Okay, you’ve convinced me to see this, even though like Luiza I’m not much of a Marvel fan. Although I do enjoy animation.
Perhaps the narrative analog to the “photo-surrealism” of the animation would be the pseudo-realism of Marvel’s stories. I always found Stan Lee to be kind of a one-note writer. Always the New York setting, always too much unnecessary dialogue, always the shady milieus from pulp magazines and bad film noir. But where Chandler’s Philip Marlowe mocked his underworld opponents, how their speech and gestures were copied from what they saw on screen, years later we were still getting these same characters and settings from Lee as though they reflected some kind of urban reality.
Lee’s best stuff was when he had someone like Jack Kirby, an artist with an actual visual imagination, to bring it to life.
It’s always worth contrasting the artistic vision of Lee and Kirby, New York-born sons of immigrants, with that of their exact contemporaries, those other immigrant sons, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, who created Superman. But Shuster and Siegel hailed from Cleveland, not New York. Perhaps sensing they did not live in the center of the universe, their world always felt more unrealistic, more deliberately fictional, so that Superman lives in Metropolis, for example, not New York.
I can’t help but think that some of the differences in these visions still hold in comic book movies. Obviously, Lee’s vision won out, just as the fiction of Hemingway and Steinbeck won out over that of, say, Kafka. Of course, today’s comic book movies are created by committees, but perhaps to coin a proverb, once the channel has been dug, it’s hard to change the water’s course.
Here’s an example of Lee and Kirby at their worst (the speech bubbles almost crowding out the art) and their best (that image of the Blob refusing to be moved):
thank you for your comment! i’ll admit i’m not at all versed in the history of comic book writing but now i gotta look into it & how it shaped the aesthetics of current marvel filmmaking
Over the weekend a new documentary on Stan Lee popped up on Disney+. It’s narrated by Lee, so it must have been in the works for years and is only now getting out.
This doc gives Lee’s personal history and point of view. Since he’s a pivotal figure in comic book history, it’s probably worth a look.
A couple of Lee innovations are mentioned. The first, depicting a teenage superhero, would seem so obvious now as not to warrant a mention, but it’s worth considering, as with so many innovations, that someone did have to come up with it.
A more interesting innovation, perhaps, was his reversal of the sequence of writing a comic book. Since Lee was working on so many of them, he was unable to keep the artists busy. So he suggested to Steve Ditko that Ditko draw how he thought the story would go and then he (Lee) would add dialogue later.
This reversal reminded me just a bit of a similar change in the writing of musicals in the early 20th century. The normal sequence, as exemplified by Gilbert and Sullivan, was for Gilbert to write lyrics and then Sullivan would supply music for them. P.G. Wodehouse, working with composer Jerome Kern, reversed this based on Wodehouse’s belief that he could fit lyrics to any melody.
Okay, you’ve convinced me to see this, even though like Luiza I’m not much of a Marvel fan. Although I do enjoy animation.
Perhaps the narrative analog to the “photo-surrealism” of the animation would be the pseudo-realism of Marvel’s stories. I always found Stan Lee to be kind of a one-note writer. Always the New York setting, always too much unnecessary dialogue, always the shady milieus from pulp magazines and bad film noir. But where Chandler’s Philip Marlowe mocked his underworld opponents, how their speech and gestures were copied from what they saw on screen, years later we were still getting these same characters and settings from Lee as though they reflected some kind of urban reality.
Lee’s best stuff was when he had someone like Jack Kirby, an artist with an actual visual imagination, to bring it to life.
It’s always worth contrasting the artistic vision of Lee and Kirby, New York-born sons of immigrants, with that of their exact contemporaries, those other immigrant sons, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, who created Superman. But Shuster and Siegel hailed from Cleveland, not New York. Perhaps sensing they did not live in the center of the universe, their world always felt more unrealistic, more deliberately fictional, so that Superman lives in Metropolis, for example, not New York.
I can’t help but think that some of the differences in these visions still hold in comic book movies. Obviously, Lee’s vision won out, just as the fiction of Hemingway and Steinbeck won out over that of, say, Kafka. Of course, today’s comic book movies are created by committees, but perhaps to coin a proverb, once the channel has been dug, it’s hard to change the water’s course.
Here’s an example of Lee and Kirby at their worst (the speech bubbles almost crowding out the art) and their best (that image of the Blob refusing to be moved):
https://earthsmightiestblog.com/the-x-men-3-1964-1st-blob/
thank you for your comment! i’ll admit i’m not at all versed in the history of comic book writing but now i gotta look into it & how it shaped the aesthetics of current marvel filmmaking
Over the weekend a new documentary on Stan Lee popped up on Disney+. It’s narrated by Lee, so it must have been in the works for years and is only now getting out.
This doc gives Lee’s personal history and point of view. Since he’s a pivotal figure in comic book history, it’s probably worth a look.
A couple of Lee innovations are mentioned. The first, depicting a teenage superhero, would seem so obvious now as not to warrant a mention, but it’s worth considering, as with so many innovations, that someone did have to come up with it.
A more interesting innovation, perhaps, was his reversal of the sequence of writing a comic book. Since Lee was working on so many of them, he was unable to keep the artists busy. So he suggested to Steve Ditko that Ditko draw how he thought the story would go and then he (Lee) would add dialogue later.
This reversal reminded me just a bit of a similar change in the writing of musicals in the early 20th century. The normal sequence, as exemplified by Gilbert and Sullivan, was for Gilbert to write lyrics and then Sullivan would supply music for them. P.G. Wodehouse, working with composer Jerome Kern, reversed this based on Wodehouse’s belief that he could fit lyrics to any melody.
Reading so much good things about this movie! Although I’m not a Marvel fan, I’ll check it out. It seems pretty worth it.