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| No Amazing Fantasy #15, alas, but here's the first issue of Spidey's own mag. Copyright MARVEL COMICS |
Hi, Stan Lee here again with the lowdown (from my perspective) on who created Spider-Man. Jack Kirby claimed he did, but then again, Jolly Jack once claimed to have created Superman and The Punisher (the Frank Castle version, not Galactus's servitor), so his memory really wasn't any better than mine. To be fair to him, according to Mark Evanier, he probably didn't mean to claim he was responsible for Superman, and maybe his hearing let him down when he was asked to clarify which of the two Punishers he'd created, but Jack wasn't always the most reliable witness in how things happened years after the fact.
(Incidentally, it was me who christened the character when the creators - Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr., and Ross Andru - were trying to figure out what to call him. "What does he do?" I asked them. "He punishes criminals" was their answer. "Then call him The Punisher" I said.)
Another example of Jack's poor memory is that for many years he believed he'd designed Spidey's costume, probably because he drew the published cover of Amazing Fantasy #15, the comic in which the web-slinger made his debut. It was eventually pointed out to him that his cover was based on Steve Ditko's original version, which didn't see print until quite a few years afterwards. No, don't ask - I just can't remember why I nixed Steve's cover and asked Jack to draw a replacement (which Ditko inked), but that's exactly how it happened. And if Jack could make that kind of mistake with Spidey, he may have done the same thing with Iron Man, who we looked at in the previous post.
Jack wasn't even correct when he later claimed he'd suggested to me doing a Spiderman character (no hyphen) he'd created, which had morphed into The Silver Spider (drawn by C.C. Beck) and then The Fly, because it was Joe Simon and Jack Oleck (his brother-in-law) who came up with that idea. At one time, when Joe was still considering doing a Spiderman strip (prior to the name being changed to The Silver Spider, remember), he lettered a logo for the purpose, and it was this discarded logo that Jack later said he'd shown to me when touting the character as a possible feature for Marvel. (And it's not impossible that Jack was simply responding to my idea about doing a spider-powered character, and he merely recycled Silver Spider/The Fly.)
I've no memory of ever having seen the logo, much less one of Jack suggesting the strip, but even if he had, it was Simon and Oleck's baby he was nursing, not his own. Joe Simon later said that he'd expressed surprise to Jack about his claim, and Kirby's response was something along the lines of "Hey, what can I say, Joe, I needed the work." Is it possible though, that Jack approached me with the idea of doing a strip by that name? Anything's possible, but the concept of Spider-Man that Marvel published was mainly down to me, with the assistance of the incredibly talented Mr. Ditko, who designed the costume and the web-shooters. (Though Eric Stanton, who shared a studio with Steve at the time, claims that it was he who suggested the latter to his artistic companion.)
See how confusing things can be when trying to decipher the facts so long after the events? Steve, of course, brought a lot to the table, but I still maintain that I dreamed up the concept, and that's why I consider myself the creator of the idea. Of course, whether it would have been as successful if handled by anyone other than Ditko is certainly debatable and maybe even doubtful. So I'd go as far as to say that yours truly and Steve can rightly be regarded as co-creators as far as the finished published character goes, but Steve didn't come up with the concept and that's why I regard myself as sole creator in that department.
That's my take on the matter, but you may disagree. And you're allowed to - just as I'm allowed to see things my way. However, infamous faulty memory or not, I was there at the birth so I'd say my account of events has the edge on the way you might prefer to see things any day of the week. Anyway, that's it for now - see you next time, true believers, when we'll be taking a look at Doctor Strange!
Excelsior!
Can you do a review of this years beano/dandy annual to see if they ruined comics any more
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen them (they're usually issued around August/September each year, though DCT may already have them available by mail order), and it's unlikely I'll be buying them this year.
ReplyDeleteIt's fun to speculate what Kirby might've told Stan that impressed the editor enough to greenlight a series, foe which Kirby drew a few pages prior to Stan pulling the plug. Kirby would not have had the pages from the failed Harvey Comics proposal Simon arranged with CC Beck; he would probably have just related the base concept, and maybe Stan told him to go ahead without thinking much about it.
