In Your Opinion: What Single Person Has Had the Greatest Impact on Comics? - Page 2

Rob Liefeld... we're talking negative impact, right?

Impact is impact. Wetham sure didn't help the medium along.

Surprised no one has mention Siegel and Schuster yet.

I second Outcault. He created that feaking medium
IMHO we will never know how much of the success of Marvel was due to Lee,and how much to Ditko and Kirby. I feel that Lee was given too much credit...and was pretty tasteless in his self promotiion as the creator of the Marvel heros...but I think he was better then a Hack.
ANd,yeah,he was given a job as an office boy by his uncle,but if he had not had some talent he would not have stayed around for years.
And IMHO neither Lee or Kirby produced work after their parntership broke up that was as good as what they produced together.
His Fourth World was good stuff,but Kirby's weakness when it came to dialogue kept the books from being as good as his Marvel stuff.
Stan Lee was overpraised,now I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
He is also seen as The Establishment,and The Establishment must be attacked at all costs,I guess.
I agree with Richard that someone who claims to love a medium but is not familiar with it's history is a poseur of the worst kind.

Don't be so sure. The Timely/Atlas/Whatever-the-hell-else-it-was-called comic company was born mostly for a simple reason: it's cheaper to keep printing presses rolling 24 hours a day, or at least it was back then. Goodman/Donnenfeld publishing owned magazines, newspapers, and book publishers, but they needed something to print cheaply in the off-hours that could at least break even. Hence, comics. Then there was the rumour that Goodman apparently kept the company alive because he didn't want to have to tell his wife that he'd fired Stan. By most accounts they hung on JUST long enough to justify their existance with FF #1, but they came really close to having the plug pulled.

By the way, most of this stuff comes from two books: "The Comic Book Heroes" by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones, and "Comics Between the Panels" by two authors whose names I don't have handy. Alan Moore's "1963" also featured a series of interviews in which he cast himself as "Affable Al" and delivered a blistering parody of "Smilin' Stan".

Obviously this is a matter of opinion, but I really think the Fourth World, from what I've read, is the best thing Kirby ever did. That's partly because Stan Lee's dialogue just drives me up the wall at times--it's fun and jazzy for a while, but after reading a couple of issues in a row it becomes completely obnoxious. Kirby's writing style was simpler, a bit clunky, and often pretentious, but it flows MUCH more smoothly. And you can see it more carefully planned out as a multi-issue epic, as opposed to the often choppy single issues of FF and Thor.

Anyway, BEFORE Lee, Kirby created or co-created Captain America, The Manhattan Guardian, The Challengers of the Unknown, the entire genre of romance comics, westerns, war stories, and a whole slew of other stuff. So you have to factor that in, too.

I can see what you're saying, but this really is my honest opinion. If anything I defend Stan more than some, as you can see above. It's just that the more you read of that era, and the opinions of people who knew Kirby and Lee, the more it looks like Kirby was the real genius.

Don't fucking start this shit up again. Iggy was passingly familiar with the history, and that's a god damn start, okay? Fuck off with this shit.

Anyway, this thread has been interesting and is giving me some interesting insight as to the truth behind the legends. Keep up the good work most of you, and once again, shove it with the elitism some of you.

The FF are essentially the superhero version of the Challengers of the Unknown (also created by Kirby)...but yeah, I do think Lee had a hand in their personalities. Maybe more than anything else in the series. He gave Kirby rough plots and Kirby created them in comic form (inventing a lot of things along the way), and then Lee scripted the dialogue in the captions and word balloons.

This is the so-called "Marvel Method" (by the way, Prank, I'm sure none of this is news to you, but I just wanted to throw it out to folks who don't neccessarily know all about this). Sometimes Lee would change the story through dialogue from what his artist had planned (this happened notably with Kirby and Ditko). Depending on who he was working with, Lee's plot ideas were either more or less involved.

The problem with this method arose when Lee worked with guys who were master storytellers and eventually got tired of Lee nixing their ideas and quit (again, which happened with Kirby and Ditko).

