Jack Kirby vs. Stan Lee and casual sexism

Reading old Marvel comics, you'll notice that whenever Kirby draws a female character does something heroic or impressive, Stan Lee felt the need to undermine it somehow by having the dialogue contradict the art.
Like here, Kirby drew a scene where Jean Grey frees herself and her team mates with Telekinesis. But apparently Stan Lee felt that a simple woman like Jean Grey couldn't possibly think about using her powers all on her own, so he added dialogue giving Charles Xavier credit for directing her every move, even though it's clear that Kirby didn't draw an Astral image of Charles' head like he always does in scenes like that.

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youtu.be/sjobevGAYHQ
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Or here we have Medusa using her hair to disable the Baxter Building's security systems. Stan Lee felt the need to have the Wizard take credit for telling her what to do.
And then it's made pointless because it turns out that in reality the security system was already off because Stan Lee also had the FF's resident female forget to turn the security back on, meaning Medusa didn't do anything anyway. 2 for the price of one.

Huh, is Stan Lee /ourguy/?

Are you gonna start posting on /t/v about casual racism in old movies too?

because I really don't understand what your point it here

Stan really is /ourman/. So I guess this story of him creating Iron Man as "the character most of our readers would hate" was just a load of bollocks, and he clearly liked Stark's demeanor.

He's talking about the way Lee impacted Kirby's comics.

Or here, Kirby drew Sue saving Reed's life, but I guess Stan Lee thought it was unacceptable for a female to save a man this way, so Stan Lee has Reed say he was never in any danger anyway because he can somehow tell that the Red Ghost's gun was empty even though the Ghost didn't.

The point is I find it interesting that Stan Lee would take scenes Kirby drew where female characters were effective and then made them ineffective with dialogue and captions. Given Big Barda and other Kirby creations, it's clear Kirby had more progressive views on women despite being older than Stan.

What's wrong with being sexy?

>so he added dialogue giving Charles Xavier credit for directing her every move
So he's writing characters taking credit for other's work. Hmm, sounds like he likes self inserting.

stan wasn't sexist nor racist or believe in anything in general, he have always being a businessman who make the product he thought would sell the best

Here's another one, OP, that I always thought about. If you just look at Don Heck's art you assume that Pepper is scolding the men for their macho behavior, but when you read the dialogue it turns out that Pepper is self-absorbedly angry that no one is complimenting her hairstyle while the fist-fight is going on.

Do you have more examples to post? I don't care about political shitstorms, but the way the dialogue alters the meaning of the visuals seems kinda amusing. I'd be interested to see more.

oops forgot pic

>being so triggered by even the notion of sexism you can't discuss writer vs. artist and the Marvel method in old comics
Sad!

i would like to add kirby also had no idea how to make dialogs sound human im gonna post some stuff in a bit

>Stan is a hack
>Jack was based
News at 11.

Similar to how here it looks like Kirby is drawing a scene where Sue seems to be scolding the rest of the FF for being lazy bums while she is standing strong. Stan then has Sue talk about how she just want so do some house cleaning, because that's what women do.

Sure.
Here it seems like Sue is angry and wants to go at em', and Reed has to restrain her or calm her down. Stan instead has Sue asking Reed to do something and now Reed is holding Sue by the arms for no reason.

she's being the most responsible member of the team

jean is a dumb teenager, also, you need to justify charles being useufl

that's more wizard's personality than anything else, that's why they even followed with the gold star joke

humor, again

some are just case of bad/lazy writing, familia.

There's also plenty of contradictions between art and script that have nothing to do with sexism.
Like here, it's blatantly obvious that the Red Skull is murdering a man, but I guess for censorship reasons Stan instead has him "blast every button off his jacket".

youtu.be/sjobevGAYHQ
This

>pls keep buying Marvel, even if it's absolute shit!

Here we have more Red Skull censorship. The Red Skull clearly murdered this guy (especially since this is a re-telling of Captain America Comics #1, where it was indeed murder), but Stan Lee instead has the Skull use "gas that will take away your memory for months". I mean, the people in panel 3 really look like they're at a murder scene.

