Revelations about Stan Lee in Riesman's biography

[gurkle]

I actually do think that the editor is a creative job in a lot of these comics -- certainly in terms of coming up with story ideas or influencing how stories were told. (Just like in a TV show, the "showrunner" may not have written an episode in years but heavily influences everything the credited writers write.) It would be weird if DC editors constantly inserted their own story ideas and their own tastes and their own storytelling preferences, and Lee somehow never did. I guess my problem with the idea that he wasn't a creative contributor is that this would make him less of a creative contributor than virtually any other comics editor of the period. I've seen people actually say this, but that's not what I see in the comics.

If "Stan Lee" were removed tomorrow from all the "created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby" credits I wouldn't care; creator credits are notoriously inaccurate anyway, so I'd lose no sleep over Kirby being named as sole creator, and maybe it would be deserved payback for all those years Stan Lee pretended to be sole creator. Would I then stop thinking that these characters and stories reflect some of Stan Lee's personality and taste? No, I don't think I would. The only way to judge that is by reading and comparing Lee/Kirby comics to Kirby/Kirby comics, and I don't think they're the same at all, even comparing Kirby's last year at Marvel to his first at DC. That's not something you need to agree with and it's certainly not something that should influence who gets credit. I just see what I see.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I actually do think that the editor is a creative job in a lot of these comics -- certainly in terms of coming up with story ideas or influencing how stories were told. (Just like in a TV show, the "showrunner" may not have written an episode in years but heavily influences everything the credited writers write.) It would be weird if DC editors constantly inserted their own story ideas and their own tastes and their own storytelling preferences, and Lee somehow never did.

Editors do have a big say and influence on projects and stories especially with licensed characters, and a good editor makes a big difference on anything whether it's book publishing, or comics or advertising. At the same time, calling editor's suggestions the same as actually writing and creating the thing, or treating an informal conversation as the same thing as actually writing the thing which is what Lee was doing is the opposite of "stay in your lane" (in publishing and in bowling "there are rules"). It's only for Stan Lee and his big celebrity that we suspend all norms and judgments and set aside the standards and practises for everyone and give him a pass. Which to be honest is kinda insane.

To give you an example, there was an article on Winter Soldier, (written again by Riesman, but hey he happens to be among the best comics journalists around):
(https://www.vulture.com/2016/05/buck...r-history.html). Riesman was talking about Brubaker's reinvention of Bucky as Winter Soldier and bringing him back and so on. In that article it's mentioned that the idea for bringing Bucky back was something Quesada and Brevoort had discussed before Brubaker joined Marvel and Quesada suggested that Bucky have "long hair". By Stan Lee Rules, we would say that Quesada is the real writer of Winter Soldier or that it should be "Joe Quesada presents The Winter Soldier". But in actual fact it's treated as Ed Brubaker's Winter Soldier because he was the one who thought long and hard and deeply about how Bucky could and would return, and had to overcome Brevoort's immense (and in this case, justified, skepticism) of the project and he thought out everything in terms of logistics, personalities, and serialized characterisation.

A lot of Stan Lee's creative contributions sound a fair bit like general prompts and suggestions like that which he conflated with actual creative work.

I guess my problem with the idea that he wasn't a creative contributor is that this would make him less of a creative contributor than virtually any other comics editor of the period. I've seen people actually say this, but that's not what I see in the comics.

Treating Lee like any other major comics editor/impressario and judging his contributions in that fashion is totally fair, but again the reality is that Lee centered himself as the main creator and writer of the Marvel Universe. He conflated the former with the latter and he did that all throughout his life, and for me this act of denial and suppression overshadows everything else he did. The reason there's ambiguity for credit or dispute at Marvel is because Lee lied, he distorted the truth, and he muddied the waters. He started it. It's not justifiable to equivocate Kirby and Ditko striking back at Lee and putting their own narrative forward and pretend that it's a case of "they said/they said" because again Lee repeatedly and provably distorted the truth.

If "Stan Lee" were removed tomorrow from all the "created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby" credits I wouldn't care; creator credits are notoriously inaccurate anyway, so I'd lose no sleep over Kirby being named as sole creator, and maybe it would be deserved payback for all those years Stan Lee pretended to be sole creator. Would I then stop thinking that these characters and stories reflect some of Stan Lee's personality and taste? No, I don't think I would.

Decentering the Marvel Universe from Lee and his publicity does mean we need to change our opinions and views about these characters and what led to their development. For too long we have seen the MU through the prism of Lee's publicity and office rumors of that time which are now provable and demonstrable lies (i.e. Ditko objected to Norman being the Green Goblin which he didn't).

[Iron Maiden]

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.



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.

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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?

Don't you think you exaggerated here when you say she is "knocked out?" The guy does land a blow but she is still conscious in the next panel. And it's not like male heroes don't get punched in a fight. Spider-Man was a real punching bag at times. Daredevil had his hands full fighting the Trapster earlier in the run. Now that's humiliating!

