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Post by jester on Jun 20, 2023 11:23:28 GMT -5
I don't really have a lot to add to this discussion that hasn't been already discussed at length. But Romita told different anecdoctes about different experiences working with Stan on plots. He said that sometimes all Stan would do is leave him a note saying "the villain for this month is going to be the Rhino". He said that sometimes they would have detailed plotting conferences that lasted one to two hours where both men would contribute ideas and they would flesh out who the villain was going to be, the nature of the story's beginning, middle and end, what sub-plots and supporting characters they were going to focus on, etc. And he said that sometimes he would come up with plots on his own and bring them in to Stan. This is a detail I think often gets overlooked in these discussions, that the Marvel Method was designed to be flexible and who contributed what could and often did vary from issue to issue. At the end of the day, my contention is that the Fantastic Four is a Lee-Kirby co-creation, Spider-Man is a Lee-Ditko co-creation, Daredevil is a Lee-Everett co-creation, etc.
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Post by tarkintino on Jun 20, 2023 12:33:38 GMT -5
He said that sometimes they would have detailed plotting conferences that lasted one to two hours where both men would contribute ideas and they would flesh out who the villain was going to be, the nature of the story's beginning, middle and end, what sub-plots and supporting characters they were going to focus on, etc. And he said that sometimes he would come up with plots on his own and bring them in to Stan. This is a detail I think often gets overlooked in these discussions, that the Marvel Method was designed to be flexible and who contributed what could and often did vary from issue to issue. At the end of the day, my contention is that the Fantastic Four is a Lee-Kirby co-creation, Spider-Man is a Lee-Ditko co-creation, Daredevil is a Lee-Everett co-creation, etc. Exactly, hence the reason I posted, "but he's talked about his process with Lee and though not always as consistent a pattern as what i've recollected, it's a view into part of said process enough to know Lee was not a peripheral figure in the creation of major stories."The peripheral part is the extreme some use as a cudgel against Lee rather than looking for the truth in collaboration, as if erasing creative credits and participation from Lee will elevate the other creators (i.e. Kirby and Ditko) as "master" across their careers. As I've said elsewhere, if Lee was just a glorified post-it-note kind of writer, then the Lee critics should take a long look at Ditko and Kirby's creations post-Lee/Marvel association, and number how many reached the heights either reached at Marvel. |
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Post by Rob Allen on Jun 20, 2023 13:34:13 GMT -5
Jack Kirby's version of Spider-Man was a shamelessly blatant rip-off of the Fly character he and Joe Simon created for Harvey, Nitpick: the Fly was from Archie, not Harvey. |
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Post by Cei-U! on Jun 20, 2023 14:33:01 GMT -5
Jack Kirby's version of Spider-Man was a shamelessly blatant rip-off of the Fly character he and Joe Simon created for Harvey, Nitpick: the Fly was from Archie, not Harvey. Oops! You are correct, sir. My original post has been changed accordingly.
Cei-U! That's some first class nitpicking there!
