Guardians of the Galaxy: Marvel mess in the making?

A friend bought me that Marvel book by Sean Howe, and lack of royalties seems to be a recurring beef. On the other hand, it's incredible to realize how much of Marvel was really Stan Lee's baby. He kept it alive again and again, and dictated or directed nearly all the scripts of all the titles, at least for a long while. Of course, the artists were incredible, too, fleshing out his scripts, but it really seems like one of those DJ Shadow situations: it's impossible to give everyone what they deserve, because you can only split the check 50/50 once.

Lee stole credit from pretty much all his artists - Jack Kirby especially - and even the Marvel mode of addressing its readers is taken virtually wholesale from E.C. Comics. Take away Lee and you lose 'Excelsior', 'Face Front True Believers' etc etc - take away Kirby and Ditko and you lose the FF (which is really a variant on Kirby's earlier Challengers of the Unknown series for DC), Spider-Man, the Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Thor etc etc.

Pretty much every mainstream comic was created on a work-for-hire basis, across all companies, until things changed (a little) in the 1980s on. So lack of royalties is not just a recurring beef at Marvel (Bill Finger, the writer who co-created Batman, was more royally shafted than Bill Mantlo will ever be.)

the artists were incredible, too, fleshing out his scripts

lol

xpost

You mustn't have read the whole book Josh because it's pretty clear on how little Stan actually did in reality

No, I agree, ultimately, re: Lee, but unless this book is misreported, there are long stretches at the beginning where Lee is basically running the whole thing, where everyone gets fired but him and he recruits all the artists and inkers but remains the sole story guy, and the guy who keeps track of the expanding universe. A lot of the other guys - like Steve Ditko - were obviously talented but it sounds like kind of unpredictable, and everyone was always looking for a better gig (at least at this point in the book). Lee worships Kirby more than almost anyone else and gives him and lots of folks lots of opportunities. (He hires Jerry Siegel under a pseudonym when no one else would touch him). The bad blood and sniping came later, when accounts began to diverge and conflict, no thanks due to the loose crediting in the first place.

THis is also relevant to this discussion: http://kupps.malibulist.com/2014/01/26/stan-and-jack-and-steve-and-mort-and-jerry-and-joe/ (really long but worth reading)

Unless, like, there's a big reveal in this book, and halfway through they reveal that all the stuff in the first 100 pages didn't happen and Lee did nothing. Because at this point, 100 pages in, he's pretty industrious and essential. Not saying more essential than those other guys at all, but definitely the guy who gets it all off the ground and going. Has anyone else read the book? Is it considered bullshit? Like I said, I got it as a gift, from a major comics nerd, so I figured his endorsement was good enough for me. I'm sure the book goes into the controversies later.

but remains the sole story guy

lol

At this point in the book I said! He is depicted as literally dictating several scripts at once, and then spending all his time at home cranking out other scripts. This is by no means intended to degrade Kirby, Ditko et al. who were absolutely essential the Marvel identity. I'm just impressed by Lee's industriousness. As depicted in the book, Ditko hates Lee early on, and works independently, doing an awesome job but just dropping the work off at the office when he's done before eventually quitting. But Lee is in the office every day, working. So that does not mean Lee>Ditko. He's just depicted as working very hard to juggle all the balls.

Like, it's not like Lee swooped in and bought Marvel and took all the credits. He was there from the start, doing stuff. How much credit he deserves for individual titles and stories is what's debated.

if Ditko has quit already, Lee was years and years past being responsible for stories, and those stories were terrible and unremembered. (Lee's run on Spider-Man with Romita is possibly the only widely-cherished work he ever did that can be attributed to him as a storyteller, though, tbf.)

he was indeed industrious, on many levels. but his greatest talent was and remains being a flim-flam man.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that quite early on in the book it's made kind of explicit that Lee would come up with a very, very vague idea of the sort of thing that should happen in an issue ("Wouldn't it be cool if the FF went bowling and the pins were aliens? Excelsior!") and then Jack or Steve or whoever would go off and do something totally different and awesome then give it to Stand to add dialogue (which he had an ear for, no matter how hokey you personally think it is). The "Marvel Method" was pretty much that, that the 'writer' would have an outline idea then add dialogue to a finished comic.

Lee is explicitly called a token figuredhead with no idea what's going on in the company by about the Lee/McFarlane/Liefeld era in the book I think - he got shuffled off into movie properties and oversaw the FF and X-Men film deals lambasted above iirc.

