell-drawn story where the Avengers fight a guy from the future called Kang, but it probably would have been an entirely different story, perhaps one that would have faded into the dustbin of insignificant Marvel stories (like most of the stories Bob Powell did for Stan), rather than one that would eventually inspire major motion pictures. Jack Kirby drew Kang's first appearance in Avengers #8.
|
|
|
Post by berkley on Oct 5, 2021 3:12:26 GMT -5
Fascinating stuff. If we take the writer/artist plotting or story contributions as a ratio (excluding the artwork itself), can we guess that there was a range of values to that ratio that go from the low value of Lee/Kirby or Lee/Ditko, where the artist did much of the writing, through the middling values of Lee/Heck, where the artist was given a beginning and ending, to perhaps higher ratios where Lee did most of the writing for artists who needed a little more?
Or do we think that the model described by Heck applied to everyone - that even Ditko and Kirby were given those first and last three pages by Stan, and just filled in the blanks?
Subjectively, it seems to me that the Ditko and Kirby books were qualitatively different from most other Marvel books in their higher level of creativity - more startling new ideas and characters, and generally different kinds of stories. So I think they were doing much more than just filling in those middle 15 or so pages.
It might be interesting to do a statistical analysis of where new characters or unexpected developments took place in the individual issues of all the various series - within the first and last 3 pages, or in the middle - but then it seems likely that most new developments do take place in the middle of a story, since the beginning and end are largely devoted to exposition and climax+resolution, so maybe such an exercise wouldn't yield any useful results.
|
|
|
Post by MWGallaher on Oct 5, 2021 4:30:28 GMT -5
We can now be fairly confident that, had Don Heck broken his arm one month, we might get, say, a Bob Powell-drawn story where the Avengers fight a guy from the future called Kang, but it probably would have been an entirely different story, perhaps one that would have faded into the dustbin of insignificant Marvel stories (like most of the stories Bob Powell did for Stan), rather than one that would eventually inspire major motion pictures. Jack Kirby drew Kang's first appearance in Avengers #8. Granted, not a persuasive example, since Kirby laid the groundwork for this one. It may prove that none of Heck's specific contributions prove to be inspirations for future films, beyond whatever he contributed to the official Iron Man origin story and the Mandarin, who bears little resemblance to Heck's version in either plot details or visuals.
|
|