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Post by MWGallaher on Jun 20, 2023 16:30:23 GMT -5
Romita has said Stan would have very involved story conferences with him, and provide his plotting notes; as an artist, Romita also made notes based on the specifics of the conferences over panels during the process of laying out scenes, so the "Jackpot" page may have been the result of such a conference. Now, as many a CCF-er knows, I think Romita is one of the key, most impactful creators in the medium's history, and I'm in no way minimizing his being a co-plotter (and restructuring the entire visual language) on TASM (and other titles), but he's talked about his process with Lee and though not always as consistent a pattern as what i've recollected, it's a view into part of said process enough to know Lee was not a peripheral figure in the creation of major stories. And I'm really not trying to say he was a consistently peripheral figure; he was surely capable of plotting stories on his own, and of re-plotting via script when he was dissatisfied with or disagreed with what he had to work with. But when we see that there were prominent instances where he was most likely scripting over a plot that he did little if anything to originate, we're left considering which stories he did plot. Of biggest interest there are those stories that introduced characters and concepts. If we grant that he plotted some of the Spider-Man stories in some depth, and left others primarily to the artist, we need to face the possibility, at least, that he didn't do that on the origin/creation stories. I could plot a decent Spider-Man story once the basics had been established, but I couldn't create the concept. |
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Post by impulse on Jun 20, 2023 17:35:23 GMT -5
Like with many things, the truth is likely in the middle. I think the most plausible situation is a bunch of talented guys worked together, each making significant contributions of varying amounts over time, and then argued about who did the most. The guy with the PR megaphone won the argument as he had the loudest voice.  Also, I would watch a Netflix show with the knowledgeable folks here arguing about all of this stuff overlaid with examples like that original comics art page, various pages, etc. |
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Post by commond on Jun 20, 2023 17:54:38 GMT -5
My impression has always been that he was more heavily involved in the early years, and that he left more of the work to the artist as business grew. I find it hard to believe that he had little-to-no involvement in the origin stories. The artists may have plotted the stories, but I can't imagine Lee having zero input. It's hard for me to imagine the Stan Lee that we knew having nothing to say about anything. We'll never know who came up with what, or whether Stan actually wrote a synopsis for Fantastic Four #1. Perhaps Jack went off and plotted the entire thing by himself and Lee just added the dialogue and captions. I don't think it makes much difference. In the end, they were the co-creators. Jack was the plotter/co-plotter slash artist, Stan was the writer/scripter. Could Lee have invented the Fantastic Four without Jack? I doubt it. Would it have been as good without Lee scripting it? I doubt it. Challengers of the Unknown wasn't as good as prime Fantastic Four.
I completely agree that Lee shouldn't be credited as the sole creator, but that was a separate beast in itself. There are numerous reasons why that became Stan's media profile, and not all of them are Stan's doing. At the same time, painting Stan as the villain is too extreme. The industry went overboard with it in the 80s and 90s, and while I greedily ate it up in the CBJ, in retrospect it was unbalanced.
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Post by berkley on Jun 20, 2023 18:18:18 GMT -5
Agreed, and right after Kirby left FF, Lee continued without missing a creative step in line with what had come before, which is all of the evidence one needs to conclude Lee was not being carried along, or as I mentioned in my previous post, he was not a peripheral figure. We can understand Kirby's son feeling his father was shortchanged / screwed over, but his "shallow" / "uneducated" barbs are not only childish, but patently untrue to anyone whoever saw or met Lee, especially back during the Silver and Bronze Age years. Attacking Lee in that way changes absolutely nothing in regards to the historical record. He did not say he was uneducated, he said he had a limited knowledge of mythology and science compared to Kirby. This is true. One only has to look at a history of what they did before and realize Thor is a Kirby creations. And we are talking about creation, not who wrote better words, or was a better editor or what the strengths of each was. As for FF, while those Lee/Buscema were good, were there any classics or revolutionary stories as he had done with Kirby. Or were they mostly retreads of the first 100 issues?
Yes, that's one of the keys for me. The post-Kirby Thor with Lee and other artists was smilarly a very good imitation of what had been done by Kirby and Lee. I'd even say that the Lee/Romita Spider-Man, probably the strongest work Lee produced without either Ditko or Kirby, was mainly built on those early Ditko/Lee issues. So for me Lee pretty consistently showed that when he couldn't rely on a special creative and story-telling talent as his partner, his work was at a lower level.
Fans who don't think much of things like Kirby's New Gods feel the same way about Kirby. I think they're dead wrong and specifically make the mistake of seeing those works as failed efforts to reproduce the kind of thing Kirby and Lee did together, which they really were not.
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Post by kirby101 on Jun 20, 2023 18:26:37 GMT -5
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Post by commond on Jun 20, 2023 18:41:43 GMT -5
My problem with Kirby's 70s work is that he has all these amazing ideas and incredible new characters, and he starts off with a hiss and a roar only to run out of steam on every book. Kirby's biggest supporters seemingly want to paint him as the victim -- it wasn't Jack's fault, it was Carmine, it was editorial, etc. However, Kamandi ran for a fairly long time and ran out of steam fairly quickly. The impression I get from his DC books is that Jack was so embittered by his experiences at Marvel that he took on too much of the work at DC. Either that, or he was trying too hard to prove he could do it all by himself. I don't know if he needed a co-writer, but he could have done with some type of help in guiding the stories. I like his New Gods stuff, but even Jack wasn't that satisfied with the Hunger Dogs ending.
