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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 22, 2024 9:07:55 GMT -5
So which long-established pros did retain full command of their artistic skills late in their careers? The one that comes to my mind is Dan Spiegle: his work just got better and better for as long as he was in the business. Gray Morrow also seemed to keep up his abilities. Bill Everett's final Sub-Mariner work was some of his best-drawn stuff ever, but he died relatively young, before one would expect the technical skills to decline.
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 22, 2024 9:02:01 GMT -5
It seems at first as if they're going for "Loki thinks I'm his brother, he doesn't realize I'm just an ordinary human who was granted his brother's powers", but they pretty quickly realize that--now that they have established Asgard and the other Norse gods--they've got to treat this Don Blake guy like the real deal, kicking the resolution down the road until they can figure it out. Lucky for them it happened so early in the run they can get on with portraying Thor as the genuine god without much fuss.
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 22, 2024 8:52:49 GMT -5
When I read that DC started doing their own version in about 1970 and stopped after about a year, I thought "that doesn't sound right to me." Checking back, it does appear Evanier was off by a year or so; DC began phasing out the line-wide use of left-corner character images in the summer 1972 issues, around when the "double bullet banner" cover dress started up. The Superman family line continued the practice, as did a few others where the logo left a convenient gap: Korak, Detective Comics, Shazam, Witching Hour, and those four stopped shortly thereafter. It did surprise me that DC's use of the idea was so short-lived, because those tiny images made a big impact on my new-to-comics brain. Being outside the world of big city newsstands, I never saw comics racked in a way that only the left corners would show, so that rationale may have been biased from comics publishers seeing how things were done in NYC. It didn't seem like much of an advantage on spinner racks, which I think had become the primary display mechanism in most of the country in the early 70's. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 21, 2024 21:00:50 GMT -5
 The original Ant-Man helmet has been ruined by efforts to make it sleeker and more high-tech-looking. I loved Kirby's original over-all costume conception, even though he quickly streamlined the costume details, making it less obvious that the initially big dot on the chest was meant to suggest an ant's thorax. At least the helmet continued to evoke the image of an ant's round head and its mandibles. I didn't like the helmet being taken away when he changed to Giant-Man, but I suppose the thinking was that its presence would immediately make the reader wonder how the metal enlarged rather than crushing Henry Pym's head; it's a little easier to accept the notion of a stretchy mask expanding. And while I didn't care for how the basic costume designed looked at the larger Giant-Man scale, it was kind of clever that the chest dot design was replaced with a design that suggested suspenders, which somehow implies height/growing, in my mind, anyway. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 20, 2024 16:24:07 GMT -5
Thanks very much for sharing all of that information, joaquim8888 ! I would never have guessed that any of those second tier characters would have had that kind of longevity in non-American markets! I really love the look of that Annie Oakley story, and I'm amazed that the Texas Kid had more stories created in Brazil than in the US! One has to wonder why some characters like that would catch on in other markets when they seem not-so-special in America. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 20, 2024 16:14:57 GMT -5
Has anyone here said "Stan did not do anything". Or is that just another strawman? Kirby talked about the potential for comics into other media being worth billions in the 70s. No one said Stan wasn't a great salesman, no one said he wasn't superb at PR, especially when promoting himself. What we are talking about is how much input he had in creating these characters and comics. For the record, if anyway here has leaned in the "Stan did nothing" direction, it was me, so I hope you didn't think I was piling on with the mischaracterization of your point! Yes, it's a strawman, at least in this forum. I largely agree with you on this subject, but if I am right about Daredevil, one could certainly say that the inclusion of the radioactivity-induced superpowers was a significant input into the creating of that character, at the very least, even if it followed an initial round of "creation" by another writer. And I'll agree with the consensus that defining the individual voices of characters is a significant creative input. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 20, 2024 12:53:07 GMT -5
