Anyone who doubts Stan Lee's capability as a writer rather than just a glorified idea guy should really take a peak at Timely's Golden Age content. The difference in quality once Stan became the writer/editor is astonishing.
He turned shit books like Mystic into really fun reads.
he was pretty good honestly, not quite as good as Joe Simon and Jack Kirby or Bill Everett, but after S&K left he was definitely the go-to guy.
Joe and Jack were clearly overworked and their writing and composition was less refined in the early 40's. Stan was a straight improvement for Timely because his style of writing/editing gave the artists more breathing room and kept things less linear and objective-oriented.
Bill was a fucking MONSTER and it's a shame you could see the schedule creeping up on him after ~3 or 4 Sub-Mariner strips. And Burgos really doesn't get enough credit.
More details, stories and background on Everett, please. Need to know more about him.
I'm just making inference, those first few Namor strips look like they're done in Watercolor, but the painterly look was dropped and the stories meandered after a while. I just assume the crushing deadlines Timely supposedly had (Stan says he'd have two days to write a Cap story around '42) kept him from pumping out stuff like Namor's strips in Marvel 1 and 2.
I think Simon and Kirby produced some really great stuff even for Marvel, even though they were definitely unrefined and raw. Their Vision strips and Captain America strips are fucking great, dynamic and filled with energy. Their other stuff is a lot more forgettable, like Simon's almost solo Fiery Mask and Red Raven stories.
>Bill was a fucking MONSTER and it's a shame you could see the schedule creeping up on him
In my opinion Sub-Mariner was still great all the way up until Bill went into the army. But the early years were the best where Namor was more surly and more of an antihero, yes. But Everett's serialization was amazing, a clear cut above almost everything else Marvel had at the time.
Bill Everett was born to a once rich and prestigious New England family but rebelled at an early age and became a wild young man always looking for new experiences. He became a heavy drinker at a young age and also took up chain smoking, two vices which would eventually lead to his death. Everett was always artistically oriented and jumped at the chance to get into the new and exciting comic book field, creating several superhero features for a couple of young comic book companies such as Centaur. Everett became an associate of Lloyd Jaquet and was one of the first freelancers to join Jaquet's studio "Funnies Inc" which prepared finished comics for publishers to release. For Funnies Inc everett created Namor based on Everett's own love of the sea and literature about naval adventures, and made the character just like Everett himself. he was a mainstay at Funnies Inc and Marvel until he was drafted into the army in 1942, and returned after being dismissed in around 1947. He continued working on Namor-related titles, but as superheroes fell out of favor he found himself drawing more horror, crime and other genres.As the years drifted on, Everett drifted off into heavy drinking.
Stan Lee tried to keep giving Everett work since he knew that Everett's family needed the money badly. Bill had worked for some companies doing commercial illustrations while the comics field was in decline, and for example worked for a greeting card company, but he ended up dismissed there due to his drinking problems. Back at the rejuvenated Marvel, Everett created the blind superhero Daredevil, allegedly based on his own daughter who was blind since childhood. However Everett could barely complete the first issue of Daredevil and Stan had to let him go, giving the title to Wally Wood and others to continue. Everett came back to comics one last time in the early 1970's, after he had sworn to clean up his act. He went to regular AA meetings and to regular hospital treatments to help his ailing health. However his long life of drinking, partying and smoking caught up with him and he collapsed and died after a meeting in 1973, leaving his last run on Namor's comic book unfinished. Roy Thomas, one of Everett's greatest fans, continued the plotline and dedicated it to Everett's memory. During his last years Bill had had help from Thomas and another ghost writer in finishing his scripts.
Oh, hey, don't get me wrong, in my opinion Bill was THE best Timely ever had. I just meant you could see the drop from the exceptional start in both writing and art, with more traditional coloring/inking, standardized designs, and VERY obvious filler stories.
And you're right, Cap and Vision were damn good; I just mentally associate the pre-Stan Timely era as 39 and 40. And the strips then...like I said, playing editor clearly took away from their work. Simon's fantastic lettering was about all that shone through on F Mask, and the concepts and occasional great panels in stuff like Breeze Barton were great, but otherwise Kirby's first year was kinda shit.
1940 was pretty much Jack and Joe keeping shit together while Carl and Bill made the only really good stories aside from a few outliers (I'm surprised nobody at Marvel has tried returning to Magar yet).
This deserves a bump.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Everett's early stories done in the Craftint paper looked amazing, but he dropped it because he felt the printing came out too murky, not because he didn't have time. But yes, doing so many pages a month got to him, especially when he started doing material for Sub-Mariner Comics in 1941 alongside Marvel Mystery.
You can tell both Simon and Kirby are very fresh when they start working for Martin Goodman. Red Raven Comics #1 has a cover by Kirby that's a swipe, for example. Kirby basically never swiped later in his career, but he was as green as anyone at the time. Actually I also liked the Tuk Caveboy backup for Captain America Comics, since it had a lot of proto-ideas for later Kirby works (like what eventually became the Inhumans).