I think a good example of Lee's contribution to his comics is his post-Ditko work on ASM with John Romita, mainly because we know fairly well that Romita wasn't plotting the series with the same degree of control that Ditko was before him. But before that, figuring out who had a hand in what concerning Spider-Man (or any of the big Lee/Kirby comic series) is hard to say.

Lee's been prone to say some wacky shit at times considering what he's been responsible for (he once said he created Captain America, which is absolutely not true, and later retracted the statement). Though he's always credited Kirby with sole responsibility for the Silver Surfer (when he saw the pages for FF #48 Lee had to ask Kirby who the hell the guy on the surfboard was), so...that's something I guess?

Will Eisner once said that Stan Lee and Bob Kane were very similar guys...and if you read Men of Tomorrow you get a VERY sour impression of Kane. But still...Lee clearly did more for comics than Kane. Both Lee and Kane were better businessmen than anything else...the main difference being that Kane's #1 priority was furthering his own hype, while at least Lee seemed personally invested in Marvel.

P.S. Sorry if I'm rambling...it's a slooow night at work.

All that stuff was really interesting, but this in particular reminded me of something...

I have a friend who is a Ditko geek and I think he told me there was one story point in particular that made Ditko quit. I can't remember for the life of me what it was. I'd dare to guess, but I'm afraid if I got it wrong I'd get verbally beaten to death by somebody who knew the right answer. I'll do a quick wiki-search and see if it rings any bells.

EDIT: Apparently it was about the identity of the Green Goblin, but Ditko supposedly has denied this.

I think that's right. At least that's what I heard. Ditko didn't want it to be someone Peter knew and liked/loved/respected. The guy was getting pretty heavily into objectivism, and objectivism apparently indicates that people are either good or evil, with no in between. Good people don't turn evil, and vice versa. Yeah, it's fucked up. Anyway, having the Goblin be Norman Osborne was a betrayal of that, so he quit on that issue.

"The Marvel Method" leaves a lot of leeway for what Stan Lee might have contributed at the planning stage--it might have been an elaborate, detailed plot, or it might have been a throwaway idea that Kirby developed himself. Certainly that's been argued to be the case with the Galactus storyline--Stan Lee's entire contribution before writing the dialogue may have been limited to the suggestion, "What if the Fantastic Four fought God?" Certainly, the spontaneous creation of the Silver Surfer by Kirby suggests he hadn't exactly been micromanaging the story. There was also an anecdote from a guy--can't remember who--who watched Lee and Kirby at work at Marvel's peak, and said how it seemed like neither of them were really listening to the other...but since Kirby drew the thing, he was the one that got to have it his way, and Lee would have to shoehorn his ideas into the dialogue.

But then, others say that Lee was heavily involved in the writing of the short-lived Silver Surfer series, which is partly what caused Kirby to leave Marvel. He didn't want Stan to make him a "human" with a Lost Love back on his homeworld, but rather, an innocent being created by Galactus with no experience other than doing his job. Which I tend to think makes way more sense than what we got. By the way, Superman may be a dick, but I think the Surfer is a much bigger dick.

There's also a Lee/Ditko issue where Spidey fights a bunch of goons...who show up later on as Doc Ock henchmen...but the earlier dialogue suggests that Lee never made the connection with what was to come later. The story is weirdly incongrous in certain parts because of that (I believe it was during the storyline where Spidey has to get the serum that will save May's life).

A sorta similar thing happened on the issue of FF with "Him" and the Enclave...Lee apparently changed the story through the dialogue so significantly that Kirby was very pissed. The difference btwn Kirby and Ditko was that Ditko was much more of an extremist (for their last two years working on comics together Ditko refused to meet Lee in person--he really hated him), so when Lee was adamant about making Osborne the Green Goblin instead of "just some guy", Ditko threw a fit and quit. Whereas Kirby kept working on FF, but his heart really wasn't in it after that issue with the Enclave (read the rest of Kirby's run after that--it definitely feels a bit more hollow).

I should point out that around that time Marvel instituted a policy that there would be no multi-part storylines (didn't end up lasting too long, though), and that decree rankled Kirby.