Upon reading my post, I see that one of my sentences is not clear. The "stacks" of rejected pages are not all from Kirby. This anecdote is meant to demonstrate that Lee didn't just rubber stamp all work coming to the office . There were standards and if a story he was part of wasn't up to his standard, it was rejected. I remember Romita saying that Jack and Stan would talk and it seemed that no one was listening to the other while they were having plotting sessions , or they were talking past each other. OK, gotcha. It seems clear that Stan preferred to use the pages he got whenever he could, at least from the more reliable artists, probably because of practical constraints when redoing the pages would have jeopardized the schedule. Some of the most solid pieces of evidence against the notion that "Stan did nothing" are the many instances where his scripting re-wrote what the artist clearly intended. Sometimes that's glaringly obvious, as in the issue of HULK when Hulk gains the power of flight, which Stan unconvincingly describes as leaping; Kirby's story straight-up had Hulk gaining the power to fly like Superman. As soon as Kirby is onboard with Stan's decision that Hulk doesn't fly, he leaps, Kirby's art unmistakably depicts exactly that (and very effectively, I would say!). Whether Stan's editorial decisions to contradict the art or to insert undepicted explanations and backstory (e.g., I'm pretty sure Kirby would have included scenes of Victor Von Doom's mother if he had intended for mom to be established as a sorceress in the Dr. Doom origin) is debatable, but Stan was without a doubt imposing his own preferences via the script, even if he was working with whatever the artist submitted. For me, nowadays, that's a big part of the fun of looking back at these stories. When you can detach yourself from the ingrained notion that all these artists were working from explicit descriptions of what should happen, you can spot a lot of examples where the script and the art are not in synch, and deduce what the artist initially was trying to convey, and that's something you can't do with fully-scripted material that wasn't created via the "Marvel Method." For instance, I'm convinced that Bill Everett didn't have any intention of radioactivity-induced enhanced senses when he turned in his DAREDEVIL #1 pages; that was added in the scripting (and lettering). (And you can certainly argue that that detail was fundamental to the ultimate success of the character.) And if that, which we consider to be a key component of the Daredevil lore, wasn't present at the start, it gives more evidence that the artists, even at that stage, were plotting with very little direction, not from the kind of detailed description from Stan that we presumed, as fans of the line, was the case. When Stan came up with his stories of the initial development of these concepts, I don't think he imagined that readers of the future would ever be looking back over things like margin notes on the original art or deducing things from places where the script was inserting things that weren't being illustrated, and constructing plausible scenarios that conflicted with his media-friendly explanations. And it was, after all, a job for him, and one can't expect him to have retained exact memories of the creative process; a good story is more valuable in the hype world than a nuts-and-bolts description of what was, to most involved, a commercial product development, not a work of art that would one day merit a historian's attention and analysis. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 20, 2024 10:21:37 GMT -5
You're making quite a leap from what Shooter said. Kirby and Lee worked about 11 years and I don't think there's any way that Kirby would have stayed that long if he was turning in fully completed books just to have them turned away to be done all over again. The accounts that I've heard support that Jack and Stan would have a quick discussion about the plot. Lee not knowing what was coming every month doesn't sound like him. The FF run is mainly heralded for the first 70 or so issues and I believe they worked more closely until after that period. Lee was in charge of Marvel comics and spread himself thin until people like Roy Thomas and Conway came along, but I think he was Jim Shooter before Jim Shooter came to be , albeit with a more fun personality. Like someone said earlier, none of us were there but we can put together a picture of what was more likely to have happened by accounts from the pros that interacted with them like Thomas and Romita. I'm not sure I follow what my leap is, unless you thought I meant that he was frequently turning in complete 20+ page stories that were rejected, which wasn't what I was meant to suggest (although I can see where my wording might have led someone to that interpretation). If there were indeed "stacks of rejected pages", though, it would have added up to a considerable amount of wasted effort on Kirby's part, that he was apparently not compensated for. And we can deduce that, as in the case of the Hulk story, there were several instances where at least significant portions of what Kirby submitted were chucked. For instance, the original Silver Surfer/Galactus trilogy appears to have been cobbled together by splitting several more cohesive stories, implying that some portions of surrounding stories were deleted: we get half of the Inhumans wrap-up, then half of the first Galactus story, then a full Galactus story, then another half of a Galactus story awkwardly combined with the start of a "Johnny goes to