[Kaitou D. Kid]

I mean, if Quesada wrote the early dialogue for the Winter Soldier and influenced the voice of that character for multiple generations to come, and especially if Quesada had coined a catchphrase for the Winter Soldier that would be come associated with that character's philosophy (the way WGPCGR is associated with Spider-Man, for example), then yeah I would argue he should get some sort of co-creator credit for the Winter Soldier even if most of the work still came from Brubaker.

It's almost impossible to completely separate Stan Lee from the creative process when he technically wrote a lot of these characters and therefore influenced their voice, attitudes, and even beliefs in certain cases. His personality and tastes are engrained in these characters, for better or worse.

-- 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.

Professor X wasn’t known to be a mutant for the longest time in the Marvel Universe because he intentionally kept his mutant status hidden from the public and from the authorities so they could support him as much as possible whenever he needed it (which later writers would point out how hypocritical that was for him to make his students go out there and preach unity while he intentionally passes himself off as a mere human). As for the Original Five all being white, I give Marvel more of a pass there because they were still a relatively small company and the risk of them being hurt by putting out a mostly-minority team in a pre-Civil Rights era was a lot more possible. It doesn’t make it right, but I think it’s something most people would have internally struggled with (including a lot of Progressives) had they been in that position and not just Stan Lee. I think if the X-Men came out just a few years later (let’s say by the mid 1960’s), the team would have looked different. By the mid 60’s when the Civil Rights Movement started to have some success (not even full success), Marvel soon made Black Panther one of the main Avengers, created Falcon and a bunch of other black supporting characters in Spider-Man’s book. Likewise all these characters I just mentioned were by no means stereotypes or two-dimensional. My point was that Marvel under Stan was still pretty quick to respond to the zeitgeist when it came to race.

I actually included this next part in my initial post but took it out to keep it simple. Yes, I’m aware that the X-Men didn’t capture any zeitgeist until Claremont, but that had more to do with the 60s comics not being very good and Stan & Jack not knowing what to do with the X-Men like their other properties. I don’t know if their initial-poor performance had anything to do with lack of risk on Stan's part. Conceptually, the idea of the X-Men being a metaphor for marginalized identities was always there even if it was underdeveloped and superficial.

-- 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.

He became a regular in the Avengers book pretty early on after his creation, and a pretty big powerhouse for the team too.

Also, most of the Stan critics wouldn’t deny that Stan had some input into most of the Silver Age characters, even if it’s clear that Kirby and Ditko did the predominant work. If justice were fully served, the comics would say “Fantastic Four – created by Jack Kirby with help from Stan Lee” or “Spider-Man – created by Steve Ditko with help from Stan Lee”. Very few would argue that Stan deserves no co-creator credit whatsoever when we look at the evidence (I haven’t read Riesman’s book but I doubt even he argues this based on what we know of Marvel’s history). How then can we say that Black Panther was all Kirby? Unless there is evidence that Stan had even less input into T’Challa than he did into Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, which I don’t think there is.

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.

The name “Black Panther” predates even the Party. It was used as a symbol for strength and empowerment by black people and other marginalized identities (including hippies) prior to the Party even becoming a thing. Furthermore, even when you take the Black Panther Party out of the equation, T’Challa as a character was still radical for his time – not just due to being the first black superhero, but for embodying strength in a way that no other black comic character prior to him did (having the brains, brawn, and resources that most people only dream of). People like Feige and Coogler have pointed this out when they were giving interviews for the movie.

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.

This makes more sense.

[JackDaw]

A lot of Stan Lee's creative contributions sound a fair bit like general prompts and suggestions like that which he conflated with actual creative work.



Treating Lee like any other major comics editor/impressario and judging his contributions in that fashion is totally fair, but again the reality is that Lee centered himself as the main creator and writer of the Marvel Universe. He conflated the former with the latter and he did that all throughout his life, and for me this act of denial and suppression overshadows everything else he did. The reason there's ambiguity for credit or dispute at Marvel is because Lee lied, he distorted the truth, and he muddied the waters. He started it. It's not justifiable to equivocate Kirby and Ditko striking back at Lee and putting their own narrative forward and pretend that it's a case of "they said/they said" because again Lee repeatedly and provably distorted the truth.



Decentering the Marvel Universe from Lee and his publicity does mean we need to change our opinions and views about these characters and what led to their development. For too long we have seen the MU through the prism of Lee's publicity and office rumors of that time which are now provable and demonstrable lies (i.e. Ditko objected to Norman being the Green Goblin which he didn't).

I agree. I’ve not read much comics background stuff...but really the legend “Stan Lee was main creator of large chunks of Marvels big hitters” doesn’t stand up when subjected to even fairly light scrutiny.

Years ago on one of the earlier comics boards Paul Smith (the comics artist) was arguing forcefully that the Marvel artists contribution to original creation was woefully under-rated. In my usual cynical way I thought “artist solidarity at work”.

