Revelations about Stan Lee in Riesman's biography

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I'm somewhat ambivalent about Stan -- because I know he's not everything he claimed to be, but I don't think he's the devil.

Lee's more like the guy who sold his soul to the Devil, than the Devil himself. His life's closer to Marlowe's Faust than Goethe's. Stan Lee's a good example of how someone can be personally decent but still do several cruel things and never acknowledge and own up to that. At least that's how it comes across in Riesman's book.

I certainly would not have missed his cameos in Marvel films. The latter ones, particularly, seemed very forced.

Sam Raimi's reaction on what was the first major Marvel movie with a cameo for Lee was simply, "I know Stan! He can't act" that's why the early cameos in Spider-Man and X-Men had him in non-speaking roles. And Lee was quite insistent that the cameos get longer and longer and he get lines and he haggled for that, mugging for the camera. The funny thing is Lee didn't get paid well for these cameos, no more than the day's wages for any extras nor did he earn anything even from the "Executive Producer" credit that he got slapped on these movies. They basically catered to his desire for fame and celebrity and the appearance of success.

By the time Lee died his personal estate was valued at about less than $100mn which is still ridiculously rich by you-and-me standards but certainly a lot less than the Walt Disney level of fame and wealth people had the impression of him having.

[Iron Maiden]

Personally I disagree. I don't think he was a great writer of female characters but I don't think he was a bad one, which is not to deny the sexism and his dislike for having women actively involved in fighting.

Part of this probably stems from the fact that the Scarlet Witch is my favorite character and Lee wrote her a little spunkier and more assertive than many later writers did. I'm not sure why exactly. But I also like some of his writing of Crystal and, yes, even Sue (sometimes... there's no defending some of the writing like "forgive me for turning feminine").



Absolutely.

Wow.... how could I forget Crystal? She is a definite improvement over Susan in the Lee/Kirby years but holy cow did she ever get messed up by Steve Englehart. In fact he's the one writer that I absolutely loathe on Marvel characters. IIRC he was the one with that is responsible for the idea of the Vision and Wanda having magical babies. IMO it was a terrible idea and just got very convoluted over the years by other writers trying to fix things and making it worse....namely John Byrne.

With Crystal, it was like he was doing a hatchet job on her also. And I will throw in Quicksilver too. When he brought up the subplot of Quicksilver and Crystal's marital problems in his Avengers and Fantastic Four it was really cringeworthy.

[4sake Baned]

Wow.... how could I forget Crystal? She is a definite improvement over Susan in the Lee/Kirby years but holy cow did she ever get messed up by Steve Englehart. In fact he's the one writer that I absolutely loathe on Marvel characters. IIRC he was the one with that is responsible for the idea of the Vision and Wanda having magical babies. IMO it was a terrible idea and just got very convoluted over the years by other writers trying to fix things and making it worse....namely John Byrne.

With Crystal, it was like he was doing a hatchet job on her also. And I will throw in Quicksilver too. When he brought up the subplot of Quicksilver and Crystal's marital problems in his Avengers and Fantastic Four it was really cringeworthy.

He also made/reconed Falcon to being a pimp/street hustler literally one of the worse all time marvel writers imo

[chicago_bastard]

In the 60s, Stan's writing of women was mostly a reflection of the times. Watch any film from that era....40's to the late 1960s and women always needed rescuing. Or in a horror film where the hero and the girl are running from some peril, 9 times out of 10 the woman trips and falls. The man has to pick her up and carry her out of danger.

Way back in the 1940s there were already plenty film noirs and screwball comedies that portrayed women as being equally smart if not smarter than the men. They were the ones who moved the plot forward whereas the male protagonist was mostly a tool. That was far ahead of Lee's writing 20 years later. He's not alone though, the majority of comic book creators was pretty chauvinistic at the time.

Around 1967 women's lib and other social movements led to New Hollywood and even better representation of women in movies but the comic book industry as a whole stayed out-of-time for almost a decade longer.

