But that’s exactly the comparison I want someone to explicitly make.
Imagine an almost equally shameless self-promoter bursts on the scene next month, getting asked while launching a new comic-book character whether he’s the next Stan Lee. “Yeah, that’s right,” he replies. “That’s exactly right; I’m the new Stan Lee. I’m his equivalent for this generation; I’m already more than halfway there.” What would folks right here on the SDMB start posting that same day?
“Stan Lee. The Stan Lee. Co-creator of the Fantastic Four. Co-creator of Spider-Man. Co-creator of the X-Men. Co-creator of Iron Man. Co-creator of the Hulk. Co-creator of Daredevil. Co-creator of all those other characters who’ve gone on to carry their own titles: the Silver Surfer, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man/Giant-Man, She-Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye, Nick Fury … and, for that matter, Captain Mar-Vell, and Black Goliath, and the Black Panther, and the Black Widow, and the Man-Thing, and the Two-Gun Kid, and the Rawhide Kid, and … look, kid, come back when you’ve come up with half-a-gajillion characters and gotten even a dozen to stick around; so far, you don’t yet have a Spider-Man; you don’t even have a Doctor Strange.”
So what? You’re admitting that Stan Lee was just the right guy in the right place at the right time, that it could have been anyone who filled those shoes, but Stan just happened to be there. If Stan Lee had been hit by a bus the morning before he wrote the first Fantastic Four story, some other guy would have written a story about a new comic book superhero and we’d all know Harold Stinkfarter’s name instead.
Being lucky isn’t a quality I’d put on the list of things that matter when it comes to “has no equivalent”, or we could just say that everyone who ever got famous has no equivalent, since no one else was lucky enough to be as successful as they were. It just doesn’t compute.
Well, yeah, if Stan had stopped at the Fantastic Four – or if Harold went on to do all that other enduring stuff with Spider-Man and the X-Men and Iron Man and the Hulk and Daredevil and everyone else from Nick Fury and Doctor Strange on down. How many times does someone need to look like he just got lucky once before it stops looking like that?
I agree with the vast majority of the names that’ve been posted thus far, but I came in here with a particular slant in mind. One: the creative person or persons must be or have been big in their given creative field, and Two: there should be something else in the mix that makes them peerless. Call it the proper alignment of the stars and planets, call it catching lightning-in-a-bottle, call it hitting the lottery–what I’m speaking of here is the circumstances that brought their unique brand of creativity to the forefront of social consciousness, or fame, if you will. This isn’t something one can count on, although there are probably some examples of such.
There will never be another British Invasion, although someday there may be (or there already has been) a slice of musical history that is comparable, and The Beatles were arguably the best of that wave. Certainly they were the most famous. That coupled with their creative works makes them without equivalence, IMO. I still prefer The Rolling Stones, but that’s neither here nor there.
I said all that to say this: especially in these modern times, there have been a google-jillion amount of “models” who have achieved fame, with or without the shedding of their clothes. I’m sure any of you could name half-a-dozen supermodels off the top of your head. But the one I have in mind was a long-ago pin-up queen, who also did nude modeling…and then disappeared after a few years. One could argue that the creativity belonged to the person(s) behind the camera, but I say she possessed a natural talent that, while it could be argued that there were better at “striking a pose,” allowed Bettie Page to catch that lightning in a bottle. Nobody, IMO, had a modeling career like hers. I’m sure part of it was her “mysterious disappearance,” but based on my own criteria for “Creative Type with No Equivalent,” I nominate Miss Bettie Page.
The “got lucky” wasn’t that he had one hit story/character. It’s that he was in a position that allowed him to use his creativity so freely that was lucky. If Stan had quit the nearly-failing company to go into advertising, again, we’d all be singing the praises of Harold Stinkfarter.
Look at it this way: Steven King is a hugely successful horror writer. But he’s certainly not the only horror writer out there, and arguably not even the best. But he is the horror writer who had a novel turned into a successful film that gave him wider recognition, thus paving the way for his books to be marketed more heavily than, say, Harold Stinkfarter’s books. Thus, King’s books sell more, leading to more movie deals, which leads to more publicity, etc. But the only thing really separating King and everyone else is that he was lucky enough that the movie adaptation didn’t suck. That’s no reflection on his innate creativity being incomparable to anyone else’s.
Again, no, we wouldn’t, unless Harold used such an opportunity to succeed enough times in enough different ways to reverse the fortunes of that near-failing company to keep the whole thing in business for to keep succeeding with the next next big thing. You need to postulate a Harold who not only gets lucky enough to have carte blanche with a title and then gets lucky enough to produce a hit as big as the Fantastic Four instead of something that flops; you need to postulate a Harold who uses that stepping stone to follow up with something that hits as big as Spider-Man instead of something that flops.
We can all name plenty of one-hit wonders who (a) thereby got plenty of attention for a second try that flopped, and (b) never hit it big again. We can all name plenty of two-hit wonders who got plenty of attention for a third try that flopped and a fourth try that flopped before never again hitting it big. And even a rep like Stephen King’s only lets you coast so far unless you can keep the momentum going.
I don’t really see a good argument for including Stan Lee. He wasn’t really doing anything unique, he was just doing more of it than anyone else. The volume of work he produced at his height is impressive, but it doesn’t put him into a category of his own like a lot of other names on this list.
Y’know, I would’ve dropped this on Bo’s agree-to-disagree note, but I’m just not seeing it. I mean, really take a look at just those first eleven or twelve issues of Fantastic Four: they were public-identity celebrities who bickered and came to blows with each other, always threatening (and sometimes following through on) quitting the group, sure as they eventually settle up and head for Hollywood to shoot a rake-in-the-profits movie based on their exploits – since (a) superheroing doesn’t pay the bills, not to mention that (b) they aren’t crazy about how Stan has been portraying them in the monthly comic, and visit him across town to go over the latest issue before it hits the stands; they promptly spend half of the next issue getting increasingly irritated while answering questions from the readers, looking out from the panels at you.
There were plenty of rival comic-book types churning out stuff around then, and none of it read anything like that. And then he hit it big again with Spider-Man, who also wasn’t anything like what the Distinguished Competition was doing: a flawed and fallible teen who wasn’t a sidekick or anything, trying to hold down a part-time job in between getting up the courage to ask girls out on dates and dealing with high-school bullies, all while facing THREAT OR MENACE coverage in the local press for each costumed outing.
And then we’ve got the Hulk. My god, what the hell was the Hulk? Prone to childish rage whenever he wasn’t searching for a cure to his condition? That wasn’t typical superhero fare by any stretch; if it had been a movie instead of a comic book, folks probably wouldn’t have dubbed him a superhero at all – and likewise for Doctor Strange, at that. Stan Lee wasn’t just doing knockoffs of stuff that was selling in other comics; his impressive productivity was funneled into creative stuff at right angles from the mainstream (including writing adventures for the first black superhero. Sure, anybody else who was writing then could have done that – but no one did. Why not?)
And then we’ve got Iron Man: a crippled military contractor who turned his life-support system into an armored weapons system, and then used that superhero persona as PR for his corporation, claiming the guy is just a paid bodyguard showcasing the company’s cutting-edge tech? That’s just weird. Nobody else was doing it – which isn’t a virtue in itself, anybody can crank out stuff that nobody else was doing; the trick is doing that with something that sells like hotcakes, again and again and again.