Mostly this, but he genuinely was mildly old fashioned sexist. In Marvel Comics the Untold Story there were quite a few examples of him being kind of dismissive of women and calling women's lib just a phase, until the 70's when he decided to cash in on it.

It's telling that his pitch for a female lead book was fucking Night Nurse.

It's hard blame a 50 year old man in the 70's for being a bit old fashioned, though. He was never malicious about it and he gave people like Flo Steinberg a lot of respect and a good salary.

>defending Marvel in the fucking 60's and 70's == promoting current Marvel
Company wars are rotting your brain, dude.

>in some decades Sup Forums will say the same about Alonso

>defending Marvel in the fucking 60's and 70's

Really? I thought Stan Lee was single handedly the reason males keep getting bound/gagged in the Marvel Universe.

Uh 60s Marvel is undeniably better than 60s DC, dude. 70s they're about even and 80s is DC's.

Your backpedaling isn't working

this is a must read if you haven't already it includes the marvel method
>zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/ff_Lee-Kirby.html

Here it looks like Kirby was also somewhat at fault for this scene, the dialogue only makes it worse.
Why did Stan keep calling women "females" anyway?

Oops, forgot the pic

>go polish a test tube or something
oh snap

Stan definitely had, even for the time, kind of an old-fashioned view of what women should be doing. He didn't like women to fight and even used one issue (FF 11) to basically yell at fans who thought Sue should be fighting more.

I think part of that is also that as an editor he thought readers didn't like to see women getting too aggressive, and he might have been right at the time. Of course my sample size is basically my mom and a few of her friends.

This is also why the men in the FF and original X-Men are all deformed freaks but the women have powers that never require them to look less than beautiful at all times.

Stan's writing of women wasn't as uniformly terrible as it's sometimes made out to be (the Scarlet Witch fan blog often points out that Stan wrote her as much more powerful and confident than his Avengers successor Roy Thomas). But Kirby definitely liked strong badass women much more, which is for example why Jane Foster got phased out of Thor in favor of Sif as Kirby got more control over the plotting, and why Sif got a more "feminine" costume soon after Kirby left.

OTOH in this infamous scene, Kirby either must have come up with the idea of defending Sue because she was like Lincoln's mother... or else Stan told Kirby to put it in, which would mean Kirby wasn't actually doing all the plotting.

>the Scarlet Witch fan blog often points out that Stan wrote her as much more powerful and confident than his Avengers successor Roy Thomas
I did notice the power part, but I always chalked it up to Roy Thomas trying to define her powers more while Stan was in his "Magnets can do everything" mindset and did whatever he felt like with her powers, a mindset that ended up prevailing. I'm not sure Stan wrote her as more confident, she seemed more submissive to her brother under Stan.

>mentioning DC for no reason
Company wars are rotting your brain, dude.

and both were jews

Someday someone should do 60s marvel with pictures without text

>It's telling that his pitch for a female lead book was fucking Night Nurse.
Keep in mind that Stan cut his teeth on romance comics in the 50s, and has said several times that he very much enjoyed writing romance. He cites it as the reason for all the love drama in Spider-Man. And if you take into account the Donald Blake plots of Thor you can see how something like Night Nurse sounds like the kind of thing Stan would genuinely consider appealing. Plus at the same time he pitched The Cat and Shanna the She-Devil.

So who's idea was this, Kirby or Lee's?

This might have been Comics Code Authority appeasement. I always thought this particular bit was very noteable as well. There was an awful lot of amnesia, being put in a coma and such in early silver age Marvel stuff.

>What if we're both so stupid, neither of us know what happened in our own pasts?

Sounds like Stan.

Doom was Kang?

N SHIEEET

Then why did Kirby draw the panel of them looking intently at each other all shocked?

Kang doesn't actually seem shocked in the drawing, only Doom, who also looks confused from the start there.