Hey now...for me them's fightin' words, buddy.

Hey, I like the Silver Surfer's adventures just fine. I think the 18-issue run of the comic drawn by Buscema is some really fine work. But the Silver Surfer, as he was written by Stan Lee at least, is a dick. He's insanely passive-aggressive, he's always moaning about either his own predicament or the stupidity of the mere mortals around him, and he's always being built up as this pillar of moral perfection. But his actual actions often involve him throwing hissy-fits at the slightest provocation, like the issue where he engages in a running battle with the Human Torch when if he sat down and just listened to him it could have all been sorted out. Or the one where he basically fucks up all of Earth's machinery, just 'cuz. If you got stuck talking to him at a party, you'd be fleeing for the exit in about thirty seconds.

Well, okay, it's hard to argue against that. Those Lee/Buscema issues, while beautifully drawn, are all over the place as far as characterization. And really, most of Lee's work is. I mean, is it just me, or is every character he wrote kind of a dick? Peter Parker? Major dick. I won't even get onto the subject of Mr. Fantastic.

He even managed to make Captain America seem like an asshole sometimes ("Sharon Carter, I love you, but unless you quit SHIELD we can never be together").

Re: the Surfer...I've always thought one of the great missed opportunities was a Kirby Surfer series. While I like the soul-searching Surfer somewhat, for nostalgia reasons more than anything, I think Lee's take on him has influenced Surfer writers way too much. Though I should say that I like the Lee/Moebius Parable miniseries a lot...where the Surfer acts like a dick to save the Earth.

Tales to Astonish by Ronin Ro goes over Kirby's career in pretty expansive detail and the Comics Journal Library put out an edition on Jack Kirby that collects several interviews with him.

Both are enlightening as to the dispute over who did what (I tend to fall on the side that Kirby did most of the heavy lifting, but Lee at the very least had a fairly essential part, if for no other reason than he fleshed out some ideas and gave Kirby tremendous support for what he was doing).

Well, given the level of dorkdom around here, by not at least giving a nod to some of the big dogs like Kirby and Eisner, you probably tripped some alarms.

As Dickson said, it's like talking about great movies and not mentioning Billy Wilder or Orson Welles because they were before your time.

As it is, Kirby at least had a hand in creating Captain America, the original X-Men, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and a good chunk of the Marvel Universe. Those are some iconic characters right there. Not to mention his under-read and incredibly ambitious Fourth World for DC. Even if he hadn't created any of those characters, his style had a tremendous impact on numerous important artists (who I can't think of right now....probably all the biggies from the 80s like Byrne, Miller, Perez, Zeck, etc) through the years.
There are quite a few pretty good books about the whole situation out there. There are two called Comics of the Golden Age and Comics of the Silver Age that are very informative, as well as Ro's aforementioned Tales to Astonish.

No disrespect intended, but they created Superman and that's about it. I guess it depends on whether or not you consider the first costumed hero to be a tipping point or merely an inevitability that SOMEONE would have come up with eventually.

...or maybe someone who simply loves comics for what they are and sees no reason to delve further?

I'm a bit of a "why are things the way they are?" geek in quite a few subjects, but others I don't really give a flying fuck about the "why" and just take for what they are.

Maybe. Joe Shuster's technique of drawing the hero in tights to, in essence, draw the naked human form was innovative. I think it's up to debate whether that was fated to happen no matter what.

I would agree that it is very debatable on both sides.

If only we had some place to hold such a discussion....

If You want to consider Newspaper Comics...and I think you have to.....then Surely Charles Schultz has to be thrown into the mix. Charlie Brown,Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang might be the best known..and loved..comic characters of all time.Certainly I would say that only a few of the comic book creations..Superman,Batman,Spidey,maybe a few more are as well known as what Schultz did.
And Peanuts stands the test to time very well. A lot of the strips from the 50's in the current collectiion are just as funny now as they were then.