One thing that changed that IMO was the success of the British series The Avengers. We wouldn't get the Honor Blackman / Patrick McNee version until later in syndication. Then ABC paid $2 million dollars to import 26 episodes of the Avengers in 1965 that were filmed in color with Diana Rigg. I think it is fair to assume that Emma Peel influenced the Black Widows makeover.

In my opinion the change came some years later with new writers like Claremont entering the scene. To use your example of Black Widow: she did get a makeover and started punching the bad guys but she was still written as fairly incompetent and was the damsel in distress who needed to be rescued by Daredevil more often than not. These Daredevil issues from the early to mid 70s were still painfully chauvinistic and Claremont even directly addressed the blatant sexism of them when he wrote Natasha in a Marvel Two-in-One story at the same time. Of course it wasn't Lee who wrote these Daredevil issues but I'd say his editorial influence surely played a role here.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Way back in the 1940s there were already plenty film noirs and screwball comedies that portrayed women as being equally smart if not smarter than the men. They were the ones who moved the plot forward whereas the male protagonist was mostly a tool. That was far ahead of Lee's writing 20 years later. He's not alone though, the majority of comic book creators was pretty chauvinistic at the time.

Not to mention that the '50s had romance comics which directly catered to a female audience and female readership, an entire genre that was created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Kirby and Simon in the romance comics (in stuff like "Shame" or "Boy Crazy") wrote and developed more complex and interesting female characters, sometimes even gray in morals (who didn't get punished at the end even) way ahead of Stan Lee. Will Eisner's THE SPIRIT in the 1940s had interesting female characters like Sand Saref, Wild Rice, P'Gell.

The success of superhero comics with its (mostly) male readership came at the expense of a female-led and female-centered genre, it must not be forgotten.

Around 1967 women's lib and other social movements led to New Hollywood and even better representation of women in movies but the comic book industry as a whole stayed out-of-time for almost a decade longer.

It's funny, but Carol Danvers aka Ms. Marvel was commissioned by Stan Lee because he realized that Marvel didn't have any major female superheroes. Which would have been admirable except he realized this in 1977. That's classic Stan, he was middle of the road in politics and fiscally conservative by nature and he was skeptical of feminism until after it proved well and truly hear-to-stay so he took a stand not in the '60s when it would have counted but in the late '70s when he was a bit behind the curve.

In my opinion the change came some years later with new writers like Claremont entering the scene. To use your example of Black Widow: she did get a makeover and started punching the bad guys but she was still written as fairly incompetent and was the damsel in distress who needed to be rescued by Daredevil more often than not. These Daredevil issues from the early to mid 70s were still painfully chauvinistic and Claremont even directly addressed the blatant sexism of them when he wrote Natasha in a Marvel Two-in-One story at the same time. Of course it wasn't Lee who wrote these Daredevil issues but I'd say his editorial influence surely played a role here.

Chris Claremont was absolutely the Marvel writer who more than anyone raised the quality of writing for female characters in the superhero genre, not including female creators and writers of course.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

To be fair, Stan did commission characters like Spider-Man, X-Men, and Black Panther early on, and those characters were able to catch the zeitgeist. Things like the youth movements and the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party were literally just taking off or in some cases haven't even started when those characters first came out. I would argue at least Spider-Man and Black Panther (especially Black Panther) were somewhat risky when they first debuted. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to call Stan a middle-of-the-road Conservative who always played it safe. If that was true, those characters would have also come out in the 70s like Carol.

Marvel under Stan also defied the Comics Code Authority more than DC and its competitors did at the time, and part of the reason DC started doing more political stories again (like the Green Lantern/Green Arrow story where Speedy did drugs) is because Marvel under Stan proved they were now safe to do so.

Stan wasn't exactly the #1 poster boy for progressive comic book creators, and he played it safe on many things that he shouldn't have like refusing to ever condemn the Vietnam War, but he was obviously more complicated simply being a middle of the road or conservative kinda guy when we look at the bigger picture.

