I don't disagree at all that "original ideas and concepts [are] very different than how a character developed as time went on", but the blatant falsehood here is that "Since The Origins of Marvel Comics, Stan had claimed that all the original ideas and concepts were his". As I noted above (and I'll quote myself)...



Nobody is saying that Stan didn't take more credit than he probably should've at times, or that he couldn't be a bit of a c*nt to Kirby or Ditko (like in the "an idea can be given to any artist" quote). But he also did a lot more in the creation of those stories and the development of those characters than "just" the dialogue.

There is testimony from impartial bystanders like Flo Steinberg of the hours-long brainstorming sessions for particular comic issues that Lee would have with Kirby or with Ditko -- you don't need an hours-long brainstorming session over an issue of Fantastic Four or Spider-Man if the artist is doing everything and Stan is just adding dialogue (though I'm sure that did happen on occasion too, but not quite as often as some like to suggest).




Well, I'm not gonna go through every character because, frankly, I can't be bothered, but let's just look at Spider-Man (which, personally, I regard as Lee's best co-creation). The very name Spider-Man was Lee's idea (inspired by the pulp hero The Spider, who Lee was a fan of as a child, but perhaps also influenced by the fly he watched crawling up the wall one day or however that story goes); it was his idea to make Spidey a teenager, rather than an adult, which was certainly unusual for "long underwear characters" at the time; it was Lee who decided that Peter Parker should have plenty of typically teenage problems to deal with; and it was Lee that gave Spider-Man his wise-cracking characterisation (obviously, as a counter-point to the shy, bookish Peter Parker). That's without going into how Lee developed the character as those early issues went on (with a lot of input from Ditko, of course).

Ditko contributed a shed load of design stuff to the creation of Spider-Man, such as Spidey's costume, his web-shooters, the spider signal etc, and Jack Kirby also had some input apparently, such as having Peter orphaned and living with an elderly Aunt. But irrespective of their contributions, clearly Stan had a good many of the basic ideas that make the character who he is. So, for you to say that he "was not the creator of great ideas" is patently false.




Which is why I said "supposedly". I've always been a bit suspicious of that story myself, but it is what Stan said pretty consistently for decades.




I think you can absolutely consider some of it be real or at the very least rooted in truth (not that I've read it, mind you, but I've heard or read plenty of Stan Lee quotes about the origins of Marvel Comics over the years, so I know what his side of the story is).

Thing is, like I said earlier, if your default position is to treat everything Stan Lee said as a lie and everything the artists said as truth, that's not a neutral position from which to posit an alternate, revisionist theory from – which is what you are attempting to do. We must accept that everyone in this story has motives for lying, but equally, everyone probably told the truth as they remembered it a good amount of the time too.

I'm not sure that I have ever read any. I'm not terribly interested in Golden Age comics, to be honest, as I don't tend to enjoy reading them. I just find them a little too basic.

But if the inference of your question is to suggest that Lee didn't write any good stories before Kirby came back to Marvel in the late '50s, I would counter by saying that what I have read quite a lot of are Marvel's pre-Fantastic Four monster and sci-fi tales that Lee & Kirby put out. Though they certainly have a period charm and some nice artwork, I don't consider them to be very good or terribly memorable.

As far as I'm concerned, the great and memorable Marvel comics didn't come along until Lee, supposedly on the brink of leaving comics, decided to shake things up for his own amusement, so that when Martin Goodman asked him to create a copy of Justice League of America, he created a dysfunctional group of bickering, flawed superheroes in the Fantastic Four. Obviously further greats followed like The Hulk, Thor etc, and Lee's best co-creation in my opinion, Spider-Man. But it was Lee and his idea to write flawed and more "realistic" superheroes that sparked the so-called Marvel Age of Comics on the '60s. No matter how much the artists may have also contributed to the success of those comics, without Lee's idea, Kirby, Ditko, Ayers, Wood et al would've likely continued to churn out forgettable monster and sci-fi tales.

Of course he was! Stan Lee had oodles of great ideas and wrote tonnes of great dialogue over his time at Marvel in the '60s. Did he do it all alone? No, of course not. The artists were at least as important. But to say that Lee wasn't a creator of great ideas is just plain incorrect.

