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Authors: Sean Howe
Tags: Non-Fiction
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appear bare-chested” because of the mechanical plate over his heart.
Don Heck became the regular Iron Man artist; Kirby just didn’t have enough time. “The poor guy only has two hands, and can only draw with one!” Lee wrote to a fan. “I like to have him start as many strips as possible, to get them off on the right foot—but he cannot physically keep ’em all up—in fact, I sometimes wonder how he does as much as he does do.”
“E nough of that ‘Dear Editor’ jazz from now on!” blared the letters column in Fantastic Four #10. “Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (that’s us!) read every letter personally, and we like to feel that we know you and that you know us!” Thus were planted the seeds for Lee’s most important non-super-powered characters: the merry members of the mythical Marvel Bullpen. There had been real bullpens, of course—first at the Empire State Building, and then again here at 655 Madison, though that was already five years in the past, before Stan got shuffled off into the corner, crowded in between file cabinets. Now Lee began to paint a picture of a utopian workplace, in which all the jolly artists cracked jokes while they worked away under one happy roof. (Doctor Doom even visited “the studio of Kirby and Lee, on Madison Avenue,” in that same issue of The Fantastic Four , crashing a plotting session and knocking them out with sleeping gas.) In reality, Kirby only came into the offices about once a week. He worked from a varnished-pine room in the basement of his Long Island home, with a bookshelf of Shakespeare and science fiction for inspiration and a ten-inch black-and-white television for company—and the door shut, to keep the cigar smoke from billowing out to the rest of the house. His name certainly wasn’t on any Madison Avenue door. “That was a lot of stuff that Stan Lee put into magazines, but the artists were all over the island,” Iron Man artist Don Heck told an interviewer. “I could go into the office two times this week, and somebody else could go in two other times . . . you just don’t cross paths.” But Lee’s spirit of cheer was genuine. Things were looking brighter.
“I would see Stan being very convivial out of the corner of my eye, seeming to have fun with his work,” said Bruce Jay Friedman, who had watched as the comic kingdom had been stripped from Lee in the late 1950s. “He was sort of like a big kid. I had no idea there was a legend building right in front of my eyes.”
Still, Lee needed help. “We seem to exist from crisis to crisis,” he wrote in private correspondence with a fan. “You can’t possibly imagine how rushed we are. It isn’t a question of can’t our artists do better (or can’t I write better)—it’s more a question of how well can we do in the brief time allotted to us? Some day, in some far distant Nirvana, perhaps we will have a chance to produce a strip without a frantic deadline hanging over us.” Soon Sol Brodsky, who’d been a production hand for Atlas Comics, returned, as the de facto production manager. “My job was mainly talking to the artists and the writers and telling them how I wanted the stuff done,” Lee recalled. “Sol did everything else—corrections, making sure everything looked right, making sure things went to the engraver, and he also talked to the printer. . . . Little by little, we built things back up again.”
Lee began sharing more of the writing duties, often with old friends. “Martin Goodman started pressuring Lee to have other writers do some of the stories,” said Leon Lazarus, an ex-Timely staffer who was himself recruited to script an issue of Tales to Astonish . “He became concerned that Stan would have too much leverage over him, and he worried about what would happen if Stan ever decided to leave the company.”
At the end of 1962, Lee moved younger brother Larry back over to the westerns, and assigned “Iron Man,” “Thor,” and “Ant-Man” scripts to other
Don Heck became the regular Iron Man artist; Kirby just didn’t have enough time. “The poor guy only has two hands, and can only draw with one!” Lee wrote to a fan. “I like to have him start as many strips as possible, to get them off on the right foot—but he cannot physically keep ’em all up—in fact, I sometimes wonder how he does as much as he does do.”
“E nough of that ‘Dear Editor’ jazz from now on!” blared the letters column in Fantastic Four #10. “Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (that’s us!) read every letter personally, and we like to feel that we know you and that you know us!” Thus were planted the seeds for Lee’s most important non-super-powered characters: the merry members of the mythical Marvel Bullpen. There had been real bullpens, of course—first at the Empire State Building, and then again here at 655 Madison, though that was already five years in the past, before Stan got shuffled off into the corner, crowded in between file cabinets. Now Lee began to paint a picture of a utopian workplace, in which all the jolly artists cracked jokes while they worked away under one happy roof. (Doctor Doom even visited “the studio of Kirby and Lee, on Madison Avenue,” in that same issue of The Fantastic Four , crashing a plotting session and knocking them out with sleeping gas.) In reality, Kirby only came into the offices about once a week. He worked from a varnished-pine room in the basement of his Long Island home, with a bookshelf of Shakespeare and science fiction for inspiration and a ten-inch black-and-white television for company—and the door shut, to keep the cigar smoke from billowing out to the rest of the house. His name certainly wasn’t on any Madison Avenue door. “That was a lot of stuff that Stan Lee put into magazines, but the artists were all over the island,” Iron Man artist Don Heck told an interviewer. “I could go into the office two times this week, and somebody else could go in two other times . . . you just don’t cross paths.” But Lee’s spirit of cheer was genuine. Things were looking brighter.
“I would see Stan being very convivial out of the corner of my eye, seeming to have fun with his work,” said Bruce Jay Friedman, who had watched as the comic kingdom had been stripped from Lee in the late 1950s. “He was sort of like a big kid. I had no idea there was a legend building right in front of my eyes.”
Still, Lee needed help. “We seem to exist from crisis to crisis,” he wrote in private correspondence with a fan. “You can’t possibly imagine how rushed we are. It isn’t a question of can’t our artists do better (or can’t I write better)—it’s more a question of how well can we do in the brief time allotted to us? Some day, in some far distant Nirvana, perhaps we will have a chance to produce a strip without a frantic deadline hanging over us.” Soon Sol Brodsky, who’d been a production hand for Atlas Comics, returned, as the de facto production manager. “My job was mainly talking to the artists and the writers and telling them how I wanted the stuff done,” Lee recalled. “Sol did everything else—corrections, making sure everything looked right, making sure things went to the engraver, and he also talked to the printer. . . . Little by little, we built things back up again.”
Lee began sharing more of the writing duties, often with old friends. “Martin Goodman started pressuring Lee to have other writers do some of the stories,” said Leon Lazarus, an ex-Timely staffer who was himself recruited to script an issue of Tales to Astonish . “He became concerned that Stan would have too much leverage over him, and he worried about what would happen if Stan ever decided to leave the company.”
At the end of 1962, Lee moved younger brother Larry back over to the westerns, and assigned “Iron Man,” “Thor,” and “Ant-Man” scripts to other
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