True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee 6 6

[BuscemasAvengers]

I appreciate the quoted sections coming from the book and being posted here by Prince Namor; the book has been added to my reading list.  I am in awe of the impact Lee, Kirby, Ditko and the 'pen have had on culture.  The story arcs spread throughout the silver age and beyond will be enough to feed the MCU for years (decades?) to come. However, I do not think we should easily separate the final product from the creator(s)' personal lives.  This seems to me to be dualism, and hints that the private has nothing to do with the public.  To that I am in total disagreement, and books like the one being highlighted here support the idea that private and public are intimately meshed together.  Having a contextual understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Dante's 'Inferno' or Stan's life does not take away from what these incredible creators have manifested.  For me, it enhances the creation, by giving context to what most of us enjoy in its final stage.  How it arrived there - that's just as fascinating to me.  We learn that creativity is often the product of passion and drive, but is also a result of life's messiness, its flawed relationships with others, and its stubbornness when insisting something must be done this way rather than that.  Perhaps, as more layers of Stan and the gang are revealed, there may be a need to reflect more on what it is that we cherish in the stories. Ignoring context is, I believe, to our own detriment.

[BuscemasAvengers]

8 hours ago, Rip said:

I have yet to read the book. And I hope to.

A friend of mine had sent me this a while ago and I have only skimmed some of the Roy Thomas "pushes back article" article. Hoping to catch up on this whole thing soon.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/roy-thomas-former-marvel-editor-pushes-back-on-new-stan-lee-biography-guest-column

Over the years I've felt like I've been kind of neutral on the topic. Kirby should have been treated better, but at the same time I've also felt like I've seen an over correct against Stan Lee. But I never worked with him either.

Also I'm often skeptical of some of these posthumous books about celebrities as I've all to often seen complete fiction passed as fact. 

I'll try to save my next 2 cents after I read the book. I'm curious how being a graphic designer myself who has worked for larger studios will weigh my opinions. Puts on diving suit,.... gets reading glasses.

This article is a must read in light of the book in question. Had no idea about how Maneely had died, and then (of course) the ensuing insinuations made by Kirby (as Riseman alleges, but Thomas questions and claims as a weak analysis on Riseman's part) that the overload of work Stan tossed toward Joe may have been a contributing factor!

[Prince Namor]

42 minutes ago, BuscemasAvengers said:

I appreciate the quoted sections coming from the book and being posted here by Prince Namor; the book has been added to my reading list.  I am in awe of the impact Lee, Kirby, Ditko and the 'pen have had on culture.  The story arcs spread throughout the silver age and beyond will be enough to feed the MCU for years (decades?) to come. However, I do not think we should easily separate the final product from the creator(s)' personal lives.  This seems to me to be dualism, and hints that the private has nothing to do with the public.  To that I am in total disagreement, and books like the one being highlighted here support the idea that private and public are intimately meshed together.  Having a contextual understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Dante's 'Inferno' or Stan's life does not take away from what these incredible creators have manifested.  For me, it enhances the creation, by giving context to what most of us enjoy in its final stage.  How it arrived there - that's just as fascinating to me.  We learn that creativity is often the product of passion and drive, but is also a result of life's messiness, its flawed relationships with others, and its stubbornness when insisting something must be done this way rather than that.  Perhaps, as more layers of Stan and the gang are revealed, there may be a need to reflect more on what it is that we cherish in the stories. Ignoring context is, I believe, to our own detriment.

I feel exactly the same. 

Knowing the intimate details of the Beatles, and their lives, gives a flavor to the music that makes it even greater than if viewed as a simple pop song.

[Prince Namor]

Stan Lee - 1955

769 pages

665 in Humor/Romance (86%)

32 in Horror/Suspense (4%)

69 in Western/Fantasy (8%)

3 in Superhero

[Prince Namor]

More of the type of thing I found interesting in the book:

[Prince Namor]

On an almost reunion with Steve Ditko in the 90's:

[JollyComics]

On 3/10/2021 at 4:32 PM, Prince Namor said:

Stan's best artist had died

 It was Joe Maneely?

[Prince Namor]

19 minutes ago, JollyComics said:

 It was Joe Maneely?

Yes. 
 

[JollyComics]

3 minutes ago, Prince Namor said:

Yes. 
 