Stan also loved Archie-style humor stuff and kept writing it into the '70s.

Millie the Model and comics like that do a good job of exposing his strengths and weaknesses. The big weakness is that the characters are really flat, so Millie is always good and her rival Chili is always bad. Betty and Veronica aren't always pure good or evil which makes them stronger characters.

But his wise-ass, lampshade-hanging style and his good eye for artists turned out to give him an edge when the superhero line started up.

>Stan's writing of women wasn't as uniformly terrible as it's sometimes made out to be
Not entirely, but it was also seriously regressive. The core three females of that era, the era that built Marvel up into the giant they became, was Sue Storm, Wasp and Jean. And Stan characterized them all the the same way. They were usually ditzy, fashion/style obsessed and weak enough to get captured and/or need help from their male teammates. Now all three later got some good writing under their belts and became much more, but during this period they were just there to be "the girl" and hen-peck their teammates. Or pursue romance.

And while Stan did write Wanda as being more powerful, I thin Roy did more for Wanda as a character. He made her less subsidiary to her brother and let her stand on her own feet more. Roy was the first one to give Wanda a plot which did NOT revolve around Quicksilver, which I consider to be a turning point for her. Now Roy was by no means perfect, but his tenure on Avengers saw Wanda and Jan become more useful and less stereotyped overall, in my view.

Not that guy, and I ain't company warring, pal.

>one houg lateg

Jack Kirby wasn't goo at making women look different. Big Barda was the exception, not the rule.

He also wrote Venus Comics which was Timely's version of Wonder Woman

underrated

Any number of reasons that would make more sense than neither of them realizing that the other guy was a PAST version of themselves.

Yeah, some of us have real-world obligations.

>he said, posting in a Sup Forums board

>male characters were never given instruction by Xavier.
Mmkay

But that was for things they would actually require instructions for. Do you really think that Jean would need somebody to tell her to use her powers to take off her fucking blindfold? Or that she wouldn't be able to think about moving those knives on her own?
And why was Angel so surprised that Jean could free herself when he knows her powers?

Shut the fuck up. You haven't actually read this issue.

According to Waid he's still a version of Kang...

yfw you realize Jean doesn't have any psychic abilities but Xavier projects his own abilities onto her so she feels good about herself.

>yfw.jpg

Okay this one is pretty bad.

this is hilarious.Which makes me wonder how much of it was sexism on Stan's part an how much was desire to screw with Kirby.
Also I just figured that Namor suffers from Kabuki Syndrome

Meanwhile, in central Africa and the Middle East...

Kirby was definitely wasted at Marvel.

Funny how whoever colored this book changed Sandman's classic green and brown color scheme to make him match the rest of the Frightful Four's purple.

I've read this guy. I honestly think he tries a little too hard to attribute modern sensibilities to Kirby.

I mean, there's something there - Kirby is definitely drawing women as more capable than Lee is writing them - but sometimes it seems more like Lee just felt remiss if he didn't find a way to squeeze some text into a panel.

He was also wasted at DC in both his stints with national publications

Also Kirby would mess with Stan, cause in point, adding the Silver Surfer at the last minute. Funny how Stan would later turn that character into his own. Then way the Surfer turned out wasn't the way Kirby intended. Lee turned him into that Byronic philosophical deep hero.

It's amazing how Lee manage red to get things down as editor in those days. It's funny to hear stories like how Daredevil was running late and they decided as a quick fix to just grab a bunch of already established books and combine into the Avengers.

That's just how people look at each other in Kirby comics. With that level of whacked out cosmic space dot shit going on the only human reaction is agape shock and awe at the horrifying potential of the future and the infinite cosmos.

>stanfag

Correct. Fourth World is a tough read. I just look at the panels and make my own dialog, just like I do when I read Lee/Kirby Marvel

>muh realism
The Cancer Killing Comics.

Yes! Glad someone has the link

Stan Lee didn't draw the telepathic speech bubbles.