But as Paul S developed his theme..he was very persuasive. The line of argument that effectively won me over was when he showed the original designs of Spider-man from Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and asked the question: “If Stans original brief had any detail, how could two such talented professional artists come up with such fundamentally different character designs??”

I wish I could find a picture of Jack’s design (of Spider-man)...but basically it was of a muscular adult man, armed with a gun, and in a costume utterly totally different to the Steve Ditko one.

From then on, in my eyes Steve Ditko became the main creator of Spider-man and Stan became the guy who came up with the name (and had the nous to go with Steve D’s design).

But yes...still accept Stan made an enormous impact on comics, but a different one to my earlier thoughts.

[chicago_bastard]

Don't you think you exaggerated here when you say she is "knocked out?" The guy does land a blow but she is still conscious in the next panel. And it's not like male heroes don't get punched in a fight. Spider-Man was a real punching bag at times. Daredevil had his hands full fighting the Trapster earlier in the run. Now that's humiliating!

The Trapster wears a costume and has a cool name, that elevates his threat level far above some nameless thug in street clothes.

Knocked out or not, they made it clear that she needed saving by that average guy who gave his life for hers. Did some average Joe come to rescue Matt from the Trapster? I bet not.

If that were a one-off it wouldn't be a thing but that incident is actually pretty representative for how Nat was portrayed until Claremont started writing some stuff with her.

To give you another example, I remember one issue in Daredevil when they were all tied up on a plane and then Matt and Ivan (Nat's chauffeur) somehow got free and they deliberately decided to not untie Natasha saying it would be too dangerous for her to join the fight, so she watched Matt and her chauffeur (of all people) taking out the bad guys while being tied to her seat.

The book was titled Daredevil and the Black Widow for more than a year making her the co-star and yet it was always Matt who took out the villain while she mostly got knocked out or captured and needed saving.

I mean it was definitely an improvement for female representation to give her that co-star status as it was to give her the solo stories in AA, but the execution was really lacking, thus unmasking these positive actions as rather hollow.

I think you mentioned the letters pages of the time earlier, it's also telling that the editorial of Daredevil did get a lot of flak for her treatment of Natasha in readers letters. Many readers complained about how she was written, what shows that Marvel clearly wasn't ahead of their readers on that one.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

If justice were fully served, the comics would say “Fantastic Four – created by Jack Kirby with help from Stan Lee” or “Spider-Man – created by Steve Ditko with help from Stan Lee”.

I'd agree with this. That's how the credits should ideally have read. If Stan Lee had been open and honest, he would be valued and appreciated as a great editor and patron and impresario who brought a unique touch to his collaborations, in the same way we treat movie producers like Val Lewton or Roger Corman or music producers like Berry Gordy or George Martin. For that matter Kevin Feige. People have compared Feige to Stan Lee in terms of Feige being in charge of the MCU and having the final say but Feige has never taken credit for writing or directing any of these films, nor has he even taken credit for all the casting and creative decisions (mostly because Hollywood's a union town and the kind of stunts Lee pulled off in Marvel wouldn't work, you need to be a little more creative, and also Feige just doesn't seem like that kind of guy) and he's always presented himself as a facilitator and manager who brings people in the room together (at least based on what we know now). It's a matter of public record that the idea for the MCU wasn't Feige's it was David Maisel so he's never taken credit for what he didn't do.

People have said that so-and-so artist was never as good as when he worked under this (Insert Producer-Agent-Publisher-Editor) and so on. You can accept for instance that the solo albums of the Beatles weren't as good as them together and that the managers and producers on had a great deal of say in their success, and keeping them together. But nobody who says that would say that the Beatles didn't create or write their music and songs themselves or that the producers/managers/agents created and wrote that stuff. In the case of Stan Lee, he and his defenders, are conflating the latter argument with actual creative credit.

Very few would argue that Stan deserves no co-creator credit whatsoever when we look at the evidence (I haven’t read Riesman’s book but I doubt even he argues this based on what we know of Marvel’s history). How then can we say that Black Panther was all Kirby? Unless there is evidence that Stan had even less input into T’Challa than he did into Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, which I don’t think there is.

The point is that there's no hard evidence on how much input Lee had on any character's creation aside from his own word. We either accept that Stan Lee is telling the truth about his process or we don't. To accept that Stan Lee is telling the truth, on his word alone, is the same thing as claiming that we would have to accept that artists as individual and distinct as Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Joe Simon, Dick Ayers among others are all lying about the same guy by claiming to have the same exact experience and same complaint about him. I don't think the latter is supportable on any logical and empirical level. Not all of them were in communication with each other and they left Marvel at different times (and this was before social media, when all of them rarely turned up at office and worked at the same time). So to me, I'd say Black Panther is primarily Kirby's creation. It's far more consistent to his aesthetic and craft (mixing and matching high tech science with traditional societies -- as with Asgard, the Inhumans, Wakanda, and eventually New Gods, Eternals -- and also Doctor Doom, mixing a medieval European monarch/sorceror/knight with a contemporary mad scientist and dictator) which when extended to a black African character led him to dip his toes, quite unintentionally, into what's now called Afrofuturism.

