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Post by Hoosier X on Jan 29, 2024 19:12:55 GMT -5
It's the only time he uses a reverse angle in the two page sequence. It doesn't seem like a particularly good choice by Kirby. I also can't understand how Ben lifts the rug up that Sue and Reed are both standing on if we're getting picky. It is crappy scripting, though. The story telling is clear and Stan thinking Reed is Johnny is a mistake. Anything else is just fog to obscure what a careless editor and scripter Stan could be.
Does anybody else here have any problem with Kirby's reverse angle in panel 3? Or is it a red herring.
I do not see how the reverse angle is a problem in any way. |
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Post by chadwilliam on Jan 29, 2024 20:44:53 GMT -5
As someone who's been following this thread with interest, but without a strong opinion in the matter due to the lack of knowledge I have about its finer details, I was wondering if there's a consensus as to roughly when Lee would have reached that point in his relationship with Kirby/Ditko/Romita/etc. where he would say "I want Dr. Doom to be the villain in the next issue" to the artist and leave it at that until he got the artwork back requiring his captions and dialogue?
I've heard it claimed that Marvel was desperately in need of a hit at the start of the 1960's and The Fantastic Four made that possible. I don't know how desperate things were - perhaps they could have continued with monster mags and westerns and stayed afloat for years, I honestly don't know - but I think it's understood that the company had high hopes when they returned superheroes to their stable. Given the importance of this move, I have trouble believing that Lee's approach in 1961/62/63 when success was hardly a guarantee would have been the same approach he was taking when things were up and running successfully - there's a big difference between Spider-Man #50 featuring the debut of The Kingpin falling flat and Amazing Fantasy #15 falling flat.
Would Lee really have said to Kirby in 1961, "We need a story of four people going into space, getting hit by cosmic rays, and getting powers - you take care of that for me and I'll fill the word balloons when it's done?" I'm not saying that Kirby couldn't have turned in a masterpiece singlehandedly, but the question I have is - would Stan Lee really have been comfortable not getting involved personally in that first issue (and any subsequent ones prior to his becoming convinced that the feature was a hit) given how much he had riding on it? If this were Lee's one shot at turning Marvel into a major publishing company, wouldn't - if nothing else - sheer nerves over the worry of failing in this venture have motivated him to get deeply involved himself regardless of how talented he knew Kirby was?
What about the comics Lee was credited with writing up until then - in Amazing Fantasy, Tales of Suspense, and so forth? I haven't read a lot of those, but the ones I have don't seem to lend themselves well to the Marvel Method. There's a lot of O' Henry twists in those stories - would Lee have been saying "I want a story where a guy's cheating on his taxes at the start and is ironically being chased by a mummy at the end - draw that up and I'll add the captions and dialogue later."? Sounds a lot harder than "I want Spider-Man fighting Sandman this issue".
Of course, by his own admission, Lee did start giving his artists those one sentence descriptions, but I find it hard to believe that he would have been more closely involved in the scripting process of the final issues of Amazing Fantasy than he was in the early days of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four when he had so much riding on those comics.
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 29, 2024 21:18:36 GMT -5
As someone who's been following this thread with interest, but without a strong opinion in the matter due to the lack of knowledge I have about its finer details, I was wondering if there's a consensus as to roughly when Lee would have reached that point in his relationship with Kirby/Ditko/Romita/etc. where he would say "I want Dr. Doom to be the villain in the next issue" to the artist and leave it at that until he got the artwork back requiring his captions and dialogue? I've heard it claimed that Marvel was desperately in need of a hit at the start of the 1960's and The Fantastic Four made that possible. I don't know how desperate things were - perhaps they could have continued with monster mags and westerns and stayed afloat for years, I honestly don't know - but I think it's understood that the company had high hopes when they returned superheroes to their stable. Given the importance of this move, I have trouble believing that Lee's approach in 1961/62/63 when success was hardly a guarantee would have been the same approach he was taking when things were up and running successfully - there's a big difference between Spider-Man #50 featuring the debut of The Kingpin falling flat and Amazing Fantasy #15 falling flat. Would Lee really have said to Kirby in 1961, "We need a story of four people going into space, getting hit by cosmic rays, and getting powers - you take care of that for me and I'll fill the word balloons when it's done?" I'm not saying that Kirby couldn't have turned in a masterpiece singlehandedly, but the question I have is - would Stan Lee really have been comfortable not getting involved personally in that first issue (and any subsequent ones prior to his becoming convinced that the feature was a hit) given how much he had riding on it? If this were Lee's one shot at turning Marvel into a major publishing company, wouldn't - if nothing else - sheer nerves over the worry of failing in this venture have motivated him to get deeply involved himself regardless of how talented he knew Kirby was? What about the comics Lee was credited with writing up until then - in Amazing Fantasy, Tales of Suspense, and so forth? I haven't read a lot of those, but the ones I have don't seem to lend themselves well to the Marvel Method. There's a lot of O' Henry twists in those stories - would Lee have been saying "I want a story where a guy's cheating on his taxes at the start and is ironically being chased by a mummy at the end - draw that up and I'll add the captions and dialogue later."