[Iron Maiden]

Way back in the 1940s there were already plenty film noirs and screwball comedies that portrayed women as being equally smart if not smarter than the men. They were the ones who moved the plot forward whereas the male protagonist was mostly a tool. That was far ahead of Lee's writing 20 years later. He's not alone though, the majority of comic book creators was pretty chauvinistic at the time.
Around 1967 women's lib and other social movements led to New Hollywood and even better representation of women in movies but the comic book industry as a whole stayed out-of-time for almost a decade longer.

While you are correct about a small number of films that portrayed strong female leads, this probably would not have been the kind of movie the writers to be of the 60s and 70s would go to see at the theaters in their younger years. They would be going to Westerns or sci fi films, not films with Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck....the films adults would be attending. The film industry was still feeling threatened by television and would not release their catalog of films for TV until later on in the 1960s. We are accustomed to having theatrical releases available for viewing at home.

In my opinion the change came some years later with new writers like Claremont entering the scene. To use your example of Black Widow: she did get a makeover and started punching the bad guys but she was still written as fairly incompetent and was the damsel in distress who needed to be rescued by Daredevil more often than not. These Daredevil issues from the early to mid 70s were still painfully chauvinistic and Claremont even directly addressed the blatant sexism of them when he wrote Natasha in a Marvel Two-in-One story at the same time. Of course it wasn't Lee who wrote these Daredevil issues but I'd say his editorial influence surely played a role here.

I did check out the credits on that era and as I suspected Stan had already stepped away from the EIC role and the Roy Thomas era was already in place. Gerry Conway wrote the series with Thomas editing. It's been quite a while since I read the Daredevil of that era so please show some examples of Black Widow's incompetence.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

To be fair, Stan did commission characters like Spider-Man, X-Men, and Black Panther early on, and those characters were able to catch the zeitgeist.

We need to be very careful about the word "commission" as far as Lee goes. I'd say he commissioned the character that became Spider-Man (the idea of the character living with his Aunt and Uncle came from Kirby, the costume, look, gimmick and everything else came from Ditko, Stan wrote the dialogue and maybe came up with some of the names) but it's not at all clear that he commissioned the X-Men or Black Panther.

-- X-Men didn't capture any zeitgeist until Claremont. In fact throughout Riesman's biography Stan is indifferent and ignorant of the X-Men, hilariously so. Like for instance the producers of the Fox X-Men show had a meeting with Stan to pick the brain and Lee gave them nothing because he knew or remembered nothing of the characters and then the producers were more or less "thank you for your time we'll take it from here". And he was often befuddled by the fact that when he left Marvel Comics in the '70s and came back the X-Men were the top title of his company. (An anecdote that some of the Marvel Comics forum-ites will relate to I think). The version of the X-Men that Lee/Kirby introduced was definitely very conservative, like Professor X is backed and supported by the FBI, you have an all-white team. It's ironic but the X-Men started out as the only all-WASP team that Marvel had (save for Iceman -- Irish Catholic Bobby Drake) and over-time it became its least WASP-y team.
-- Black Panther was Jack Kirby's creation and idea, who realized that he didn't have an African-American major character and he wanted one. T'Challa was introduced in Fantastic Four like that and showed up as a FF supporting player before languishing until Don McGregor's iconic run "Panther's Rage" in 1972 in the pages of a title called "Jungle Action" (!) about 6 years after he made his debut in 1966.

I would argue at least Spider-Man and Black Panther (especially Black Panther) were somewhat risky when they first debuted.

In the case of Black Panther, in a bizarre historical coincidence, the character and the political movement/party originated at the same time with the same name having no inspiration and contact. And Stan Lee upon seeing the burgeoning Black Panther movement briefly retitled T'Challa as "Black Leopard" (https://www.cbr.com/black-panther-bl...opard-renamed/) only going back to the original name when the Panthers were no longer a threat.

I'm not sure it's entirely fair to call Stan a middle-of-the-road Conservative who always played it safe. If that was true, those characters would have also come out in the 70s like Carol.