college" story. Throughout that arc, we can see a few instances of classic Kirby "final panel" scenes that fall in the middle of the printed issue, leading me to guess that a big piece of the Inhumans story was thrown out and the in-progress Galactus story was inserted ahead of schedule. And of course, the Galactus saga is the prime example where Lee is on record implying that Kirby was free-wheeling, as the Surfer, who is the focus of the first installment, came as a complete surprise to him. To confirm that I consider this a positive and productive discussion, I will admit that exploring this subject has me softening my opinions of Lee's contributions to the collaboration, although I continue to prefer Jack's own scripting to Lee's, and I think Jack's language, quirky and occasionally awkward though it could be, was more evocative and meaningful than Lee's breezier, playful, and more easily digested wordings. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 20, 2024 8:35:46 GMT -5
Jim Shooter stated in one of his interviews that there were stacks of rejected Kirby pages in Lee's office. Lee insisted on certain story beats and particular storytelling in their book. Very key information; the fact Lee had so many rejected Kirby pages and guided the kind of stories written is the kind of information which shatters the anti-Lee narrative. Shooter--as opposed to fan/writers with agendas--would know, and his word should not be dismissed on so specific a topic. That's not what I would conclude from that evidence. I think it more strongly supports Kirby's contentions that he was writing the stories mostly independently, delivering them with his margin notes explaining to Stan what was happening, and Stan would dialog them starting with Kirby's plotted and drawn stories. It's not that Stan was dissatisfied with how Kirby had rendered the plot Stan had given Kirby, it was that Stan hadn't told Kirby what to draw but was then rejecting the plot that Kirby had created and drawn. That's the kind of thing that would lead to a very rotten working situation for Kirby. He was expected to plot and draw a story with minimal or zero direction, at the risk of what he spent all that time on being rejected and his having to still meet deadlines by supplying a different story, fully penciled...and he doesn't even get the pages back?! (And this also goes to the question of whether this really was "work for hire"; if my work needs revision, I should still get paid for the work done in the first place, they can't just tell me "we're not paying you for what you did on company time this week." Unless I'm not really a company employee and I'm taking the risk of independently creating material and offering it on the chance that they're willing to buy it from me.) We know of at least one incident where Kirby's story was rejected on the spot, and he ripped pages in half and threw them in the trash, that being an unused Hulk story rescued from the garbage by Larry Leiber. Nothing similar to the story being told in those pages ever appeared in HULK. If it was a plot Lee had directed Jack to draw, one would expect the story to be redone. Or if Lee had provided a plot that just didn't work, then Jack should have been paid something for dutifully rendering what he'd been assigned, even if Lee decided against it once he saw the pages. The only conclusion I can draw is that in this instance, at least, Stan simply decided the story was no good after Jack had come up with it and written it the only way he wrote: in pencils on the art board. If Lee did have a stack of rejected pages, that means Kirby would do his job, deliver the work, and later be informed that he had to start over, and he wouldn't be paid for the work he put in. If you're going to operate that way, a good editor should be giving ongoing direction to ensure that time wasn't wasted on non-viable work, not saying "bring me a fully plotted and fully drawn story, and I'll see if I like it once you're done." |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 18, 2024 15:32:37 GMT -5
Regarding Twitter (no, I will not call it X), are there any accounts that highlight and cover comic stores and/or the business of comic stores? I fully expect that very soon typing "twitter.com" in your browser will lead you to an error page. Musk will sacrifice the redirect traffic just to force users into typing his rebranded site name. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 18, 2024 13:36:49 GMT -5
Ouch...somebody please tell me I'm not the only one aggravated by the attempt to re-use the 'C'. My mind rebels at allowing this to be anything other than "En Bee Comics", even though I know they wanted us to read it "NBC comics"... |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 18, 2024 13:29:59 GMT -5