Stan Lee in a legal court deposition said that while he created the "core concepts" (a word that's pretty vague and can mean anything from an editor's prompt for a superhero team to a teenage superhero to something more detailed like the actual name and superpowers and so on), Jack Kirby often created "secondary characters" entirely on his own. What Lee means by secondary characters is equally, and I'd argue intentionally, vague (Lee wouldn't want to outright perjure himself so he was selective about his word choices). But if you apply it to Fantastic Four, the fact is that the Inhumans of Attilan, Black Panther of Wakanda were introduced definitely as secondary characters in the sense that the story was largely about the Fantastic Four. So that suggests that this would be something Kirby had more of a say on. Lee's input on the creations of these characters would be far closer to (as cited above), Quesada and Brevoort's feedback to Brubaker on the Winter Soldier, but no one is saying that Quesada and Brevoort deserve primary credit on the creation over Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting.

But as Paul S developed his theme..he was very persuasive. The line of argument that effectively won me over was when he showed the original designs of Spider-man from Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and asked the question: “If Stans original brief had any detail, how could two such talented professional artists come up with such fundamentally different character designs??”

BINGO! The lack of consistency across the Marvel line even when it was all theoretically written by one guy is one of the major reasons why Lee being the real creator doesn't sustain itself well. I had a similar revelation. The clincher was when I read the earlier Spider-Man comics from the Lee-Ditko era to the early Romita era issues. In a modern comic many writers shift through different artists so Jason Aaron on his run for Thor has worked at different times with Esad Ribic, then Russell Dauterman, and then several others, but it all reads consistently as the work of one author. Jonathan Hickman on his X-Men comics right now worked with different artists too but it's clearly Hickman. When Ditko stepped down and Romita Sr. took over you should have felt as seamless a transition as for instance when Nick Spencer's comics run moves from Ryan Ottley to Mark Bagley to Patrick Gleason, but instead it feels like a new writer had taken over and essentially that's what happened. Ditko wasn't just the artist he was the writer of Spider-Man, and when Romita Sr. came in he became the main writer. How can Norman Osborn who's so villainous and manipulative in Ditko suddenly become tragic, schizoid and whiny in just a few issues if the same guy had been the main writer? It doesn't make sense.

If Stan Lee was the main creator of Fantastic Four, The Mighty Thor, Spider-Man, Doctor Stange then there should be similar themes and correspondences between different works as for instance you can tell with Alan Moore where you have some similarities between V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Miracleman, From Hell, The Killing Joke even if they are all different, it's quite obvious that despite the different artists it's by the same guy. Now you can argue that Lee was so creative and such a good writer that he could make each work distinct and unique, which okay but you are then building Lee into someone like Shakespeare or Dickens who had this immense level of creativity and imagination that (unlike those writers who displayed that over several decades) in Lee's case concentrated itself in a single decade and somehow didn't display itself in any other period of his long life before and after Marvel.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

There's an extended interview that Riesman gave to Newsarama, that's actually quite insightful and expands on some of the conclusions and issues with Stan:
https://www.gamesradar.com/who-reall...s-to-find-out/

Emphasis by me:

Riesman: Here's the thing – Stan gets a lot of credit for the credits. He wasn't the first person to credit artists and anchors and letters, DC had done that sometimes. But he was certainly the first person to do it in superhero comics with, at least, the kind of at the scale he did, with just virtually every issue delineating that stuff. That's admirable. We should be happy about that...the credits are something that we should be glad about, because people should get credit for their work. But at the same time, overall, I would say the ledger is very much in the red for Stan when it comes to creator rights. I mean, this was a guy who did not invent the concept of work-for-hire, he's not Martin Goodman. Goodman started this exploitative machine – his company went by so many names I usually just call it 'Goodman's Company' – and Stan was just, initially, a gear in it. But he really became a full company man who internalized the idea that this was how breaks work and perpetuated this unbelievably unjust system where creators don't have any control of ownership of or remuneration for the use of their characters.

The point is he helped perpetuate, more than almost anybody who didn't start a company, this unjust system. Talked a lot about credit. And when I say "credit" in this case, I mean like who was credited with creating the Marvel Universe characters. But one thing that I think often gets obscured there is people will go, 'Well, okay. We don't know we weren't in the room, maybe Stan was responsible for the initial ideas and deserves that credit, maybe Jack is responsible. Let's split the difference, we'll just say they're both co-creators and that's the credit that we'll get.' Okay, fine. I disagree with that methodology, but fair enough.The trouble is you can't reasonably argue that guys like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Don Heck – you know these people were not getting paid for writing comics that they were writing. That's not about going like, 'Oh, let's split the difference and say this person was co-creating X with this other person.' This is something very rooted in cold hard cash and the basic principle of fair capitalism, which is if you work, then you're properly remunerated for your labor.