I call him a middle-of-the-road liberal and not a conservative. Stan Lee was a fiscal conservative i.e. he wanted less taxes and less regulations but he was socially liberal in other respects, at least publicly. Being a middle-of-the-road liberal made you come across as Che Guevara in the ultra-conservative milieu of '60s and early '70s superhero stories. DC Comics were so conservative that Lee came off as a big hippie, so in the context of his time, Lee was definitely more progressive than average and the comics and stories he did certainly did push stuff. The Drug Trilogy for instance even if it's kind of ridiculous (portraying LSD, a drug that's not habit forming, as if it's a hard drug) certainly did break boundaries for censorship in superhero comics.

At the same time this didn't make Lee progressive even for that era. The truly radical comics of that time didn't happen in the superhero genre after all, it happened in underground comics (Robert Crumb and several others). EC Comics in the 1950s directly addressed the Holocaust, presented anti-racist stories, and condemned police corruption (in "A Kind of Justice" which is one of the darkest bleakest stories ever in US comics) while Harvey Kurtzman in his satires attacked the forces of consumerism by exposing patriarchy and sexism in works like Superduperman, Starchie and his Goodman Beaver stories. It took decades before superhero stories touched on the kind of stuff that Gaines and his gang did back then.

I am not trying to discount the impact or value these works have for you and for many other fans. My point is that the value that has is quite independent of Stan Lee and his personal politics and it's probably something that should be credited to other creators and you know what, it should be credited to the fans. I think finding out that he had a progressive and hip readership pushed Stan towards taking on ideas he was initially reluctant about.

[Mike_Murdock]

We don't know the nature of their conversations while Kirby was at Marvel but for his part Stan did always promote Kirby as the greatest, etc. IIRC Before Stan started doing it at Marvel, none of the comics would provide credits for the artist and inker on the title page. IIRC that would be done only on the magazine formats. I'm not saying Stan was a saint but the nature of the business has evolved quite a bit since then.

Yeah, Stan Lee went out of his way to credit his artists. They pretty often got equal billing - especially with Jack Kirby. Now there may be an argument that Kirby deserved some kind of primary billing, but the idea that Stan Lee took all of Kirby's credit is not supported by the evidence at the time. Even then, I don't think Lee's role as scripter should be discounted in the creative process. It was truly a collaborative effort and a Lee/Kirby comic is better than either one individually.

In my opinion, the cult of Stan Lee (and the idea that Lee was above everyone else) started when Kirby left to go to DC. With Kirby gone, Lee started to promote himself more - which makes sense as the other half of the creative team still left. That continued after he stopped having a major role with "Stan Lee presents" in every book for decades.

But I think the entirely justified revision to make sure artists get recognized for their creative contributions has morphed into a desire to discredit Stan Lee's contributions or to use later history to suggest that he didn't give people credit at the time.

[chicago_bastard]

To be fair, Stan did commission characters like Spider-Man, X-Men, and Black Panther early on, and those characters were able to catch the zeitgeist. Things like the youth movements and the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party were literally just taking off or in some cases haven't even started when those characters first came out. I would argue at least Spider-Man and Black Panther (especially Black Panther) were somewhat risky when they first debuted. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to call Stan a middle-of-the-road Conservative who always played it safe. If that was true, those characters would have also come out in the 70s like Carol.

Marvel under Stan also defied the Comics Code Authority more than DC and its competitors did at the time, and part of the reason DC started doing more political stories again (like the Green Lantern/Green Arrow story where Speedy did drugs) is because Marvel under Stan proved they were now safe to do so.

Stan wasn't exactly the #1 poster boy for progressive comic book creators, and he played it safe on many things that he shouldn't have like refusing to ever condemn the Vietnam War, but he was obviously more complicated simply being a middle of the road or conservative kinda guy when we look at the bigger picture.

Marvel was pretty progressive when it comes to the representation of minorities. Makes it all the more puzzling why they stayed so conservative regarding female characters.