You mean, getting sick of an exclamation point at every sentence. That's different from lauding Watchmen as the new standard and not getting the point

Interesting thread. I'd love to see more examples - this seems like untapped comics history.

Protip: Artists don't draw speech bubbles either.

Dude Stan did this ALL the time whenever characters weren't doing what he wanted, girl or not.

One of the worst ones in ASM is when Dr. Doom kicks Peter's fucking ass and shoots him into a ravine, looks down, assumes he's dead and goes back to his shit. Stan wrote it as Spidey "making a quick exit!" despite clearly BEING FUCKING SHOT BY ENERGY and Doom cursing the incredibly skilled and handsome and sexy mysterious self-inse-I mean hero.

what issue is that?

google gave me darth and luke instead

Likely scenario: Kirby either wrote them both realizing at that moment that they were related or our pal Kang telling Doom that they were, and then Stan decided to spice it up.

It's ASM #5, real damn early in.
It's very clear that Spidey got shot out of a fucking window and Doom thinks Peter is drowning.
The dialogue says otherwise.

The classic one is that in the first appearance of the Silver Surfer, Kirby draws Ben knocking him off a roof, and Stan must have decided he wanted the Surfer to be more powerful than that, so he has the Watcher say the Surfer let himself be pushed because "it was the easiest way for him to depart."

i find it hilarious that doom's finger gun pose is exactly the same as peter's.

these look like an intentional "fuck you" to Kirby.

ASM was drawn by Steve Ditko, user.

>Reading old Marvel comics, you'll notice that whenever Kirby draws a female character does something heroic or impressive, Stan Lee felt the need to undermine it somehow by having the dialogue contradict the art.
Y.. you do realize that the script comes before the art, right? Like, Kirby didn't just start drawing pictures before Stan came up with the dialogue.

>Y.. you do realize that the script comes before the art, right?
user, you can't seriously be this ignorant, can you?

>In a plot script the artist works from a story synopsis from the writer (or plotter), rather than a full script. The artist creates page-by-page plot details on his or her own, after which the work is returned to the writer for the insertion of dialogue. Due to its widespread use at Marvel Comics beginning in the 1960s, primarily under writer-editor Stan Lee and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, this approach became commonly known as the "Marvel method" or "Marvel house style".[9]

Almost makes the Silver Surfer sound like an autistic person who doesn't know how to just leave

This thread is really interesting and well thought out. Nice job OP you weren't a faggot this time.

Stan Lee confirmed /ourguy/, Jack Kirby is just a nu-male cuck.

If not knowing an obscure approach to writing comics that isn't used by any of the books I read makes me ignorant, guess so.

>Almost makes the Silver Surfer sound like an autistic person
This isn't inaccurate.

Man, The Cat was fucking AWFUL.

user.
This shit isn't obscure. It's something Stan himself paraded around for DECADES. It's one of the most well known thing about Marvel comics. It's something they still do sometimes and writers reference quite frequently in interviews and at cons. There is nothing obscure about the Marvel method. Hawkman is more obscure than the Marvel method.

>obscure

Don't you have another thread to start, Vox Day?

Stan did NOT like the Silver Surfer, at least at first. It was a character that Jack Kirby came up with wholesale from Stans simple note "The fantastic four fight god!". They had discussed Galactus and the Watcher, like they usually did. Brief talks about who would be in an issue, etc... This time though when Stan got the pages he was like "The fuck is this naked guy on a surf board?"

When Surfer turned out to be a hit, he changed his mind obviously. He also changed a lot of shit Jack intended. Initially the Surfer wasn't an alien humanoid made into a herald. He was a being of pure cosmic energy that was learning to be human. He was like Data from Star Trek TNG.

>If not knowing the obscure fact that Bob Kane is a hack fraud makes me ignorant, guess so.
This is what you sound like.

Why is Hitler shocked by someone following his orders though?

Because he clearly wasn't giving an order in the penultimate panel originally, if anything he looks like he's about to tell Skull to calm down.