The best of all!  Sadly, he was only 32 years old and left behind his wife and two young kids with a recently purchase of a new house.

[Prince Namor]

7 minutes ago, JollyComics said:

The best of all!  Sadly, he was only 32 years old and left behind his wife and two young kids with a recently purchase of a new house.

Yeah it’s a sad story. A great appreciation has grown for Maneely’s work over the years - he was fantastic. 
 

Much of that Atlas stuff isn’t written all that great - the horror stuff is EC-lite, but the artists that worked for them at the time did some of their best work.  

[Ken Aldred]

On 3/12/2021 at 4:33 PM, Prince Namor said:

I wasn't a fan of Marvel's over pontification at times - but Stan's sense of humor, through his dialogue and his Soapbox or ads, made Marvel so much more enjoyable to read vs DC or anyone else. 

Possibly why I soon got tired of Lee's writing on Silver Surfer, and the lack of the warmth and humour present in his earlier work.

Edited March 13, 2021 by Ken Aldred

[Ken Aldred]

On 3/12/2021 at 4:38 PM, Prince Namor said:

If you've ever wondered why Joe Orlando had such a short one issue stint with Marvel back in the early 60's....

 

Yet another classic creator, Joe Orlando, was recruited after him (Bill Everett) and chafed under what he identified as Stan’s desire to have art that looked like Kirby’s, so he quit… admitted Orlando... 

-from True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

Orlando's style was more closely aligned with Wally Wood's than Kirby's, both of them being great EC science-fiction artists.  Both worked briefly on Daredevil, and I also wonder if Wood quickly lost patience with Lee for similar reasons?

[Prince Namor]

43 minutes ago, Ken Aldred said:

Orlando's style was more closely aligned with Wally Wood's than Kirby's, both of them being great EC science-fiction artists.  Both worked briefly on Daredevil, and I also wonder if Wood quickly lost patience with Lee for similar reasons?

It was worse.

Wally Wood 

Wood: I enjoyed working with Stan [Lee] on Daredevil but for one thing. I had to make up the whole story. He was being paid for writing, and I was being paid for drawing, but he didn't have any ideas. I'd go in for a plotting session, and we'd just stare at each other until I came up with a storyline. I felt like I was writing the book but not being paid for writing.

Evanier: You did write one issue, as I recall--

Wood: One yes [Daredevil #10]. I persuaded him to let me write one by myself since I was doing 99% of the writing already. I wrote it, handed it in, and he said it was hopeless. He said he'd have to rewrite it all and write the next issue himself. Well, I said I couldn't contribute to the storyline unless I got paid something for writing, and Stan said he'd look into it, but after that he only had inking for me. Bob Powell was suddenly pencilling Daredevil.[Later on in the interview] ... I saw [Daredevil #10] when it came out, and Stan had changed five words---less than an editor usually changes. I think that was the last straw.

[Prince Namor]

Kurtzman worked at Timely/Atlas after the war for a few years but left for EC because Stan didn't like him writing his own stories. Once he left, Stan plotted and then dialogued those books for the next 20 years, getting paid as the Editor and Writer, while the artist just got paid to draw. Stan Goldberg recounted in Alter-Ego Magazine:

GOLDBERG:” Stan would drive me home and we’d plot our stories in the car. I’d say to Stan,”How’s this? Millie loses her job.” He’d say,”Great! Give me 25 pages.” And that took him off the hook. One time I was in Stan’s office and I told him, “I don’t have another plot.” Stan got out of his chair and walked over to me, looked me in the face, and said very seriously, “I don’t ever want to hear you say you can’t think of another plot.” Then he walked back and sat down in his chair. He didn’t think he needed to tell me anything more.”

JIM AMISH:” Sounds like you were doing most of the writing then.”

GOLDBERG: “Well, I was.”

[lordbyroncomics]

Roy Thomas's rebuttal is built on a sense of preservation and his own bias. Not a surprise. I'm amused how his "manager" continues to get his credit multiple times in anything Roy is involved with these days.

