Julias Schwartz versus Stan Lee

[The Dork Knight]

I know. Once you get into the, "Man builds on the shoulders of Man" argument, there's just nowhere to go with it.

No superhero character can be better than Superman because he's the original.

Nobody in a field can be more significant than those who went before him because they paved the way.

Those sorts of arguments are more a desire to see the earlier people being given due credit which they deserve and not forgotten.

It would help some if this was editor versus editor or writer versus writer rather than two people who were mostly in different aspects of the business.

Except the fact that Lee was also the editor in addition to being the writer , so where's his credit for the editorial bit?

How much of Scwartz' (and DCs) success can be attributed to the lawsuit against Captain Marvel, I wonder ?

People talk about the business bits of him reviving waning sales but again , Lee ( whether with help or otherwise ) turned a nothing company to the point that within 5 years of the first FF issue iirc ( might not be exact but approx ) Marvel had started outselling DC and stayed there right upto the Crisis

People talk about reviving golden age characters , what about Namor ? And ahem , this one guy called Captain America ....

People talk about Kirby and Ditko but what about just as one example Gardner Fox ?

The way I'm reading this everything good about DC was all Scwartz despite him not even being a full time writer . But everything good about Marvel was maybe Kirby maybe Ditko , anyone but the head honcho who was the actual writer to boot . Scwartz revived sales despite DC not even having a competetitor till Marvel arrived on the scene ,having successfully shut down the one character that had been outselling them . Lee however gets no credit apparently for taking a small time company and turning it into the most successful company outselling DC for the next several decades while Scawrtz WAS in charge of several DC titles

[The Dork Knight]

well, you and Tanrage are perfectly good examples of two guys who have already made up their minds and won't back down. that's fine. it makes the debate more interesting to read if both sides genuinely believe they're right.

if you're merely using superhero comics as a point of reference then I would agree with much of what you've written here. however, superheroes are only a small portion of my total comics collection and experience-- so naturally I will disagree with Stan Lee's overall importance to the comics medium overall.

I don't think of Stan Lee as introducing "realism" to comics medium as whole. he simply brought it to the superhero genre. while that IA important-- it's misleading to suppose that he did this for the entire medium of comics. there were a lot of historical, romance, and western comics prior to Stan working in comics that showed elements of realism (both in terms of narrative and psychology).

it's just that Stan brought that same sort of psychological realism and naturalistic characterization to the superhero genre and used it on a larger scale; basically, he combined the superhero comic genre with the soap opera. he helped forge a shared world all these fun characters co-existed. and it was great. it wasn't really possible for that sort of sustained narrative to happen in romance and historical comics at the time.

it's not useless to talk about how great Stan Lee is... but different people are allowed to have differing opinions on just HOW great he really was. you appear to think Stan Lee is personally responsible for Marvel's ultimate success. you also seem to think of him as some sort of singular genius/auteur behind the Marvel comics revolution-- and I don't. never thought of him that way. I never will. I think of it more like the Beatles (you had three or four fantastic artists working on something together that transcended anything they could do by themselves)

actually, if you hadn't opened up with "no, just no" and declared that Stan Lee is a "household name" things might have turned out differently. you made some perfectly good points that would get overlooked because you opened up with a condescending attitude and conflated fame for importance. (while fame and importance can be related properties, they're not the same)

yeah, I nit-picked you quite a bit-- but I did the same thing to Tanrage as well. (I may have argued with him more)

everybody here agrees that Stan Lee is important. everybody here agrees that Julius Schwartz is important. it's just a question of how important do we consider them to be relative to each other and to the comics medium as a whole.

P.S. my bad for thinking it was Schwartz, and not Gardner Fox, that brought in the multi-verse idea. from introducing Batarangs, co-creating the Flash, and coming up with the Multi-verse, I guess Gardner Fox should get some more credit! (if I could just reach my Utility Belt!)

(am I the only one that has found this debate to be both fun and educational? STILL think this should have been an appreciation thread on the DC forum and not a rumble, though.)

It's not that I have made up my mind, it's that I have yet to see a convincing argument to change it

What has Scwartz particularly done outside of superhero comics for your second argument to be a thing ?

DC had multiple writers and editors working for them when Scwartz did his thing . Marvel did not have a full time writer other than Lee till Roy Thomas joined them in the late 60s. Yet Scwartz totally was a one man army over at DC but Lee wasn't over at Marvel. Totally

I never said Lee was solely responsible for Marvels success. But he was the main reason. There's no two ways around this . This guy took a nothing company and made them the largest in America . Can the same be said for Scwartz, who rekindled the superhero genre ....while at the same time allowing his company to be surpassed by Lee's , when even by the Kindest of views you cannot accurately claim he was the major driving force behind DC , the sole permanent writer /editor throughout the same time period ?

