The Myth of Stan Lee: An Opinion / Randall Hugh Crawford
The Myth of Stan Lee
An Opinion
Randall Hugh Crawford
Once upon a time in the ’60s, a small town journalist-wannabe named Scoop (because all reporters are named Scoop) and his sidekick photographer (inevitably named Flash) were loitering around the drugstore taking pictures of the comic-book rack, waiting to see if there was anything left to that decade old crock about comics leading to juvenile delinquency. They caught a few little children picking up comics about funny ghosts, funny witches and even funny devils, a few pre-teens buying comics about funny teenagers, and the occasional mom buying her child comics about the funny ducks and bunnies that were in theatrical cartoons when she was a kid. But Scoop and Flash were surprised to see adolescents and post-adolescents, and old teens and young adults and even a few collegiate types and not-so-young adults eagerly picking up some brightly colored super-hero comics emblazoned with the logo, “A Marvel Pop Art Production”. They bought a few of these and flipped through them and cranked out a load of crap entitled “Zap! Bam! Pow! Comics Not Just for Kids Anymore”. They noticed that most of these seemed to have been authored by an incredibly prolific writer named Stan Lee. Imagining a coffee-guzzling hack in rolled-up shirtsleeves pounding out full scripts on a battered Underwood, they assumed he was the fastest, most prolific and most imaginative writer of his generation, and praised him as such. One of the wire services picked up on this stinker and filed it, and all across the country other hacks named Scoop churned out variations on this theme, usually with the same title, and almost always including the myth that Stan Lee created Marvel Comics.
Seeing his name pop up so often, the tabloid cult-of-personality rags and the publications catering to the burgeoning youth culture — including a few of the new “underground” journals — all sent their own Scoops out to talk to “The Man” and turn in a story by deadline Friday that would bear the title “Stan Lee: The Genius Behind Marvel Comics!!!”
As the Marvel legacy grew in the ’60s, the Stan Lee cult of personality grew with it, as he promoted Marvel as the alternative to the old-fashioned comics of their Distinguished Competitor, first in the comics letters pages, and later on the bombastic Bullpen Bulletin pages and in his own editorial Stan’s Soapbox.
At some point Lee’s fame turned him into someone the mainstream media was vaguely aware of. He was invited to appear on a few radio and television talk shows and be interviewed by elderly hosts so out of it and unaware of pop culture that they assumed comics were still exactly like the ones they’d skimmed through half a century earlier — people who remembered comics as colorful cartoons you glanced at. To them, comics were a visual medium and a comic-book creator was someone who drew pictures. These were folks that could not conceive that comics actually had to be “written”, and asked Stan questions about how he drew Spider-Man and ignored his answers while concentrating on their next uninformed question.
There are still some people who think comics are strictly a visual medium and assume the above described process is all there is to making a comic, and all the writer or, more accurately, scripter does is fill in the word balloons. While there have been a few pantomime comics and comic strips like Henry over the years, quite a lot is enhanced in the final result by adding dialogue, captions, mood, characterization and humor.
A lot of those old Lee-penned Marvel tales have more jokes — or at least more humor — than a typical sit-com from that era. The dialogue of Thor or The Silver Surfer or Dr. Strange lent the characters dignity and nobility; Ben Grimm’s dialogue and inner thoughts make him vulnerable and likable; Spider-Man’s wisecracks gave him a cocky bravado that contrasted wonderfully with Peter Parker’s insecure, mopey self-pity.
Then teenagers — comic fans — with access to mimeograph machines began cranking out something called “fanzines”, in which they discussed the comics they loved and the men who created them. Some even managed to get interviews with those literary and artistic giants. As time passed, these “fanzines” went national and emulated professional and sometimes even journalistic standards.
By this time, many of Marvel’s early lesser artists had been replaced while their two big guns, Kirby and Ditko, had left the company over disagreements of opinion and other reasons — one of which was that Stan was getting that “writer” credit on the stories they plotted and paced as well as illustrated. In some cases, like the Spider-Man/Dr. Strange crossover from Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2, Ditko was given a credit as plotter; in other cases Stan just told people, “I discussed a Galactus story and Jack turned in these pages with the Silver Surfer. What can I tell ya, the man’s creativity is unstoppable.”
Eventually, with all his friends gone, Stan Lee stepped down from writing and editing at Marvel, and was granted “Editor Emeritus” status. His name was used to “Present” the work of the next generation of creators, and he went on as Marvel’s diplomat to Hollywood and mainstream book publishing.
