Revelations about Stan Lee in Riesman's biography

[krazijoe]

Stan Lee is more the manager or producer of Van Halen's records. He's Col. Tom Parker or Brian Epstein to Kirby and Ditko's Elvis and the Beatles. The most specific analogy is Malcom McLaren and the Sex Pistols.

David Lee Roth was the lead vocalist of the band whereas in the comics, the equivalent to the lead vocalist would be the character-designs and powers and abilities, which Kirby and Ditko did by themselves. They also designed the art which is the rhythm, bass, drum sections all by themselves. In addition to that they also came up with most of the plots and stories and Lee worked as a script doctor punching up the dialogues in their boxes, had a say in choosing the cover of the comics and maybe the lettering and types. So at best Lee would get a co-credit for songwriting, still sticking with the band analogy. About the only thing he is guaranteed to have contributed to Spider-Man is the hyphen, the name comes from Kirby and Joe Simon, the concept of the hero staying with his Aunt and Uncle from Kirby, the everything else from Ditko.

Andy Warhol produced the first album of The Velvet Underground and Nico. He insisted Nico be the "chanteuse" on the first album even if she didn't contribute anything else. He designed the cover of the first album but otherwise didn't have anything to do with the music and lyrics or content. He lent his celebrity to promote a band and then got out of the way and never took credit for the songs or lyrics.

If Stan Lee had behaved the way Warhol did on that album, he'd be far more respected and held in greater esteem and we would have none of this controversy and most likely Jack Kirby and even Steve Ditko would have continued to stay in Marvel.

I was going for minimal talent, stealing all the limelight while the real artists just did their thing.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I was going for minimal talent, stealing all the limelight while the real artists just did their thing.

Well it comes to the same thing, I suppose.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

The tendency to give Stan Lee a pass for the Marvel Method is astonishing considering that his own public admissions decades across amounted to him saying that he was just an editor and not a writer:

Like in the 1980s he said,

"I wrote the stories and these fellas would draw a lot of them. They both were so good at story that I would just have to give them a few key words and they would do practically the whole thing and then I would just polish it up after they had done it, and it was a wonderful way to work."


So he starts by saying "I wrote the stories" and then says that his collaborators were so good "I would just have to give them a few key words"...yeah that's an editor and not a writer. Offering "Key Words" isn't writing. You can't start a statement by saying "I wrote the stories" and then describe what you actually do as being an editor and then act as if you're a writer at the end of the tunnel.

In 1965, he said,

"Some artists, of course, need a more detailed plot than others. Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean, I’ll just say to Jack, “Let’s let the next villain be Doctor Doom”…or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He’s so good at plots, I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I. He just about makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing….I may tell him that he’s gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I’ll give him a plot, but we’re practically both the writers on the things."

He says 'we're practically both the writers on the things'...I mean how is it that this was even a debate to start with? He outright admits that Kirby did the writing on these issues.

Stan Lee is a good example of the phenomenon of celebrity where personal charisma and fame as well as a generally welcoming and benevolent interpersonal nature leads people to suspend all their judgment and give him a total pass for stuff you wouldn't tolerate or enforce in any other situation.

I am thinking of what Frank Herbert, the author of DUNE said, "Charismatic leaders should come with a warning label attached - might be injurious to your health."

[gurkle]

Maybe I come at it from a different angle, since it doesn't surprise me at all that someone can be the "creator" or at least co-creator of something while farming out the writing to others.

This happens all the time in television, where the showrunner is often too busy to write episodes themselves, but the credited writer of the episodes is made to filter everything they do through the sensibility of the showrunner. When we see an episode, no matter who wrote it, the showrunner's personality and preferences come through.

And of course there are lots of movie directors and producers who don't write anything but are still more responsible for what we see than any writer.