I did check out the credits on that era and as I suspected Stan had already stepped away from the EIC role and the Roy Thomas era was already in place. Gerry Conway wrote the series with Thomas editing. It's been quite a while since I read the Daredevil of that era so please show some examples of Black Widow's incompetence.

Good point about the editor, I didn't consider that. So a better example than Daredevil would be her own strip in Amazing Adventures prior to her Daredevil appearances as these books still credit Stan Lee as the editor.

AA1.jpg

AA2.jpg

She fights some street thugs and gets knocked out by one of them, which is rather embarrassing for a super-heroine. The thug is then about to throw her off the roof and some nameless average guy has to save her from getting killed. Would a male hero be portrayed like that in his own strip?

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Yeah, Stan Lee went out of his way to credit his artists.

No he did not. That's just not true at all. The evidence against that is pretty crystal clear. Stan Lee all throughout his life never fully admitted that Ditko and Kirby were co-writers and that issue-by-issue they did the majority of the creative work. He would get around admitting it by using weasel words like saying, "I consider them" and so on and so forth but never openly.

They pretty often got equal billing - especially with Jack Kirby.

That happened only intermittently and only after an infamous New York Herald Tribune article that destroyed whatever friendship the two of them had. And even then Stan Lee took to it to ensure that his name had bigger lettering than Kirby's and appeared more prominently to ensure who's boss. A lot of what Stan Lee's actions amounted to over the years was a form of gaslighting on both his fans and others where it appears as if "gee whiz I didn't mean to appear it that way, I am sorry you felt that way" and so on, denying what he did.

Now there may be an argument that Kirby deserved some kind of primary billing, but the idea that Stan Lee took all of Kirby's credit is not supported by the evidence at the time.

In the 1940s, Stan Lee outright claimed that he created Captain America, which was a character that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created. There are repeated examples of Lee claiming credit for stuff other people did. Fred van Lente (a former Marvel writer much like Roy Thomas) wrote a positive review of this biography (https://13thdimension.com/the-sad-co...y-of-stan-lee/) and he pointed out that when Stan Lee wrote the book "The Origins of the Marvel Universe" in the 1970s, the cover had Lee on a typewriter posed as characters jump out of the keys. Van Lente points out, "I pulled out Origins of Marvel Comics as a refresher to write this review and realized for the first time that the cover features two Lee-appropriated Golden Age stalwarts, Human Torch and Sub-Mariner, that were absolutely created by other people (Carl Burgos and Bill Everett, respectively) long before Lee even began working at Marvel. That’s partly why the Stan Lee Myth is so frustrating to us non-believers: It only takes the slightest tug at the seams to make the whole thing unravel."

So repeatedly over and over again, you have a guy who is on record for taking credit for stuff he didn't do.

Even then, I don't think Lee's role as scripter should be discounted in the creative process.

If you mean dialogue writer, perhaps you have an argument, but the word "scripter" is deceptive. These comics were all made without a script. And the fact is there's no hard evidence that Stan Lee ever originated or generated any real ideas. The nearest thing (those Fantastic Four synopsis that Roy Thomas brings up) is very sketchy and notably Stan Lee himself rarely submitted or invoked that as evidence, not even in court.

It was truly a collaborative effort and a Lee/Kirby comic is better than either one individually.

In the case of Stan Lee, all his Lee/Kirby, Lee/Ditko, Lee/Romita stuff is better than the stuff that Stan Lee did individually. But that is not at all the case with Jack Kirby. Kirby's "Madbomb", his Captain America story from the 1970s still ranks high among all time great Cap stories and it's better than anything he did under Marvel-Method. Kirby wrote and drew Madbomb all by himself. I recently re-read The Eternals Volume 1 and it's pretty awesome (better than Neil Gaiman's Eternals certainly) and it's got wit, nuance, characterization, and intense action that's among the best Marvel stuff of the '70s (and also has him touching on the Holocaust in a fairly shocking way, well before Claremont did in the X-Men). And then in the 1980s, he produced what some call his greatest work, the autobiographical "Street Code" a 10-page black-and-white comic that's great comics regardless of genre. Kirby was an excellent writer and a great artist. He created great stuff with collaborators and great stuff by himself.

