Just imagine Stan Lee creating Watchmen.

Fysh

No, don't worry, he hasn't signed on for this, it's a fan spoof :

Click here to see.

I've not read any of the Just Imagine Stan Lee... comics, but then not being a fan of material written by Stan Lee anyway I doubt I'm missing out on much.

the Shades

Only some of the worst written comics ever!

Briony Noh

the Shades wrote:

Only some of the worst written comics ever!

Which clearly explains why Marvel was completely unable to compete with DC in the open market. If only they'd had some writers and maybe an artist or two and just a handful of reasonable ideas, maybe Stan Lee would be better regarded today as, I don't know, an innovator or something. Maybe even (and I scoff at the prospect) a creative genius!

But no.

the Shades wrote:

Only some of the worst written comics ever!

Excelsior:D .

constitutionus

no one can deny stan lee revolutionised comics in the 60's. but he aint written crap since! anyone remember that god awfull "ravage 2099"? mother of god.

stans way past it, i remember the old "just imagine" series but couldnt be arsed picking any of it up. some of it made tha amalgam stuff look good

lee's like kirby, great in his day but the mediums moved on. half the crap you hear about them now is tantamount to deification

bombidol

in fairness Jack Kirby's stuff is still amazing today. I LOVE his stuff, his art to me essentially set the standard for whats coming out now. Look at Mike Mignola, theres no way in hell he would be as good as he is today if it wasnt for him. The man was a legend in every sense of the word. In fact im in the process of getting a Jack Kirby Drawn Orion Vs Darkseid tattoo on my arm.

Briony Noh

constitutionus wrote:

lee's like kirby, great in his day but the mediums moved on. half the crap you hear about them now is tantamount to deification

Have to say I agree. Haven't actually read any recent Lee but I've heard him doing his schtick on something, possibly a documentary, recently and he still thinks that stuff has an audience. Kirby disappointed, even in his New Gods series, but I still love to look at his X-Men era and a lot of his work on Thor.

To be fair, very, very little of the classic "Silver Age" stuff stacks up against even some of the more mediocre modern fare, but in its day it was unmatched (literally) and I think deserves a little covert reverence from time-to-time. We all get old and set in our ways and lazy.

But every generation has a tendency to disparage its forebears at one time or another. I guess a track record of trend-setting and trail-blazing just isn't enough for some folk anymore.

So, until :eek: I can't believe I was about to do that! (If you don't know what, you ain't a true Keeper Of The Fame)

bombidol

New Gods is amazing, as a matter of fact im rereading it as we speak. Its pure Kirby. The art is mindblowing. As for writing, i agree that across the board the writing wasnt up to the standard that it is today. It just cant be, the freedoms allowed to writers now are amazing. they can literally do or say pretty much what they want.
Back then if something was even slightly rough around the edges it was gone.
The art back then to me is amazing, the imagination it took to draw stuff like that astounds me. Even today , you read something like Xmen or JLA etc, when they are in space or theres a space battle or robots fighting etc it simply hasnt moved on from what people like Kirby drew. its essentially the same thing.
I think comics have simply expanded since those days not nessicarilly improved that dramatically.

Briony Noh

bombidol wrote:

I think comics have simply expanded since those days not nessicarilly improved that dramatically.

There's a lot in what you say, in fact there are some modern comics that barely reach the standard of a Stan Lee with a bad head-cold, a stack of bills to pay by the 30th, a ringing phone that he just knows is his mother asking if he's coming to visit this weekend and a Dear John letter from his girlfriend crumpled up in the ashtray script. But the colours are usually very nice to look at.

bombidol

I mean Stan lee for his day was a great writer, he brought depth and history to a lot of characters which set the standard for today. where a good chunk of a comic is used to develop a character you can give a crap about. Lee's characters were almost instantly likeable. Saying that i feel that writing has expanded a good deal as has art but what im saying is that it couldnt have come this far without the originals. Theres still a big place for them.
Its like Elvis or the beatles, just cause they are old and sound a little dated doesnt mean they are any less good than when they started.

Fysh

I have to admit, I understand the reasons why a lot of the Silver Age comics don't appeal to me. But that doesn't let me overlook what were and are still, to my mind, flaws.

Specifically:

The work of a lot of fantastic artists is shown off in nothing like its original glory by the printing techniques used at the time. Hell, a lot of the superhero characters dating back that far were given costumes and colour schemes designed specifically to stand out when printed using the colour printing techniques at the time. Not something that any of the creators can be blamed for, but still something that I find detracts from my enjoyment of the story.

The artwork itself - now we get somewhere. It's not specifically a Silver Age thing, but it's conspicuously worse for me when reading Silver Age comics because of the previous point. There's nothing like mediocre artwork with uninspired layouts to put you off a particular comic, and I have to admit that what I know of Silver Age comics is definitely tainted with the general impression of less-than-stellar artwork.