Here's where I am: As it's become more and more evident that Stan was less involved in the plotting than fans of, say, the 1970's, were led to believe, there remains, among comics fans, a strongly conditioned and difficult-to-displace affection for him as the "father" of the Marvel Universe they love. Hence, we want to extend him all possible credit, the benefit of the doubt, justify the conviction we have that whatever role he actually had in producing a beloved comic, it must surely have been critical to its success, and that absent the "Stan Lee magic" this story would surely have fallen flat and impressed no one. So even if we bring ourselves to acknowledge that maybe Kirby and Ditko were developing the plots, rather than working to a detailed outline from Lee (as has been convincingly established, at least in the prime years of Silver Age Marvel), even if we grudgingly admit that most--or at least many--of the grand concepts originated with the artists (notice that Stan never seemed to come up with a Galactus or Silver Surfer or Black Panther or Inhumans or Dr. Doom or Magneto when he was working with folks like Don Heck, Gene Colan and Dick Ayers, on books that surely would have benefited greatly from that kind of big idea), we fall back on the one claim that can affirm our faith in Stan Lee's vital role in these stories: Stan's unique scripting, his sense of dialog, his dramatic narration, his engaging sense of humor, those were key ingredients, that was where Stan Lee was indisputably a master of the craft, a once-in-a-lifetime genius who could bring these characters to life in a way that no one could top! Right? Surely we can all agree on that? Right? OK, maybe so, maybe so... And so I embarked on re-reading some of those classic tales, trying to isolate the scripting, the one aspect where we can always be confident Stan was dominant, even if the artists were supplying rough dialog suggestions. And what I'm finding when I re-read is that...well, the scripting is not that great, after all. It's distinctive, but, being as objective as I can be, it's just not good writing. Dialog is bombastic, unconvincing, redundant, overblown. The wisecracks are not just "corny", they're just plain not funny (Spider-Man during the middle of a fight with the Rhino: "I can't understand why everyone wants to end my capricious career! I always thought of myself as the most loveable little hero in town!"). I don't think I've ever actually laughed at any of Stan's supposed jokes--and take a look at some of the "humor" comics he spent so much of his career on if you want to see some real bombs. Stan's lines, to me, have the impression of being humorous without actually being humorous. Marvel.com recently published an article highlighting the dynamic dialog of Stan Lee, the best of Stan's scintillating sound bytes they could round up, and there's not a whole lot beyond "With great power there must also come...great responsibility!" and "Face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot!" (Amusingly, I discover that the Thing's original, complete catch phrase was "Yay bo! It's clobberin' time!") His narration is inflated without being evocative: "Known to the outside world simply as Latveria..." C'mon, would we say "a bullring in the nation simply known as Spain", "on a mountain range in the country the world knows simply as Argentina"? I'm trying to find that Stan Lee magic, but it's not where I remember it being. It turns out my fondness for these stories really is rooted in the concepts, the plot, and the art. The scripting is getting a free ride on top of fun stories, but when I focus on the scripting, I'm not seeing anything I can really call "good". It's an ingredient that is inextricably entwined with my memory and nostalgia for the material, but I can't honestly say I like it, and I certainly can't say that no one could have done it better. When I see people pointing out admittedly bad Jack Kirby scripting ("...and me, young but cool Harvey Lockman!") I can point out equally bad lines committed to paper by Stan Lee. But for the weightiest, most evocative lines from Kirby, I can't seem to find the comparable qualities anywhere I look for it in Stan's work; I find padding, I find fluff, I find pretentious blather. I'd really love for someone to point me to one issue where they can honestly say "Just read the words, and tell me Stan wasn't a great scripter!" |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 16, 2024 14:46:12 GMT -5
foxley for posting the only comic bold enough to print its "coming next issue" tease on the freakin' cover!
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 15, 2024 22:27:32 GMT -5
The promised 3-5 inches skipped Huntsville, but the icy roads and single digit temperatures will keep things shut down tomorrow and maybe Wednesday. No "snow day" since I can telework; tomorrow is the start of week 20 counting down to retirement!
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 13, 2024 23:28:16 GMT -5
I can top that. In the early 70's, when I realized all of the ads in the DC books were printed on the same sheets, I'd often rip 'em all out, leaving only the story pages and ads printed on the inside and back covers. This is the most interesting thing I read this entire week. You win the internet today. You can win it for the month if you show some of these books in tomorrow's Zoom meeting. * *Shameless plug  My collection's in a highly disorganized state at the moment. My first thought was "How would I even find which ones I did this to?" but then I remembered specifically doing it to THE SHADOW #2 while I read it in the back seat of the family car waiting for my father to finish up with something. If I can find my DC 'S' box, it would be fun to confirm whether this is a true memory! |
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