Amusing article from 'The New Republic's' book review section, pithily telling the story of how 'Stan Lee' (not his real name) stole credit for the creation of the Silver Age Marvel universe (i.e. everything but the Sub-Mariner and Captain America) from artists like Steve Ditko and especially Jack Kirby (also not his real name), as well as other writers, while Lee took all the fame and became Marvel's 'brand':
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112342/stan-lee-launches-kids-comics-usual-he-didnt-write-them
Editor's note: This story has been told before, but with more interviews and publications, the evidence is piling up pretty strongly in favor of this version of the Marvel story--or its theft by 'Lee.'
This is indeed a pretty good summary of Stan Lee's weird behavior.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding of the way Lee and Kirby (who legally changed his name to that pretty early in his career) worked together in the early day was roughly as follows: First, Lee and Kirby would work out a rough plot. Then Kirby would do the layouts, making whatever changes he saw fit to the story for dramatic reasons and send Lee the results. They would argue over the story again and Lee would write/outline most of the dialogue. Kirby (or sometimes another artist) would then pencil the finished panels based on the finalized script.
The number of comics that Lee worked on was so large that it was obvious to me as a kid (reading old issues of his magazines) that he couldn't be doing all the plotting and dialogue writing on his own, as well as overseeing editing of the whole Marvel enterprise. Since I was introduced to these comics fifteen to twenty years after their heyday (at a relatively dead time in comic book history, actually), there wasn't the same marketing machine associated with them, and I could look more dispassionately at what was happening than the first generation of Marvel fans. I remember reading some of the letters that were overflowing with admiration and thinking to myself that they were extremely uninsightful.
That description of yours of the Kirby/'Lee' creative process matches what I'd read about the way the two of them worked years ago (though your summary is actually somewhat more comprehensive and detailed). Anyway, thanks for sharing it, here--I find it strange that Lee and Bob Kane (I am speaking of Kane's denial of Batman co-creator Bill Finger the appropriate credit, including of the monetary sort--an injustice now widely recognized in the genre) have not, during their lifetimes, ever really paid for their theft of credit; in general, the comic world seems a very Hobbesian place, as these things go, with little justice for a lot of important creators.
DeleteI find the article also interesting for its observations about the transformation of the early Silver Age kids-oriented comics into a market that re-expanded to include teens (I'm assuming older folks had read comics more in the '40s than after their circa 1950 collapse amid outrage over the relatively uncensored content (which of course was then censored pretty heavily for quite some time)
The article and almost everyone else goes too far in giving Lee credit. In fact, the evidence is that he created nothing at all. What he did was edit. He never created ANY of the characters for which he takes credit. Jack Kirby created the lion's share of them in the early years of Marvel Comics, and Steve Ditko the rest. All Lee did was tweak the dialog and put his name on everything. He was a classic corporate shill for his uncle, who owned Marvel Comics. And he remains so today, keeping up the image that he created everything so that Marvel/Disney can milk it for billions. In the meantime, Jack Kirby's (Jacob Kurtzberg) heirs and Steve Ditko get nothing.
ReplyDeleteI never liked Lee, but I hadn't heard before that the story was so one-sided. Do you remember your source?
ReplyDeleteIronic, too, considering every new artist at Marvel for a couple of decades was given, at their, ah, audition, a page of Kirby's art and told 'this is the type of stuff we want. Give us something like it.' Ah, well.
I knew everything Kirby was saying about what Lee/Goodman did to him was true when I bought some pages of very early Kirby Marvel artwork. On every page you could see Kirby's detailed explanations as to what was going on, what characters were feeling, what they were saying, etc. In most cases Lee changed the dialog quite a bit, in other cases not one whit. It was a great "Aha!" moment. The evidence for Kirby's side of the situation is vast. That for Lee comes only from Lee and the Lee droolies who parrot his line.
DeleteDamn. I mean, it's nice to know one's intuition on the subject was correct, but...if it's one that one-sided, that's really disgusting.
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