The writing - far and away my biggest complaint with Silver and Golden Age comics. I understand that comics as a medium has developed over the last few decades, that with the advent of Wertham's poisonous allegations and the Comics Code writing could not be as shocking as it might have otherwise been. But where comics like the Spectre found ways in which to deal with dark content, the majority of the marvel stuff involved characters I liked spouting godawful dialogue. I compare it to Star Wars : Return Of the Jedi; there's nothing wrong with the ideas or the plot, but the dialogue was often terrible, failing for the most part to give the characters the depth that the stories could have benefited from.

(There again, this is just my take on it and a large part of it is down to my generally demanding standards for superhero stories...)

bombidol

the printing takes away an awful lot from the art i agree. and also remember that back in the day these things were written for a 99% market of kids, unlike today where its probably 60/40 adults to kids

partholon

you know the funny thing is i used to get my mits on the old reprint marvel uk pocket books featuring thor/spiderman/x men/ hulk. all reprints of the 60s original runs and i cant help thinking the art looks better in black and white.

i dont mean to belittle what lee and kirby did. they were the foundation and considering the innovation in terms of layouts and storytelling (correct me if im wrong but didnt kirby basically invent the two page splash page?) they cant be dismissed but like bethoven and the beatles, they may have been the best at what they did but theryre not my bag and i dread the thought of all artist going back to that just out of laziness or deifying them, we should acknowldge the debt we owe them and then try to exceed them, im not sure who is the next kirby but its pretty obvious stans replacement is moore, like him or not he's the only one to really expand the medium to the same extent.

personally i dont think either creator would like the idea of the medium not building on what they started. look at clayton crains work on the recent garth ennis written ghost rider series. amazing stuff (well at least to look at, felt like garth was posting it in. sitll good but not stellar)

by the way bombidol, if you like kirbys style check out a guy called ladronn. he's aped it big time and its very good. really makes you wonder what kirby couldve got up to with the new computer tech.

Briony Noh

bombidol wrote:

also remember that back in the day these things were written for a 99% market of kids, unlike today where its probably 60/40 adults to kids

And this is where the story really starts, folks.

It's the late 40s, early 50s. There are only a handful of professional writers and artists around working in comics and pulp novels. Comics are considered considerably less than an artform, the poor relation of literature's poorest relations. Anyone working in comics as a writer was considered to be either just learning his trade or already a failure at it.

The writing is simple. So are the audiences, average age about 11 or 12, predominantly male. Action is all they want. Action and a lot of it. Plots are an optional extra; characterisation, completely unnecessary beyond the superficial - he's a boy, she's a girl, he loves her but can't reveal his secret identity, that's enough of that, now let's fight the bad guy for some reason we'll come up with later.

With some exceptions, this is how it stays for two decades. Then a writer emerges who actually enjoys and relishes the medium, and his style, naive and childish though it still is, strikes a chord with his audience, who are as tired of he is of Golden Age over-simplistic simplicity, though they don't realise it till he points it out.

Lee wasn't the first or even the best writer in the field to embellish the medium, but he was the first in the monthly, multi-issue, mass-production field. Will Eisner had an entire studio working on just The Spirit. Stan Lee had himself and a small, select team of artists to generate up to twenty pages a month of Hulk, Fantastic Four, Thor, X-Men, Doctor Strange, Iron Man and later The Avengers, Sub Mariner, Spider-Man and many, (many, many, many), many more before Roy Thomas joined the stable and took over some of the chores (though Ditko for one is adamant that he provided a lot of plot detail on all the books he worked on). What's truly amazing is that he could be so personally prolific without becoming quite stupifyingly repetitive. Just compare Iron Man with any one of the original X-Men; Spidey and his various opponents with Thor and his. The research he must have done just to get a start on Doctor Strange! And where did The Ringmaster's Circus come from? What a concept! (Actually, I think this was one of Kirby's massive contributions.)

And as Marvel aged, so did its readership until new writers emerged, inspired by the Marvel style, who had grown up with the characters and their histories, who built on what had been done by Lee and his small but growing team of creatives, and who made comics into something even more literate, even more critically respected. (You can see some of their names in early, early letters pages. I kid you not.) Writers now became comic writers because they wanted to, not because they weren't good enough to be anything else. They were fans!

By now, Marvel Comics had developed a house-style unlike any other mass-market company in the disposable reading-matter business and suddenly this trash called comics became collectable and aspirational, though it would take even longer before improvements in technology and reductions in price would permit the use of quality paper and better printing to benefit the artwork, and in the process justify the medium's popularity; and even longer before simple, crude block-and-screen colouring could be replaced completely, permitting shades and tones and subtlety.