The 'Marvel Method' meant the artists were writer-artists who were not just regular artists, but the primary writers on these comics. The conversations that you hear about, the story conferences where it's Stan and the artists talking about the stories are going to be, and Stan's jumping up on the desk and acting stuff out…um. For one thing, Jack Kirby always said that was not how it worked with him – he would just tell Stan what he was going to do, and then he went and did it. Even if Stan is contributing ideas here, according to Stan's own descriptions, very often, he was just saying, "Okay, let's have Dr. Doom come back, and the FF fight him." That's an editor. That's not a writer. [laughs] At that stage, you're not writing anything. You're saying, 'Hey, writer, go write this story that has the five or six elements I'm tossing out in this casual conversation.' The writer-artists would then go home and write the story. They're writing it visually, but that's writing. There was no story prior to the writer-artist sitting down and actually doing it. There were just keywords, or maybe a vague narrative outline as best as we can tell, because Stan wasn't writing scripts. He wasn't writing down treatments. He was having these brief conversations, the nature of which we don't know. And then, even if he was contributing a lot of ideas, at the end of the day he's not the person writing the comic. The writer of the comic is the writer-artist, and then Stan ends up doing the embellishing at the end.

Now, the embellishing is really important, because the use of language is Marvel Comics is something that really transformed the genre in the media. So, the narration and the dialogue are really important, and that's why Stan is still a writer on these things, he's just not the primary writer. For God's sake, the artists would very often, when they were doing the 'Marvel Method' stories leave little notes in the margins about dialogue and what's going on. Even if that dialogue doesn't get used, the fact is they are, again, doing more than just contributing. They're the people coming up with the structure of the whole goddamn thing, and then Stan, as he would put it, gets the stuff back and basically, like a crossword puzzle, he'll sit down and try and fill in words, where just structure has already been set up.

...

But he never wanted to be known as the greatest editor in comics. If he'd been known as that, he'd be Julius Schwartz… who is a figure with a lot more problems. But Julius Schwartz is still remembered, even though he's got issues these days, he's remembered fondly by a lot of people in comics. Who knows about Julius Schwartz outside of comics fandom? Basically no one, and Stan didn't want to end up like that.

So, Stan never talked about being the greatest editor. He was always the ideas man, and he's the writer. And the fact is, we have no idea if he was actually the ideas man; we have no clue whether he came up with those characters. As I say in the book, there is zero evidence that Stan Lee created those characters that he was credited with creating.

So that's the rub of the issue here.

It's not the case that Stan Lee didn't contribute to Marvel and so on. He did contribute, the same way Martin Goodman did, the same way Flo Steinberg did, the same way the distributors and other nascent comics press and others contributed. The fact is that Stan Lee was a largely behind-the-scenes figure who poses as a major creator and who went out of his way to obscure and denigrate and on occassion outright swipe credit for the creations of others. The evidence points significantly to that reality.

I used to be of the mindset to give Stan Lee some benefit of the doubt even if I felt that Kirby and Ditko were the prime movers but after reading Riesman's book and the full weight of the argument and testimonials I can't help but think his decades of denial has completely overshadowed everything else he did. At least once you put it all together.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

That's an interesting interview. It really does get you thinking.

My first instinct is that Riesman's argument depends on the character. In the case of Ben Grimm and Doctor Strange, it's safe to bet that Kirby and Ditko are exclusively or near-exclusively the creators of those characters. Those characters are practically stand-ins for Kirby and Ditko respectively, so I'm willing to give Riesman the benefit of the doubt there.

With a character like Spider-Man, I think it's more complicated. My general impression has always been that the spirit of Spider-Man comes from Stan. By "spirit" I'm referring to the humor, energy, optimism, and even the anti-Establishment voice that that character has (even if Stan didn't believe it himself) . How much of that was in Ditko's notes? Ditko always struck me as too reserved, calm, and serious (kinda like Strange) to fully give that kind of personality to Spider-Man and therefore more of that part of the character arguably came from Stan. And what about "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"? Was that in Ditko's notes or did Stan choose to add it in at the end of AF 15? If it was Stan, he technically gave Spider-Man his core worldview, which isn't the kind of trivial crossword puzzle thing that Riesman is referring to.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

My first instinct is that Riesman's argument depends on the character. In the case of Ben Grimm and Doctor Strange, it's safe to bet that Kirby and Ditko are exclusively or near-exclusively the creators of those characters. Those characters are practically stand-ins for Kirby and Ditko respectively, so I'm willing to give Riesman the benefit of the doubt there.

Fair enough. And Stan Lee himself admitted back in the '60s that Strange was largely Ditko's work.

