I have read that in several places, though I can never find the original source. Just referred back to.

But, but, but ...Stan did give credit to Ditko and Kirby.

From Stan Lee's autobiagraphy in 2002.


Notice "co-creator is in quotes. And even then, he claims all the ideas, all the characters, all the concepts, originated with him and him alone.

You are being so generous Stan. as you continue to steal from those who did the real creating.

Hey, c'mon…there's no need to be sarcastic towards posters here who think that Stan's dialogue was an important component of what made these stories great. That's not the appropriate tone for this thread.

But to your point, Stan didn't "just" do dialogue. That's way too simplistic a take on it. He was a co-creator of most, if not all, of Marvel's classic Silver Age superheroes and many of the monthly stories originated with him (or co-originated with him), and after providing a rough plot outline -- verbal or on occasion typed -- he allowed the artist to run with it. He would then add the dialogue which gave the characters life, and his scripting was almost always entertaining. On some occasions, Stan's dialogue could even be surprisingly deep and philosophical, given that these comics were aimed at 8 to 14-year-olds for the most part.

The fact that Stan was something of a braggy, carnival huckster and did often take too much credit for himself shouldn't obscure the fact that he was an extremely important part of Marvel's success in the '60s. His contribution to the personalities of these fictional characters is also a big part of why we're still talking so passionately about those comics 60 odd years later.

No, there is nothing else in the issue showing the radar. There are some panels showing him using his hearing and sense of smell to aid his heroic activities, but those could have been originally intended to be representations of Matt's training to refine his natural senses, as per the notion--which was at the time taken as established fact--that blind people's other senses improve to compensate for the lack of vision. 

My contention is that "the concept of this new Daredevil being blind and having a radar-sense" were in fact not in place before work started: that Stan Lee did indeed come up with the radar-sense angle but that it came after Everett completed the pages, exactly contrary to what Confessor takes as a given. This gets to just the point I was trying to express: if we take as a given that all the key elements were in place before Stan's artists (in this case, Everett) did their work, it it's not surprising that someone says "I just don't see that in the artwork..."

I think it's quite clear in the artwork that he is walking with the crook of the cane (where, presumably, the electronics are installed) pointing ahead of him (which, again, is absolutely not how someone who is blind or is trying to appear blind would carry it), and that the "pings" are all shown at the level of the cane, and emitting from the crook of the cane.

Bottom line is, I think Everett gave Stan a story about a blind superhero acrobat, Stan decided it was too implausible and injected the radar-sense concept by tacking on some radioactive waste that wasn't part of Bill Everett's pages.

Which leads to questioning just how detailed a plot he gave Everett, if he gave him any plot at all, which, ultimately, leads to looking at all the early Marvel comics in a different light, when we divorce ourselves from presumptions about their development process.

Thank you, kirby101.

I've been enjoying the Atlas series, Strange Worlds, which was a science fiction anthology series that included elements of horror and fantasy. There's no way of knowing who plotted and scripted each story -- whether it was Stan & Lieber or the artists themselves -- but the editorial directive is essentially same: short 4-5 page stories with an O.Henry/Twilight Zone style twist at the end. I believe the debut issue includes the very first story Kirby did upon returning to Atlas in '58. Marvel has collected the Kirby and Ditko stories from Strange Worlds in Monsters: The Marvel Monsterbus by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber & Jack Kirby and Marvel Masters of Suspense: Stan Lee & Steve Ditko Omnibus, but if Stan was providing plots, it was a sentence at best. I suspect he scripted the Ditko stories. It's possible that Lieber scripted the Kirby stories, but Jack may have done so himself. The Ditko stories are very cool, and to my tastes, better than the Kirby stories, but there's also fantastic work from Don Heck, Dick Ayers, and John Buscema. Kirby's stories are probably closest to what I would consider actual sci-fi, but it's clear from reading the stories that sci-fi wasn't something that only Kirby could do. The bullpen could crank out just about any genre. Any link between this series and the Fantastic Four is tenuous at best. It's becoming clearer to me that a character book was a distinctly different thing from these anthology books, though some of the stories accomplish a great deal in 4-5 pages.