RIP Stan Lee

walrus

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Stan Lee passed away today. I grew up on Marvel Comics - I particularly loved Spider-man. I can see the hardcover reprints of the first 100 issues or so of Spider-man that I bought several years ago right behind me on my shelf! Lee's writing and Steve Ditko's drawing - what a combination!

Thanks for the great memories, Stan...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/12/entertainment/stan-lee-obit/index.html

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walrus

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Al, as the most prolific poster on LTG, please remember Lee's words- "with great power comes great responsibility"...

walrus
 

adorshki

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Al, as the most prolific poster on LTG, please remember Lee's words- "with great power comes great responsibility"...

walrus

img_0139.jpg


And that's all she wrote, folks.
 

wileypickett

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img_0139.jpg


And that's all she wrote, folks.

I grew up on Marvel.

I bought this issue when it came out, at a lunch counter / soda fountain place in Ho-Ho-Kus , NJ. Stan certainly had an amazing life. He survived all his peers and saw so many of his characters and ideas go hugely mainstream in a big ($$$) way. (Even Ant-Man, one of his goofiest characters!) Don't know if that's necessarily a good thing, but his impact on pop culture (not to mention teenage me) is (was) profound.

Sad to see him go. A bit of my childhood goes with him.
 

chazmo

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My aunt worked for them and every month growing up I got a package in the mail from her with a pile of comics in it. By my teens I had boxes of them (all read, mind you). As Glenn said, a piece of my childhood goes with Stan. RIP.
 

walrus

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That's an excellent point about his impact on pop culture, wiley. You don't really think about it much but it really is a decades-long worldwide impact.

walrus
 

mike1100

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My childhood was brighter as a web-head fan. Thanks Stan.

Nuff Said
 

adorshki

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Lotta folks (including his 2 most famous collaborators, Kirby and Ditko) claim Stan was too quick to claim credit for their work.
Good exploration of the subject here:
https://www.vulture.com/2016/02/stan-lees-universe-c-v-r.html
The basic story there is pretty consistent with things I discovered long after my love affair with silver-age Marvel ended in about 1970.
The thing abut Stan Lee is that after the re-birth of Marvel following the introduction of the Fantastic Four, he was tireless in promoting comics as a genuine art form.
For that he deserves all the credit he gets.
He really did have a profound influence on popular culture that transcended the decade of the '60's in the end.
And he made the readers feel like they were part of a special family.
As a "real person" editor in chief he talked to 'em, not down to 'em, and wasn't afraid to poke a little fun at Marvel's quirks and oopsies.
Spider-Man? Even Kirby claims he created the character*, although I think it was really Ditko.
At least I'm fairly certain Spidey's teenage angst has Ditko written all over it, so to speak.
Stan claims that since he came up with the basic idea he was the "creator", but he even admits Kirby was a far better plotter than he was.
I think the artists deserve a lot more credit than they got at the time, they were responsible for fleshing out the concepts Lee gave 'em, not just drawing panels according to a script.
It was the "Marvel Method".
It was revolutionary.
The one gripe I have with that article's historic perspective is the story of publisher Goodman telling Lee to come up with a hero team based on DC's Justice League.
Kirby was already an accomplished plotter/writer/artist of his own creations ever since co-creating Captain America with Joe Simon in the '40's.
When Kirby showed up at the Marvel office to freelance right about that same time as the Goodman edict, he was fresh off a stint as artist (and according to some sources) creator of DC's Challengers of the Unknown.
A 4-man team.

latest


Look/sound familiar?
This is all in the interest of separating the man from the myth when it comes to Stan Lee.
The man is interesting enough on his own merits.
**Allowing for the fog of memory I think we're all getting a little too familiar with, I suspect this may be related to the fact that he did draw the layout for the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15, Spiderman's first appearance:
maxresdefault.jpg

Cover inked and inside story art by Ditko.
 
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walrus

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"I think the artists deserve a lot more credit than they got at the time, they were responsible for fleshing out the concepts Lee gave 'em, not just drawing panels according to a script."

Al, I agree 100% with this statement. As a kid, the artwork attracted me just as much as the stories. I know I'm a geezer, but when I see a comic on the bookstore shelf today, I am not impressed at all with the artwork. Ditko, Kirby, and others had so much detail!

Think about Ditko's work on "Dr. Strange" and the psychedelic backgrounds in those panels - wow!

I don't think Ditko ever said why he left Marvel in the mid-60's, but I think his perceived "lack of credit" probably had something to do with it.

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adorshki

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"I think the artists deserve a lot more credit than they got at the time, they were responsible for fleshing out the concepts Lee gave 'em, not just drawing panels according to a script."

Al, I agree 100% with this statement. As a kid, the artwork attracted me just as much as the stories.
More to the point both Kirby and Ditko were already accomplished story-tellers before ever going to work at Marvel.
To me the art was actually more important than the storylines, at the time.
And I actually didn't like Ditko at first, I thought his stuff was awkward looking.
Only as I grew to appreciate the importance of style did I understand his greatness.