Around that time, all the pro-level fanzines (Rocket’s Blast, Comixscene, Reader, Journal, Buyers Guide, etc.) were eagerly deflating the Stan’s The Man mythos and describing the Marvel Method of putting together comics as a Ford assembly line. Each publication announced — as if they were the first to reveal this scoop — that after a brief discussion between writer and artist (in which the writer offered a suggestion, a name, a springboard of a vague plot idea), the artist would then go and make up the story: plot, subplots, pacing; and in cinematic terms, be light director, scene designer, and — by drawing the characters’ facial expressions and body language — actually serve as director and actor. By the mid ’70s, a series of trade paperbacks were released with names like Origins of Marvel Comics, Son of Origins, Bring On The Bad Guys and The Superhero Women. These books were credited as being “By Stan Lee”. This bothers some people, for all Stan did was... script all the stories reprinted, serve as editor in choosing what material to reprint, write extensive introductions to each book and each reprinted story, write the dedications, and (quite likely) reach out to the publishers and make the book deal in the first place. And in his lengthy and verbosely bombastic introductions he did pat his own back and sometimes tell, or avoid telling, things that do not entirely jibe with the current conventional beliefs. And yet in every opportunity he does sing the praises of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko as creators and innovators, and acknowledges in detail the working of the Marvel Method that had his collaborators plotting and creating the tales on which he had received a writer’s credit and they had received an artist’s credit.
There were self-serving omissions. In his introduction to the first Hulk story he saves himself, Kirby and Marvel the embarrassment of mentioning that the original Hulk comic failed to find an audience or a tone and was canceled after six issues. Likewise, in praising Ditko’s Doctor Strange, he avoids admitting that he and Kirby had tried to create a mystic superhero with Dr. Droom, a name and a bald-headed monk-like occultist which landed with a thud.
In the ’60s, Jack Kirby created an incredible legacy of characters — the majority of what is known as The Marvel Universe; characters that are now worth millions — billions — for Marvel’s owners, the Walt Disney Corporation; creations that he sold away the rights to for simple page rates.
In his 2014 Playboy interview, the aged and ailing Stan Lee states he offered Jack the job of Art director, which would have essentially made him the Number Two man at Marvel Comics in the ’60s. Jack declined; he just wanted to draw comics and take home a paycheck. Jack had the vision to create a universe; Stan and his employers had the vision to create an industry legend. Not the legend of Stan Lee, but the Legend of Marvel Comics — a business that, even as it was climbing to the top of the sales charts and even as the underground comix of the late ’60s and early ’70s were tearing down the fences of the Comics Code, continued to claim that it was the little guy, the under-god, the hip alternative and the buddy-pal to it’s readership.
In that same interview, the elder Lee — the elderly Stanley Martin Leiber — does fall back on the stories he’s told for half a century. The long-involved origins of Spider-Man’s creation gets shorthanded down to “I was sitting in my office watching an ant on the wall and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if...”.
He also states that Jack held him no enmity. If Jack felt Marvel had treated him badly in the long run, then he considered Stan no more than a cog in the machine that ground him. And even though Steve Ditko pointedly declined an invitation to collaborate with Stan once again, Stan still feels they parted as friends.
No doubt all across the nation there are still papers called The Smalltown Outhouse Weekly filling pages with recycled versions of “Zap! Pow! Comics Are Not For Kids Anymore” and “Stan: The Man Behind Marvel”.
The rest of the journalistic world — major publications like The New Yorker, and some forty five years or so of comics fan and comics industry trade publications — know the truth. They know how the Marvel Method worked. They know that Stan was the carnie huckster that sold the Marvel image while Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were the primary creators and storytellers of the Marvel Universe. They all know that in the ’60s (the Silver Age or sometimes alternately known as The Marvel Age of Comics) Kirby was the Marvel “house style”; that Stan’s instructions to the bullpen were “Let Kirby be Kirby, let Ditko be Ditko, and let everyone else... be Kirby”; that many of the biggest names of the later ’60s Marvel (Buscema, Steranko, Barry Smith) hit the ground running by following Kirby layouts or drawing Kirby characters and doing homage to the Kirby style. (Once those founding creators left the company, Marvel did try to distance themselves by allowing more diversity in style, bringing in romance comics artists like John Romita and Gene Colan, and even using Romita’s work in their promotional materials and house ads and promoting Romita as the new Marvel House Style — even as new artists who had grown up on Kirby (Buckler, Frenz) continued to try to draw like Kirby.)
For the last couple of decades we have seen the rise of the Internet. There must be hundreds of websites devoted to comics, and hundreds of blogs both by comic creators and would-be critics and pundits.
