When I was a kid I had a book called Origins of Marvel Comics, and a bit later one called Son of Origins of Marvel Comics. That second one sounds a little tongue-in-cheek now that I think of it. As you might guess they were about the beginnings of the first popular Marvel Comics characters in the early-mid sixties.*
The thing I want to emphasize is that, yes, it featured reprints of the first and/or origin stories of the superheroes, as well as sometimes another reprint from slightly later in development. But on top of that there was Stan Lee's reminiscences about how the ideas came to him, and his collaborations with Marvel's art staff.
Lee is often accused of giving himself too much credit in the creation of the Marvel Universe. For diehard fans of Jack Kirby and sometimes Kirby himself, any credit given to Lee was too much. I wouldn't agree, but there's definitely an element of self-mythologizing in these books.
Around the same time I had another book, analogous, on the creation stories of DC Comics superheroes. It's similarly rich in the number of characters, and they're colorful characters. But this was more of a historical telling. No one person could give a firsthand account of all these creations and say, "Yeah, I had a hand in all of them." Not even fraudulently. It wouldn't have been credible. A couple of them hadn't even started at DC. **
To the extent I have a point here, it's not about whether Marvel or DC is/was better. It's that people have a tendency to be sucked in to big stories, not just about fictional characters but also their fictionalized idea about the real people behind them. That's why you hear a lot of things that are too "good", too simple, to be true.
*The company had been around since the thirties, and the characters Captain America and the Submariner predated American entry into WW2, so this was really more a highly successful rebranding than anything else.
** Plastic Man was one of the big successes at Quality Comics, a company that didn't long survive the industry downturn of the early fifties. The "Shazam!" version of Captain Marvel came from Fawcett Comics. DC had taken him out with a frivolous lawsuit and then revived him in their own pages about 20 years later.
2 comments:
Sometimes it seems that the big comicbook boom happened in the 40s and early 50s and even I'm not old enough to have recalled the beginnings or to have had favorite characters. Stan Lee I'm persuaded was always a handful - talented and driven but very likely prone to self-promotion.
I did happen upon a Reddit composition that had the following to say about Ditko and Stan Lee's relationship:
Now, Steve Ditko left the best-selling Spider-Man title mostly because he was tired of doing the plotting without getting full credit, and because he didn't like the way Stan Lee used dialogue and narration to change the direction of what Ditko had intended. Fair enough. This was also Jack Kirby's main gripe against Lee and "the Marvel method." But have you ever read the stuff that Steve Ditko started to turn out without Stan Lee to rein him in? ack! Ditko was a believer in Ayn Rand's objectivism and it quickly turned his output from super-hero or mystery comics to jaw-dropping sermons. Even in 1968, his HAWK AND THE DOVE was hopelessly one-sided and preachy.
To which somebody else responded:
This makes Ditko sound like a crazy asshole, when he was actually intensely professional. His gripes with Marvel weren't really about content, it was about Stan Lee's absolute refusal for years to acknowledge his co-creators as actual co-creators. An issue that culminated in the infamous letter Stan Lee sent around internally at Marvel in a weird condescending way that said he 'considered' Ditko a co-creator. Which pissed off Ditko big time. That was when he showed up at Marvel and dropped off his last work and told them under no uncertain terms that he quit.
I wonder which, if either, you might agree with?
You won't be surprised to hear I don't remember either of those books but you've always been successful at sending me off to explore some cultural byways.
The first comic book boom did indeed happen before you would remember, starting a little before WW2 and ending a few years after the Allies won. It was also an American phenomenon in origin, so I'm not sure how far it penetrated into Britain and Canada.
There were already talented writers at work in the field by 1960, although their talents had more to do with action and out-there ideas rather than things like characterization. Stan Lee was competitive, though. He was working as an editor at a comic company run by his brother-in-law, but he wanted to stand out, and for the company to stand out. So he capitalized on the differences Marvel heroes had with the competition: things like the Fantastic Four being public celebrities instead of furtive vigilantes, or the Hulk being the monster in a 50s monster movie but essentially good.
That did involve taking the work of the artists and making it his own through dialogue and narration, to varying extents. Jack Kirby, who was a little older and had created characters on his own at several companies, had very little patience with this. But like it or not, Lee did have creative input and the characters are what they are in part because of him.
Ditko was very talented and rather eccentric, somewhat hard to work with. Denny O'Neil recalled writing a script which mentioned a "former criminal", only for Ditko to write a note saying that there's no such thing. His work was always visually interesting but in later years had trouble finding readers. Still, Spider-Man almost certainly wouldn't have worked without him being the original artist.
These are things i just recall now and then. Then I guess I feel the need to share them in some way.
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