“… a knife in the guts of less famous comics creators.”
I first came across this on Twitter, when Scott Kurtz mentioned it and correctly called it out for the jackassery it is.
Comics Alliance never misses an opportunity to invent an injustice. Especially when they can attack a 90 year old. http://t.co/nlDEiJVSEu
— Scott Kurtz (@pvponline) July 10, 2014
More below the fold. Fair warning: I get pretty cranky in this…
ComicsAlliance.com’s Matt D. Wilson has decided Stan Lee is the Devil. Based on what? A goofy video posted last week that’s part of “Stan’s Rants” on YouTube. “Stan’s Rants” are brief videos of Stan going off like a crazy old man. It’s a self-parody and it’s done with tongue firmly in cheek. It even has cheezy, ranty music at the end of the clips. It’s a gag; a goof.
But for Comics Alliance it’s an opportunity to erupt hipster-style about Stan Lee in relation to other Marvel writers/artists. Now here’s the video in question, in which Stan rants about long credits at the end of movies.
From that, ComicsAlliance.com’s Matt Wilson crafts this incredibly ridiculous click-bait headline:
Here are some nuggets from this smear piece. Note the way he starts it out of the gate:
Ravage 2099 and Stripperella co-creator Stan Lee has been channeling Andy Rooney in a series of videos on World of Heroes called “Stan’s Rants.” Like those missives of the late American broadcaster, these clips are mostly benign “cranky old man” bits. His newest one is about how he hates being on hold, for example.
Ravage 2099 and Stripperella co-creator. On top of co-creating other laughable stuff you’ve probably never heard of. You know, like Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four. Completely insignificant, right? He then goes on to say “most” of the Stan’s Rants videos are just benign “cranky old man bits.” Except for this one, of course, because he can twist it into an attack on Stan.
Wilson goes on to say:
But the video above, which is from last week, is a knife in the guts of less famous comics creators — which is to say, nearly all of them. In the video, Lee complains about having to sit through long credits at the end of movies, including superhero movies.
“Nobody knows who (these people) are, nobody can read them and nobody cares,” he says, astonishingly.
But here’s the problem: Those credits are usually where the names of comics creators who wrote and drew the characters the movies are based on actually get seen.
How much say does Matt Wilson think Stan gets when it comes to setting up the movie credits, anyway? Before the current stream of Marvel movies (hell decades before Blade!) Stan was working very hard to get Marvel heroes into film and television. Should he not get honorary producer credit for that?
Later Wilson says:
Nevertheless, what he’s saying — what Stan Lee is saying — intentionally or not, is that the one place where comics creators get credited in films based on their work is non-essential, should be truncated substantially or removed entirely.
No, Matt. It’s what you’re reading into it because you need it to fit some sick anti-Stan narrative.
I’m not going to keep quoting this tripe. The link’s above if you want to read it. If you’ve read the “I hate Stan!” stuff before, where it’s the same “Boo hoo, Stan gets too much credit!” crap, then you’ve already read this. Except that it goes waaaay the Hell out of its way to add two and two together to get five. All for the sake of attacking Stan Lee.
It’s laughable hipsterism. I’ve hit the limit of my patience for fanatical anti-Stan people. Honestly, at this point if you have hate for Stan Lee it says way more about you than it does about Stan.
–George Berryman!
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I thought Sean Howe handled Stan fine and I enjoyed that book very much. He did a good job showcasing the difference of Stan the face man for Marvel and Stan the businessman as well as the benefits & pressures of each.
George, what’s your opinion of how Sean Howe handled Stan Lee’s story, in his book “Marvel: the Untold Story”?
#12 Thanks. I will be sure listen to that Podcast.
@10- Oh, Yeah. If there’s anyone in comics that rightly deserves hate it’s Bob Kane.
@10 – If you enjoy folks sticking up for Stan then you will definitely want to catch the next Spider-News Crawlspace Podcast, in which we all pipe up about it. Recorded it last night. I’ve hit my limit on patience with people like this.