So I don't find it inherently far-fetched that someone could be considered a co-creator based on being editor and dialogue writer. Even being the editor is enough sometimes, granted that Mort Weisinger was probably much more hands-on with his writers than Stan Lee was, at least before the dialogue stage (and even there, he seems to have mostly stopped rewriting or even reading his writers' dialogue after he was confident that they could write like him).

A difference is that the writers on a TV show get paid good money and get full writing credit, indeed, more credit than they "deserve," since they usually get sole scriptwriting credit no matter how much the showrunner contributes. The best case for dragging Stan Lee is the inherent unfairness of the Marvel Method and the uncredited writing/storytelling work it involves, along with his doing nothing to disabuse people of the notion that he created everything himself.

[JackDaw]

The best case for dragging Stan Lee is the inherent unfairness of the Marvel Method and the uncredited writing/storytelling work it involves, along with his doing nothing to disabuse people of the notion that he created everything himself.

Lol. Wasn’t Stan effectively the guy who invented “The Marvel Method”?

And rather than just “doing nothing to disabuse people of the notion that he created everything himself” wasn’t he a skilled and enthusiastic pusher of that notion?

I don’t dislike Stan...on balance I feel he was a like-able guy who helped bring an enormous amount of enjoyment in the world. But I also wish the respective contributions the key artists and he made were more widely known. That’s about being fair to Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and other artists, it’s not about “getting at” Stan.

I think anyone that understands how the Marvel method worked will understand that in many key comics the guys just credited with art, should have got the main writing credit as well...that really shouldn’t be controversial, it’s widely accepted how the Marvel method worked.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Maybe I come at it from a different angle, since it doesn't surprise me at all that someone can be the "creator" or at least co-creator of something while farming out the writing to others.

This happens all the time in television, where the showrunner is often too busy to write episodes themselves, but the credited writer of the episodes is made to filter everything they do through the sensibility of the showrunner. When we see an episode, no matter who wrote it, the showrunner's personality and preferences come through.

Being a showrunner on TV isn't the same as being an Editor on Comics. The showrunner developed the concept, shopped the pilot got it cast and developed the original characters. The showrunner is closer to who Kirby and Ditko were. Especially Ditko since he was the one actively and consistently developing subplots across his run on Spider-Man, namely the Green Goblin (where he clearly inserted Norman Osborn in the background in early issues to seed the idea of him becoming a major figure).

Stan Lee would be the senior executive taking credit for the show. Casey Bloys HBO head taking credit for Game of Thrones and not Benioff and Weiss. Could Game of Thrones been greenlit by any studio other than HBO? No. That much even the showrunners admit. But (regardless of what you feel about the final seasons) would anyone else have been able to cast the way the showrunners did, get the show greenlit the way they did, deal with the logistics and other issues the way they did, the answer would be no?

And of course there are lots of movie directors and producers who don't write anything but are still more responsible for what we see than any writer.

In a comic, Stan Lee isn't a director. He's closer to a producer and script doctor but the bulk of any comic is Kirby and Ditko's doing. And even in the Golden Age of Hollywood producers never took credit for directing. In Hollywood the debate is that "Because I produced it the movie is mine" while the director goes "because I directed it the movie is mine" and the screenwriter is "I wrote it, it's mine" and the actors are all, "they came to see me, not all of you". The issue is which credit is more important and determining for the final outcome of the movie and who should have last say on the movie (general consensus leans to the director on this among movie scholars and the wider public and among most professionals in the business) but there aren't any real cases of a producer conflating their producing with writing and so on, that's a comics' issue and unique to the medium.

The best case for dragging Stan Lee is the inherent unfairness of the Marvel Method and the uncredited writing/storytelling work it involves, along with his doing nothing to disabuse people of the notion that he created everything himself.

Absolutely.

Lol. Wasn’t Stan effectively the guy who invented “The Marvel Method”?

Yeah he was.

And rather than just “doing nothing to disabuse people of the notion that he created everything himself” wasn’t he a skilled and enthusiastic pusher of that notion?