Daring Mystery and Mystic Comics were... pretty fucking bad, though. It's weird, i was thinking about it just today. But whatever possessed Goodman and Simon to do titles with no strong central feature, when a strong central feature was the ABSOLUTE necessity for popularity at the time, is a mystery to me.
That's kind of why I made the thread: under Simon and Kirby, Daring and Mystic not only lacked a good feature, they lacked theme. Stan's first issue of Mystic immediately fixes this by establishing a strong sense of tone, and pretty much all the stories follow it. Then in #6 they introduce Destroyer as the main pull for the book and suddenly...it works! I think that, while it doesn't stand up to Cap, Sub, HT, AW, etc, the second half of Mystic is actually really good. Hell, the final issue of Daring turned things around too, Citizen V and the Thunderer story were both really well composed.
One theory about Daring and Mystic is that Simon was simply using his contacts in the business (he was at the time working as editor for THREE separate comic book publishers at once) to get unbought stories from friends of his packaged and sold. if true, that would explain the weird scattershot nature of Daring and Mystic during the first few issues of their run - Simon didn't care much beyond getting some of his buddies work. It's fairly clear that the comics he did care for got a lot more attention, such as Captain America Comics. But even so, someone probably should have put their foot down in the early stages.
It also makes me wonder why Red Raven Comics only had a single issue (and then became Human Torch Comics with #2). Maybe Simon wanted to focus on the upcoming Cap project, or it just sold poorly. I'm amazed Daring kept going as long as it did.
>tfw your creator leaves you to go kill Japs and you become a Yaoi character.
>swiped covers
Good lord the Atlas era is hilarious in that respect. Swiping covers from your OWN SERIES and concurrent issues. Fuck's sake, man.
>Someone should have put their foot down.
We're talking about the company that made the errand boy the editor-in-chief and greenlighted Sgt. Fury because the notion that people bought comics for character writing and personality was ludicrous.
But man, I'm pretty sure one or two issues of Daring are, quite literally, six or so consecutive origin stories. That's bonkers.
I can't decide whether to make a crack about Everett being Stan's first victim, though.
Seriously, though, that was good of Stan to try and help the guy, even if it didn't work.
Well, if the whole idea that he was offloading friends' work was true and we accept the commonly agreed on theory that numbering was screwy because they changed series names instead of re-registering to save on postage, it's reasonable to assume Joe knew they were going to make Human Torch Comics and either
1. Registered early so he could pass his friends a buck.
2. Had to delay the Human Torch feature and made a one-shot to cover the already-paid-for series.
It's probably the latter, given the hasty Kirby cover.
Someone should storytime his Spider-man newspaper comics someday.
People (rightfully) criticize Stan for being a bit of a cunt and screwing people, but he's not a bad person. He was ahead of the curve in terms of pushing creators' rights, even if it was more like "Creators' Noteriety and Basic Courtesy" and he could and should have done more given his position.
>numbering was screwy because they changed series names instead of re-registering to save on postage
that was something that Timely/Red Circle/Atlas/Marvel did a lot over the years, heck I'm pretty sure they still pull it out every now and then
I think Archie still does it occasionally, but since Marvel got with Diamond they only do it to push sales via rebrandings of the same content, not to save postage costs.
>Thread where Sup Forums actually discusses comics.
>Slow as fuck.
Whoda thunk it?
>>swiped covers
To be fair the cover of Red Raven Comics is Kirby swiping from a Hal Foster Prince Valiant sunday strip. That's pretty good shit to swipe from at least. And he did it rarely.
Stan is related to Martin Goodman, that's why he got the job. Also Goodman was indeed famous for being stingy and turning pennies over to make a profit, so of course he'd churn out loads of expendable stories to fill the racks.
The best part about Daring is that most of those characters got a single issue (an origin) and then never appeared again in a golden age story.
If you want to go that route, Joe Maneely would be Stan's first victim.
But Stan did seem to be alright to creators in general. The reason Martin Goodman dissolved the Bullpen and fired everyone except Stan in the 50's (the writers and artists became freelancers after that) was that Goodman discovered that Stan had literally drawers filled with unpublished stories from the company creative team. Goodman figured "why keep these guys employed when I can fire them and publish stuff they already created for me?" whereas Stan had tried to keep a backlog because he wanted the guys to keep having work monthly.
Also he hired Jerry Siegel after he got fired from DC for the second time and tried to get the guy to write for Marvel, but Jerry was so frayed and weary at the time Stan had to have the scripts rewritten before publication. He still paid Jerry full royalties, but Siegel decided to have his work published under a pseudonym anyway.
First class mailing permits were a pretty big investment at the time so the reason comics publishers tried to never renumber their comics was that as long as you kept a consecutive numbering you could still run on the same mailing permit without paying again. This got especially insane in the late 40s and 50s when Marvel kept renumbering and retitling like crazy to keep expenses down.
>Goodman discovered that Stan had literally drawers filled with unpublished stories from the company creative team
How many years did that inventory last them?
Not them, but that depends on what those stories were.
If it was romance and thriller stuff, it was probably the bulk of what they published through the 50's.
Probably through the Marvel collapse
The Destroyer is fun in all his hokeyness
I think it lasted them most of the years between then and Fantastic Four #1