In my opinion, the cult of Stan Lee (and the idea that Lee was above everyone else) started when Kirby left to go to DC.

Opinions are one thing, facts are another. The facts don't vindicate this idea of Stan Lee at all.

But I think the entirely justified revision to make sure artists get recognized for their creative contributions has morphed into a desire to discredit Stan Lee's contributions or to use later history to suggest that he didn't give people credit at the time.

It's demonstrably true that Stan Lee didn't give appropriate credit at the time and that he routinely took credit for creations that he had no hand in. And it's not a desire to discredit Stan Lee's contributions because his own actions do that sufficiently.

[gurkle]

"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 Dr. 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 these things."
- Stan Lee, 1968.

Admittedly he would never have said anything like that after Kirby left, at which point it became necessary to play down his contributions to make it seem like the book was going to be just as good without him. (Spider-Man stayed good without Ditko, but "Fantastic Four" and "Thor" went into a decline after Kirby left -- or maybe even a bit before -- that arguably didn't fully reverse until the 1980s.) Some (not all) of his interviews in the 1960s seem a lot less egomaniacal and self-serving than anything that came after.

At some point -- I think around Fantastic Four 48 -- Marvel dropped the separate writer and penciler credits for the Lee/Kirby books and switched to "By Stan Lee and Jack Kirby," which was done to acknowledge that Kirby was doing more than just penciling. Ditko asked for, and got, credit as plotter. I don't mean to pretend that Lee got them the credit or money they were due for their work, just that pretending to be the sole creative force behind the books was something he really started doing in the 1970s.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

At some point -- I think around Fantastic Four 48 -- Marvel dropped the separate writer and penciler credits for the Lee/Kirby books and switched to "By Stan Lee and Jack Kirby," which was done to acknowledge that Kirby was doing more than just penciling. Ditko asked for, and got, credit as plotter. I don't mean to pretend that Lee got them the credit or money they were due for their work, just that pretending to be the sole creative force behind the books was something he really started doing in the 1970s.

Riesman's biography covers all this, stuff like elevating the artist or giving him a boost happened as CYA as a result of promotional backlash that got Lee into hot water.

In the case of Ditko, Stan Lee always backbited the issues where he got higher credit. Like Stan Lee said in fanzines, words like Ditko's doing the next plot because he wanted to give it the college try so let's humor him, which Ditko heard and got infuriated by because Lee was acting as if he didn't do the plotting already on the Spider-Man stuff and before on the many short comics and stuff that Ditko and Lee worked on in Marvel-Method fashion. The point is anything exculpatory you can dig up in the '60s and people have used elements such as this, doesn't work as "points in favor" when you see it against the context of the time.

And look, when you read everything it just doesn't look good. Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance but four or five times you have a pattern. It's not just Kirby and Ditko but it's also Wally Wood it's also Dick Ayers, Joe Simon.

"I enjoyed working with Stan 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."

Wood complained about the situation and raised enough of a fuss that Stan allowed him to act as sole credited writer, including dialogue and narration, on Daredevil #10, albeit still with just an artist’s pay. “I wrote it, handed it in, and he said it was hopeless,” Wood recalled. “He said he’d have to rewrite it all and write the next issue himself.” Wood complained that he wouldn’t do any further work on it unless he got paid as a writer, and, in Wood’s telling, Stan said he’d “look into it” but never made the payout. Insult was then added to injury three times over. First, Stan opened the issue with passive-aggressive narration that crowed, “Wally Wood has always wanted to try his hand at writing a story as well as drawing it, and Big-Hearted Stan (who wanted a rest anyway) said okay! So, what follows next is anybody’s guess! You may like it or not, but you can be sure of this…it’s gonna be different!” (Stan was credited only as an editor on that page, but his name still came first in the box.) Second, according to Wood, when it came to the actual story and script, “Stan had changed five words—less than an editor usually changes,” thus making his lack of writer’s pay all the more frustrating. And finally, there was a kick in the pants in the letters page: “Wonderful Wally decided he doesn’t have time to write the conclusion next ish, and he’s forgotten most of the answers we’ll be needing!” Stan declared there. “So, Sorrowful Stan has inherited the job of tying the whole yarn together and finding a way to make it all come out in the wash! And you think you’ve got troubles!”