I did not open with a condescending attitude or used fame as an argument at any point. By all means leave out the very valid reasons supplied immediately after the " no, no, no" in the same comment if it makes you feel better

Fact is without Lee , we probably wouldn't even have had something like CBR and DC and Marvel would be treated in the same category as my little pony or Mickey mouse or DBZ or at best in the Archie comics category of being a pop culture reference point ...for kids and teenagers

[The Dork Knight]

Just so you guys know I'm not pulling the sales figures out of my ass

http://zak-site.com/Great-American-N...mic_sales.html

This among many articles on the matter are easy enough to find on the net

[Tanrage]

(am I the only one that has found this debate to be both fun and educational? STILL think this should have been an appreciation thread on the DC forum and not a rumble, though.)

If I had posted an appreciation thread it would have been a well deserved love fest of Schwartz's accomplishments, not this thoroughly enjoyable debate we've got going here!

[Powerboy]

Except the fact that Lee was also the editor in addition to being the writer , so where's his credit for the editorial bit?

Um, man who edits himself usually corrects typos and little else. It's more significant what he did as a writer. I think the problem is in understanding what an editor really does. For instance, did Schwartz think of the idea of the Flash of Two Worlds? Did he outline it and assign someone to write it? Do we know?

How much of Scwartz' (and DCs) success can be attributed to the lawsuit against Captain Marvel, I wonder ?

People talk about the business bits of him reviving waning sales but again , Lee ( whether with help or otherwise ) turned a nothing company to the point that within 5 years of the first FF issue iirc ( might not be exact but approx ) Marvel had started outselling DC and stayed there right upto the Crisis

People talk about reviving golden age characters , what about Namor ? And ahem , this one guy called Captain America ....

People talk about Kirby and Ditko but what about just as one example Gardner Fox ?

The way I'm reading this everything good about DC was all Scwartz despite him not even being a full time writer . But everything good about Marvel was maybe Kirby maybe Ditko , anyone but the head honcho who was the actual writer to boot . Scwartz revived sales despite DC not even having a competetitor till Marvel arrived on the scene ,having successfully shut down the one character that had been outselling them . Lee however gets no credit apparently for taking a small time company and turning it into the most successful company outselling DC for the next several decades while Scawrtz WAS in charge of several DC titles

Well, yes, it is falling into that. How much of Lee was really Kirby and Ditko but then it suddenly becomes as if Schwartz was all-important to what DC did. What about Gardner Fox, Edmond Hamilton, Denny O'Neill, etc.?

As you said, though Schwartz revived an already successful company and took it to a new level, Lee took a nothing company and, within a few years, it was kicking the proverbial butt of a company that was huge and, for a long time, had no competition.

And, yes, how much of DC's success was that they managed to eliminate the one character that was giving Superman a run for his money on the grounds he was ripping off Superman. To this day, I am not sure why Fawcett (a huge company) didn't just go buy the rights to "Gladiator" by Philip Wylie and then give a step by step demonstration of how Superman's early powers simulated Gladiator's in every detail and say, if you want to play this game, fine, we own the rights to one of the sources you stole from. Wanna deal with out lawsuit against you? Or at least demonstrate that this was all a process of borrowing from one's predecessors? Maybe they did but DC just kept dragging it out. But I digress.

In addition to seeing the importance of characters having real substance, Lee also saw that they needed to be designed to work in the same setting. So you had an integrated universe while DC, even after there were crossovers, always had that feeling that many of these characters don't belong in the same universe.

Even if we assume that everything Lee, Kirby and Ditko did was all Lee and likewise assume that everything Schwartz edited for Fox, Hamilton, O'Neill, etc., was all Schwartz, it can well be argued that Lee is more significant. Unless we fall back on, "Well, Washington is more significant than Lincoln because, without Washington and others like him, there would have been no United States for Lincoln to be president of". Technically true but doesn't really address the accomplishments.

[Tanrage]

DC didn't really eliminate Captain Marvel in court, Fawcet threw in the towel because the sales of superheros had fallen so low in 1951 that they just felt it wasn't worth the money to keep fighting the lawsuit. What had been an immensely valuable property abandoned because the publisher thought the fad had passed for good! So the market for Superhero comics continued to dwindle until Schwartz came along with the vision needed to revive the genre.

[The Dork Knight]

That's actually a valid point. Scwartz was important on that front in being the driving force in bringing back superhero comics which inspired marvel (iirc not even called marvel at that time ) to do the same

To be noted , the likes of Superman and Batman never went out of publication at any point so it wasn't exactly a dead genre

But yes he was hugely influential in bringing back superhero comics to the fore. Then Lee went ahead and did something quite different with the genre

Unless it's a Lincoln vs Washington kind of argument , and people want to go all the way back to Nietzsche, I stand by Lee being more important