geneweigel wrote:Yes, backwards and in Japanese. Very tight and small-sized. I never sell anything though.
Well if you're not gonna read them anyway, why not?
Stan Lee is an enigma. Sometimes people can't figure him out. Was he "Funky Flashman" of the Kirby MISTER MIRACLE comics who gets by and lets the ceiling fall on everybody's head while he escapes out the back door? Or was he the human personification of The Watcher who shed insight into human nature in tales of the fantastic? I think its somewhere in the middle. He did write comics for a long time and he stuck with the company through all the fallouts and business shifts so he usually gets hammered for being a tool. However, he still was very imaginative. The original Marvel style was that Stan would do the premise and he would let the artist make the story with the art then he or another scripter would finalize the dialogue.
I find some quotes in
this article kinda telling in that regard (note that that's the last page of it, but IMO the most important--the rest of the article talks about a legal hassle between Kirby and Marvel that took place in 1985, in which apparently Marvel wanted to deny Kirby any creatorship credits. I've found independent records of this so that much is verified).
That being said, I'm not really impressed by his other accomplishment--his supposed ear for dialogue and insight into the human condition.
His comics were a step backward in one respect--they were way too dialogue heavy. Imagine a movie where the characters stand around talking during the action scenes and you've got a Marvel Comic of the 60s. You also have a lot of instances where a panel shows Spidey or whoever doing a simple action, like throwing a punch, but hero and villain alike exchange no less than five balloons of dialogue. That to me is anethema. I mean, what am I supposed to imagine? That he talked a bit for throwing an attack, or that the attack took the entire length of the dialogue (Marvel characters must move slower than molasses, if that's the case)?
By contrast, artists and teams such as Carl Barks, and Siegal and Shuster, would could and did have action-only panels, and the rest usually had just two word balloons with simple dialogue which gets the point across. They were very manga-like in that regard... Marvel seemed to feel like you wouldn't get what was going on if they didn't explain it to you (or perhaps it was a fault of the Marvel way of writing--perhaps the artists put in too many word balloons, out of caution, and Stan couldn't think of any better way to fill them up).
More than that, his dialogue really wasn't that great. Maybe its because I wasn't around in those days, but I can't imagine a pair of teenagers calling each other "son" or "my lad." Lee used a lot of this "young men talking like old men" type dialogue and it really breaks my immersion in the story when I see it and realize how weird it is. Anyway, his dialogue is so excessive that its hard to take any of it seriously.
[That being said, Mary Jane is a fun to read character, because her dialogue and general demeanor honestly sounds like she's been smoking her namesake]
Last point is... Lee (and Marvel) is often acclaimed for inventing the "flawed" superhero who has problems. I kinda think that's sort of on the level of praising an airplane that can't fly. I mean first and foremost, we read superheroes for the power fantasy/escapism element. Why the eff would you want them humanized and dragged down to Earth?
Moreover I find Lee's techniques for doing so... ineffective at best, paranoid at worst, and generally just lame. Like how Spider-Man is a guy who is treated like a criminal because
one lone newspaper constantly runs scathing editorials about him. Yeah. I'm not believing everyone in New York reads the same newspaper, nor that they still take Jameson seriously after the fiftieth anti-Spider-Man rant (and the fortieth retraction of said rant).
X-Men is even worse. That comic presents the idea that if you display mutant powers, everyone will drop what they're doing and chase you through the street in an attempt to kill you (and don't tell me that was a Claremont invention--there were a few Lee-era comics where this exact thing happened). In fact, pretty much X-Men presents the idea that all normal people just want mutants dead, period. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of comic fans are anti-social if they read stuff like this.
Funny thing is... take the concept of X-Men but replace "mutants" with "robots," and you've got essentially the premise of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, which began in 1956 and not only covered most of the same ground as X-Men, but also gave the whole situation a more rounded and believable portrayal. There are people who hate robots on principle (sometimes to the point of obsession), people who sympathize with them and will defend them to the bitter end, people who see robots only as tools for labor, people who don't really have an opinion but will quickly give in to mass hysteria created by robot-related felonies, and politicos who just do whatever the people want so their seats will remain firmly in office. You don't see anything like this in X-Men, ever.
And Astro Boy succeeds better as a heroic fantasy on top. With the X-Men you get no sense of forward momentum, at times you wonder why the hell they're even bothering (personally, I would've joined Magneto at the first opportunity). Asro Boy is the exact opposite. Robot-related hysteria? By the end of each adventure Astro and his scientist friend have managed to, if not totally abate their fears, at least soothe them over for the time being. There is a campaign for robot rights that eventually gains popular acceptance. The main character himself starts off as an underdog, grows in social acceptance, helps Earth establish peaceful relations with aliens, and finally dies a hero's death.
Stan Lee is totally incapable of writing this kind of story. In fact without Ditko or Kirby to crutch on, Lee's stories are the absolute most basic brain-dead affairs. Iron Man--one of the few characters who is debately Lee's own--is uncreative as hell (especially his early costume) and totally lacks the dialogue and insight that are supposed to be Lee's hallmarks. The stories as far as I've read have been very basic "hero gets called in to beat someone up, does so" affairs. Tales of Suspense #42 has a story where someone figures out Iron Man's secret identity... but the subplot never even amounts to anything, and is resolved in the most cop-outish way imaginable.
Actually, despite what Cheeks says, Lee apparently did do a lot of non-Marvel superheroes. Mosiac, The Condor, Stripperella... and according to Wikipedia he's teaming up with manga author Hiroyuki Takei for a new hero! It's kind of appropriate... Takei only has one notable work,
Shaman King, and that is personally what I consider to be lousy manga. It'll be two bad authors who go great together, or something.
So yeah, I guess I've rambled at length about Lee way too long. I think now I'll relax, find a bottle of (ahem) "Chill" pills, and play a video game or two. Oh, and read manga.
Itadakimasu!