And what about "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"? Was that in Dikto's notes or did Stan choose to add it at the end of AF 15? If it was Stan, he technically gave Spider-Man his core worldview, which isn't trivial and something he would deserve co-creator status for.

That's a more intricate thing to parse.

Until Spider-Man, Ditko had worked with Stan Lee for a near decade at Atlas and then Marvel as a freelancer. During that time Marvel was chasing EC Comics' coat-tails and putting out titles in imitation of EC. During that time Ditko cut his teeth on a lot of O. Henry like stories and sometimes outright O. Henry stories. These were short stories where you had characters do something and learn a moral lesson at the end. One of the stories in these publications features what can be identified as prototypical versions of Ben, May, and Peter (https://bleedingcool.com/comics/aunt...ange-tales-97/). Obviously it's different in that the kid's disabled but the characters looks, and relationships does anticipate the Parker household. It has the names "Uncle Ben" and "Aunt May". And believe me you will be amazed at how many Marvel creations are repurposed from non-superhero stories from the '50s. This was a comic published just three months before AF#15 and it's by Lee and Ditko and features Aunt May and Uncle Ben who are looking after their niece Linda who is a mermaid (!).

The structure of AF#15 is very much a cruel twist story in the mould of O. Henry with a moral lesson at the end. So on that level, AF#15 is in continuity with the kind of stories Ditko was already doing. And these early work was done in the Marvel Method absolutely. Ditko and Stan were genuinely friends in that time (Kirby and Lee never were) and Ditko kind of looked up to Stan who was the first boss to give him a gig at a company and so he would read stories and books that Lee suggested (including Rand aka the Batman dunking Joker in acid part of their relationship) and hone his writing skills and frame of references, so Ditko cut his teeth as a storyteller and writer/plotter already, and was more than well trained to come up with the narrative of AF#15 by himself.

As far as "With Great Power comes Great responsibility" that's a phrase and coinage that has many precedents. It's been traced to the French Revolution where in 1793 it was voiced in France's National Convention (the fact that this quote was uttered by people involved in the guillotinings of the Reign of Terror is an interesting irony). Closer to Lee's time, Winston Churchill uttered the phrase and FDR used it in a rejected speech which was printed in the 1940s and it was sort of in the ether of things. You can actually find a version of it in a Superman serial in the 1940s where Pa Kent tells Clark that "because of your great power -- your speed, your strength, your X-Ray vision and super-sensitive hearing -- you have a great responsibility" (https://twitter.com/geneluenyang/sta...60938564935681).

And yet the fact is that "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"* was never attributed to Uncle Ben directly by Stan Lee or repeated in the pages of Spider-Man for the rest of Stan Lee's run. People often assume that Lee-Ditko's run and Lee-Romita's run revolved around or turned on this phrase but that's just not the case at all. It was only in 1987 that Jim Owsley/Christopher Priest directly attributed this to Uncle Ben and it's only since then that this quote has taken the importance it has come to acquire in the Spider-Man mythos. (https://www.cbr.com/when-we-first-me...esponsibility/) So even this is something that you can't actually entirely credit to Lee. Yeah Lee wrote the quote at the end of the issue but the meaning it took on, the attribution it took on, and the idea of it as a "core worldview" for Spider-Man in the stories that's something by later writers and not really something directly handed to him by Lee or by Ditko. And I think we should attribute it to Owsley/Priest. It's a good thing that Spider-Man's most foundational quote, dedicated to social responsibility, is in fact the contribution of Spider-Man's only major African-American writer (and editor).



* Recently some smarty pants writers in Spider-Man, *cough* Slott *cough* make a big to-do about the actual quote being "With great power there must come great responsibility" and yeah that's closer to what Lee wrote in the captions at the end of AF#15, but the first known attribution to Uncle Ben by Owsley is "With Great Power comes Great Responsibility" and that's Peter's own captions. So in terms of proper citation the most common phrasing is actually the most accurate.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

I know the quote predates Spider-Man, but my point is that whoever of the two decided to inscribe it to Spider-Man (or at least its message) was the one more responsible for the character's worldview. And even if it wasn't repeated all the time to ascribed to Uncle Ben prior to 1987, it did set up the character's philosophy from day one and the character has consistently adhered to that philosophy for 60 years. It's a question of whether it was Steve or Stan who decided to inscribe it to Spider-Man.

Also, what about the humor/energy and overall voice of the character? The way Stan wrote Spider-Man influenced how everyone else would write him for decades. Did the humor and the kind of wisecracks we associate with Spider-Man come from Ditko's notes? Honestly, did Dikto's notes even specify that Spider-Man should be funny and a motormouth?

What about the "teenager striking back at adults" vibes that some of the dialogue in Lee/Ditko's work gives off that more-or-less gave the character some anti-Establishment undertones that stuck (even if unintentional)? Was that also in Ditko's notes to Stan?