To be fair though, Stan didn't always say he created everything. He often outlined how important the artists were to the comics in the comics themselves (in Stan's soapbox or on the letters pages), and even in interviews he did in the '60s, '70s and '80s he would usually say that he co-created Spider-Man with Steve Ditko or co-created the Fantastic Four with Jack Kirby. Even in the recent Disney+ Stan lee documentary there is ample enough evidence of him saying that: it's right there in vintage audio recordings for all to hear.




Absolutely! Which is kinda what I am trying to say to MWGgallaher above.

OK, some thoughts on issue #6 and responses to Wildfire2099's excellent review…




Issue #6 was probably the weakest part of the whole story for me. For one thing, the dialogue was pretty dire across most of the issue. For another, the climax with Luke, Leia and the princess's unborn child joining their Force talent together to defeat the Emperor just didn't work that well on the comics page: it was too static, with not enough visually to engage the reader. And finally, having R2 just introduce a gizmo supercode to knock out the World Devastators smacked of Veitch running out of page space to sort the situation on Mon Calamari out.




I thought that Luke cutting off the Emperor's hand was a nice symbolic touch, alluding to both Luke losing his hand to Vader on Cloud City and to Vader then losing his hand to Luke on the second Death Star. To me it just seemed like an obvious callback to the original trilogy.




Well, I guess that General Calrissian and the rest of the Alliance and Mon Calamari forces did at least hold the World Devastators at bay until Han and Leia could arrive in the Millennium Falcon with R2-D2 to sort them out. Without the Alliance's participation, the fate of Mon Calamari would've been much, much worse.




Yeah, the Yoda quotes were a nice touch.

Something I also thought was kinda cool in retrospect was that Luke says that he found tremendous fear within the Dark Side; that ties in very nicely with Yoda's comment to young Anakin in The Phantom Menace that, "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."




Yeah, that was a real…"Ooooookay then" moment for me. Very selfish and needlessly dangerous, I'd say. It kinda makes Luke seem like a bit of a d*ck.




Yeah, I completely agree. Han's dialogue has been hit and miss throughout this series, but in this issue, I found a lot of the various characters' dialogue to be mildly excruciating.




I agree. This issue felt a bit rushed to me, in a way that the previous five hadn't. It almost makes you wonder if Veitch could've done with another two instalments to play with.




Yeah, the Star Wars newspaper strips that Classic Star Wars is reprinting at this point are a completely separate continuity to the old Marvel series and the current Dark Horse comics. Back in the day, I remember being a bit disappointed when I realised that these new Dark Horse comics weren't gonna use the same "comics continuity" as the Marvel comics. I soon got over that disappointment and realised that the DH stories worked much better as their own thing, but yeah...as a massive fan of the Marvel run, I was slightly bummed that those stories had been cast aside.




I think the colouring of Luke's lightsaber red was absolutely done on purpose. Back when these comics were published, there was hardly any lore about the significance of lightsaber colours – all we knew was, the Sith used red sabers and the Jedi use white/blue ones (or green at a push). Kennedy's decision to colour Luke's saber red is to show us that he is now very much "in the Dark Side", just as Vader was. That said, I have no idea why the Emperor's saber is coloured blue (surely it should be red too), but I can only assume that was a design choice that looked better on the page. Actually, I almost wondered if the Emperor had picked up Leia's lightsaber to battle Luke with, but I don't think so. Personally, I'd rather the Emperor's lightsaber was red as well.




Good point. That hadn't occurred to me.




Is the ending really that definite? It very much seems like it's been left open for a continuation, should this inaugural series prove to be popular with readers. Mind you, I think it was a nicely satisfying ending.

Great set of Dark Empire reviews, wildfire2099. Well done! I've really enjoyed following them and commenting.


So, what’s next? Do you plan to review all the Dark Horse series in their published order? I believe the first Tales of the Jedi mini-series would be next. Or are you going to follow storylines across various sets of mini-series, so Dark Empire II with be next, followed by Empire's End?

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.