That's the weird part of this, everyone presumes Stan Lee was somehow innocent and this was a terrible misunderstanding. Even if it was, Lee had the biggest megaphone in the world to clear that up. All he had to say, "Look I am just the editor-in-chief, and I touch up dialogues here and there but the stories in your hands are the works of Jack Kirby, writer-artist, Steve Ditko writer-artist".

Mark Evanier recounts in Riesman's book that he pointed this to Stan and said to his face that in all his life he never lived up to the idea of 'with great power comes great responsibility', instead you have a guy who never took responsibility, never owned up to anything.

I think anyone that understands how the Marvel method works that in many key comics the guys just credited with art, should have got the main writing credit as well...that really shouldn’t be controversial, it’s widely accepted how the Marvel method worked.

Well not by Roy Thomas, lol.

The fact is that the Marvel Method did evolve after Kirby and Ditko and Lee had a falling out and when Thomas and others entered in the mid-60s but that's a separate issue entirely.

[gurkle]

but there aren't any real cases of a producer conflating their producing with writing and so on, that's a comics' issue and unique to the medium.

Well, if a producer writes as much of the dialogue as Stan Lee did, they would probably be eligible to give themselves a writing credit, even if they were writing entirely from someone else's notes.

Some countries' film industries used to credit "scenario" and "dialogue" separately, so one credit would go to the people who worked out the plot, another credit to the person who wrote the dialogue script.

The fact is that the Marvel Method did evolve after Kirby and Ditko and Lee had a falling out and when Thomas and others entered in the mid-60s but that's a separate issue entirely.

Yes, the Marvel Method continued to be the way most Marvel comics were produced right up until the early 2000s, but the plots became more detailed and sometimes even had panel-by-panel breakdowns. Even now some books are still produced Marvel-style, but they're essentially fully-scripted comics where the dialogue isn't finalized until the art comes in.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Yes, the Marvel Method continued to be the way most Marvel comics were produced right up until the early 2000s, but the plots became more detailed and sometimes even had panel-by-panel breakdowns. Even now some books are still produced Marvel-style, but they're essentially fully-scripted comics where the dialogue isn't finalized until the art comes in.

Yeah, we need to distinguish between "the Stan Lee Method" which only he used to the extent he did which is essentially "Editor thinks editing is writing" and talks of his job as editor as if it's writing, and the so-called "Marvel Method" that was practiced by the writers Stan brought in once Marvel took off -- Roy Thomas being one of them, others being Gerry Conway, Jim Starlin among others. Thomas of course as a young fan looked up to Stan (and that adulation I think has compromised his judgment about Lee) and sought to imitate him and became the first EIC after Lee and he wrote detailed plots for the artists and added in the dialogue with the finished art along with the sound effects after getting back the pencils. So Thomas and others assumed that Lee's collaboration with Kirby and Ditko happened the same way it did with him and others.

That's also how Gerry Conway worked and he described it in detail when he talked about writing "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" and adding in the 'snap' sound effect after getting the finished sound effect**. Conway wrote and conceived the entire story beat by beat, and had a specific vision. When he got the epilogue he didn't like Gil Kane's pencils so he had John Romita Sr. redraw the epilogue (which ironically enough was a completely silent sequence without dialogue but it's still writing when you decide you don't want to use any dialogue). So that's an example of a writer calling the shots and determining the look, feel, tone and theme of the finished issue.