I know I'm a geezer, but when I see a comic on the bookstore shelf today, I am not impressed at all with the artwork. Ditko, Kirby, and others had so much detail!
Not sure what you're seeing but the current artists exhibit almost what I'd call an excess of detail, something I think was pioneered by Steranko (Nick Fury Agent of Shield starting in '66) and built on ever since.
BUT a lot of that stuff's only sold by subscription and even digital versions now, after the implosion of the boom of the '90's which saw dedicated comic book shops and a vintage craze similar to the one for guitars.
Typical example:
HJFLC_Cv1_R3_gallery_57fc3635f2c6a2.45566872.jpg


Think about Ditko's work on "Dr. Strange" and the psychedelic backgrounds in those panels - wow!
Y'mean like this?
05806f9c73db.jpeg

And funny thing, even though he was a Ditko character, he was one of the few where the character and content were more important to me than the art.
For a while (long after I quit collecting) I was convinced that Ditko, living in Greenwhich Village, must have been an early experimenter with LSD.
But nope.
Ditko's genius I think is summed up in this one page I've posted before:
ditko-strangetales126-clea.jpg

Ok I know the text is a little blurred when blown up, but as he's being sucked into something that's shaped like a sheet of paper (get it?) in those middle 2 panels, he's saying:
"I'm being drawn into this 2-dimensional object--as if some sort of life exists below it!!"
Yeah, it's the page of a comic book, duh..... :glee:
Do they make 'em like that anymore?
Ditko does.
When I came to Marvel, Ditko had already moved on about a year before but the first back-issues I bought were old Strange Tales so I got familiar with his style.
Dr. Strange and Submariner were actually my first 2 favorite characters, (that probably explains a lot of things about me, huh?) Steranko was actually my first favorite artist.
I eventually wound up collecting the entire line and back issues all the way back to '64 and '65 in the case of Thor and FF and Avengers, but started there.
Although I wound up selling off my collection over a few years, I do have the hardcover reprints of the Tales to Astonish Submariner and Strange Tales Dr Strange episodes.
When I did light up to Kirby (it only took a couple of months) I became insatiable.
And at the time Romita had just taken over Spider-Man and I liked his clean sharp-edged style over Ditko's.
I thought a lot of Ditko's poses were awkward and he used to get the eye openings on Spidey's mask crooked all the time, LOL!
Spidey-1-e1530923957588.jpeg

But after a couple of years I realized he was actually more anatomically accurate than most Marvel artists and instantly recognizable to boot.
k6qVGyJi_2901181505151gpadd.jpg

12-ditko-spider-man.jpg

I had discovered the importance of style.

I don't think Ditko ever said why he left Marvel in the mid-60's, but I think his perceived "lack of credit" probably had something to do with it.

walrus
Oh yes both Ditko and Kirby did, but the info only leaked out in interviews in hard-core collectors organs which normally didn't appear on newsstands, so even my buddy , a big Spider-Man fan, didn't know.
And it was that lack of proper credit thing.
From that link I posted:
“The story of Stan, Jack, and Steve is the stuff legends are made of,” one of Stan’s oldest friends and collaborators, comics writer-editor Roy Thomas, tells me over the phone. “It’s on them, more than any other three people, that the whole Marvel thing is built.” Thomas had an experience any comics fan or historian would kill for: He walked the offices of Marvel in the mid-’60s, when Lee and Ditko were working together on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange stories and Lee and Kirby were working together on nearly everything else, including The Avengers, The X-Men, and The Fantastic Four. Here’s the problem: It’s extremely unclear what “working together” meant.

According to Lee, it meant he came up with the concepts for all the characters, mapped out plots, gave the plots to his artists so they could draw them, and then would take the finished artwork and write his signature snappy verbiage for the characters’ dialogue bubbles. The artists, in Lee’s retelling, were fantastic and visionary, but secondary to his own vision. According to Kirby and Ditko, that’s hogwash. Ditko has retreated into a hermetic existence in midtown Manhattan, where he types up self-promoting mail-order pamphlets claiming Lee had only the most threadbare initial ideas for Spider-Man, and that Ditko is the one who fleshed the iconic character out into what he is today, then came up with most of the plot beats in any given story. Kirby, from the time he left Marvel in 1970 until his death in 1994, swore up and down that Lee was a fraud on an even larger scale: Kirby said he himself was the one who had all the ideas for the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the rest, and that Lee was outright lying about having anything to do with them. What’s more, he said Lee was little more than a copy boy, filling in dialogue bubbles after Kirby had done the lion’s share of the conceptual and writing work for any given issue."

