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By the 1980s Lee was worried about margin notes making him look bad Mark Mayerson 16 October 2016 "The only time Stan had a problem with my plots was when I would put notes in the margin to kind of explain things to the scripter. So I'd do that and, every once in a while, I write a little line of dialogue rather than go into some lengthy explanation of what Spidey was doing. Stan got pissed off at this: -I'm writing this. I can't use your words because I'm writing this. You wrote that stuff and now I can't use those words! And those are the words I was going to use! Never put any dialogue down! It has to be all mine! - I liked that about Stan. He really had integrity. He didn't want to use anybody's words but his own. He didn't care if you wrote the plot, but the words had to be his. So I would carefully avoid doing anything that suggested dialogue. I did that for a while." -Jim Shooter from Alter Ego #137, p. 23, on his plotting the Spider-man comic strip. It's an odd definition of integrity, when the writer, who takes all the money and credit, is only concerned about the words and not the plot or structure. This is what Lee means when he "writes" a comic and is the basis of the disagreements with Kirby, Wood, Ditko, et. al. I question whether Lee is capable of creating stories from scratch. If he was working in films, the Writers Guild would never give him more than a shared credit on a script. Patrick Ford: Lee never objected to Ditko and Kirby writing dialogue. Patrick Ford: BTW. Ditko began selling his work to Marvel in 1956. In "The Avenging Mind " (2008) Ditko wrote: "Lee never wrote a full script for any work I did at Marvel," Patrick Ford: ALTER-EGO #68 published a couple of the "panel scripts" Steve Ditko supplied to Stan Lee along with the artwork. Mark Ricard: When was that issue published? Will look for it. Patrick Ford: Several years ago. Just go to the Tomorrows page and they will either have it for sale or a PDF. Chris Tolworthy: Stan sounded worried. I wonder when he said this? I presume that this was after people pointed out that Kirby's margin notes undermine Stan's claim to be the writer.

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