I recently discovered that my public library has copies of many of the “Essential” collections of 1960s and 1970s Marvel superhero comics. I was a D.C. reader in my youth, so I never followed Spider-Man, the X-Men, etc., very closely. So I’ve been getting these archives out of the library to catch up.
For the most part, I find them to be mildly amusing entertainment. Their naivete and good nature is kind of refreshing. However, I have to admit that often the corny dialogue really has me cringing. It’s especially bad in the old Spider-Man stories, with all the hip lingo of the crazy crowd at Empire State U.
I wonder, did people really talk like this, or is it largely from Stan Lee’s own overexuberant mind?
In particular, I wonder about the phrase “ever lovin’,” which gets a good workout from a range of Marvel characters. I can’t believe this is a phrase that anyone ever said in real life. I’m inclined to think it’s something Stan Lee made up all by himself. Having heard him actually use the phrase in interviews makes me think it’s an idiosyncracy.
Another thing that occurred to me is that maybe it’s Lee’s way of indicating that the character really said something stronger, like “motherfuckin’.”
So, what about it? All you cool cats and fancy foxes who were swinging’ in 1961? Did any of you ever actually say things like that, especially, "ever lovin’ "?
Stan the Man had a way of writing that was his very own. Nobody I ever met in the 60s talked like a Marvel character.
Some of it’s an age group problem, though. I was a kid when I read my first Marvel in 1962. Copacetic and other words were 50s collegiate slang and he may have been drawing on that. Some of the inflections also seem to be close to advertising lingo of the 50s. Remember that Stan was about 40 at the time and not very close to the teenage world.
But that’s the point of imaginative writing. You write like you want the world to talk, not like it actually does. What’s the fun in that?
Being a guy who is prone to blurting out “EXCELSIOR!” in public, it’s hard to imagine Stan Lee being able to contain his expansiveness enough to write much in the way of realistic dialogue. His stylized approach is either something you love or hate. I to find it a tad cringeworthy, and am glad they’ve reworked some aspects of characterization for the Marvel-inspired films.
They were doing that in newspaper comic strips before there were any such things as comic books.
The standard reason is that periods would not print properly but exclamation points and question marks could always be seen.
Well, maybe. The practice evolved, as most things do. Buck Rogers, interestingly, ended most dialog with no punctuation at all, although you can see a period or a small circle every once in a while in the earliest strips from 1929. They really aren’t easy to see and after a few years they’re gone entirely.
Less super-heroey strips tried to cope. The earliest Peanuts used either no punctuation or ellipses (…) to end most dialog, although the last panel might have the exclamation point.
Pogo had periods, though, and used them all through the 50s.
Besides, you try speaking Stan Lee dialog without exclamations!!!
I was not aware that opossums had menses! :eek:
Seriously, Stan Lee was and is a fairly expansive sort, softspoken when explaining something but effusive when expressing enthusiasm, and I think his dialogue was based in large measure on his own speech patterns.
And yeah, my friends and I used “ever lovin’” as a mild expletive adjective, though we may well have picked it up from Stan the Man.
You know, I have to admit, I really like the sound of “The Motherfuckin’ Blue-Eyed Thing.”
I like Stan’s dialog for the most part, although a few “This was obviously written in the 60’s” things always bug me (“Quiet, girl!” when addressing any woman at all, regardless of her age).
The best thing about it is that it lends an element to his comics that’s totally lacking in almost everyone else’s - a distinctive, gripping voice that pulls you right into the story and expresses your shock and amazement right along with you. It’s something that I find very effective, whimsical, and just fun (“Hey, true believers! How is our favorite thunder-god going to get out of this one?!”).
Interestingly, when they try to update his dialog for things like the Marvel Age and Marvel Adventures books, it always comes out sounding even cornier than the old stuff.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea that Lee was originally looking for euphemisms for stronger phrases. Would this make sense in context?
Stan and Jack Kirby and the others had all been in the war so that vocabulary would be ingrained in them. Maybe Stan tried to slip in a euphemism or two for his army buddies to laugh at, knowing that they used to use “ever-lovin’” when they couldn’t get away with “motherfucking.” Some of the strings of adjectives do sound like strings of profanity.
The counter is that Stan wrote everything that way: the dialog, the narrative, the breaking-the-fourth-wall talk to the readers, the letters page, the columns, the interviews, the articles in newspapers about the industry.
Stan has never admitted that he was playing around this way, and I’ve read all the books by him and on him. You’d think that 40 years later he could get away with admitting the joke if there were one to begin with.
So maybe “ever-lovin’” means something more than ever-lovin’ but I doubt that very much of Stan’s hyper prose had a deeper level than what you saw on the page.
Well, I’m not thinking that he was necessarily “playing around.” It seems to me that it was pretty common for euphemisms to be used in mass media to substitute for strong language that might come naturally in real life. Maybe after doing for a while, it just became habit and then integral to his own way of speaking.
I have a friend who has never read comics who uses the phrase “ever lovin” so I don’t think it’s necessarily a Stan Lee thing. Not sure where he picked it up (his parents I suppose?)