It's a well-balanced read, though, it's not a Stan Lee bashing piece.
I started losing interest in Marvel when Kirby left, it was a real head-scratcher to me.
Steranko was gone by that time too.
Thee only 3 real heavyweights left were John Buscema who was great on the Avengers and Submariner, and Gene Colan who was the best possible replacement for Ditko on Dr. Strange.
And Romita was still on Spider-Man.
The rest of the string just wasn't up to the standards of the golden era of '65-'69, in fact some of 'em were downright bad and by then I knew how to tell.


BTW< a while back our member D30man showed pictures of the Telecaster he built featuring decoupage of his favorite Marvel character, and I posted quite a few examples of my favorite Marvel artists there too:
http://www.letstalkguild.com/ltg/showthread.php?193413-NGD-sort-of/page3
 

walrus

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Al, this a great post! Thanks! :applouse:

Are you sure you're not retired?

walrus
 

adorshki

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Al, this a great post! Thanks! :applouse:

Are you sure you're not retired?

walrus
Thanks.
Circling back to what Stan did contribute, I think a couple of themes that occur in both Dr. Strange and Fantastic Four are evidence of his input to the Marvel "gestalt":
The idea of "Worlds within worlds" and the infinity of the universe itself, and of course the famous "With great power comes great responsibility"; originated in that first Spider-Man episode.
I have no doubt this was a reflection of his personal convictions about the role of the United States on the world stage, and the status of "the Bomb" in particular.
Early ('61-'62) Marvel stuff was rife with atomic bomb and radiation references:
The Hulk was created from exposure to gamma rays thrown off by an A-bomb test, (in fact the original Hulk used to turn himself into the Hulk by intentional exposure to a gamma ray generator, anybody remember that?!) the FF were created by exposure to cosmic rays, Spiderman gained his powers from the bite of radioactive spider.
At the opposite end of the spectrum Dr. Strange gained his powers while journeying in the Himalayas in search of a mystic holy man; about 5 years before the Beatles went to Rishikesh:
strange-strangetales115.jpg
.
And yet there is a connection of Hinduism to atomic weapons, in Oppenheimer's quote from the Bhaghavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"...
One of Lee's complexities was his unapologetic patriotism tempered with the time-honored American tradition of questioning authority.
Perhaps being Jewish and seeing both the intolerance of Hitler in WWII and the similar phobias of American McCarthyism of the '50's contributed to that mind-set, but it resonated with college students and supporters of the "Ban the Bomb" movement of the early '60's in an almost ironic way.
At the time American mainstream culture looked askance at those who questioned authority, but the pendulum was swinging back in Lee's favor, and he absolutely added a little momentum to it.
Examples of Marvel's flagrant anti-communist stance in the early '60's aren't hard to find:
674313.jpg

Yep that's Thor in Viet Nam in March 1965.
Iron Man's chief nemesis was the Mandarin, and the Black Widow was originally a Russian spy (Granted this was also at the height of Bond-mania).
The Avengers even battled a Russian superhero as late as mid 1967:
Avengers-43.jpg

Red-Guardian-Marvel-Comics-Alexei-Shostakov-g.jpg

Yet somehow Lee's irreverent and anti-authoritarian editorial persona retained the core audience's loyalty until late '67, at which time they finally began to tone down the jingoism.
A lot of their early readers were now getting their letters from Viet Nam published on the letters pages but a little (patriotism) had gone a long way by that time.
But in earlier more innocent days the Thing and The Human Torch even met the Beatles:
detail.jpg

bfc1c42d3133d364c0ec2a541d7dec00.jpg

And in '68 Romita's Spider-Man was indelibly identified with the idealism of the protest movement with a cover image that's been re-used and re-vamped ever since:
9781630362607__zvoy8wtujqzcrcu6g3uyeotyue.jpg


Historic side-note:
One of today's biggest franchises, the X-Men, was always an also-ran sales-wise for Marvel although it was another one of my favorite titles.
In an attempt to boost sales they gave 'em a couple of fantastic artists towards the end, Steranko and the legendary Neil Adams, but to no avail, and they simply stopped publishing with nary even an obituary in late '69.
The push that started me out the door, with Kirby's exit in mid-'70 being the final straw.
But like many of our generation, I'll always have a soft, nay, hot spot in my heart for Silver-Age Marvel.
 
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wileypickett

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Nice thread.

Coincidentally I was reading Tashen's massive *The Marvel Age of Comics, 1961-1978*, written by Roy Thomas, when I heard about Lee's passing. I recommend the book to anyone with a fondness for that era. (Like Adorshk, I pretty much stopped reading Marvel around 1970, with a few exceptions -- Barry Windsor-Smythe's *Conan*, some of John Byrne's *X-Men* and *Fantastic Four*.)

* * *

During Kirby's latter years battles to get his original artwork back (Lee was gone from the company by that point), someone said that Marvel's PR department painted them as embodying the philosophy, "With great power comes great responsibility," but their actual behavior was more along the lines of "Hulk smash puny human."
 
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