For greater than 50 years, there’s one identify extra related to comics greater than some other: Stan Lee. The gregarious author and editor of Marvel Comics throughout its Nineteen Sixties glory days, and the co-creator of many of the firm’s most well-known characters from that interval just like the Implausible 4, Spider-Man, the X-Males, and the Avengers, Lee largely stopped actively writing Marvel’s books by the mid-Nineteen Seventies. However he remained with the corporate for many years in a wide range of administration roles, and spent a lot of time touring the world and evangelizing about comics typically (and Marvel particularly).
He additionally performed himself in Marvel TV and flicks, and the extra he performed “Stan Lee,” the larger-than-life face of Marvel, the extra he turned inextricably linked not solely with the corporate, however with its characters — to the purpose the place the artists he labored with creating all of these characters and comics typically acquired ignored. Lee did have a tendency to present a bit extra credit score to artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in his later years, and Marvel has begun to credit score these males of their comics and flicks. However to loads of laymen, should you ask who created Marvel or Spider-Man, odds are loads of them would say one identify: Stan Lee.
That notion will solely be strengthened by Stan Lee, a brand new documentary about his life that’s now streaming on Disney+. As one would count on for a movie that’s streaming on the service of the corporate that owns all of Lee’s most iconic work, it largely tells a easy, uplifting story in regards to the rise of Marvel. It solely spends a handful of minutes on any of the animosity between Lee, Kirby, and Ditko over the authorship of their creations. And it’s virtually totally narrated by Lee himself, in interviews and thru archival audio of “The Man.” It is vitally a lot Stan’s story.
And that didn’t please Neal Kirby, the son of the late Jack Kirby, who died in 1994, and who co-created the Implausible 4, Thor, the X-Males, the Hulk, and lots of extra nice Marvel characters. In an announcement posted to Twitter, Neal Kirby wrote “The problem is prolonged to anybody who needs to rely the variety of ‘I’s’ throughout the 86-minute working time of Stan Lee” — which means Stan Lee is all about what Lee did, to the detriment of what Marvel’s artists like Kirby did.
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Neal Kirby added:
“I (ooops!) perceive that, as a ‘documentary about Stan Lee,’ many of the narrative is in his voice, actually and figuratively. It’s not any massive secret that there has at all times been controversy over the components that had been performed within the creation and success of Marvel’s characters. Stan Lee had the lucky circumstance to have entry to the company megaphone and media, and he used these to create his personal mythos as to the creation of the Marvel character pantheon. He made himself the voice of Marvel.”
The exact authorship of Marvel Comics’ characters is sophisticated. Whereas Lee was the author on Marvel’s comics all by the Nineteen Sixties, he was so busy managing a complete line of comics, that he additionally employed a inventive methodology, mentioned within the Stan Lee documentary, the place he gave his artists solely a top level view of a narrative to attract. They might go off and illustrate the comics virtually totally by themselves, then return the artwork to Lee, who would then add his dialogue on high of what they drew.
That course of — the place the artists had been actually producing loads of the story, however typically solely getting the credit score for the artwork — would solely gasoline the arguments about who did what. If I inform you to make a comic book a couple of super-wizard, let’s say, and also you come again and also you’ve named the character and also you’ve given him his backstory and also you’ve designed his costume, who’s the true “creator” right here? And that’s simply the matter of a personality’s authorship; the sentiments in regards to the characters’ possession, which is all within the fingers of Marvel and Disney, is a complete different can of worms.
In closing his assertion, Neal Kirby wrote “The battle for creators rights has been round for the reason that first inscribed Babylonian pill. It’s well beyond time to at the least get this one chapter of literary/artwork historical past proper.” If you wish to watch it and see how this story is instructed for your self, Disney’s Stan Lee documentary is now streaming on Disney+.
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