? Sounds a lot harder than "I want Spider-Man fighting Sandman this issue". Of course, by his own admission, Lee did start giving his artists those one sentence descriptions, but I find it hard to believe that he would have been more closely involved in the scripting process of the final issues of Amazing Fantasy than he was in the early days of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four when he had so much riding on those comics. Fantastic Four #1 is such a Frankenstein of a book that it's difficult for me to consider it the "creation" of the FF. The Mole Man chapter is clearly a Kirby monster story from inventory that has been cut up, rescripted, with art inserts and restructuring to try to pass it off as the FF. The original version may have had Kirby in the driver's seat of the plot but I doubt he masterminded the revisions that saw publication. The first part, the origin/intro, is more coherent and intentional, but that too has what appear to be non-Kirby panels, and I think that if Kirby were directed to come up with a new super-hero team, he would have preferred to create an original character rather than use the Human Torch, a feature he hadn't done in the Golden Age. So I have to conclude he was working from some kind of direction, even if we disregard the disputable document of the FF #1 "plot synopsis" that's not a plot synopsis. Kirby may have quickly assumed primary plotting responsibilities once the comic was actually running from-scratch FF adventures, but there is clear evidence of Lee defying or revising Kirby's offerings early on, such as the elimination of masks seen in Kirby's original issue 3 pages. I'd say it was several issues in before we really had the "Fantastic Four", muddying the arguments that either man "created" the FF in the sense of presenting a coherent concept with the ingredients for that success that it became. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 29, 2024 21:31:39 GMT -5
The story telling is clear and Stan thinking Reed is Johnny is a mistake. Anything else is just fog to obscure what a careless editor and scripter Stan could be.
Does anybody else here have any problem with Kirby's reverse angle in panel 3? Or is it a red herring.
I do not see how the reverse angle is a problem in any way. Yeah, I don’t get it either. I don’t see anything wrong with the storytelling there at all. |
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,872
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Post by shaxper on Jan 29, 2024 21:43:51 GMT -5
The unnecessary jabs seem to be kicking back up again. Folks, I brought this thread into the world, and I can take it out.
LAST WARNING.
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Post by kirby101 on Jan 29, 2024 22:52:54 GMT -5
From what I understand, Kirby had been pushing Goodman to restart Superheroes ever since he came back. The success of them at DC, including his own Challengers, eventually convinced Goodman to give it the green light.
I don't know how much I believe that the had to come up with a hit or the comics were done. Probably just them not doing more heroes. Goodman almost quit comics a few times. It was not his main business.
As for the FF, it definitely had a few hands giving it birth. I see Kirby coming up with the team, and plot idea, Stan adds to it, they throw in that Moleman story, as MWGallaher mentioned, and maybe Goodman says to add the Torch.
The FF is not just like the Challengers, but other teams Kirby created were similar.
So you start with a Kirby conception, Stan adds to it, and FF 1 is born.
And obviously Stan could plot, he did those mystery, Western and teen funny books in the 50s. But he had little superhero experience. Nothing like Kirby, or even Ditko.
The monster book plots were probably mostly, Ditko and Kirby conceptions.
In the early days, he talked the plots over with the artists, but with nothing written down, the artist usually went to work without a page by page plot. At some point after a year or two, Ditko and Kirby just did the story on their own.
So when did he do that one sentence plot idea? Probably after he got comfortable with the artists, as with Romita, Colan or Buscema.
But he did this occasionally, not for the most part.
Read what I posted from Romita. The story conference could be anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.
The artist would turn in the pages, often with notes, and Stan would write the script, sometimes reworking the story the way he wanted.
And again, no one is saying that Kirby handed in a finished FF#1, done all on his own, just awaiting dialog. It's a matter of who came up with the original concept once Goodman said to do a superhero book.
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Post by kirby101 on Feb 3, 2024 10:31:41 GMT -5
Mark Evanier talks with Wall;y Wood, SDCC 1980.