That's why with certain characters it's more complicated, and it also sucks that Ditko was such a real-life enigma on top of that.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I know the quote predates Spider-Man, but my point is that whoever of the two decided to inscribe it to Spider-Man (or at least its message) was the one more responsible for the character's worldview. And even if it wasn't repeated all the time to ascribed to Uncle Ben prior to 1987, it did set up the character's philosophy from day one and the character has consistently adhered to that philosophy for 60 years. It's a question of whether it was Steve or Stan who decided to inscribe it to Spider-Man.

The more interesting question is which of the two came up with the idea that Peter lets the burglar go who ends up killing his Uncle Ben? That to me is the more interesting and determining question of what makes Peter the character. Without that crushing sense of personal culpability you have no Spider-Man. You have no character, and without that, "with great power..." just becomes an empty quote.

For me it's more likely that Ditko came up with that than Stan. It's part of the O. Henry short story structure that he had been using until then. Likewise, Ditko was a big enough Batman nerd that he explicitly sought out the school where Jerry Robinson (aka Joker's original artist and the ghost who contributed a lot to Batman) taught to study at his feet. And obviously the story of Spider-Man's origin and his desire to fight crime over the loss of his father is a variation of Batman's origin with an updated new character and generation. Fundamentally, Stan Lee didn't really know about comics or read comics or had a history or tradition in it. Kirby and Ditko did. They knew Eisner, Milton Caniff, Hal Foster and others. So Ditko would be the one with the frame of references.

Also, what about the humor/energy and overall voice of the character? The way Stan wrote Spider-Man influenced how everyone else would write him for decades. Did the humor and the kind of wisecracks we associate with Spider-Man come from Ditko's notes? Honestly, did Dikto's notes even specify that Spider-Man should be funny and a motormouth?

The dialogues and the way each characters have a voice you can attribute to Lee. The fact that Spider-Man, Jonah, Flash, and the villains all sound different is no mean feat.

At the same time, a lot of the humor in Spider-Man does revolve around visual gags. Like take this one here:

42969346_10100287126558037_3888175387024293888_n.jpg

I mean obviously the thought bubbles are important but the visual image of Peter smiling with an evil grin at Flash being kidnapped by Doctor Doom (in ASM#5) with the Peter half gloating and the Spider-Man half going (yeah obviously I'll save that a--hole's life) is pretty hilarious by itself. And it's totally visual in design. So Steve Ditko knew that the tone of Spider-Man should have an element of comedy when applicable. J. Jonah Jameson's design which is a mix of contrasts is very cartoony and satirical and Ditko designed him as a broad caricature. So I would say Ditko knew what he was doing and that some of the humor was intended by him. If you compare Spider-Man to Doctor Strange, the characters he drew are more expressive and fleshy in Spider-Man than in Strange, that meant that Spider-Man characters were more expressive of emotions than Dr. Strange was. Which makes sense since Dr. Strange is about the visions and quests and crazy backgrounds rather than the characters.

What about the "teenager striking back at adults" vibes that some of the dialogue in Lee/Ditko's work gives off that more-or-less gave the character some anti-Establishment undertones that stuck (even if unintentional)? Was that also in Ditko's notes to Stan?

That part we don't know. However, of the three major Marvel creators, Ditko was the only one with a college degree (which he was able to get thanks to the GI Bill, another example of a Randian never owning up to how much government investment in society helped his career). Lee never went to college nor did Kirby, both worked right out of high school, so Ditko simply had a better sense of what being a student and a teenager was like (albeit 20 years behind the times). None of them had personal experiences of what it meant to be a teenager because all three were pre-war dudes who never experienced the generation gap and the birth of the teenager. But Ditko had what we can call an adolescence and a youth which neither Kirby or Lee had.

That's why with certain characters it's more complicated, and it also sucks that Ditko was such an enigma on top of that.

Ditko was content to let the work speak for itself and to invite readers and fans to look past the surfaces and rumors. As I said, Stan Lee as an editor and a dialogue writer was a valuable contributor, and to Spider-Man certainly but the bulk of what defined and determined Spider-Man was Ditko's creation, just as most of the Marvel Universe was Kirby's creation.

[Mike_Murdock]

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.

Look at the credits page of most issues of the Fantastic Four and it will clearly give Lee and Kirby equal credits.

For example, Fantastic Four #67:
FF 67.jpg

Here is Amazing Spider-Man #38 giving Steve Ditko plot credits:
ASM 38.jpg

I still don't understand the argument that he didn't give them credit. To me, the argument can only be that he gave himself too much credit, which is essentially to say that his scripting was irrelevant to the creative process.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Look at the credits page of most issues of the Fantastic Four and it will clearly give Lee and Kirby equal credits.

These specific instances came from CYA actions as a result of Lee's over-publicity creating backlash (in other words not exactly representative of the reality of their collaboration) and it still obscures the truth. "Proudly Produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby" implies that Lee's contribution was equal in weight to Kirby's when it wasn't.