Lee was certainly a workaholic in the early days and somebody had to write all that dialogue but it's obvious the artists did most of the heavy lifting creatively. Here's Stan himself, in the opening pages of the book, smugly describing the Marvel method

"It isn't generally known, but many of our merry Marvel artists are also talented story men in their own right! For example, all Stan has to with the pros like JACK 'KING' KIRBY, dazzling DON HECK, and darlin' DICK AYERS is give them the germ of an idea, and they make up all the details as they go along, drawing and plotting out the story. Then, our leader simply takes the finished drawings and adds all the dialogue and captions! Sounds complicated? Maybe it is, but it's another reason why no one else can bring you that old Marvel magic!"

I'll be surprised if you don't think he's a bit of a dick by the end of the book

So wait, is that book considered accurate? I've been considering reading it myself

It seemed well researched and evenhanded to me but obviously it's going to be difficult to uncover the full truth about things that happened half a century ago in a chaotic environment like early Marvel (especially when there's lasting acrimony between some of the key players)

the Lee/McFarlane/Liefeld era

Lee moved to Hollywood in 1981.

that would be Jim Lee

I've read the Howe book, and yes, it is very fair-minded. I don't have it to hand, but I'm pretty sure that at no point does he say that Lee ever 'wrote scripts', because that would be utterly inaccurate - as other people have said, at best Lee would have a story conference with Kirby or Ditko or whoever, agree on a general outline/plot idea, and then leave it up to the artists themselves to 'break down' the story panel-by-panel, page by page. Once he received the finished pencilled artwork, Lee would then add dialogue and captions; Kirby would actually include pencilled notes in the margins of the pages, telling Lee what was going on. This is a terrific analysis of that creative process:

http://www.tcj.com/a-96th-birthday/

The fact that, once Kirby left, Lee did not create a single substantial new character for Marvel seems to me the best proof of his shameless credit-hogging and outright lying when it comes to creative contribution.

xpost - Yes, so Stan wasn't shuffled off onto movie properties as late as 1991, he'd been completely gone from Marvel ~per se~ for a decade.

Lee did not create a single substantial new character for Marvel

For Marvel or for anyone else. (Fans of Stripperella are welcome to make their detailed exegeses on his creative contributions.

yeah sorry, I realised that's what you meant after I posted. He was still acting as a public figurehead for the company in the 90s though. There's one scene in the book where he's doing an interview for a series of videos with Liefield. The Robster starts drawing some character that he claims he's making up on the spot and Stan is like "we're both creating this together so we share the copyright hahaha"

Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have implied he wrote the scripts, sure, but it seems early in the book though that Lee is keeping the entire enterprise afloat. You'll get no debate with me as to whether it was the other guys that made it great, but Lee comes off if not an auteur than certainly an essential producer/director, and the one inarguable (right?) fact appears to be that there would be no Marvel (historically) without Lee.

But of course, this is one of the most contentious, acrimonious he said/he said debates of all time, and many of the principals (and principles) are long dead, so ...

lol Stripperella! i totally forgot about that

even if Stan was as bad a credit-hogging, scene-stealing flim-flam man as his reputation would lead me to believe, he still deserves credit for his part in the era, as well as being a notable, positive public face for comics for the last 50 years. but you know, maybe just I'm biased because he signed a copy of Ravage 2099 for me.

It's VERY arguable that there would be no Marvel without Lee - you could say there would be no Marvel without Martin Goodman (the actual owner of Marvel until the late 1960s, and not coincidentally Stan's uncle - Stan never owned Marvel), or that there would be no Marvel without Joe Simon AND Jack Kirby, who together created Captain America and give the fledgling company their biggest hit character, and you have to say that there would be no Marvel without Jack Kirby's incredible range of characters, who continue to form the bedrock of Marvel's comic and film empire.

To give Stan some small measure of credit, he was - by the standards of publishing at the time - reasonably loyal to his artists, doing his best to keep them in regular work and trying to raise their page rates (though he could never compete with DC in that regard.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripperella

lolololol

I meant 'no Marvel' in the most literal sense. Goodman put Lee in charge and basically was hands off, as long as it made money (and the comics made much less than his other mags), and the book notes that he'd seen comics up and down trajectory enough that he knew to hold on.But there were points where everyone but Lee was basically fired, but he kept churning stuff out with a skeleton crew. Later, he's the guy who hires the likes of Kirby, Ditko et al. Those are the guys who made the characters and titles legendary, but Lee was the one who recruited them.

xpost - Yes, so Stan wasn't shuffled off onto movie properties as late as 1991, he'd been completely gone from Marvel ~per se~ for a decade.

