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COMICS 101

By Scott Tipton

August 6, 2003

I’M TELLING YOU FOR THE LAST TIME…

Although we do our best here at Comics 101 to answer all of our correspondence (most of which can be seen weekly in the Mail Shoot column – check it out if you haven’t been already), a few questions seem to come up a lot more frequently than others. In an effort to put these issues to rest (as well as help me get caught up on things between Comic-Con International: San Diego and Wizard World Chicago), we hereby present the first installment of COMICS 101 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS. Satisfaction guaranteed; your mileage may vary. Ready? Let’s get started.

Who was more important, Stan or Jack?

My repeated trips in the Wayback Machine to the Silver Age of Marvel have apparently inspired many of you to take sides in the great Lee vs. Kirby Question. I’ll let reader Rich Leung elaborate:

How about giving us your take on the controversy about Stan Lee being the creator of all those classic Marvel characters? With Stan the Man doing interviews left and right to support the movies, he is very much in the spotlight these days. So it might be a good time to revisit the issue. Kevin Smith threw him a couple of softballs in their DVD interview, but didn't really get into the uglier aspects, like Jack Kirby basically declaring that Stan contributed next to nothing to the creation and plotting of the Fantastic Four, Hulk and Thor among others.

Con-man or comics god? I'd be interested in your views.

At this stage of the game, no one can really know for certain who invented what in the Lee/Kirby partnership. All we have to go by are their interviews and their work.

In interviews, Stan has always credited Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (and others) as co-creators. I've seen him go out of his way to do that many a time. People who want to discredit Lee for being in the press for all these movie premieres need to realize that Kirby would be too, if he were alive. (And as for Spider-Man co-creator Ditko, the fact that he hasn't allowed a photograph of himself to be taken in decades indicates that his staying out of the spotlight is by choice, not because of Stan elbowing him to the side.) As far back as the '70s, Stan was crediting Kirby and Ditko as the co-creators of these characters, in print, well before any lawsuits or movie deals.

As for Kirby, many of the interviews in which he claims sole credit for works like the Fantastic Four and the Hulk took place towards the end of his life when he was embroiled in a lawsuit with Marvel over his artwork, and, in my opinion, anyway, may have been getting some poor advice from people who encouraged him to hit the comics press and make some headlines.
It was during that period that Kirby was even claiming creator credit on Spider-Man, of all things. True, Kirby did an early sketch of Spider-Man, but it mostly resembled an earlier work he did called "The Fly," and looked nothing at all like Ditko's Spider-Man.

So if interviews are inconclusive to prove Kirby's claim, let's look at the work. Together, Lee and Kirby created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men and Nick Fury, to name just a few. Now let's remove Kirby from the equation. With Steve Ditko, Lee created Spider-Man (arguably the company's greatest success) and Dr. Strange. With Don Heck, Lee created Iron Man. With Bill Everett, Lee created Daredevil. I refuse to believe that the common denominator in these successes was not the editorial hand and writer's voice of Lee.

Now let's look at the reverse. Some of Kirby's solo creations include the New Gods, Mr. Miracle, the Forever People, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth and the Demon. All of these are extremely strong concepts with innovative designs and knockout storytelling. However, the absence of Stan Lee's dialogue and editorial eye is clearly noticeable. Am I saying that "Kirby couldn't write," as his detractors are wont to do? Certainly not. What I am saying is that, if Lee had as little to do with the process as Kirby was alleging, than his absence should be less apparent in Kirby's post-Marvel work. And that's not the case.

It's always seemed to me that Lee and Kirby were an artistic collaboration in the best sense of the word, with each suitably complementing the other's strengths.

Anyway, that's what I think.

Tell me about the Spider-Man Clone Saga.

Lots of you have been asking about the infamous “Clone Saga” in the pages of ‘90s Spider-Man comics. I thought about trying to do a column on them, but to be honest, those comics were, in my humble opinion, really bad, and the thought of brushing up on those entirely forgettable comics kinda makes me wince. So here’s a bare-bones synopsis of what went down. If you want to read the books for yourself, be prepared to track down a lot of back issues, ‘cause I don’t expect these stinkers to be collected in a MARVEL MASTERWORKS volume anytime soon…

Back in the late '70s, Peter Parker’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy returned from the dead. Or so everyone thought; turns out it was really a clone of Gwen created by one of Spidey's newest villains, the Jackal. The Jackal, it was eventually revealed, was really Dr. Miles Warren, who just happened to be Peter Parker and Gwen's biology professor at Empire State University. Warren had taken cell samples of all his students (which seems a little inappropriate to me, but I guess you can get away with a lot if you have tenure), which meant he was also able to create a clone of Spider-Man. When the dust cleared, the Jackal and Spidey's clone were presumed dead, and the Gwen clone, having realized she wasn't the genuine article, left New York City and Peter Parker forever to start a new life somewhere else.

Jump ahead to the '90s. In an effort to spark slumping sales, as well as find a way to make Spidey, now married to Mary Jane Watson, seem young and single again, it was revealed that not only was the Spider-man clone alive and well, having been living in seclusion, but it turns out that he was the real Spider-Man, and the Spider-Man that fans had been reading about for the last 20 years was the clone. Peter and Mary Jane moved away from New York and out of the Spidey-books, leaving this new, ostensibly original Spider-Man (who went by the name “Ben Reilly”) as the star. After the initial shock, sales went in the dumper, as readers rightfully resented being told that the Spider-Man they'd been reading about all their lives "wasn't the real Spider-Man."