ReplyDeleteDitko recalled that when he was given a few Kirby pages to ink, he brought to Stan's attention that the base concept seemed pretty similar to Archie's feature The Fly. That feature was of course was originated by Simon and Kirby, who had reworked the bare bones of the Silver Spider concept for Archie. Not all fans believe that Lee would have dropped an approved feature just on the possibility of a suit from Archie, so it may be that once he saw Kirby's pages he wasn't really knocked out by the execution of the concept, and didn't think it salable.
I hypothesize that what really grabbed Stan about the Kirby proposal was the idea of the orphan kid coping with super powers. Maybe Stan had a rough notion of what sort of thing he might do with such a character, if indeed he had a notion of breaking away from the sort of (mostly uninspired) formula-work he'd been doing for Goodman for about twenty years. We know that Stan was working almost exclusively with Ditko on AMAZING ADULT FANTASY and that he appreciated Ditko's angst-heavy take on fantasy-stories. Maybe Ditko subtly implied that he could do a better job of delivering a story free of FLY-similarities, and Stan took him up on it. For all we know, Stan could have told Kirby that he Stan wanted Spiderman to be less obviously heroic, and Kirby just ignored that directive and did his thing anyway.
As I say, airy speculation only, but kinda fun.
It's mostly always fun to speculate, GP, though we'll never know for sure precisely what happened. Kirby, Ditko, and Lee didn't have the best memories in the world, so that's a hindrance to the facts for a start. If Kirby did suggest to Stan about doing a Spider-Man character, I doubt Stan would have gone for a kid with a magic ring and a genie anyway, as it wasn't the 'pseudo-reality' angle that he usually went for. Back then, radioactivity possibly could cause super powers for all anyone knew, but a kid with a magic ring? Nah! Stan could possibly have suggested a Spider-Man (or Spiderman) character to Jack, and Jack simply recycled an old idea in response to Stan's suggestion.
ReplyDeleteThere's really only one thing we can be almost certain about; had Jack drawn the strip from the beginning, it probably wouldn't have lasted. Ditko worked some magic with that costume design, and that helped pull in the readers.
I definitely agree that Stan wasn't invested in the "Captain Marvel" trope of the hero who regularly transforms into his alter ego, particularly by some impish kind of magic-- and this is significant because a fair number of creators in the sixties kept using that trope, mostly for such marginal characters as the "Split" version of Captain Marvel, Dell's "Fabulous Four," and Beck and Binder's "Fatman the Human Flying Saucer."
ReplyDeleteThe closest thing Marvel had to Original Captain Marvel was of course Thor. But was Stan very invested in that character, given that he assigned the scripting of many early stories to Brother Larry? I haven't studied the course of the Thor feature in detail, but Stan seems to take more interest around 1964, when Kirby begins expanding on the Asgardian mythos, like the debut of the Enchantress and Executioner in JOURNEY #103.
The whole thing with Spidey's re-creation also contrasts with Stan's laissez-faire attitude toward his previous series-collaboration with Kirby, The Hulk. Stan must have thought the main appeal of the monster-hero was that of his "Super-Frankenstein" image, because he let Kirby wander all over the place. First the Hulk is the enemy of the human race, then he's a mindless golem controlled by Rick Jones, then he becomes a grumpy hero a la The Thing. That was all because Stan himself didn't have a definite idea of what the Hulk should be, so he just let Kirby do whatever and let the sales chips fall where they might-- which as you know led to the cancellation of the Hulks' first title, right on the heels of the success of the Lee-Kirby FF (on which I think Lee was more involved).
Now I haven't checked how many HULK issues had come out in whatever month Stan gave Kirby permission to commence a Spider-Man project, and then pulled the plug. Could he have rec'd intel on disappointing HULK sales at the time he reversed himself on SPIDER-MAN and re-routed the assignment to Ditko? Maybe it wasn't always a good idea to give creators complete freedom? He gave Kirby his head on the loose Spiderman concept, and Kirby gave Stan a watered-down reprise of THE FLY. Maybe the younger, more passionate Ditko could do better?
