Stan Lee sues Marvel. I guess he didn’t have his lawyer look at the contract first.
Eh, if he signed an agreement that gave him profits from the movie, he probably signed an agreement that split net profits, which any Hollywood lawyer could’ve told him NEVER exists on any movie. Just ask the guy who wrote Forrest Gump!
Lee’s worked for Marvel for this long and is just now realizing that he’s getting the shaft? Wow, he’s farther removed from reality than I though…
If there’s one guy who deserves to get shafted by Marvel it’s Lee; especially considdering how he shafted other people at Marvel (most notibly Jack Kirby) for fourty years. I guess Steve Ditko and the others who did the real work in creating those characters (as opposed to vocally taking way too much credit for decades) didn’t even get the promise of part of the gross.
Leaving that point asside, there must be a half dozen of these “where are the film profit” lawsuits every year. I have heard of some of them succeeding but apparently it’s an uphill fight. If Lee wants to see any of that money he better have retained both a good lawyer and accountant.
Ex-sue-sior!
I find it funny, considering that Lee was paid about $1,000,000 a year by Marvel, essentialy to do nothing but promote the various comics.
Not the hardest job in the world.
Good one!
Have to disagree, at least partly. Pretty much all of the artists who helped create Marvel’s most popular characters had been in the industry for years without achieving the level of popularity that they did working on plots and characters developed by Stan Lee.
I’m not sure from your post if you’re in this camp but I’m just gonna post a pet peeve real quick. Why is it that so many people claim that Stan Lee had so little to do with the creation of these characters and yet every one of the characters Lee worked on wound up becoming hits? It’d be one hell of a coincidence for all these varied artists to hit their creative stride at the same time working for the same company.
And in a direct challenge to your post how do you figure Stan didn’t do any “real work”? He was the Ed in Chief of Marvel at the time so on top of writing plots and dialogue he had to be the art supervisor, keep continuity straight, do hiring and firing and everything else that goes along with being the head of publishing company (although granted Marvel was only publishing eight or so titles for the early part of the sixties). Not to knock the artists and their hard work but Lee’s job was much harder than any of the artists and the fact that everything he touched at the beginning of the sixties turned into super-hero gold would seem to indicate that he was the primary driving force of Marvel’s success, not the artists.
Having said all that I do agree that Lee came out ahead at least partly on the backs of the artists. I don’t know how much money Ditko (is he still alive?) got from the Spider-Man movie but I’m pretty sure it’s nowhere near as much as Lee did (or will). While I do feel that Lee was an excellent storyteller many of these characters would not have been successful if were not for classic costumes designed by the artists and other stellar artwork they provided. Per character it’s difficult to determine whose input is more important, the artist or writer, so the artists should be getting roughly a 50/50 split of the profits with Lee IMO.
Little off topic, but now I’m thinking of Jim Shooter in the 1980’s and the royalty’s program that he started. How much in royalties are the Marvel artists from the sixties getting anyway?
Ant-Man?
But I generally agree – the real test is looking at the work of Ditko and Kirby that wasn’t plotted or written by Lee. None of it is as good – even the New Gods stuff, which is appealing in its grandness, doesn’t stack up in quality to the Silver Age FF (or even Thor, for that matter).
–Cliffy
Oops. I knew he had some flops and was thinking about that when I wrote that post and yet I still made that way too broad comment.
That should’ve been “nearly every character”.
Thanks for the catch.
Having some of the stuff Kirby and Ditko produced solo, I’d tend to disagree.
Atlas, Dingbats of Danger Street.
The Mocker, Static(not to be confused with the Milestone character of the same name.
I await a post by Comic Book Guy, Uncle Cecil, or Fenris to settle this thing definitively.
Kirby yes. He needed Lee for the dialogue if nothing else and I think their partnership was a true collaboration.
Ditko on the other hand created some stunning stuff on his own after he left Stan Lee: Captain Atom, the third Blue Beetle (Ted Kord), The Question, Nightshade, Mr. A., the Creeper, Hawk and Dove, etc.
I’d easily stack Ditko’s Captain Atoms against the best of the early Marvel Age.
But when it comes down to it, what made Marvel’s early days magic was the same thing that made the Beatles magic; the tug of war between the creators. One example: Lee/Ditko. Consider the fight that broke up the team: Ditko was an Ayn Rand (lookit Ditko’s Gwen for a young Dagny Taggart) fan and wanted the Goblin to be just an everyday Joe. Lee was getting out of his “Commies suk” phase as he realized that it didn’t sell with the college market he was trying to attract and made the Green Goblin into an evil industrialist which pissed Ditko off so much that Ditko has refused to ever draw Spider-man again*.) That’s a struggle of passion for a work of art.
The artists that Lee had that just worked with him (Tuska and Heck to name two) produced competent but not good stuff (early Iron Mans, Hulks, Avengers). It was the synergy between the two duos that made early Marvel Magic, IMO.
And of the two duos I firmly believe that with Lee/Kirby, Lee had the dialogue and plotting skills, Kirby had the imagination while with Lee/Ditko, Lee had the characterization skills (Ditko never managed a complex person like Peter Parker or Dr. Strange after Lee), while Ditko brought most of the rest of the stuff (dialogue to a degree…I understand that Ditko dialogued a bunch of Dr Stranges).
Of the three of 'em, I’d say Ditko had the most rounded talent (he could draw stunningly, write competently), Kirby (couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag, but the artist who defined the Marvel look and an imagination that wouldn’t quit) and finally Lee who could dialogue, plot, do characterization and had a pretty good imagination himself. He also was able to hype his products at a time when DC and Dell were thought to be untouchable and within 12 years, in large part due to Stan Lee’s hyping Marvel to newspapers, colleges, radio stations, etc, was able to actually beat Superman’s sales.
Fenris
*And in that Rom issue that Ditko drew that had a shot of Spider-man, Spidey was drawn by someone else after-the-fact. Even at that late date, Ditko didn’t want to touch his “butchered” character.
On a somewhat related topic: the Question/Green Arrow argument in DK2 was friggin hilarious. The Libertarian superhero and the Communist superhero shouting at each other while everybody else does all the work.
IMO, Stan doesn’t get much of the credit (from the geek crowd, not the mainstream) because he made a charicature of himself later. People saw this odd old man spewing bizarre phrases and couldn’t believe he was really responsible for so much of classic Marvel. Or at least half responsible.
And anybody who’s knockin New Gods needs a smack upside the head 
Kirby’s Fourth World stuff was stunning, but the dialogue was really, really, really bad. (As was the plotting, charactarization and pacing.)
Brilliantly imaginative, yes. Good? Not so much. Don’t make me dig out the “Dan Turpin uses his hats to prove U.F.O.s exist” speech. I will.
Fenris