Somehow this universal democracy, this access to have-your-voice-heard-no-matter-how-unedited-and-how-unqualified-your-opinion, has given rise to the counter-myth that Stan Lee did little or nothing to create the Marvel Universe; that Kirby and Ditko and the bullpen workers did it all, and Stan just stole from them and claimed all the credit. And repeatedly the claim is made that “the mainstream media thinks Stan did everything, gives Lee all the credit”.
That's a croc of hooey that is at times sadly hard to refute. In the latest Marvel blockbuster film, 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a full-screen credit scroll identifies the creators of many of the characters used in the film. Reportedly the brain-damaged Bill Mantlo laughed to see his Rocket Raccoon cavort on the screen and cried for joy to see his name in the credits. And the creators of Howard the Duck, who had a short cameo in the film, were given a full-screen credit to themselves — perhaps to make up for the short shrift they were given over the Howard the Duck movie. And yet, somehow, Jack Kirby, creator of Ronan and the film’s breakout star Groot, has his name tucked away in the “thanks to” scroll.
Maybe it was a punitive move, because some members of Kirby’s estate would like a financial compensation and a piece of the empire that Jack knowingly sold for page rates. Perhaps it’s about the copyright lawsuit that may appear before the Supreme Court. And, ironically, maybe he will get more publicity and credit from fans and bloggers complaining about his location in the film’s credits than he would have gotten with a full page “Ronan and Groot co-created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee” blurb in the credits scroll.
Among comic-book fans, I know, and you know, how the Marvel Method worked — who created the Silver Surfer; who plotted the Wally Wood issues of Daredevil with virtually no input from the “writer”; which issues of Amazing Spider-Man were plotted by Steve without conferring with Stan. And every comics industry fan magazine and trade publication knows it. Frankly, a huge amount of the mainstream media knows it. Pretty much all comic-book fans over the age of six or seven know it. You and I and anyone we know that will listen to us talk on and on about comic books know it. It’s a significant part of comic-book history and our shared verbal history — something we all know.
There are probably a few semi-literate hick town reporters named Scoop who don’t know it; a few elderly talk show hosts with inept assistants who don’t do their research.
And apparently a whole lot of bloggers and irate comics fans who have convinced themselves that they know something no one else knows; who are still intent on breaking that same old news that might have been an industry-insider-type revelation back in the early ’70s. So we keep hearing the clanging of that rusty old bell: “Stan Lee took all the credit”... “The Mainstream Press thinks Stan did it all”... “The Media credits Stan”... “The Movie-going public thinks Stan Lee created Spider-Man and Iron Man and The Hulk”... “Everyone thinks Stan Lee created The Avengers”... and, of course, “That's what Stan wants them to think!”
A typical ‘anti-Lee’ Facebook page
Bull Shit. I won’t say no one thinks that, but certainly no one who cares believes that. And have you ever noticed that these bloggers and outraged chat-room posters and Facebook group commentators never actually reprint a newspaper clipping or cite a source or provide a link to a mainstream article that says that? Why, you ask? Because there aren’t any. At least none that I’ve seen.
One thing old Scoop got right: “Marvel comics are creating a modern mythology.” And the Marvel mythos lives on. It was Scoop and his ilk that created the myth that Stan Lee was The Man behind Marvel. It was the teenage fanzine publishers who created the myth that “Stan took all the credit for Jack (and Steve)’s work”. And it is the internet generation that keeps alive the myth that “everybody” or “the mainstream media” thinks Stan created the Marvel Universe out of blank paper, as if from the brow of Odin.
In troubled times, whether the nineteen-sixties or the twenty-teens, people need myths to cling to. But the conceit that a small cadre or rebel band of comics fans knows some secret handed down from generation to generation, some hidden truth that no one else knows... it’s bullshit. The word “everybody” is all inclusive. If you know the truth and I know it and the comic industry knows it and the comics fan publications know it and the mainstream publications know it and all of your friends and family know it and you have no idea of who in the world doesn’t know it, then exactly who is left to make up this “everybody” that supposedly doesn’t know it?
Oh, it's a nice comic-book super-hero power fantasy. An evil writer/editor/publisher stole the credits that his co-creators and artist so rightly deserved while paying them a trifle, and now only you and your secret clubhouse gang know the real truth about what happened and have to get it out on the internet so the world can learn the truth at long last. It’s quite a fantasy, all right, and might have been a bit of a revelation back in 1970. Now it’s been elevated to the status of a myth. A tired, worn-out, old, old myth.
