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  1. #121
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    Quote Originally Posted by JackDaw View Post
    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.
    Totally. There's an entire website and sub-field in Jack Kirby studies called "Kirby Without Words":
    https://kirbywithoutwords.tumblr.com/

    And they point out numerous instances where the art tells one story but the dialogue contradicts it, and usually the most prominent is that the art is often more feminist than Stan Lee's dialogue. And in some cases, they compare the original dialogue suggestions to what Lee did, and Kirby's dialogue is more economical and reads better than what Lee did.

    More than that dialogue is determined by context. Without context, dialogue is often meaningless.

    There's documentary evidence for that: "With Great Power comes Great Responsibility". This was not an original quote, many versions flowed around. A superman serial in the '40s had Pa Kent telling this to Clark long before the comics credited that caption to Uncle Ben. Here's the thing, between AF#15 in 1962 to Spider-Man V. Wolverine in 1987, the first 25 years of the character, this line had no special significance and meaning and was never alluded to after the first issue. Famous landmark stories like Spider-Man No More which revisited the origin made no mention of this line. And yet Spider-Man was a successful and famous character and already arrived in those 25 years. If the final captions didn't have that line, if it said something else, something that doesn't become iconic...the history of Spider-Man in those first 25 years would be unchanged.

    What determines and gives that line meaning is -- Peter lets the burglar go who ends up killing his Uncle Ben. All empirical evidence suggests that Ditko created this. That is the engine of the character, and it is this action that gives that line any meaning. Without it, "with great power'' is well a vague, empty phrase that can mean whatever you want it. (Remember the first version was said in 1793 by the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror, aka Robespierre's committee, and it's possibly a self-righteous way of saying, 'we have to guillotine a bunch of people and we're not gonna be happy about it, so don't make me destroy you').

    Quote Originally Posted by Alan2099 View Post
    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.
    The way characters acted is often shaped and determined by the art, by action and movement. In the case of what the actors thought and talked, Stan didn't create that entirely because he followed dialogue suggested by Lee and Ditko. So he's technically what's called a "script-doctor" to use Hollywood terms, where a major production would hire someone to touch up the dialogue.

    Take Star Wars. Here's a comparison of George Lucas' draft of a famous speech and Lawrence Kasdan's touch-up of the same speech:
    George Lucas: “Not material are we. Luminous beings are we, tied together by the Force. Yes. There are two of you … your body and your energy.”
    Lawrence Kasdan: “Luminous beings are we [pinches Luke’s skin], not this crude matter.”

    Now Kasdan's dialogue obviously flows better but fundamentally Lucas already created the character, the personality and content of the story before Kasdan's input. Yoda is George Lucas' creation, he created the name, the look, the entire role and personality, as well as the kind of Buddhist Monk trappings to him. Kasdan was obviously important to that, but no one, and certainly not Kasdan, has ever said that he created those characters.

    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 t.ell a coherent story. Even with a good artist, it's hard.
    "Kirby Without Words" said hold by beer to that a long time ago (https://kirbywithoutwords.tumblr.com/).

    A lot of Kirby's panels read quite clearly and legibly and in many cases Stan Lee's dialogue overexplains stuff and doesn't actually qualify as good dialogue in terms of economy.

    In some cases, Lee hardly touched up anything.

  2. #122
    Better than YOU! Alan2099's Avatar
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    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.
    Partially, but I'm going to bring up the Beast as an example here. For the first few issues, Beast talked like a thug and wasn't that different from Thing. A few issues later, he became the genius we all know, yet you wouldn't be able to pick up any real changes with the art alone.

    Also, there are several instances (more noticeable with Ditko than Kirby) where Stan seemed to be going against the personality that was drawn.

  3. #123
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    Quote Originally Posted by Alan2099 View Post
    Also, there are several instances (more noticeable with Ditko than Kirby) where Stan seemed to be going against the personality that was drawn.
    In the case of Ditko, that's just not true. Unless you are referring to the rumor and myth that apparently Lee undercut Ditko's portrayal of a college protest by making Spider-Man side with the protestors. The original issue with that ASM#38 shows no such thing and Stan Lee himself politically had the same attitude as Ditko towards college protests.

    I mean an obvious tell is the last issues of Ditko and the first issues of Romita Sr.