― (D1CK$) (sic), Thursday, 20 February 2014 14:21 (1 hour ago)

Mea culpa, as the ILC thread on it has shown, my memory isn't 100% reliable about the book.

The Howe book is v. gd, but there's not that much in it that's new or revealatory about the Lee/Kirby era of Marvel (the Gerard Jones superhero history, for example, covers a lot of the same ground and is, imho, stronger on the Golden Age-era in general).

what are you guys going to do next, tell me that Stan didn't hand out all those No-Prizes himself?!?

I'm pretty sure the no-prize one of Stan's original scripts.

omg guys I'm dying here
In 2003, ex-stripper Janet Clover, aka "Jazz", aka "Stripperella", filed a lawsuit in the Daytona Beach, Florida circuit court against Viacom, Stan Lee, and Pamela Anderson, claiming she is Stripperella's true creator and Stan Lee stole her idea when she discussed it during a lap dance.

There was an actual empty no-prize envelope that was posted out to the lucky winners (again, this was the kind of thing that Stan pinched from E.C.):

http://bmj2k.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/no-prize.jpg

"I was delighted to learn that Lee has attained the status of an authority in the comics field. Twenty years of unrelenting editorial effort to suppress the artistic effort, encourage miserable taste, flood the field with degraded imitations and polluted non-stories, treating artists and writers like cattle, and failure on his part to make an independent success as a cartoonist have certainly qualified him for this respected position." - Bernard Krigstein, 1965

poor Universal :(

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v655/rockcandy83/Stuff/fave%20tv%20characters%20picspam/jack-donaghy.png

I'm late for a Namor Universe brainstorming session. We're planning Tiger Shark and Fathom Five spin-offs and the lawyers think we may even steal the rights to Alpha Flight through Marrina. Alpha Flight!

it's ok, they'll never stop trying to make SEA SUPERHERO happen

the best stuff is actually later on the Howe book e.g.

The empowerment of the editorial staff, began as a morale-building necessity in the wake of Jim Shooter's stormy departure, now resulted - in extreme examples - in instructions to writers and and artists on how to appeal to the lowest common denominator "If the Punisher appears in a panel with another character," Jim Starlin was told, "that character should be killed within the next few pages by either the Punisher or someone else. If the Punisher appears with any object, it should be destroyed in an explosion as soon as possible"

that just makes me want a humor comic titled "Oh No, It's The Punisher"

1. The Punisher should be louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine.
2. Whenever he is not in a panel, the other characters should ask, "Where's the Punisher?"

set it out of continuity, have the whole thing be Frank Castle wandering in the vicinity of established fan-favorites and new characters and said victims realizing that The Punisher's presence means they are doomed

maybe the whole series is a chase sequence with a protagonist desperately avoiding the Punisher, who keeps intentionally and accidentally killing every single person around him

krigstein otm

xps djp "and that bear... was my MOTHER!"

i was trying to find the right image but holy shit, it's amazing how many "Spider-Man" web searches lead to porn

Can you imagine if they had enforced those rules for

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/ArchiePunisher.jpg

ah, love that PunArchie logo in the corner

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/3/36845/1076351-punisherkillsthemarveluniversev1a.jpg
actual cover btw

i went to high school with a kid who was obsessed with the punisher and had a serious inferiority complex
he ended up taking "steroids" (nb: i have no idea if they were actually steroids, they were pills that he took at regular intervals throughout the day) in the hopes of getting stronger so that he could "avenge those who had been done wrong"
at one point at band camp (he played marching baritone i think?) he passed out from heat exhaustion and in a half daze i remember him telling us how he was frank castle
he's a cop now, of course.

http://www.angelfire.com/alt/punisher/images/23.jpg
KLANG
KLANG
KLANG
KLANG
KLANG
squitch

oh boo: http://www.angelfire.com/alt/punisher/images/23.jpg

haha great story

http://i57.tinypic.com/ifoo5i.jpg

that punisher kills marvel comic is the only punisher as protagonist i've read and it was fantastic