I love seeing people sticking up for Stan Lee. He does deserve a ton of credit for his contributions to Marvel and the comic book industry in general. The negative image people try to place on him is so sad. Even at my LCBS one of the staff said that she disliked Stan Lee. I agree with #9. Stan was a co-creator. As far as I know he has always said that. He ain’t Bob Kane.
While I’m all for giving Ditko,Kirby et al the credit that’s long overdue; I felt the same seeing this article. It makes such a huge amount of what was such a nothing. jokey clip by Stan.
I’d wanna have a drink with both, but if I had to pick ONE, I’d have a drink with Ditko.
Ditko’s untimely departure from and ultimate dissatisfaction with ASM was as much about his own egregious personality as it was editorial rough-housing. He is an inflexible, cranky old guy whose reactionary views didn’t have any place in the increasingly progressive silver age of comics.
Don’t get me wrong, his work was and is seminal and his credit well-deserved. Similarly, comics is a brutal world where far too many great creators are unceremoniously pruned, hidden and forgotten. But the clash between Ditko and Lee involved two egos, not just one, and the winner was the guy who was willing to move with the times.
I love them both, but I know which one I’d rather have over for drinks 🙂
That article made me so mad! What a ridiculous allegation to make! I imagine that the articles writer simply couldn’t think of anything interesting to do a piece on that day, and so decided to just grasp at straws and make a story all on his own.
I don’t think Steve Ditko gets nearly as much credit as he deserves most of the time, but I still admire Stan Lee and his work. Many people don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around the concept that the success of Spider-man was a collaborative effort. Ditko had plenty of input, but that doesn’t mean that Lee should automatically take no credit at all, or that he’s in the wrong for still being successful because of his work.
Watching the Stan video I expected him to say “You know what really grinds my gears?”
Anyone that can watch that video and not realize that it’s intended to be funny has some problems.
@3 – Sorry I wasn’t aiming the Ditko thing at you, I was just sounding off about the whole argument. I agree with you 100%.
@1 – I’m not saying Ditko was any less important. Just that I’m sick of the mewling anti-Stan people. That’s not to downplay any of the work done by anyone else – just that I’m done listening to hipsters denigrate this man and his accomplishments. I suspect some of them don’t even really subscribe to it so much as squawk it to sound edgy.
The thing these Anti-Stan people seem to be forgetting is that there wouldn’t even BE a Marvel Cinematic Universe…hell, there probably wouldn’t be comic books in general…without Stan “The Man” Lee.
He did far more than just co-create some of our greatest comic book super heroes. He created an indelible pop culture phenomenon by introducing the Marvel Universe to the general public through cartoons and tv shows.
And all the while he remains a perfect gentleman. I’ve very rarely ever heard an unkind word toward anyone, and if you ever do, it’s pretty much guaranteed that they deserve it…like this guy.
Excelsior!
Good on you George. This article is just really low and pathetic. But it did get me thinking about this whole “who created Spider-Man” debacle.
A sect of comic fans like to moan about Ditko not getting enough credit for “designing Spidey’s world”. But I think that people often forget that Stan created one of the most important and (at the time of his inception) unique aspects of the character, his humour. Stan’s goofy, pun filled dialogue, and his desire to make a young, relatable superhero was a large part of what set Spider-Man apart from the other costumed heroes of that time.
If Ditko had written and drawn the early ASM issues by himself, then Spidey probably would have ended up being a Spider-suited version of the Question (or Mr. A). We already had a glimpse of that in the issue where Peter yells at a bunch of hippies, and it just came off as weird and unrealistic (to me at least). That’s not me bashing Steve by the way, his designs and art were the other half of what made early Spidey great, and quite well known that he kept some of Stan’s more bizarre ideas in check (I.E scrapping the original concept for the Green Goblin.)
Basically what I’m saying is that I think they both played an equal part in Spider-Man’s success.