Eventually Marvel slowly but surely phased towards writing full scripts. And under Jim Shooter you had credits that were specific because sometimes writers would do the plotting but wouldn't have time to do the dialogue so you had credits go "Plot by so-and-so" "Dialogue/Script by so-and-so" and Pencils and so on. Jim Shooter for instance wrote and plotted out the entire storyline of the Trial of Yellowjacket where Hank slaps Janet but the final issues had dialogue by Roger Stern who plotted it out so that's what the credits reflect. Other times Roger Stern would plot out stuff but other would do the dialogue. The Spider-Man Wedding Annual had a plot by Jim Shooter but dialogue by David Michelinie. On the other hand Frank Miller wrote full scripts in that time. He started out as a writer-artist on Daredevil credited for his dual work but eventually became a full-time writer and he wrote full scripts for his collaborators like Klaus Janson and David Mazzuchelli on BORN AGAIN. I think it was Miller's influence that shifted away towards full-scripts. Miller and Alan Moore. J. M. Dematteis was also a full-script guy. Roger Stern worked in the intensified Marvel Method style of Conway. Claremont started in Marvel Method before going towards full-scripts after Byrne left, but depending on the collaborator, such as Bill Sinkiewicz he went to the Thomas-Conway intensified Marvel Method. The Marvel Method got out of hand and toxic when Chris Claremont and John Byrne worked together. Both of them had strong opinions and completely opposing values. By the mid-70s it was generally understood that artists would mostly follow the detailed outlines for the plot writers gave them, but John Byrne saw himself as a creator in his own right and he would outright reject and undo Claremont's scripts, not drawing it in panels and so on...in response Claremont wrote detailed word baloons and captions to cover and indicate stuff Byrne refused to draw, so you had a writer and artist at cross-purposes, a tag-team where the wrestlers prefer fighting the partner. There were great comics and ideas that came from that collaboration but it was combustible and not built to last.

The marvel method is also responsible for delays in getting a story out because the artist without a full script to draw would often not have the same sense of pacing the writers do and some writers would tarry with their dialogue and so on. The use of the Marvel Method under Thomas and others led to marvel comics becoming famous for delays and not getting anything out on time until Jim Shooter came in and fixed the problem. So it was inefficient and in the case of Claremont-Byrne clearly creating a terrible work environment (but then maybe that's just John Byrne since Claremont didn't have issues with his other collaborators, including Frank Miller). Dan Slott is basically the only major writer at Marvel who still works in the "marvel style" and as that Disney documentary reveals, it leads to delays and procrastination, and then they have to get another writer (Christos Gage) to come in and write the dialogue. Whereas Bendis, Hickman, and others all used full scripts.

On the whole, Stan Lee not only obscured his contributions with Kirby and Ditko but he also set the precedent for a terribly inefficient method of producing comics. The Marvel Method is supposed to make it easier for artists to draw but that only works with Kirby and his page-rate, it doesn't for the non-Kirbys that comprise the majority of artists and writers.

** The other issue with the intensified marvel method of Thomas-Conway is plain incoherence. The Night Gwen Stacy Died is a good example. That entire story was plotted and drawn with the idea that Goblin killed Gwen Stacy by dropping her off the bridge but then after getting the pencils, Conway adds in a sound effect as basically a joke and suddenly you have a story that's about Spider-Man's incompetence killing Gwen which the story and following issue still treats as Norman's doing. So that's an example of incoherence that this leads to.

[captchuck]

I like Stan Lee. But, I like Jack Kirby more. Jack really cared about Marvel Comics and comics in general. Stan needed something to make money and please Martin Goodman.

Comic books in the mid-60's were the lowest-rung magazines being sold. They were sold at 12¢ each. If a store sold one, the store would make 2¢ on that book. Stan kept it all going in spite of this. Marvel survived. DC survived. Archie survived. Gold Key, Harvey, and Charlton didn't. There was no guarantee that Marvel would be a survivor.

Jack Kirby (and Steve Ditko) supplied the characters that kept Marvel in business. Nobody (except Jack ) thought these stories would end up on the big screen or that Disney would need Marvel Comics one day for the characters. Stan was desperate to stay employed and self-promote, while Jack Kirby continued to create new worlds.

Maybe the credits would have been more fair if Stan Lee believed that these characters would last the same way Kirby thought they would last.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I like Stan Lee. But, I like Jack Kirby more. Jack really cared about Marvel Comics and comics in general. Stan needed something to make money and please Martin Goodman.

