I was truly hoping no one would make this comparison. Kane and Lee operated on very very different levels. Kane actively hid the fact that he had an entire studio writing and drawing as "Bob Kane" long after he had stopped contributing entirely, whereas Lee actively gave credit to his colleagues when that wasn't standard practice at the time (please note that I mean "gave credit" in terms of pencils and inks, not creatorship). Kane's degree of boasting and lying was, by most accounts, far more extreme and duplicitous than Lee's, and Kane seemed content to let Finger starve whereas Lee allegedly played some part in fighting for Kirby behind closed doors. Years later, Stan and Jack were able to reconcile. I'm not aware of any effort on Kane's part to ever reconcile with Finger or offer him and his estate any grace, even after Finger had died and Kane was raking in the big ones from the 1989 Batman movie.

They're not the same.


I want to be clear again that I am no Stan fanatic. When a conversation moves too far to one extreme, the guy standing in the middle is always going to look like a radical in contrast.

No offense, but I always chuckle when people wat to reduce Moore down to something that simple.  I read that long interview session he did, I forget with whom, but it was collected into a book or special magazine, in the 00s (or very early 10s), where he described his beliefs and practices and, basically, it boiled down to meditative practices and the whole snake god thing merely a focal point for meditation.  Not very dissimilar to a mandala.  At least, that was my take.

Moore likes to play to his audience and play up the eccentric and iconoclast; but, to totally dismiss the points he makes, without some consideration, is reductive.  I don't agree with everything he says, nor believe everything he says as gospel truth; but, he does provide interesting perspectives on various subjects that at least raise interesting questions.  They are rarely knee-jerk reactions.  To me, he is worth hearing on a subject, then contemplating what he says and weighing it against other input.

I think it's fairly obvious that Stan wasn't some creative genius. When I was going through the DeFalco years, there was a string of collaborations that Stan failed to get off the ground. The only character he was capable of writing well was the Silver Surfer and even that was a rehash of the same basic ideas. There's no way he could have created the Silver Age Marvel books without the work of his artists. However, the majority of those books and characters would have died on the vine if not for Stan's PR work.

Stan was the guy who was willing to go out there and shill the stuff. Kirby and Ditko showed no interest in doing interviews or any sort of media appearances. Lee wound up becoming the face of the company even after he stepped down as Editor in Chief, whether it was through his soapbox updates or simply by having "Stan Lee Presents" on every comic. And to Stan's credit, he stayed connected to the readers well into the 90s. Whenever you read a Marvel book, particularly while Lee was still part of the bullpen, it felt like Stan was talking directly to you. He was highly adept at making the reader feel like they were part of a special club. It's no surprise that over time Stan became Marvel. I don't believe it happened all at once as part of some Machiavellian scheme to give the artists no credit. A large part of it was due to Stan's long association with the company after Kirby and Ditko had left, as well as the eventual lawsuits. Stan gave Kirby and Ditko writing credits while they were still on the books, but it wasn't enough to satisfy either man.

I don't think Kirby had a lot of respect for writers, which is an attitude still shared by many cartoonists today. In Kirby's day, it was similar to the mistrust between creators in other fields, for example screenwriters, directors and producers. I also think Kirby was massively overrated as a plotter. As overrated as people find Stan was a scripter. I think the plotting is flawed in his solo work to the detriment of just about every book he created, and I'd go further to suggest that outside of the sweet spots that he hit on Fantastic Four and Thor, due to his interests in sci-fi and mythology, he didn't produce a ton of great plots for Silver Age Marvel unless someone can drag up the great X-Men or Avengers plots he came up with. 

One contention I have about the creation process is that Lee seems to suggest coming up with the basic idea makes you the creator of the character. Artists seem to think it's the visual design and the character sketches that are the creation of the character. To me, that's all just ideas and sketches on a page. It's the finished product that's the creation. Spider-Man isn't Spider-Man until he walks and talks within the comic book pages. Dr. Doom is nothing but a striking visual character until he opens his mouth. The scripting was important. You don't just look at comic books, you read them. Some one else could have scripted the same pages. Kirby and Ditko could have done it themselves. But it was Stan who actually did it and managed to create a style or uniformity across the line. 

And finally, artists never seem to give credit to the "inspirations" for their own character designs. Don't get me wrong, I actually think it takes a fair amount of genius to drawn inspiration from a multitude of sources and create something new, but let's not pretend everything came to the artist in a vision of light. 

Where do I say Lee never contributed anything.

I consider Stan Lee one of the greatest Marketers of all time. Lets be honest, alot of the comics in the silver age were lousy... they just were new and exciting, and created great characters and a shared universe that really worked.

Kirby without Lee is just a wild slapping of ideas on the page... brilliantly creative, but not always coherent. Lee, it seems to me, (and this is just from my experience reading comics, I'm not much of a behind the scenes guy) was the one that made the characters into people you could relate to.

Could Kirby have been giving him ideas? Sure. At this point no one can know to what extent, as Shax said in his intro both men remembered things differently, contradicted themselves, etc (as old men do when you ask about old stories)

I am just happy to appreciate their collaboration gave us so many amazing characters and stories.

Ok... how's this... "I tend to take anything said by a guy who says he is a wizard with a grain of salt."