    How is it that Norman Osborn so unsympathetic and slimy in Ditko's ASM#37-38 devolved in Lee-Romita's first two "Green Goblin Reborn" into an amnesiac lame dad and midlife crisis man? How is that Gwen Stacy showed by Ditko as a kind of narcissistic Liz Allan copy from ASM#30-38 suddenly becomes an entirely different character in the L-R era? When I read the Ditko and Romita Sr. issues, those differences were enough to prove to me that Ditko was the main author of those stories. If you have the same writer and a change in artists, you generally don't get such jarring changes in characterization and continuity. In fact you get the opposite, seamless flow connecting things together.

  4. #124
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    Quote Originally Posted by krazijoe View Post
    I may be in the minority but I always looked at Stan Lee as the face and everyone else the talent. So Stan Lee is David Lee Roth and Kirby and the rest are Eddie Van Halen.
    Agreed. Stan wrote every marvel comic during the silver age. And I can't understand why Kirby was the artist because Dick Ayers' art was so smooth and flawless, far superior to Kirby's bulky art style.

  5. #125
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    Quote Originally Posted by shooshoomanjoe View Post
    Agreed. Stan wrote every marvel comic during the silver age. And I can't understand why Kirby was the artist because Dick Ayers' art was so smooth and flawless, far superior to Kirby's bulky art style.
    Kirby and Ditko didn't have the prettiest art in the business, but it didn't matter -- they were brilliant storytellers and were great at generating plots and characters (both character designs and character concepts). Other artists were able to do that too, but not to the same extent.

  6. #126
    Extraordinary Member Mike_Murdock's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    And they point out numerous instances where the art tells one story but the dialogue contradicts it
    By definition, this is an example of Stan Lee contributing to the character and story in a way that is his own. Whether that's a good contribution obviously is a matter of opinion, but it's clear that this is still part of the final product we got.
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  7. #127
    Fantastic Member captchuck's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    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.



    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.
    I generally agree with most of what you said but almost no comics were successful in the long term with original characters not found in other media in the late 50's early 60's, certainly not at Atlas Comics. Fantastic Four was done in answer to The Justice League and somehow succeeded. It was a fluke, but Stan was able to make Marvel (Atlas) (Timely) successful at that point for the first time in years. I believe Stan did roughly script at least the first 8 issues and set the pace for the future of the line. When Steve Ditko left Spider-man, Stan (with Romita) was able to make it more successful than it was before.

  8. #128
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mike_Murdock View Post
    By definition, this is an example of Stan Lee contributing to the character and story in a way that is his own.
    It proves quite the opposite of that.

    If Stan Lee had written the plot of these stories or originated it, you shouldn't see such a dramatic contrast and clash between the visual panels and plot and the dialogues papered over it. The fact that there is, suggests quite strongly someone who didn't follow or understand, or know a great deal about the comics he's typing dialogues for and it suggests that the primary storyteller are the writer/artists.

    Whether that's a good contribution obviously is a matter of opinion, but it's clear that this is still part of the final product we got.
    The inker, the colorist and the paper used for the comics is also part of the final product we got.

    So that's neither here nor there.

    Quote Originally Posted by captchuck View Post
    I believe Stan did roughly script at least the first 8 issues and set the pace for the future of the line.
    The word 'script' implies a document pre-existing the comic but that was never the case. "Roughly script" is the same thing as editorial prompts more or less.

    Stan Lee never wrote the script for any comic.

    When Steve Ditko left Spider-man, Stan (with Romita) was able to make it more successful than it was before.
    And there's many reasons for that success:
    -- The 1967 Spider-Man Cartoon coincided with Romita's first year on the title.
    -- Progressive word-of-mouth on Spider-Man. Couple that good word-of-mouth with
    -- Excitement built up after Spider-Man graduated high school for college (character growth and progression was vital for retaining reader engagement in general). Couple that with,
    -- Likewise he inherited the title by paying off two subplots Ditko graciously allowed him to get at the starting plate (the Green Goblin mystery and yeah, Ditko definitely wanted Norman to be Goblin, sorry Stan Lee-apologists*, as well as the introduction of Mary Jane Watson).
    -- Romita Sr. was simply a very good artist, and artist-plotter as it turned out. He was able to infuse a glamor and charm to the Spider-Man comics.

    So I don't think Stan Lee by himself had a great deal to do with the success of Spider-Man after Ditko left.


    * Referring to a widely common and utterly false rumor that Ditko left Spider-Man because he disagreed with Stan Lee on the identity of the Green Goblin. This rumor generated mostly by Stan Lee fans was often used to insist that Lee understood what the title needed better than Ditko, but again it's false. As is the idea that Lee brought realism to Spider-Man, or that Stan Lee disagreed with Ditko politically on a substantial level i.e. college protests. Oh and my favorite, Ditko objected to Spider-Man graduating high school when he was the one who made that call and later openly told people that he intended Peter to grow up. None of these rumors are true.
    Last edited by Revolutionary_Jack; 04-11-2021 at 05:12 PM.