Well, that's roughly the history. Stan Lee was a product of his era, but he was the mutant offspring that begat Alan Moore and Frank Miller. It's possible that without that quantum leap towards proper story-telling, comics would have stayed more or less as they were for another twenty or thirty years and many of us would have had nothing to read that was even worth moaning about.

Like him or loathe him, you don't even have to admire him to acknowledge what he did. And, of course, you don't really need to read his work for any reason other than academic interest, which doesn't have any dependence whatsoever on your subjective assessments of quality.

Next month: Will Eisner - Fiend or Foe!?

I've over-written this, haven't I? Who's going to read all that???

This has been a Stanley Manley Epic Tale . . . ( I'm doing it again!!)

the Shades

Funny you should mention Eisner, go back and look at his the Spirit strips from the 40's and 50's and you'll see he was light years ahead of Lee in terms of writing and storytelling in his art.

As for how much Lee actually contributed to the comics that came out of Marvel in the 60's it's been disputed by practically every artist he worked with. The evidence for characters he claims were created by him and Kirby, actually being Kirby's alone is huge (Kirby created numerous characters like them before he ever went to work for Timely). Ditko's claims also seem pretty solid, in fact if a time machine could help clear the mess of lies up I wouldn't be surprised if Lee did nothing more than write dialogue for the comics.

Of course all of this is personal opinion from my own reading of various sources and histories and should in no way be considered as fact, as Mr Lee has been quite litigation happy when it comes to the quagmire of his early career.

Fysh

the Shades wrote:

Funny you should mention Eisner, go back and look at his the Spirit strips from the 40's and 50's and you'll see he was light years ahead of Lee in terms of writing and storytelling in his art.

As for how much Lee actually contributed to the comics that came out of Marvel in the 60's it's been disputed by practically every artist he worked with. The evidence for characters he claims were created by him and Kirby, actually being Kirby's alone is huge (Kirby created numerous characters like them before he ever went to work for Timely). Ditko's claims also seem pretty solid, in fact if a time machine could help clear the mess of lies up I wouldn't be surprised if Lee did nothing more than write dialogue for the comics.

Of course all of this is personal opinion from my own reading of various sources and histories and should in no way be considered as fact, as Mr Lee has been quite litigation happy when it comes to the quagmire of his early career.

I'm inclined to agree with this - what I've read of Eisner (which isn't much, though I do have a copy of Comics & Sequential Art lying around somewhere) suggests that Eisner was a far better writer in terms of characterisation and subtlety than Lee. Eisner is definitely the person that I'd credit with changing the mass perception of comics in the context of literature; Lee was more about popularising superhero comics after the drastic restrictions imposed under the Comics Code.

That being said, Marvel doesn't have the best reputation for having had any respect for creator rights. Kirby was definitely involved in the creation of some of Marvel's most popular characters, as were a couple of other artists, but because of the circumstances they were working in the rights were handed over to Stan and the company without a struggle and it only became apparent years later what their contribution was actually worth.

When I mentioned print quality earlier, incidentally, I was referring more to Silver Age colour comics - I actually don't mind the black and white comics that much because they're a more accurate rendition of the artists' original work.

Briony Noh

In fact, Eisner is probably like, I don't know, God or something in terms of the medium. I recommend Contract With God, of course (friend of mine had a signed copy) which is both adult and naive, probably the first real graphic novel - i.e. self-contained stories exploring New York lives and not a costumed hero in sight.

So much has been written about his innovative style that I'm sure there are thousands of people laying claim to his best bits, but he was definitely at the forefront of using filmic iconography in a static form, as well as creating or promoting the shorthand visual language that we still use in comics today to represent, for example, the rate of time passing, lighting that reflects mood, atmosphere and character, even rain, and so much more that we take for granted now.

The key thing about Eisner for me is that he was a story-teller who wasn't afraid to experiment, even within the limited framework of a weekly crime series. There are Spirit episodes where the Spirit doesn't appear until the last frame, and then only as the spectator of the event. Of the stories of this sort that stand out are Lucky Chance and an enchanting one about a Flying Saucer (which was a plastic saucer that had blown away from the picnic Spirit and Ellen were on). You've seen its analogue in X-Files and Buffy, in Moore's Halo Jones and others, but not until relatively very recently. Eisner was doing this in the 40s.

Even so, it wasn't until the late 70s/early 80s that he began to get the recognition from fandom that the pros had been giving him in secret all along. If you get a chance to see either his old work or his new I believe you will find the research rewarded. His writing style is humourous and witty while his drawings are deceptively simple. The only thing to be aware of, really, is that as the workload increased and war intervened, most backgrounds and even background characters were drawn by other people - though he might sometimes go back and do the faces himself.