In the case of Stan, in addition to pleasing Martin Goodman, there's the fact that he was 40 years old and didn't have anything to show for his life. He apparently wanted to be a serious novelist but he was also married and had a kid, so he needed the only paying job he had (which he got from nepotism rather than merit, let's be real).

As Mike Avila of Syfy Wire pointed out the biggest problem with Stan's credibility is his own life.
"The entirety of the Stan Lee myth stands on this unsteady foundation: That we must believe that a man who spent two decades in comics not creating a single memorable character or story, would suddenly be primarily responsible for the single greatest creative period in comics history... and who would never come close to creating anything remotely substantial ever again. How does that make sense in any reasonable way?" (https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/stan-l...k-kirby-credit)

In the first 40 years of life, he had nothing. If Stan was such a natural and great editor and so on, how is it that in the near two decades he ran Timely/Atlas before Kirby arrived in the late-50s, Lee didn't produce or introduce any notable comic and in fact all they did was chase trends done in the industry at large. Then Kirby arrived in the late-50s and things changed. Stan Lee had a great talent for publicity and a good sense for editing when he had his hands on something valuable and popular, and he ran a good ship as EIC in the 1960s, but then his own practices drove away Kirby and Ditko and Marvel in the 1970s had a slump it fell into until Jim Shooter arrived.

Maybe the credits would have been more fair if Stan Lee believed that these characters would last the same way Kirby thought they would last.

The credits would only be fair if Stan Lee actually wrote full-scripts for each and every comic. Or at the very least wrote detailed plots for issues. He said "Written by Stan Lee" and he drew a salary as a freelance writer in addition to being an editor while artists only got paid for the page-rate. Later in the decade he tried and changed that, and altered that, but it was still a dodge of his responsibility and a failure to come clean.

...as for the idea that Lee believes that these characters would last, that's neither here nor there. The Roman poet Virgil believed The Aeneid should have been burned after he died. The Emperor Augustus refused and today the poem survives and is considered a classic. That doesn't mean Augustus is the author of the poem. Nobody has that attitude. The truth is most any writer creating any work of art (a film, a novel, a play, a music album) wouldn't be fully aware that their work would succeed or have the impact it would. All they can be comfortable and happy about is putting in the best effort and ideas into their work and hope that leads to something interesting.

[gurkle]

I've always liked some of Marvel/Timely's humor comics, particularly "Millie the Model" and "Patsy Walker." They reveal Lee to be not quite in the top tier of scriptwriters, like Frank Doyle at Archie Comics, but possessing some of the qualities that would come in handy in the superhero comics, like an ear for a cynical one-liner and a love of characters who are constantly sniping at each other. But even there, the main attraction is not his writing but the art. Dan DeCarlo and Al Hartley would go over to Archie when work dried up at Lee's shop, but their work on "Millie" and "Patsy" respectively may be the best of their careers and the best Archie-style art of the '50s. Along with Buscema on "Silver Surfer" and Colan on "Daredevil" they convinced me that Lee had some kind of ability to get career-best work out of artists, though his limitations as a scriptwriter held back al those comics from the very top tier.

My own orientation as someone who came to superheroes late and mostly read Archie-type comics as a kid, meant that to me Stan Lee's pre-1961 résumé seemed more impressive than Jack Kirby's. Of course I no longer think that, but I do think that the coverage of comics history is a bit skewed against the types of stuff Lee was putting out in the '50s. Most people know that Dan DeCarlo is a major figure in comics history but there's very little coverage of his working relationship with Lee, for good or ill (though apparently Lee took a 10% cut of some of DeCarlo's "adult" cartoons in return for introducing him to the editor of a big men's magazine).

"The entirety of the Stan Lee myth stands on this unsteady foundation: That we must believe that a man who spent two decades in comics not creating a single memorable character or story, would suddenly be primarily responsible for the single greatest creative period in comics history... and who would never come close to creating anything remotely substantial ever again. How does that make sense in any reasonable way?"