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Post by kirby101 on Jun 20, 2023 18:44:04 GMT -5
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Post by kirby101 on Jun 20, 2023 18:47:14 GMT -5
My problem with Kirby's 70s work is that he has all these amazing ideas and incredible new characters, and he starts off with a hiss and a roar only to run out of steam on every book. Kirby's biggest supporters seemingly want to paint him as the victim -- it wasn't Jack's fault, it was Carmine, it was editorial, etc. However, Kamandi ran for a fairly long time and ran out of steam fairly quickly. The impression I get from his DC books is that Jack was so embittered by his experiences at Marvel that he took on too much of the work at DC. Either that, or he was trying too hard to prove he could do it all by himself. I don't know if he needed a co-writer, but he could have done with some type of help in guiding the stories. I like his New Gods stuff, but even Jack wasn't that satisfied with the Hunger Dogs ending. According to Mark Evaner, who was there and should know, The New Gods were menat to be a limited series and DC told Jack to make it an ongoing after he started. So yeah, it started to limp when they made him change what he intended to do.
Disagree about Kamandi, read issue #16. Great writing.
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Post by commond on Jun 20, 2023 18:53:15 GMT -5
This what I was talking about before. Because Stan was the salesman for Marvel Comics, it's so easy for people to view him as a con-man who did none of the work and took all of the credit. |
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Post by berkley on Jun 20, 2023 20:55:13 GMT -5
My problem with Kirby's 70s work is that he has all these amazing ideas and incredible new characters, and he starts off with a hiss and a roar only to run out of steam on every book. Kirby's biggest supporters seemingly want to paint him as the victim -- it wasn't Jack's fault, it was Carmine, it was editorial, etc. However, Kamandi ran for a fairly long time and ran out of steam fairly quickly. The impression I get from his DC books is that Jack was so embittered by his experiences at Marvel that he took on too much of the work at DC. Either that, or he was trying too hard to prove he could do it all by himself. I don't know if he needed a co-writer, but he could have done with some type of help in guiding the stories. I like his New Gods stuff, but even Jack wasn't that satisfied with the Hunger Dogs ending. According to Mark Evaner, who was there and should know, The New Gods were menat to be a limited series and DC told Jack to make it an ongoing after he started. So yeah, it started to limp when they made him change what he intended to do.
Disagree about Kamandi, read issue #16. Great writing.
I strongly disagree that the New Gods ran out of steam: for me, it was just getting going when it was cancelled. Hunger Dogs came years later when the momentum had been lost after such a long time away from it. An interesting alternate ending, as I see it, but not satisfying as a definitive conclusion to the story.
Same with the Eternals: he was just getting it set up when it was first undermined by moving away from the core concept and trying (and failing) to make it more like other MU comics. So for me, not only great ideas but also great execution while those two series lasted.
Kamandi OTOH, I tend more towards Commond's view: I've always seen it as a lesser work, really just a cool future setting and scenario but not much else, and certainly nothing to give it the greater thematic depth of the New Gods or the Eternals.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jun 20, 2023 21:33:23 GMT -5
My problem with Kirby's 70s work is that he has all these amazing ideas and incredible new characters, and he starts off with a hiss and a roar only to run out of steam on every book. Kirby's biggest supporters seemingly want to paint him as the victim -- it wasn't Jack's fault, it was Carmine, it was editorial, etc. However, Kamandi ran for a fairly long time and ran out of steam fairly quickly. The impression I get from his DC books is that Jack was so embittered by his experiences at Marvel that he took on too much of the work at DC. Either that, or he was trying too hard to prove he could do it all by himself. I don't know if he needed a co-writer, but he could have done with some type of help in guiding the stories. I like his New Gods stuff, but even Jack wasn't that satisfied with the Hunger Dogs ending. According to Mark Evaner, who was there and should know, The New Gods were menat to be a limited series and DC told Jack to make it an ongoing after he started. So yeah, it started to limp when they made him change what he intended to do.
Disagree about Kamandi, read issue #16. Great writing.
Is there a source for Evanier’s statement there? Because I find it very hard to believe that New Gods was meant to be a limited series since DC didn’t publish their first intentional mini-series until almost a decade later. |
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