Good call on Charles Shultz, though probably outside the scope of what was intended. I think if we did include newspaper strips in the discussion, mention would have to made of Walt Kelly. People today seem to have very little awareness of Pogo, but a lot of the classic comics people cited it as an influence. Certainly, Bone wouldn't exist without it.

And if we want to talk about negative impact on comics, Todd McFarlane certainly qualifies. A lot of what I don't like about modern comics art started with people aping his style.

And probably not Doonesbury or Bloom County either.

Actually, Superman is not the first hero in tights. The Phantom predates him by two years. And there were a lot of basically superhero-ish characters before then: Mandrake the Magician, The Shadow, Zorro, Tarzan, Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, etc. Superman's big innovation was the addition of superpowers--but even then, some of the above had superhero-ish powers (Mandrake especially). Superman was simply the first to do it in a certain way, and did it so successfully that he became an archetype.

My beef with not knowing who Wertham didn't have anything to do with comics, by the way. The guy was a major figure in popular culture during the 1950s--"Seduction of the Innocent" goes after TV, too, by the way--as well as being indicative of a kind of puritan paranoia that was prevalent at the time. Anyone who's even remotely studied history or the 1950s would have heard of the guy, and Richard was right--it is like talking about Citizen Kane and not knowing who Orson Welles is (or who inspired 'Star Wars', if that's your thing). And the guy's name still pops up a lot--he's a major figure in the last fourth of Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I thought was sort of mandatory reading for comic book fans at this point.

Anyway, I hearby resolve to let it lie.

My point is THIS is the EXACT place where people learn about books like you all keep mentioning. As I stated before, it's not like you walk into a comic book store and get a history lesson and a suggested reading list, or we're taught this stuff in school. If you feel it's mandatory reading, spread the word before you start looking down on people for not reading books they've never even heard of. How can you argue with that? Not only are you helping out your fellow geek, you're helping everybody by making sure there are less people talking out of their ass.

Comics are such a niche interest and, like anything, have a dense array of information to take into account, so obviously things are going to slip through the cracks depending on what a person has decided to focus on within them.

I'm glad people are now making suggestions about what to read up on and stuff. I'd appreciate it more for myself if I weren't getting more passive about my interest in comics lately.

On the topic of books on comic history (and Stan Lee), this is a good "warts and all" bio of Lee--

http://www.amazon.com/Stan-Rise-Fall.../dp/1556525060

On the topic of books on comic history (and Stan Lee), this is a good "warts and all" bio of Lee--

http://www.amazon.com/Stan-Rise-Fall.../dp/1556525060

I'm hardly a die-hard fanboy these days, and I found all the books mentioned to be worth my time.

It is astonishing to me that there are comic fans posting on CHUD who have not read Kavalier & Clay. That's not elitism, by the way--I've just heard that book mentioned in so many different places on these boards, and in many different comic book circles, that I thought it was par for the course to have read it.

If we're talking superhero comics then I guess it'd have to be Stan Lee.

Here's another piece of recommended reading: Comic Wars.

Written by a journalist who normally covers politics and war in the middle east, this covers the bankruptcy and subsequent salvation of Marvel Comics, and all of the negotiations and wheeling and dealing that made it all happen. It's much more interesting than it sounds, trust me.

It's a great novel even if you are not a comic book fan,and I hope they get the film version of it off the ground.
And the female lead is a role that Natalie Portman was born to play.
And I would certainly second Walt Kelly as having a huge influence on the daily comics..probably second only to Schultz's.

I thought it was OK, not necessarily essential.

That actually sounds really fuckin' interesting, so I guess it's even more than fuckin' interesting.

That's perfectly fine. It's not condescending to express an actual surprise that people haven't heard of the book, especially when supported by the fact that it's apparently been discussed heavily on this very board. You were being condescending in how you expressed a similar surprise earlier, but certainly not now.

There's so many bloody threads, though so it shouldn't be that surprising. Regardless, it's appreciated you brought the book to the attention of this group here.

I may pick it up, but currently I have a huge backlog of books to read and none of them involve comics so I'll get to it one day if I still feel as interested in the medium.

