It's been a while since I read comic books on any kind of regular basis. (Newspaper comics are another story, and The Comics Curmudgeon is a big reason.) Still, I saw Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story on the shelves of my local library, and couldn't resist checking it out in both senses of the phrase.
When I was a kid I wouldn't have been very interested in the office politics that went into the creations of Marvel titles. I would have been wrong, because there's a lot of good material there. One edge that Marvel had over DC was the appearance of a cohesive creative team, the famed and largely mythical "Marvel Bullpen." It is true that at one point editor/writer/mascot Stan Lee and veteran artist Jack Kirby were responsible for the company's most popular characters and stories, along with prickly Steve Ditko. But that was more a product of the severely limited budget they had in the beginning than anything else. And it was never a happy marriage. Each of them saw themselves as the more important partner, and despite Lee's brother-in-law Martin Goodman being publisher, neither was ultimately happy with the deal he got. The pattern of clashing egos and hurt feeling would repeat itself in later years, the X-Men behind-the-scenes team of Chris Claremont and John Byrne being a somewhat surprising example.
Also a revelation is how many of the creators from the seventies were getting high for inspiration, albeit mostly on soft drugs. One exception is Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber, drug free and by the sound of it mostly a homebody in general. Given the troubled humor and low-budget surrealism of his writing, this is both surprising and not.
When I was a kid I wouldn't have been very interested in the office politics that went into the creations of Marvel titles. I would have been wrong, because there's a lot of good material there. One edge that Marvel had over DC was the appearance of a cohesive creative team, the famed and largely mythical "Marvel Bullpen." It is true that at one point editor/writer/mascot Stan Lee and veteran artist Jack Kirby were responsible for the company's most popular characters and stories, along with prickly Steve Ditko. But that was more a product of the severely limited budget they had in the beginning than anything else. And it was never a happy marriage. Each of them saw themselves as the more important partner, and despite Lee's brother-in-law Martin Goodman being publisher, neither was ultimately happy with the deal he got. The pattern of clashing egos and hurt feeling would repeat itself in later years, the X-Men behind-the-scenes team of Chris Claremont and John Byrne being a somewhat surprising example.
Also a revelation is how many of the creators from the seventies were getting high for inspiration, albeit mostly on soft drugs. One exception is Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber, drug free and by the sound of it mostly a homebody in general. Given the troubled humor and low-budget surrealism of his writing, this is both surprising and not.
2 comments:
excelsior!...
with that much talent/ego working together, the situation you describe isn't all that surprising. didn't take very long before becoming all a bit too much for steve ditko (the j.d. salinger of comic artists?)...
marvel's current major resurgence, in the form of a motion picture box-office monster, has been a strange thing to behold. that the movies are being both appreciated & reviewed as 'serious' films, to the point of considering the creation of a new academy award to accommodate (honor?) them, is pretty disturbing...
i just happen to be working my way through the first major, triple-a, marvel video game at the moment (there've been a number of others, up till now, but none enthusiastically embraced/promoted by the company) - 'marvel's spider-man', developed by one of our favorite game makers, insomniac, the creators of the 'ratchet & clank' series. they were a perfect choice, both talent & humor-wise, & the results are quite impressive, sometimes chaotically so...
Oh, Ditko's a fascinating character. Probably impossible for most people to get along with. Part of that is the Objectivist thing, which he actually seemed to put more effort into trying to live out than Ayn Rand herself did. But his work always had this alien beauty to it.
From what I understand the plan to institute a new academy award for blockbusters has been scrapped, or at least put off. But the glut of Marvel movies (DC only wishes it was producing a glut) does have a downside. It's not that it's making movies dumber, necessarily, since idiotic behemoth movies would be getting made anyway. But to an extent it's like using an H-bomb to get ants out of your kitchen: overkill for the kind of stories they're telling.
Yeah, I've been hearing a lot of good things about the new Spider-Man game. I didn't know it was from the makers of Ratchet & Clank. They've got another feather to put in their cap. The photorealistic backgrounds are something else. I can't imagine the drug-fueled all-nighters the coders must have pulled.
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