  9. #129
    Extraordinary Member Mike_Murdock's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    It proves quite the opposite of that.

    If Stan Lee had written the plot of these stories or originated it, you shouldn't see such a dramatic contrast and clash between the visual panels and plot and the dialogues papered over it. The fact that there is, suggests quite strongly someone who didn't follow or understand, or know a great deal about the comics he's typing dialogues for and it suggests that the primary storyteller are the writer/artists.
    The plot is the final product that gets shipped out the door, not the original idea of the artist.

    The inker, the colorist and the paper used for the comics is also part of the final product we got.
    They didn't generally impact the actual plot, though.
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  10. #130
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mike_Murdock View Post
    The plot is the final product that gets shipped out the door, not the original idea of the artist.
    The plot is the actual penciled art. Which by the way is in most cases the only documentary evidence we have about this comic. There's no script after all.

    They didn't generally impact the actual plot, though.
    Neither did the dialogue in most cases.

    What counts for more: "Peter letting the Burglar escape who killed his Uncle" (Ditko) or "with great power..."(Lee). Would the latter have any meaning without the former as context?

    I mean there's documentary evidence for this. For 25 years "with great power..." wasn't attributed to Uncle Ben in-page and many issues dealing with Peter's origin or issues about his guilt never addressed the slogan (Spider-Man No More).

  11. #131
    Latverian ambassador Iron Maiden's Avatar
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    Presented for your discussion:

    The Daredevil #37 (Stan Lee & Gene Colan) / Fantastic Four #73 (Stan Lee & Jack Kirby) crossover

    As most readers know the multi-issue arc with Doctor Doom siphoning away the Power Cosmic from the Silver Surfer (FF 57-60), Reed distracts Doom with a small device that Doom pursues into the upper atmosphere and then vanishes in a flash of light. As Reed surmised, Galactus had left behind some kind of barrier to enforce his will so that the Silver Surfer could not leave Earth. This took Doom out of action until his next appearance, which would be in Daredevil 36 -38

    In the Daredevil #37, Doom reveals to Daredevil how he survived the collision with the barrier from the previous encounter with the FF


    After a switching bodies with Daredevil, Doom as Daredevil departs for the Baxter Building where he plans to gain access as Daredevil and take his revenge on the Fantastic Four in the next issue. To sum it up Doom's plans are foiled by Daredevil but Doom gets a message to the FF that Daredevil in on his way to their HQ but he is really Doom. Of course Reed is aware of Doom's ability to switch bodies from his own experience in FF #10. Fantastic Four #73 picks up the plot from there with the FF on the alert for an attack by Doom in disguise as Daredevil.


    So since the Riesman book takes the position that Stan contributes next to nothing, how would he explain this crossover. Stan provides the story or plot if you prefer for Gene Colan to illustrate (note that Gene Colan has never made claims of providing the plot). Now which one makes more sense.....Stan links back to Doom's defeat by Reed in Fantastic Four #60 with the use of a decoy/drone. We now see that Galactus was alerted to Doom trying to reach the upper atomosphere of Earth and sends him back. He removes the Power Cosmic and sends the Surfer's board back to it's owner. Under Riesman's theory then Gene Colan came up with that and not Stan. Gene Colan is not noted for doing any dialogue AFAIK.

    On the other end of the story, it's not logical to advocate that Kirby came up with the story on the Fantastic Four piece of the crossover, which provides the conclusion of the story started in Daredevil, a work that Kirby has provided no input.

    IMO this shows a definite flaw in Riesman's theory ....he admits to not reading anything of the comics doesn't he?
    Last edited by Iron Maiden; 04-12-2021 at 09:46 PM.