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Post by commond on Feb 3, 2024 16:52:04 GMT -5
Larry Hama discusses Wally Wood and Stan Lee:
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 3, 2024 17:20:35 GMT -5
I have heard and read information about the Wally Wood / Stan Lee fight. It seemed to me that maybe Wood thought he could make Marvel his home but was disappointed because of the Marvel Style which place too much work on the artist. Wood went from place to place and I thought Tower would be where he could stay. That didn't work out either. Alcohol can swallow you up , if you're not careful.
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Post by tarkintino on Feb 3, 2024 18:03:44 GMT -5
Larry Hama discusses Wally Wood and Stan Lee: LARRY HAMA Even when he was castigated in the fan press by a former colleague who went so far as to claim total authorship of work that was clearly a collaboration, Stan refrained from rebuttal because to do so would be a cruelty to great talent who was laboring under a few unfortunate decisions. Fascinating, and I get the strong impression of the "former colleague" who made the false claims. Lee could have placed this person on the equivalent of the witness stand to expose the fairy tales with the truth, but he was being kind...merciful, rather than evasive. Undoubtedly, and nevermind historical records. Quite true, and yes, some did not wish to hear the truth about the creative process--the person who had to take control in order to make the project work. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 3, 2024 19:07:43 GMT -5
Maybe it's wise to understand that most people are not black and white. There are nuances to them and their behavior. Lee, for the most part kept collecting checks from Marvel and the other creative forefathers were left out in the cold. I can imagine that causing resentment.
This is why I admire the Image 7 for recognizing that artists have a small shelf live and once the big 2 don't need you, they fire you without any mercy.
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Post by commond on Feb 3, 2024 20:14:21 GMT -5
Maybe it's wise to understand that most people are not black and white. There are nuances to them and their behavior. Lee, for the most part kept collecting checks from Marvel and the other creative forefathers were left out in the cold. I can imagine that causing resentment. This is why I admire the Image 7 for recognizing that artists have a small shelf live and once the big 2 don't need you, they fire you without any mercy. The problem is that people tend to blame Stan for everything because in their minds Stan = Marvel. Some headline will come out like Neal Kirby blasting the Disney Stan Lee documentary, the media will run with it and suddenly you have people picking sides based on very little information. It doesn't take much to tarnish a person's reputation these days and Stan has been bashed about since his death. You have to remember that after Goodman sold Marvel and Stan didn't get the keys to the kingdom like he expected, Stan went through a period where he was outspoken about the evils of the comic book industry. That period lasted for about two years until they made him the president of Marvel. From that point on, he towed the company line. If Stan had left Marvel for good in the early 70s, he may have expressed different opinions later on in life. Even after decades of being the company face, folks were still poking and prodding him about whether he had any regrets about not owning the rights to the Marvel characters. When he sued Marvel and won, that led to another round of Stan bashing. As far as I can tell, the turning point was when Goodman sold the company and the creators were forced to sign their rights away. The Kirbys never sued Marvel while Jack was alive, AFAIC, despite their lawyers sending threatening letters to Marvel, and the reason for that may have been because they didn't have a case. It may have also been that Jack didn't want to do it. When the new owners took over from Goodman, they were adamant that Marvel owned all rights to the characters and that is reflected in books like The Origins of Marvel Comics yet people assume that Stan was the driving force behind those decisions. I read any interview with BWS the other day where he supposed that if Jack had been more of a business man that he may have been able to have negotiated a better deal from Marvel. I also read comments from Sim about how he regretted that Jack missed out on the direct market by a few years and wasn't able to complete New Gods and have it continuously in print. Unfortunately, Jack worked for 40 years under conditions that were much worse than the artists who were able to hold onto copyrights. As my countryman, Dylan Horrocks, put it:  |
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 3, 2024 20:34:47 GMT -5
Yep. You raise some reasonable points. What gets lost in the shuffle is that Kirby made a lot of money in comics. He wasn’t poor and I’m sure that the way he was treated at the end became a sticking point. I heard that some editors would pass his finished pages around and make fun of them the second time around at Marvel.
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Post by berkley on Feb 3, 2024 21:34:12 GMT -5
Larry Hama discusses Wally Wood and Stan Lee:
One must always remember that it's easy, and in fact to your advantage, to be the gentleman when you're in a position of power, just as it's almost inevitable that you'll appear surly and ungrateful when fighting for your rights within a system that denies them. This is played out in history time and again.
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 3, 2024 21:51:12 GMT -5
Larry Hama discusses Wally Wood and Stan Lee:
One must always remember that it's easy, and in fact to your advantage, to be the gentleman when you're in a position of power, just as it's almost inevitable that you'll appear surly and ungrateful when fighting for your rights within a system that denies them. This is played out in history time and again.
Valid point. |
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