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Post by MDG on Jun 29, 2015 9:38:24 GMT -5
...I'd rather give both men the benefit of the doubt than demonize either. Cei-U! I summon the hazy history! Well, you're a better man than I am. To me, what gives Jack the edge is the way his Marvel work, especially FF, fits into the continuity of his whole career. Even acknowledging collaborators like Simon, you can track themes and character tropes from his GA work, Boy's Ranch, Challs, monster books, etc., through his Marvel work, and later on through New Gods, etc. That's a little harder to do w/ Stan. On a side note, it must have been very exciting to be at Marvel at the beginning. To be sure. It seems comics are full of these these 5-year bursts of innovation and creativity, like the GA hero explosion during WWII, post-War Spirits, EC, post-Zap undergrounds, DC around the time of Crisis, first indie explosion in the mid-80s (first, Fanatgraphics, Pacific, Eclipse, Renegade) etc. |
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jun 29, 2015 16:01:27 GMT -5
...I'd rather give both men the benefit of the doubt than demonize either. Cei-U! I summon the hazy history! Well, you're a better man than I am. To me, what gives Jack the edge is the way his Marvel work, especially FF, fits into the continuity of his whole career. Even acknowledging collaborators like Simon, you can track themes and character tropes from his GA work, Boy's Ranch, Challs, monster books, etc., through his Marvel work, and later on through New Gods, etc. That's a little harder to do w/ Stan. Sorta. But you can definitely see Stan's pre-Fantastic Four career as a series of aborted attempts to reach a more sophisticated audience - Or, specifically, cater to the same audience as EC. Menace, Battlefield, even Amazing Adult Fantasy all seem like attempts to do comics the Stan Lee way. His more sophisticated-than-the-competition superhero stuff definitely seems to fall into that pattern. |
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Post by gothos on Jul 1, 2015 12:36:23 GMT -5
Well, you're a better man than I am. To me, what gives Jack the edge is the way his Marvel work, especially FF, fits into the continuity of his whole career. Even acknowledging collaborators like Simon, you can track themes and character tropes from his GA work, Boy's Ranch, Challs, monster books, etc., through his Marvel work, and later on through New Gods, etc. That's a little harder to do w/ Stan. Sorta. But you can definitely see Stan's pre-Fantastic Four career as a series of aborted attempts to reach a more sophisticated audience - Or, specifically, cater to the same audience as EC. Menace, Battlefield, even Amazing Adult Fantasy all seem like attempts to do comics the Stan Lee way. His more sophisticated-than-the-competition superhero stuff definitely seems to fall into that pattern. I'd definitely agree that Stan, as the longtime editor of Marvel Comics, was trying to cast around for survival strategies long before the infamous "conversation with the wife" story. We forget at times that even before the Wertham incidents, comic books had become a very unstable business in the early 50s. Major player Fawcett even quit the playing field in '52 or '53. Clearly Bill Gaines hoped (in vain, as it turned out) that his "picto-fiction" would reach an adult audience with deeper pockets than the traditional juveniles, and to whatever extent Stan Lee followed Gaines' lead, he may've shared a similar goal. The introduction of the Code certainly had a chilling effect on any forays into adult material, but some fans have suggested that Lee found an outlet for his ambitions in his collaborators with Ditko. It's not for no reason that the title devoted mostly to Lee's collaborations with Ditko was called "Amazing ADULT Fantasy"-- though it doesn't seem likely that Lee really expected this title to sell to adults, regardless of Lee's own opinion of Ditko's art. Kirby's infamous "I found Stan crying" tale-- which I don't credit-- makes it sound like Timely brought him in to save the company. Long ago the Timely-Atlas Yahoo group ran some mss. that showed concretely that Kirby didn't immediately become THE featured artist at Marvel when he began working for them regularly in '58 or thereabouts. I add that a lot of Kirby's monster-books are collaborations not with Stan but with his bro Larry, perhaps at times using broad plots from Stan. That would argue that Stan personally didn't value the "big creature" stories that much, though he must have known that they had struck a nerve with young horror-fans. (To my knowledge only Charlton actually went out its way to license such big-screen gargantuas as Konga, Gorgo, and Reptilicus, later renamed "Reptisaurus" to avoid the licensing fee.) |
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