[lordbyroncomics]

I appreciate Prince Namor quoting and giving excerpts from the book itself, but I thought some quotes from the author in recent interviews would be worth sharing as well:

"One of the great tragedies of Stan’s life was that there were a lot of things that he was unambiguously good at, and those were generally not the things he chose to emphasize. He chose to put the spotlight on things that he claimed he did that there is a lot of doubt about. He emphasized that he was the great ideas man, when it’s unclear whether the ideas behind these characters and stories were really his. He pitched himself as this great writer when he wasn’t writing scripts. He was writing dialogue and narration, sure, but he was not doing the first pass at the drafts. At the same time, he was not saying, “I was a great editor,” which he was in a lot of ways, or “I was great because I created the interconnected continuity of the Marvel universe.” That was another thing that was pretty unambiguously him, but he didn’t choose to emphasize. So yeah, it’s interesting. It raises a lot of questions about human nature and the degree to which we all do that. We all have the things we do that we want to be known for that are not necessarily the things we’re known for, and that can be frustrating. But when you go against the grain like that, you can at times end up getting caught in a lie."

[lordbyroncomics]

"One thing I’m trying to put across that there are these things that Marvel should be proud of him for, or thank him for, such as the concept of the shared Marvel universe. Or such as the wrangling of talent. Or even just the letters pages. The letters pages were enormously helpful. They were instrumental. People who read those comics came back month after month, week after week, because they wanted to interact with Stan and see what Stan’s interactions with other fans was like. Stan still has an enormous legacy for Marvel. Without Stan, I don’t think Marvel succeeds. I don’t think you could have had the Marvel revolution without a Stan Lee. It’s not that I’m trying to say his name should be banished from the Earth – far from it. He’s somebody who really was crucial for the success of Marvel and therefore for the comics medium and the superhero genre, and that’s not something to sneeze at. You just have to take it also with the fact that a lot of his legacy was built on falsehoods or dubious claims or exaggerations and so on. So, just because his legacy should change doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve a legacy or that he has none."

One other point Riesman made was that Stan's entire legacy is built on one small block of time, with nothing great or groundbreaking before that block of time or after it, whereas Kirby goes on to create the New Gods, The Demon, etc.- whether or not you view those as valid creations, the point is he kept creating. Not in a contest sense but simply to add more weight to the argument of who creates what. It's also interesting that Stan never ever claimed sole credit until Kirby left Marvel and went to DC and Marvel was bought by Chemical Co. and the new owners secured him in a new position. It's suggested that the powers that be always supported Stan because he was going to claim creator as sole creator without going against them for any sense of ownership so long as he had a secure position, and therefore protecting them from any future legal claims. The same is true at the Disney deposition, decades later. There's a vested interest in Marvel/Disney keeping this myth alive. Even the blurb for the forthcoming 'August 1961' Omnibus begins with something like, "It wasn't until his beloved wife, Joan, told him to take a stand and do comics HIS way..."

It's obnoxious. And again, the issue is not taking anything away from Stan. Why Stan defenders won't get this is due to their child-like need to preserve their notions of nostalgia. It's simply to properly credit who did drive the creative pulse at Marvel. There's no Marvel without Stan, I'm the first to say it. But it's the things he didn't do that he keeps getting credit for- this needs to be corrected and balanced. Sorry, frantic ones!

[Prince Namor]

19 minutes ago, wisbyron said:

Roy Thomas's rebuttal is built on a sense of preservation and his own bias. Not a surprise. I'm amused how his "manager" continues to get his credit multiple times in anything Roy is involved with these days.

Yeah, Roy writing the newspaper strip for 20 years while Stan signed his name to it and got credit, tells you plenty about their relationship.

[piper]

Well I've read Fourth World, Kamandi, Demon, Eternals, 70's CA and Black Panther... Kirby couldn't right a -script to save his life.

[lordbyroncomics]

10 minutes ago, Prince Namor said:

Yeah, Roy writing the newspaper strip for 20 years while Stan signed his name to it and got credit, tells you plenty about their relationship.

Plus, according to Ed Piskor (who states this on an episode of Cartoonist Kayfabe), Roy also ghost-wrote Stan's introductions to Marvel Masterworks (!!), and someone at ReedPop told me that Stan's "How to Write" and "How to Draw" Comics books from a decade ago were ghost-written by Fingeroth. And Jim Shooter has famously explained how Stan needed someone to plot the daily Spider-Man strip from the inception of it back in the late seventies... again, I'm not saying those things are bad or wrong per se.. I guess.. I'm just saying, doesn't all of this support the argument at least that Stan was not a creative force? But rather someone very good at embellishing and guiding?