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Amazing as it might seem these days, there was a time when not everybody loved Stan Lee. Let's let Arnold Drake (creator of the Doom Patrol and Guardians Of The Galaxy, among many others) tell you about it...
(You didn't think that Funky Flashman was the only one out there, did you?)
Well, that was an awfully short post, wannit? Why don't we look a little deeper into the issue of Sick that brought us Ego Man?
Here's another from Drake, lampooning another still-popular feature. (No, not All In The Family...)
They went on to parody 3 other shows from the time - Soap, Three's Company and Carter Country. Just if you was the curious type.
page art from Sick #120 (1978)
Hardly inspired, barely funny, but rife with resentment. My estimation of Arnold Drake has gone down. And Doom Patrol was always a bit of a dull read compared to The X-Men - even when he was writing it. (Though it was better than his usual stuff. Roy probably rewrote a lot of it.)
ReplyDeleteYeah, there's a reason why i wanted to open referencing a loving tribute to Stan.
ReplyDeleteThere doesn't seem to be any point or reason to the strip beyond expressing dislike. It's fairly impossible to imagine a strip like this being done these days - Everybody Loves Stan. Even if they don't always like everything about him, he became such a lovable patriarch of comics and superheroes before he died.
Drake had quit Marvel almost a decade before this strip came out. Old grudges or bitter editor - who knows?
Oddly enough - some of Drake's last work before leaving Marvel was writing the X-Men, as you were mentioning. You don't suppose rewrites were part of what annoyed him?
Could be, but apparently he was convinced that Stan had got wind of the Doom Patrol when he first created it and had ripped off his idea by doing the X-Men. Some Kirby fans who think that Jack did everything and Stan just took credit won't subscribe to the idea of Stan stealing from Drake, because that would mean Jack didn't come up with the idea on his own. However, it surely must have irked Drake that he was writing what he saw as a rip-off of his own creation, and working for the very man who he believed responsible for the act of plagiarism (in Drake's mind, that is). You'd think he'd just be grateful to be working somewhere.
DeleteMany people still have reservations against Stan.There are many reasons. He stole credit and stabbed many people in the book. Even Marvel Comics when he could not get the 10 million dollar clause for movies from his contract.
DeleteWhy should he be grateful if Lee took credit and stole from other people.
DeleteVery true, and i'm even one of them. I love Stan, and he disgusted me at times.
DeleteBut Marvel did screw him over on that contract - as is their usual, even before they were bought by the screwmeisters at the big D.
Stabbed people in the book? Is that worse than stabbing them in the back? And as Marvel seemingly didn't want to honour its contract with Stan, weren't THEY stabbing HIM in the back? Taking legal action to get what you were promised is hardly stabbing anyone - either in the back or the book. And Arnold was barking - Stan gave him a job, he didn't steal anything from him.
ReplyDeleteI was trying to decide if "stab them in the book" was clever wordplay or mangled phrasing, but i got the point either way.
DeleteYeah, the Marvel contract was him getting screwed. Again. Even though others were getting screwed worse, Stan was very in the Right on that one.
And the timing really doesn't work for X-Men/Doom Patrol to be concept theft. I've been involved in several cases of simultaneous development of concepts, and i was only active for a couple of decades and only one project at a time. It happens, and it's inevitable.
So, as many bad things as Stan may have done at times, those are definitely bad examples. And he did a lot of great, too.
Funny how people aren't all simple and 2D, huh?
The seemingly simultaneous development of Swamp Thing and Man Thing is a perfect example of that, 3 - if we believe those involved that neither of them knew what the other was doing. (Even though they were apparently rooming together.)
DeleteActually, that's less unbelievable than you might think. To twist an situation i once found myself in - they could actually have been talking about their work without realizing it to each other. How?
ReplyDeleteBy both talking about the source inspiration without mentioning their current update version.
So both could have been enthusing over The Heap and the concept, and only after passing time realized that both were doing a modern version.
Or maybe they just didn't talk work to maintain sanity.
(Doesn't help much here)
Or it's always possible that they each did their own version with the full knowledge of the other, but denied it in order to avoid reprimands from their employers, as well as the copyright conflicts that could potentially ensue.
DeleteYeah, but i figured that possibility didn't really need explaining. Of course, not having been involved in even a tangentially remote sort of way, i have no real opinion on what happened.
DeleteBut speculation abounds...