Trying to clean up the mess, Spidey-editors revealed that it had all been an attempt to mess with Parker's head by (wait for it...) Norman Osborn, a.k.a. the Green Goblin, who apparently didn't really die back in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #122, and had spent the ensuing years hiding out in Europe, plotting out extremely long and impractical revenge plots against Peter Parker while healing up from a nasty case of Punctured Torso Syndrome. Yeah, whatever. Anyway, at the end of the day, all was pretty much as it had been before: the clone was dead (again) and Peter Parker had always been the real Peter Parker. Unfortunately, the ill-advised resurrection of Norman Osborn remained.

It's all considered part of continuity, but no one much talks about it, and for good reason.

How do you pronounce …

I get a lot of these, so let’s go down the list. Pronunciations are taken from either official reference materials, or interviews with the creatives involved.

Magneto: mag–NEET-o

Sub-Mariner: sub-muh-REEN-er

Darkseid: dark-SIDE

Mxyzptlk: mix-yez-SPIT-lick (and despite what you heard on SUPERFRIENDS, it’s not “Mixxxle-plick.”

Mjolnir: MYOL-ner

What do you use for research?

Frightening as it is to admit, there’s not a lot of research done for the columns, at least first-hand. I try and write the columns straight through from memory, in an attempt to get across the initial impact the stories and characters had on me as a first-time reader. Once the copy is done, I go back through and fact-check for dates, issue numbers (with occasional assistance from Ye Olde Editor-in-Chief Ryall, who’s a RAIN MAN-style freak when it comes to issue numbers) and the like. At this stage, a lot of the same reference books get utilized pretty consistently. Here’s a partial list:

  • ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, edited by Stan Lee
  • SON OF ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, edited by Stan Lee
  • BRING ON THE BAD GUYS, edited by Stan Lee
  • THE SUPERHERO WOMEN, edited by Stan Lee
  • SUPERMAN: FROM THE ‘30S TO THE ‘70S
  • BATMAN: FROM THE ‘30S TO THE ‘70S
  • SHAZAM: FROM THE ‘40S TO THE ‘70S
  • THE OFFICIAL HANDBOOK OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE, VOLUME TWO
  • WHO’S WHO IN THE DC UNIVERSE, VOLUME ONE
  • THE WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COMICS, edited by Maurice Horn
  • MARVEL: FIVE FABULOUS DECADES OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST COMICS by Les Daniels
  • DC COMICS: A CELEBRATION OF THE WORLD’S FAVORITE COMIC BOOK HEROES by Les Daniels
  • MARVEL UNIVERSE by Peter Sanderson

    Why do some characters age and others don’t?

    Aging in comics is a tricky business. If characters aged properly, year for year in real time, Batman and Superman would be pushing 90, and Spidey would be nearing Social Security age. On the other hand, if the characters never grow and develop, they become stagnant and out-of-date, and bored readers will wander away. Currently, both Marvel and DC operate on a rough 7-to-10-year timeline, meaning that their current batch of title characters has been in active existence for just about a decade.
    This allows their longest-running characters to still logically appear youthful, while other characters who were introduced as kids/teens can now be allowed to develop into adults. For example, if we are to assume Bruce Wayne began his career as Batman at 20 or 21, this line of reasoning allows him to remain a relatively youthful man in his early thirties today, while accounting for Dick Grayson’s growth from the 13-year-old Robin to the 22-year-old Nightwing.

    Personally, this to me was a large part of the appeal of the old Earth-2 stories at DC Comics in the ‘70s and ‘80s. You really got to see the characters age, and watch their places become taken by their children and chosen heirs. It added a humanity to the notion of the super-hero that’s missing when a character is eternally 29. DC has tried to incorporate some of this in their post-CRISIS universe, especially in series like STARMAN and the current JSA, which utilizes the original 1940s characters as the elder statesmen of the DC Universe, without making them seen like irrelevant fossils. However, with ever year that goes by, it becomes less realistic to have WWII-era characters still up and active, and eventually, another continuity housecleaning is going to be inevitable.

    It used to be that DC and Marvel had distinctly different approaches when it came to dealing with the passage of time and anachronisms in their characters’ history. The sadly departed comics editor and historian Mark Gruenwald had an apt analogy about the two approaches:

    DC history was like a skyscraper; every few years you knock it down and start over. You use the same rough plans, but the final result would be different. Marvel history, on the other hand, was like a tree. Every few years you prune it back, and take out the details that no longer make sense with the passage of time (Reed Richards and Ben Grimm’s WWII service, Spider-Man’s pal Flash Thompson serving in Vietnam, Iron Man’s Vietnam-era origin), but the trunk, the core of Marvel’s continuity, remains strong.

    Of course, in recent years, looking at Marvel’s increasing reliance on their “Ultimate” reboots and general disregard for the past, one has to wonder if certain Marvel executives aren’t heading for Gruenwald’s tree with a chainsaw…

    When are you gonna cover Superman/Batman/fill in the blank?

    There are some comics I really want to cover, but I’m trying to hold off until the most effective media tie-in, such as next spring’s HELLBOY film or the possibility of a STARMAN series on ABC. The other ones I’ve been avoiding have been strictly due to length and ambition – the Superman and Batman entries will probably take a couple columns each, and I want to make sure to spend the time to do them justice, which is why I opted to put them on the back burner throughout the hectic convention season.

    Scott Tipton just returned from the San Diego Comic-Con, and has the sore feet and the lighter wallet to prove it. If you have an Infrequently Asked Question for Scott, send it to stipton99x@comics101.com,and he’ll do his best to get you some answers.

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