"I think the artists deserve a lot more credit than they got at the time, they were responsible for fleshing out the concepts Lee gave 'em, not just drawing panels according to a script."
Al, I agree 100% with this statement. As a kid, the artwork attracted me just as much as the stories.
More to the point both Kirby and Ditko were already accomplished story-tellers before ever going to work at Marvel.
To me the art was actually
more important than the storylines, at the time.
And I actually didn't like Ditko at first, I thought his stuff was awkward looking.
Only as I grew to appreciate the importance of style did I understand his greatness.
I know I'm a geezer, but when I see a comic on the bookstore shelf today, I am not impressed at all with the artwork. Ditko, Kirby, and others had so much detail!
Not sure what you're seeing but the current artists exhibit almost what I'd call an excess of detail, something I think was pioneered by Steranko (
Nick Fury Agent of Shield starting in '66) and built on ever since.
BUT a lot of that stuff's only sold by subscription and even digital versions now, after the implosion of the boom of the '90's which saw dedicated comic book shops and a vintage craze similar to the one for guitars.
Typical example:
Think about Ditko's work on "Dr. Strange" and the psychedelic backgrounds in those panels - wow!
Y'mean like this?
And funny thing, even though he was a Ditko character, he was one of the few where the character and content were more important to me than the art.
For a while (long after I quit collecting) I was convinced that Ditko, living in Greenwhich Village, must have been an early experimenter with LSD.
But nope.
Ditko's genius I think is summed up in this one page I've posted before:
Ok I know the text is a little blurred when blown up, but
as he's being sucked into something that's shaped like a sheet of paper (get it?) in those middle 2 panels, he's saying:
"I'm being drawn into this
2-dimensional object--as if some sort of life exists below it!!"
Yeah, it's the page of a comic book,
duh..... :glee:
Do they
make 'em like that anymore?
Ditko does.
When I came to Marvel, Ditko had already moved on about a year before but the first back-issues I bought were old
Strange Tales so I got familiar with his style.
Dr. Strange and Submariner were actually my first 2 favorite
characters, (that probably explains a lot of things about me, huh?) Steranko was actually my first favorite
artist.
I eventually wound up collecting the entire line and back issues all the way back to '64 and '65 in the case of Thor and FF and Avengers, but started there.
Although I wound up selling off my collection over a few years, I do have the hardcover reprints of the
Tales to Astonish Submariner and
Strange Tales Dr Strange episodes.
When I did light up to Kirby (it only took a couple of months) I became insatiable.
And at the time Romita had just taken over Spider-Man and I liked his clean sharp-edged style over Ditko's.
I thought a lot of Ditko's poses were awkward and he used to get the eye openings on Spidey's mask crooked all the time, LOL!
But after a couple of years I realized he was actually more anatomically accurate than most Marvel artists and instantly recognizable to boot.
I had discovered the importance of style.
I don't think Ditko ever said why he left Marvel in the mid-60's, but I think his perceived "lack of credit" probably had something to do with it.
walrus
Oh yes both Ditko and Kirby did, but the info only leaked out in interviews in hard-core collectors organs which normally didn't appear on newsstands, so even my buddy , a
big Spider-Man fan, didn't know.
And it
was that lack of proper credit thing.
From that link I posted:
“The story of Stan, Jack, and Steve is the stuff legends are made of,” one of Stan’s oldest friends and collaborators, comics writer-editor Roy Thomas, tells me over the phone. “It’s on them, more than any other three people, that the whole Marvel thing is built.” Thomas had an experience any comics fan or historian would kill for: He walked the offices of Marvel in the mid-’60s, when Lee and Ditko were working together on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange stories and Lee and Kirby were working together on nearly everything else, including The Avengers, The X-Men, and The Fantastic Four. Here’s the problem: It’s extremely unclear what “working together” meant.
According to Lee, it meant he came up with the concepts for all the characters, mapped out plots, gave the plots to his artists so they could draw them, and then would take the finished artwork and write his signature snappy verbiage for the characters’ dialogue bubbles. The artists, in Lee’s retelling, were fantastic and visionary, but secondary to his own vision. According to Kirby and Ditko, that’s hogwash. Ditko has retreated into a hermetic existence in midtown Manhattan, where he types up self-promoting mail-order pamphlets claiming Lee had only the most threadbare initial ideas for Spider-Man, and that Ditko is the one who fleshed the iconic character out into what he is today, then came up with most of the plot beats in any given story. Kirby, from the time he left Marvel in 1970 until his death in 1994, swore up and down that Lee was a fraud on an even larger scale: Kirby said he himself was the one who had all the ideas for the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the rest, and that Lee was outright lying about having anything to do with them. What’s more, he said Lee was little more than a copy boy, filling in dialogue bubbles after Kirby had done the lion’s share of the conceptual and writing work for any given issue."
It's a well-balanced read, though, it's not a Stan Lee bashing piece.
I started losing interest in Marvel when Kirby left, it was a real head-scratcher to me.
Steranko was gone by that time too.
Thee only 3 real heavyweights left were John Buscema who was great on the Avengers and Submariner, and Gene Colan who was the best possible replacement for Ditko on Dr. Strange.
And Romita was still on Spider-Man.
The rest of the string just wasn't up to the standards of the golden era of '65-'69, in fact some of 'em were downright
bad and by then I knew how to tell.
BTW< a while back our member D30man showed pictures of the Telecaster he built featuring decoupage of his favorite Marvel character, and I posted quite a few examples of my favorite Marvel artists there too:
http://www.letstalkguild.com/ltg/showthread.php?193413-NGD-sort-of/page3