Wood gave up, left, and never forgave Stan as long as he lived. “He despised Stan,” recalls Wood’s former assistant Ralph Reese. “He was always on, he was always being Stan Lee. He was just a relentless self-promoter. He was kind of a phony, in Wood’s opinion.” Years later, according to Reese, Wood and Ditko would spend time together and kvetch about Stan. “They said that Stan’s a blowhard and took credit for a lot of stuff he didn’t really create,” Reese recalls. “Even more than that, they resented the fact that Stan was making millions of dollars and they were still struggling, living in rented apartments.”

Riesman, 138-139

Then you have this anecdote with Dick Ayers

On the rare occasions when writer/artists did speak up, Stan was known to shoot them down. Comics historian Barry Pearl once spoke to artist Dick Ayers about the latter’s putting-together of an issue of the comic Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos and was shocked by what he heard:

Dick told us how Stan called him one day and said, “I can’t think of a story for Sgt. Fury #23. We won’t have an issue unless you think of something!” A worried Dick could not sleep that night and kept [his wife] Lindy awake too. They talked about story after story until, in the middle of the night, Lindy came up with the idea of the Howlers saving a nun and her young charges. Dick said, “Stan will never go for that, he wants nothing about religion…But I’ll ask him.” When Dick did, Stan said, “What a great idea, I’ll use it.” So they put together a terrific story. When Dick’s finished pages were shown to him, he saw the credits where he was only listed as artist. He went to Stan’s office and asked if he could also be listed as co-plotter. Stan yelled, “Since when did you develop an ego? Get out of here!”

RIESMAN, True Believer, Page 131

There's no clear-cut evidence that Stan Lee ever created or wrote, or originated or generated any of these ideas and characters. It's basically just his word. And we have corroborating evidence from several employees who voiced that they were made to write the stuff and as Evanier phrased it, do his job and not get paid or acknowledged for doing that work.

The movie business has the Writer's Guild of America, a powerful union whose principal job (one it's very good at) is regulating and ensuring credit. They have this process called "arbitration" that judges whether a writer's contribution to the project is sufficient to measure as a key writing credit. If you had arbitration for the Marvel Method, then the writing credits would be in the favor of Kirby/Ditko/Wood/Ayers and others, while Lee might get a separate "dialogues by" credit. In any other business of creative media, Lee's actions and defenses wouldn't pass muster whether it's song-writing, TV writing, theater writing, and so on.

[gurkle]

I think you're mistaking this for a binary "in favor" or "against" position. There's no question that he expected the artists to come up with plots on their own and downplayed their contribution.

A lot of the "against" stuff tends to go to the point of acting like he never came up with a story idea in his life, which isn't even borne out by that Dick Ayers anecdote, or that his taste and ideas didn't inform the stories and characters, which is also not borne out by anecdotes or the work artists did for other editors.

And it often skips over him publicly acknowledging (more than once) that Kirby was doing most of the plotting on his books. That's not to argue that he treated Kirby fairly or gave him the credit he deserved. It's just something that complicates the story, it doesn't "exonerate" him.

I'm not "for" Stan Lee or "against" the artists whose writing contributions he failed to acknowledge or compensate. I do think the Marvel Universe really is creatively influenced by his taste and preferences as an editor (just like Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz are arguably the co-creators of some of the DC characters/concepts) and I enjoy thinking about the mystery of how someone who was basically a hack could also have a strange kind of genius (the genius hack, or the con man whose con is a sort of art in itself, is very American to me). None of this means I take his side against the artists or think it's fair that he got rich and they didn't.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I think you're mistaking this for a binary "in favor" or "against" position. There's no question that he expected the artists to come up with plots on their own and downplayed their contribution.