  12. #132
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    Quote Originally Posted by Iron Maiden View Post
    Presented for your discussion:

    The Daredevil #37 (Stan Lee & Gene Colan) / Fantastic Four #73 (Stan Lee & Jack Kirby) crossover

    As most readers know the multi-issue arc with Doctor Doom siphoning away the Power Cosmic from the Silver Surfer (FF 57-60), Reed distracts Doom with a small device that Doom pursues into the upper atmosphere and then vanishes in a flash of light. As Reed surmised, Galactus had left behind some kind of barrier to enforce his will so that the Silver Surfer could not leave Earth. This took Doom out of action until his next appearance, which would be in Daredevil 36 -38

    In the Daredevil #37, Doom reveals to Daredevil how he survived the collision with the barrier from the previous encounter with the FF


    After a switching bodies with Daredevil, Doom as Daredevil departs for the Baxter Building where he plans to gain access as Daredevil and take his revenge on the Fantastic Four in the next issue. To sum it up Doom's plans are foiled by Daredevil but Doom gets a message to the FF that Daredevil in on his way to their HQ but he is really Doom. Of course Reed is aware of Doom's ability to switch bodies from his own experience in FF #10. Fantastic Four #73 picks up the plot from there with the FF on the alert for an attack by Doom in disguise as Daredevil.

    What exactly is this supposed to prove?

  13. #133
    Extraordinary Member Mike_Murdock's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    The plot is the actual penciled art. Which by the way is in most cases the only documentary evidence we have about this comic. There's no script after all.



    Neither did the dialogue in most cases.

    What counts for more: "Peter letting the Burglar escape who killed his Uncle" (Ditko) or "with great power..."(Lee). Would the latter have any meaning without the former as context?

    I mean there's documentary evidence for this. For 25 years "with great power..." wasn't attributed to Uncle Ben in-page and many issues dealing with Peter's origin or issues about his guilt never addressed the slogan (Spider-Man No More).
    It's nonsense to say the dialogue didn't affect the plot. It's clear that dialogue changed entire scenes to portray something different than what the penciler intended. The penciler would adjust in the next issue to conform with the story as it was now shaping up. This made it a collaborative process. It's impossible to say that Stan Lee was the villain for overwriting the penciler's intentions without conceding that he overwrote the penciler's intentions when it came to how the story went.
    Matt Murdock's cooler twin brother

    I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
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  14. #134
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mike_Murdock View Post
    It's nonsense to say the dialogue didn't affect the plot. It's clear that dialogue changed entire scenes to portray something different than what the penciler intended.
    These were usually on levels of characterization i.e. making Susan Storm more wimpy than Kirby's original art portrayed (and subsequent history has aligned Susan with Kirby's pencils more than Lee's dialogue). Or Doctor Doom having more dignity and bearing in the art than the dialogue at times conveyed.

    The dialogue in most cases isn't plot-critical. ​

    There are some writers -- Brian Michael Bendis especially -- for whom dialogue is all important. You can't read a Bendis comic and say the dialogue isn't the main reason for the value of the book (assuming you like the style). Bendis' decompression style, his use of pacing, and the intense panel-closeups on faces and the back-and-forth repartee is a crucial aspect of his comics. And that's also why Bendis always wrote full-scripts since artists needed to know the pace of it. To ensure that characters' facial expressions have a rhythm and co-ordination (apparent in the collaborations with Alex Maleev especially).

    Whereas the Marvel comics of the '60s were primarily action stories. Everything was about the plot, about the devices, the props, the fight scenes, the gadgets, the use of powers. The dialogue wasn't essential to the storytelling the same way it is in Bendis or Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. The stories of Bendis/Moore/Gaiman even the superhero ones are famous for many issues where characters interact with one another domestically without action and so on. That's not true for the Marvel era.

    This made it a collaborative process.
    You can't use the word "collaborative process" as a get-out-of-jail free card to dodge the issue of Stan Lee's credit swiping. Stan Lee contributing "something" to the story does not in any way make his contributions proportionate or equal to the contributions of Kirby and Ditko. Again why not talk of the work of the Inker and Colorist if that's such a concern?

    It's impossible to say that Stan Lee was the villain for overwriting the penciler's intentions without conceding that he overwrote the penciler's intentions when it came to how the story went.
    Lee overwriting stuff doesn't mean he's somehow the main leading author when he comes out on the other side. Throughout history there are examples of paintings botched by assistants, buildings botched by others, films re-edited without the director's input, and even books are printed poorly. In the case of comics, bad inks and colors ruining comics is common enough. In the case of Kirby, Vince Colletta is fairly notorious for that. But that doesn't mean that Colletta is somehow the primary artist.

    Stan Lee's dialogues sometimes overwriting Kirby's intentions simply illustrates that Lee wasn't calling the shots on the writing of the character and that he sometimes overwrote or undercut the characterization of the comic, it doesn't mean that he's somehow the main author.

  15. #135
    Astonishing Member Panic's Avatar
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    Jack, you're just so extreme with your need to separate Stan Lee from a writing credit. I feel it's actually sabotaging your argument.

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