Here is Amazing Spider-Man #38 giving Steve Ditko plot credits:

Ditko got plotting credit from ASM#25 onwards and that happened because Ditko went over Lee's head to Martin Goodman to make his demands. It wasn't out of Lee's own initiative and even then it's still obscuring the truth. "Written and Edited by Stan Lee"/"Plotted and Drawn" by Steve Ditko feels contradictory and confusing which is one reason why Marvel in recent times is more careful about using these words in situations (as with Dan Slott's stuff) where one writer does the plot and another does the dialogue (with Slott, it's usually Christos Gage).

With Stan Lee, he originally presented himself as the main creator and developer of these stories. When after time that led to problems and issues with Ditko and Kirby, he would then obscure it by claiming that he's a collaborator and that what he does is equal to theirs. And it's a blurring in the sand, and intentionally so, and essentially a gaslighting tactic.

I still don't understand the argument that he didn't give them credit.

Well that's why I recommend reading the actual book.

To me, the argument can only be that he gave himself too much credit,

That's the crux of it. More specifically it's Lee distorting that editorial prompts and suggestions is equal to writing the stuff.

which is essentially to say that his scripting was irrelevant to the creative process.

Again, the point is, there was never such a thing as Lee's scripting. When we say script, that word implies a document with detailed plot breakdowns, scene actions and movement. More specifically it implies the existence of something before the comic was drawn. And the fact is there was no script.

The only documentation that exists for these comics is the original art (of which only a small portion was returned to Kirby and his heirs, and Ditko and his heirs). The original art is the script because these comics were created without any script.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

The more interesting question is which of the two came up with the idea that Peter lets the burglar go who ends up killing his Uncle Ben? That to me is the more interesting and determining question of what makes Peter the character. Without that crushing sense of personal culpability you have no Spider-Man. You have no character, and without that, "with great power..." just becomes an empty quote.

For me it's more likely that Ditko came up with that than Stan. It's part of the O. Henry short story structure that he had been using until then. Likewise, Ditko was a big enough Batman nerd that he explicitly sought out the school where Jerry Robinson (aka Joker's original artist and the ghost who contributed a lot to Batman) taught to study at his feet. And obviously the story of Spider-Man's origin and his desire to fight crime over the loss of his father is a variation of Batman's origin with an updated new character and generation. Fundamentally, Stan Lee didn't really know about comics or read comics or had a history or tradition in it. Kirby and Ditko did. They knew Eisner, Milton Caniff, Hal Foster and others. So Ditko would be the one with the frame of references.



The dialogues and the way each characters have a voice you can attribute to Lee. The fact that Spider-Man, Jonah, Flash, and the villains all sound different is no mean feat.

At the same time, a lot of the humor in Spider-Man does revolve around visual gags. Like take this one here:

42969346_10100287126558037_3888175387024293888_n.jpg

I mean obviously the thought bubbles are important but the visual image of Peter smiling with an evil grin at Flash being kidnapped by Doctor Doom (in ASM#5) with the Peter half gloating and the Spider-Man half going (yeah obviously I'll save that a--hole's life) is pretty hilarious by itself. And it's totally visual in design. So Steve Ditko knew that the tone of Spider-Man should have an element of comedy when applicable. J. Jonah Jameson's design which is a mix of contrasts is very cartoony and satirical and Ditko designed him as a broad caricature. So I would say Ditko knew what he was doing and that some of the humor was intended by him. If you compare Spider-Man to Doctor Strange, the characters he drew are more expressive and fleshy in Spider-Man than in Strange, that meant that Spider-Man characters were more expressive of emotions than Dr. Strange was. Which makes sense since Dr. Strange is about the visions and quests and crazy backgrounds rather than the characters.



That part we don't know. However, of the three major Marvel creators, Ditko was the only one with a college degree (which he was able to get thanks to the GI Bill, another example of a Randian never owning up to how much government investment in society helped his career). Lee never went to college nor did Kirby, both worked right out of high school, so Ditko simply had a better sense of what being a student and a teenager was like (albeit 20 years behind the times). None of them had personal experiences of what it meant to be a teenager because all three were pre-war dudes who never experienced the generation gap and the birth of the teenager. But Ditko had what we can call an adolescence and a youth which neither Kirby or Lee had.



Ditko was content to let the work speak for itself and to invite readers and fans to look past the surfaces and rumors. As I said, Stan Lee as an editor and a dialogue writer was a valuable contributor, and to Spider-Man certainly but the bulk of what defined and determined Spider-Man was Ditko's creation, just as most of the Marvel Universe was Kirby's creation.

I mean, the fact that we're using language like "it's more likely that", "I would say", and "that part we don't know", it does show how things can get messy and complicated.

We desperately need a copy of the notes Ditko and Kirby left to Stan to know what the latter did/didn't contribute. Are there any surviving copies of those that are public? Did Riesman find any himself?