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Lee's claim to have read "The Spider" as a kid J David Spurlock 13 May 2017
I wonder who decided to bad-mouth Carmine in this piece by Charles Shaar Murray on Stan Lee for NME, 1975, with cameos by Marc Bolan & Roy Wood... Patrick Ford: I find it unlikely that circa 1975 there were a lot of people familiar with Stan Lee who were not familiar with Infantino. Lee would certainly have the edge, but as a percentage of the general public I think the edge would be very small. Comics were a decaying business, in 1975, headed for extinction. 1970-1975 was more than less "my era" for exposure to DC and Marvel. Those years coincided with my middle school thru high school years and I clearly remember that "no one" was reading comic books. They weren't in any way considered cool. They weren't at all like Rock and Roll or film and television. If anything they were an embarrassment. None of my friends read comic books or had the slightest interest in them. If one of them happened to pick up a comic book which was sitting around they invariably would look at and comment on the ads. Norris Burroughs: I just saw a mention of Stan Lee in a book about robots. It said that Iron Man was created by Stan Lee, the god of Marvel Comics. J David Spurlock: Stan has acknowledged he read Spider pulps as a kid. One of the most popular was "Robot Titans of Gotham" but despite the title, they were NOT robots; they were men in "robotic armor" and they were known as the IRON MEN Tim Bateman: I see no bad-mouthing here. Tim Bateman: What I do see is an accurate portrayal of Lee. Tim Bateman: 'give me a child until he is nine years old...' You got his number, Charles. Patrick Ford: The claim that Lee read THE SPIDER as a kid and that the title served as the inspiration for Spider-Man has always struck me as about as tenuous as a spider web. Patrick Ford: It's amazing the number of times I have seen fans post a slew of images of old spider characters as some sort of proof. Proof of what? I have no idea. The Spider-Man discussion re. Kirby and Lee has only to do with whether it was Kirby who brought the basic undeveloped idea (a teen orphan with spider powers) to Lee or if Lee came up with the idea after seeing a fly crawling on a wall. Which is an interesting Freudian slip.
[a panel from Kirby's comic "The Fly" from a few years earlier - ed] Dave Rawlins: Exactly, it's not as if Stan Lee was the only one familiar with the pulps. Indeed, I suspect that Kirby would have been even more familiar with them than Lee! Patrick Ford: No one fabricates an idea out of thin air. The only issue is who was the guy bringing ideas (good,bad, original, unoriginal, does not matter) to Marvel. Aaron Noble: Actually, I read this as a subtle praise of Carmine, contrasting his long record of achievement and sobriety with the portrait of Stan as a Madison Avenue blowhard obsessed with merchandising. Patrick Ford: Aaron, I agree. The only part which sounds like a slight is the bit where he says no one except comic freaks who read the small print know who he is. As I commented above it's my opinion that back in 1975 just about everyone who knew of Lee would have known of Infantino. Lee had gotten more press (although Infantino also had major press coverage at that time) so I'm sure there were more people aware of Lee than Infantino, but Lee was certainly not any kind of media star at the time. Aaron Noble: Even that kind of puts Carmine more on the side of the underground freaks that an NME reader would likely identify with. I think this is kind of a fascinating UK reproach to US hipsters and their accolades for Lee and Marvel. Murray seems to have seen straight through Stan! Reading Grant Morrison's book Supergods, with it's celebration of The Flash and other DC books of the '60s, I can picture the generation of superior writers that came over from Britain in the '80s noticing that Lee's prose was actually unreadable. Patrick Ford: Aaron Noble , A lot of people saw right through Lee at that time. Recall the brutal reviews of the Lee appearance at Carnegie Hall? I don't understand what's happened to people.

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