I don't want to derail the thread, but Portman is absolutely, 110 percent wrong for the part in my mind. Rosa needs to look like a girl who enjoys a drink and a sandwich. Portman's gorgeous, but always saw the character as having a little meat to her, like Kate Winslet or a younger Jennifer Connelly. (Although both those women are also wrong for the part.)

Wil Eisner. He created so much of the visual style of comics.

teh dood who made Deadpool hurr hurr hurr

That cover is a real turn off.

In response to the actual subject of this thread, after some thought, I'm going to have to be boring and give it to Kirby. Kirby not only created so many aspects of comics storytelling and style that it's impossible to list them all, he also laid the groundwork for the passionate, geeky fanbase and immersive universes that dominated comics from the 70s on. Obviously Lee and the other Marvel artists had a part in that, but I think the Marvel Universe, and its attendant Zombies, would have happened anyway as long as Kirby was there--and wouldn't have otherwise. And you can take almost anyone else we've suggested out of the equation and still get the same result.

For instance, Kirby happened in spite of Wertham; if the Code hadn't happened, or happened in a different way, Kirby still would probably have been at Marvel. As hard as it is to believe, Marvel was considered kind of a "washout bin" for comics artists, with Stan Lee hiring people who couldn't make it elsewhere, and Kirby's art wasn't in vogue in the 50s. The call at that point was for classical, refined artwork in superhero books, and Kirby was too expressionistic. So he could only get hired at Marvel, where he eventually had the freedom to experiment.

So as long as Kirby was doing his thing, I think comics would have turned out more or less the way they did. Without him, they would have been totally different.

I love Kirby and all, but I still say Will Eisner was far more influential.

Maybe not number one most influentual, but Frank Miller has had a major impact in the last 20 years or so. People always hold the Dark Knight Returns as a major turning point.

I like Frank Miller and TDKR a lot, but I don't think he really stands out from the pack that much. You had Alan Moore, Howard Chaykin's groundbreaking work on American Flagg! (Miller lifted some of the media commentary directly from AF!), and Art Spiegelman all hard at work during that period.

If you were going to assign credit to anyone in that period, I'd think Karen Berger and her unearthing of British talent would be near the top of the list.

I'd agree that Wertham, Kirby, Eisner, and Schulz would be near the top of the list. I'd probably add Bill Gaines for artistic vision and totally botching the congressional testimony.

While we're at it, the creators of the direct market, particularly Phil Seuling, need to be credited, for good and ill. Steve Geppi as well.

Hey, I love Berger, but Dez Skinn really did the heavy lifting in that respect.

Yeah, Dez Skinn would be an excellent candidate from the 80s.

Dave Sim would also be right up there as I think he bridged the gap from underground comics to mainstream comics quite nicely, was one of the pioneers of the tpb format, and at his peak was a terrific writer/artist.

I'm going to give my vote to George Herriman. Krazy Kat from inception to completion is a work of art. It's actually deceptively simple. Kat loves mouse, mouse hates cat, mouse womps kat with a brick, kat takes this as affection, dog seceretly loves kat and attempts to thwart mouse. It is a fourmula that on the surface seems to have the potential to go stale quite quickly and it is a testement to Herriman's greatness as an artist and storyteller that through Krazy Kat's 31-year run he consistantly found ways to keep his formula fresh. He had an insouciant way with which he played with language and an almost inconoclastic disregard for the conventions of panel design. Krazy Kat counted among it's many admirers at the time e.e. cummings, H.L. Menken, William de Kooning, and Jack Kerouac. Krazy Kat is credited as an influence by Bill Watterson. Herriman's influence can be directly seen in the panel design of Calvin and Hobbes. No lesser giants than Charles Schultz and Will Eisner themselves have credited their attraction to cartooning to their early fandom of Krazy Kat. There's my 2 cents.

Sounds like a major candidate, and I'm sure he's bene mentioned but Bill Finger is a definite must on the list. His title could be "Most-Screwed-Over Man in comics"

Although there are an awful lot of people vying for that particular title. Comics have a dirty history.

I'd vote for him for that title, easy.