As Riesman said, neither Stan Lee nor anyone of the writer/artists agreed that there was some middle-ground of give-and-take and normal collaboration. Lee said that he did all the writing and he always claimed that him coming up with the prompts and ideas (which is quite ambiguous as to what he means by that) meant that he wrote that thing. Which is something that you wouldn't accept from anyone. Imagine a college professor claiming that "because I gave the prompt that the student wrote a 14pg essay to that means I created the essay" it would be laughed out of the room.

As Riesman says, "The temptation, of course, is to conclude that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, that each man was partially responsible for coming up with the team. But this is a dangerous line of thought for a historian, a Solomonic splitting of the baby that mistakes mathematical averages for historical probability. It is absolutely possible that the initial idea emerged in the back-and-forth between the duo. But we should not ignore the possibility, given that both Stan and Kirby were adamant about being the sole progenitor, that one of them was lying and the other telling the truth." (Riesman, Page 108)

A lot of the "against" stuff tends to go to the point of acting like he never came up with a story idea in his life,

The story ideas that Lee came up with on his own, for which there is evidence, -- Stripperella, the DC "Just...Imagine" stuff, Ravage 2099 -- are frankly not very good. Lee had bizarre and weird ideas which he would pitch and try to make work but none of it came to fruition or was actionable in any sense.

That's not to argue that he treated Kirby fairly or gave him the credit he deserved. It's just something that complicates the story, it doesn't "exonerate" him.

Well that's why gaslighting is a thing. Gaslighters try and blur the distinctions and make it appear that someone misleading you isn't misleading you, and they often act carefully to implicate and make complicit the people they are misleading. And a lot of Lee's actions as editor/writer, which are passive-agressive and occassionally aggressive-aggressive (like when he fired Denny O'Neil at a time he was newlymarried with a child in a tiny apartment and then years later wrote in an intro for O'Neil that he often wonders why O'Neil left, which made O'Neil amazed at his depth of denial) falls into that pattern.

I'm not "for" Stan Lee or "against" the artists whose writing contributions he failed to acknowledge or compensate. I do think the Marvel Universe really is creatively influenced by his taste and preferences as an editor (just like Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz are arguably the co-creators of some of the DC characters/concepts) and I enjoy thinking about the mystery of how someone who was basically a hack could also have a strange kind of genius (the genius hack, or the con man whose con is a sort of art in itself, is very American to me). None of this means I take his side against the artists or think it's fair that he got rich and they didn't.

Here's the thing Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, whatever you can say against them (and Schwartz especially being a total creep deserves several things you can say against him) never claimed to be anything other than editors. One can argue that editors, colorists, inkers, and promotional people play an important and unsung role, but that's not at all the case with Stan Lee. He never said he was a great editor and great impressario of comics. William Gaines of EC Comics said that, and that's how he's remembered today but he never once claimed credit for writing Bernard Krigstein's "Master Race" or the stories and ideas he adapted. Today you can say famous rock stars like Elvis Presley depended a lot on his manager Col. Tom Parker but nobody would say Colonel Parker was the actual creator and songwriter and actually partly sung Elvis' songs. In the case of the Beatles, you have the manager Brian Epstein who many say played a big part in keeping the band together and they were lost without him, but again the Beatles created their music themselves, Brian Epstein never claimed credit for the music actually being created.

Stan Lee wanted to be remembered as the creator and chief writer of the Marvel Universe and that's just not true. The Marvel Universe such as it is doesn't have a single creator since this was built off several creations and consolidations of IP Martin Goodman had developed/owned (and it must be said, swindled but hey Goodman never claimed to write anything). It was Martin Goodman and not Stan Lee who came up with the name Marvel (for the "Marvel Comics" title in the '30s) and he rebranded Timely as Marvel. It was the creations of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and his brother Larry Leiber (who came up it seems with most of the names, such as Anthony Stark, Henry Pym) that developed it. He was certainly not the chief writer of that Universe.