I have trouble buying this argument. There are lots of people who aren't particularly great creators who happen to meet the moment and do their best work in a short period. More importantly, it seems to assume that someone has to be a genius to participate in the creation of these characters and comics, but they aren't the highest works of artistic ambition and at least some of the characters probably would be forgotten today if they hadn't been continually published and developed by others. (Virtually every '60s Marvel comic franchise is famous today, even the ones that no one considered to be much good at the time, like X-Men and Daredevil. Probably lots of forgotten superheroes could be equally famous today if creators had been continually trying them out for years until someone finally made them work.) Stan Lee had a skill for getting good work out of artists, a way with a one-liner, an attitude that mixed cynicism and sentimentality in equal parts, and a certain talent for promotion, and that's pretty much the limit of his talent, but for a few years in the '60s that was enough, in part because a superhero's cultural value isn't just based on how good their comics are but stuff like how famous they are and the cultural attitude they seem to represent.

[JackDaw]

It’s incredibly hard to distinguish myth and fact in regards to Stan the man.

I would assume that even his most loyal admirer would accept that he was a talented self publicist who had a healthy interest in promoting his own self interest. To that extent I’d take it as self evident that when anything relies primarily on Stan’s word without substantial collaboration, then it’s on a foundation of sand.

But equally I’d assume that every one accepts he was one of most important guys in comics, and specifically in the creation and success of Marvel.

Personally I’ve thought for years that he wasn’t as responsible for the creation of Marvels key characters as is generally assumed...that his key artists did most of the heavy lifting there. As much as anything I think that’s because over the years I’ve changed my understanding of where the main effort and genius of creation lies.

Let’s assume Stan was first person to say “Let’s have a guy called Spider-man, with spider powers”...and then went to his key artists with a brief not much more detailed than that. Then Steve Ditko created the look of Peter Parker, the Spider-man costume, the way he moved in fights, plotted most of the key stories that led to early success... then for me I’d regard Steve as main creator of Spider-man. That Ditko put most of the effort in, and most creative thought.

And deep down I think...based on Stan’s own words among other things such as what his main artists have said, the amount of comics he was working on in key period, the paucity of his scripts ...that’s the way he often operated.

I do not think he was a “detail” man, he was a guy that knew how to get the best work out of others.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I've always liked some of Marvel/Timely's humor comics, particularly "Millie the Model" and "Patsy Walker." They reveal Lee to be not quite in the top tier of scriptwriters, like Frank Doyle at Archie Comics, but possessing some of the qualities that would come in handy in the superhero comics, like an ear for a cynical one-liner and a love of characters who are constantly sniping at each other. But even there, the main attraction is not his writing but the art. Dan DeCarlo and Al Hartley would go over to Archie when work dried up at Lee's shop, but their work on "Millie" and "Patsy" respectively may be the best of their careers and the best Archie-style art of the '50s. Along with Buscema on "Silver Surfer" and Colan on "Daredevil" they convinced me that Lee had some kind of ability to get career-best work out of artists, though his limitations as a scriptwriter held back al those comics from the very top tier.

My own orientation as someone who came to superheroes late and mostly read Archie-type comics as a kid, meant that to me Stan Lee's pre-1961 résumé seemed more impressive than Jack Kirby's. Of course I no longer think that, but I do think that the coverage of comics history is a bit skewed against the types of stuff Lee was putting out in the '50s. Most people know that Dan DeCarlo is a major figure in comics history but there's very little coverage of his working relationship with Lee, for good or ill (though apparently Lee took a 10% cut of some of DeCarlo's "adult" cartoons in return for introducing him to the editor of a big men's magazine).

That's a pretty solid assessment all things considered.

