If you go back through this thread, you can find the post I'm referring to. It's not like I made it up. 

Exacty! And now it's apparently Flo Steinberg who is incorrect or is an unreliable witness too.

I've said it before in this thread and I'll say it again: if your default position is to treat everything Stan Lee said as a lie and everything the artists said as truth, then that's not a neutral position from which to posit an alternate, revisionist theory from. It's just classic confirmation bias.

Well, as a further argument towards my interpretation of the cane-maneuvering scene, I will note that "ping" itself is onomatopoeia, a word derived from the sound it represents. Everett was depicting sound being reflected back at him, a sound we associate with sonar, not radar. I will further note that electronic echolocation aids for the blind had long been proposed; consider these closing panels from a Dr. Mid-Nite story written and penciled in 1948, published with new inks by Sal Amendola in ADVENTURE COMICS #418, 1972:



Once the radar-sense concept is cemented in the premise, it's depicted with silent waves emanating from Daredevil's head, not sounds bouncing off of obstructions. One could argue that Everett (and Joe Orlando after him) just didn't think of that way of illustrating the idea, and that was the only way he could come up with conveying it. I think my explanation is more convincing, once you divorce yourself from the biases of assuming that the artist had been provided the radar-sense premise, and consider the possibility that he was coming up with a way to explain how Daredevil could navigate pretty much on his own.

Yes, the artists were fallible, but I find it very unlikely that if Bill Everett were instructed to draw a collision between a van and pedestrians that resulted in a cylinder of radioactive goo bursting in one of the pedestrian's faces that he would have drawn a closed van with no obvious means of its contents reaching the front of the van in the event of a crash, and that he would have chosen not to draw the freaking cylinder at all! The only explanation I find convincing is that didn't have any instruction that this element was supposed to be in the story when he drew it. Now this could be because Stan hadn't thought of it when he provided the plot, or it could have been because Bill was coming up with his own origin story that was later tweaked in the scripting. But I think the confirmation bias is working the other direction, and that gets right to the point I was trying to make: when we go in with the assumption that Stan provided the detailed plot, we are biased to overlook evidence that certain aspects were not initially in the mix.

As for Stan's interview, I am absolutely not trying to make him the bad guy or insinuating that he was lying. By all accounts, the development of DAREDEVIL #1 was a messy effort, and after the accumulation of years of lore, it's perfectly understandable that Stan would not recollect at which point the idea of radar-sense got injected into that lore. If he came up with that angle while scripting the pages, it's no sign of duplicitousness to later misremember it as having been there at the conception. The real starting point would be, in retrospect, the time of publication, and from that perspective, the radar-sense was inarguably there "from the beginning."

We know that neither Stan nor many of his prominent co-creators dwelt much on the "sausage-making" in later recollections, with Stan, in particular, very invested in Hollywood-style "mythic tales" which would resonate with his audience rather than the less-interesting real world production process. Consider FANTASTIC FOUR #1, which is quite clearly a Frankenstein merger of the FF origin with an inventory monster short that was heavily chopped up, re-scripted, and highly altered with art revisions and crude non-Kirby art inserts. Neither Stan nor Jack ever appear to have recalled or at least acknowledged that. Instead, they remembered the concept as it eventually saw print, not the construction details. If they didn't recall or at least discuss the remarkable and certainly difficult and complex details behind the production of one of Marvel's two flagship titles, why would we expect Stan to remember a much more mundane detail about when a certain concept found its way into the first issue of one of the company's lower-tier heroes?

I don't necessarily agree with every point you're making, but I appreciate your well written response. Definitely food for thought.

Thanks for providing the actual post.

Yeah. You misunderstood what he said. He doesn’t say they were all-Kirby books, and I think he probably exaggerates Kirby’s role some. (But by how much? Who knows.)

But then he backs up his statement that they were successful books with the numbers.

Kirby seems to have been doing covers and 13-page lead monster stories for Strange Tales, Journey Into Mystery , Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense by the April 1961 cover dated issue numbers quoted in Prince Namor's post.

Well, there are people on this thread who think it does matter what Jack Kirby said. Reflexively dismissing Kirby is just as bad as saying Stan is always a liar.

There are a lot of people on this thread who think it works both ways. That some people are prone to accepting almost everything that Stan says and dismissing almost anything that counters Stan’s version of the story.

I think it’s fine to hear both sides and let the reader decide.

And hopefully I won’t be called a liar or accused of having an agenda just because I don’t automatically accept one version.