And so we get the eternal "who created Spidey" debate. It's kind of pointless given that Ditko never claimed that Stan didn't have input on the early issues. What I think was more impactful on the Spider-Man franchise was not the later issues that Ditko solely plotted, but his earlier creation of the Spider-Rogues. Stan couldn't design super-villains; he wasn't an artist. But aside from a couple of weak starts (Chameleon, Tinkerer), Ditko seemed to tap into his love of grotesquerie, and I think he's the main force in giving Spidey such creepy villains as The Vulture and Mysterio. Whattyou think?
Superb comment, GP, and deserves a superb response, but I don't think I can do it justice as you've said all that needs to be said and I'd just be repeating your points. One thing I do know (and which you seem to confirm) is that Stan created the Tinkerer, because Steve wasn't happy about having aliens in Spider-Man and thought that Spidey (a name he hated) should only be involved with fighting 'real' baddies, not 'men from space'. I think that when Stan realised Steve and Jack preferred to do their 'own thing' with regard to the stories, he was perfectly happy (in the main) to let them get on with it, only 'pulling rank' now and again when he thought they'd maybe veered off-course on occasion. One last thought: if Stan wasn't quite sure what to do with the Hulk, neither did Jack, which was probably why the first five issues were so erratic. Personally, I thought the Hulk as he was in issue #5 was the best version of ol' Greenskin. And it was Ditko (perhaps with input from Stan) who developed the 'anger management' aspect of the series when Hulkie started appearing in Tales To Astonish.
ReplyDeleteI liked your point about Ditko's distaste for aliens in the Spider-Man feature, which I'm not sure I'd heard before. But it reminds me of another anecdote, in that somewhere Ditko claimed that Stan's initial concept for the Green Goblin was that of a supernatural being. Ditko opposed that genre-bending, wanting all of the hero's villains to be common criminals who either wore costumes or, more rarely, had been mutated (Sandman) or who operated through robotic proxies (both Professor Smythe and Professor Stromm).
ReplyDeleteEven in his two AVENGERS outings Stan and Jack aren't sure about the Hulk's status. His character is basically "grumpy toughguy," but for some reason he's on the lam in the first issue and only gets tentatively accepted as a hero in issue two. AVENGERS #1 appears on stands about six months after Greenskin loses his own series, and if Stan had wanted to keep Hulk in the Avengers that's what Kirby would have drawn. Kirby might've SUGGESTED something like "let's have Hulky team up with that other misanthrope Subby." But I think Stan would have decided the final disposition of the Green Goliath, and he chose to have Hulk bounce around the nascent Marvel Universe, messing with the FF in '63 and with Spidey in '64, all to build up fannish anticipation for a second Hulk series in late '64. Yet for roughly a year after AVENGERS #3 the Avengers keep looking for the Hulk in their own mag, though at some point they just give up the chase. By the time the topic came up again in late '66 for SPIDEY ANNUAL #3, I bet most readers had forgot that the Avengers had ever been considered Greenskin an ongoing threat. As you say, though, Ditko made a big difference in the monster's persona by working with Stan to make the Hulk into a childlike brute, which was one take on the "Super-Frankenstein" that Kirby never thought of.
You should ask Stan how he and Ditko decided on that persona after so many others tanked!
I think perhaps it was more the soap opera quality of the TTA strip that worked with the readers than the Hulk's actual persona, GP, though it probably helped. For myself, I preferred the angry Hulk of #5 (and the Avengers) than any other version, and I wasn't particularly a fan of the 'childlike brute'.
ReplyDeleteNext time Stan pops in for a haunting, I'll ask him about it.
FWIW, Angry Hulk finally got a lengthy run thanks to Peter David and his "Gray Hulk" idea. For all I know that may still be the prevailing version at Marvel.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Joe Fixit - really enjoyed those issues, which lasted for quite a while if I recall correctly, GP. Dunno what's happening with the Hulk these days.
ReplyDeleteKid, this week's Marvel releases feature a tribute to John Romita on their covers. They've re-instated the corner-box which now shows an image of Romita's "I Quit" cover from ASM #50.
ReplyDeleteTa, CJ, I'll take a look in WHS tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteKid, I was referring to imported US Marvel comics. Do they sell those in WH Smith's nowadays?
ReplyDeleteActually, no, CJ. I don't think any UK newsagent does nowadays, sadly. Changed days from when I was a kid.
ReplyDelete