I didn't grow up with superhero comics myself and even then I was DC before migrating to Marvel (it's a case of "DC left me" rather than "I left DC" *cough* Geoff Johns *cough*). I only became interested in Kirby and Ditko and the Marvel Method controversy because of Alan Moore, who was my gateway guide to comics history.

I have trouble buying this argument. There are lots of people who aren't particularly great creators who happen to meet the moment and do their best work in a short period.

If Stan Lee had written the "one good book" or if he had written the "one great play" it would be believable. Instead we are supposed to believe at the age of 40 after a career of mediocrity, he in a short five-six years produced, wrote and developed the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Spider-Man, the Avengers and not only the heroes but all the villains and the supporting characters! Essentially about a 100 iconic characters in a few short years. It's like Shakespeare sat on his ass for 20 years and then in five years wrote all his plays and poems and then spent the next 40 years of his life d--king around. That's not how it worked. The actual Shakespeare, from what we gather, honed his craft and produced his plays over a period of time, with clear differences between his early, middle and mature years. Charles Dickens, about whom he know, is also a novelist who is prolific and wrote many great books and many iconic characters and he again evolved and honed his career over decades.

A short burst of creativity can justify the one good comic, or the one great character and title. Maybe two. It can't justify an entire continuity and line of comics. And even if that was the case, it can't justify Stan Lee's unbelievable decline after the '60s. As Robert DeNiro says in CASINO, the odds for that are impossible, it cannot happen. You don't go from nobody to Shakespeare and then back to nobody. You can go from nobody to write "the one great book" and that's not inconsiderable by any means. There are quite a few examples of authors who are famous just for the one major work and maybe don't do anything else. You can be a late-bloomer as well, but even then once you bloom late you generally do stay active and working. Robert Altman is one of America's greatest directors and he toiled two decades in TV and on the skids before bursting in the '70s as a major director, making 14 films in a single year and then in the decades after that remaining a consistent maverick who produced several interesting films and so on.

[Alan2099]

Let’s assume Stan was first person to say “Let’s have a guy called Spider-man, with spider powers”...and then went to his key artists with a brief not much more detailed than that. Then Steve Ditko created the look of Peter Parker, the Spider-man costume, the way he moved in fights, plotted most of the key stories that led to early success... then for me I’d regard Steve as main creator of Spider-man. That Ditko put most of the effort in, and most creative thought.

One thing I always feel gets left out of these discussions about who created what is the characters personality. Stan created who the characters acted, talked, and thought, even if you want to say he didn't have anything else. The personality is what separates a good character from an instantly forgettable.

Also, I don't know how many of you have ever tried this, but take a comic, erase all the word balloons, and captions, then go back and try to rewrite them and tell a coherent story. Even with a good artist, it's hard.

[JackDaw]

One thing I always feel gets left out of these discussions about who created what is the characters personality. Stan created who the characters acted, talked, and thought, even if you want to say he didn't have anything else. The personality is what separates a good character from an instantly forgettable.

Also, I don't know how many of you have ever tried this, but take a comic, erase all the word balloons, and captions, then go back and try to rewrite them and tell a coherent story. Even with a good artist, it's hard.

I agree with a lot of what you say. Certainly putting the dialogue in was no piece of cake. Undoubtedly Stan did a lot more than Bob Kane did!

But I do demur from your view that it was Stan who usually created how the characters acted in the two key runs (the Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four and the Ditko-Lee Spider-man).

In those runs Jack K and Steve D in many of the stories plotted and drew the stories (and sometimes put in dialogue hints) and Stan put in dialogue afterwards....so the way the characters acted was down to Jack and Steve.

And comics is a heavily visual medium...so a lot of personality cues come from the way they were drawn, just as an actors body language and facial expressions often tells you more about personality and character than the dialogue.

A specific example: Take the original Galactus trilogy...the way Jack drew the sequence where Johnny travelled through space and time to get the weapon that causes Galactus to leave said masses more about Johnny’s character than any dialogue in those issues.