does Lee = the wisecracking Webhead, and ditko = tortured Parker?

http://www.msu.edu/~daggy/cop/images/00000208.gif
(excercise: try to find matched pictures of spiderman : lee|ditko)

Is Spider-Stan having a seizure?

Thread dangerously close to instant kibosh because I thought it was about meee... AND IT'S NOT.

;-P

The creative process of Silver Age marvel is a subject I find endlessly fascinating - is there a good book that covers the period?

You can get a slight input if you get 'Comics Creators On Spider-man', but that's only worth getting through the library, although it is fascinating. If you can find Jacobs and Jones' The Great Comic Book Heroes, that's the real goods. Goes from the Silver Age to 1990 or so in some considerable detail.

No, Spider-Man was pretty much always wisecracking when he could during the Ditko period... there's a great Kurt Busiek story in I think his "Amazing Fantasy 16-18" thing where Spidey, having just put on the costume for one of the earliest times in his career, is fighting some thugs or other and starts running off at the mouth with wisecracks, and wondering why he's suddenly gotten so motormouthed, & decides it's a way to blow off steam/hide his nervousness.

well, jacobs and Jones is even more essential if you get the 1996 edition. The one and only time I have ever used electronic bay was to locate and purchase that book. Get it!

still though, I would guess that the Marvel Method resulted in this case in Lee inserting the wiseacre dialogue onto Ditko's finished pencils. I would also guess that it is that sort of thing, culminating with the dispute over the identity of the Green Goblin, that made ditko say "fuck this, I'm gonna go make comics where the Blue Beetle and the Question do battle with relativists!"

also, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book examines the Marvel Method with great acuity, among other things.

I suppose with the arrival of Romita, he does become significantly less tortured and angst-ridden, suggesting that that side of his personality was down to Ditko to some extent...

Maybe Lee was feeling tortured and angst-ridden by Ditko?

http://www.thecomicsource.com/news/stanlee.gif

Anyone read this? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1563898918/sr=8-5/qid=1151088582/ref=pd_bbs_5/104-3762887-3590353?%5Fencoding=UTF8

'veronica' i think you answer yr own question w/ yr post abt the Marvel method - nothing else by Ditko is anywhere near as angsty as Spiderman, and his own somewhat incoherent screeds/strips abt the nature of heroism etc. indicate that Ditko personally didn't have much time for wisecracking, wishy-washy, conflicted neurotic boy outsiders - to this day nobody REALLY knows why Ditko left Marvel, but I think his annoyance w/ Stan's goofball dialogue must've been one motivating factor, at the v. least (Ditko had already insisted on a plotting credit as of issue 26 of AS - he left w/38)

i disagree slightly that the romita era represents a shift away from the 'tortured' Peter Parker - romita snr was def. a sunnier, sexier artist than ditko (who is one of comic's most purely GOTHIC artists), but issue 82 for example, where spidey is totally beaten up by electro, is as downbeat and desolate as anything during the ditko run - stan was well aware by this point that teenagers/college kids etc liked the superhero-as-failure biz more than the superhero-as-father/authority biz of DC's Superman - this is, not coincidentally, the era when Charlie Brown/Peanuts REALLY takes off in mass consciousness, surely an inspiration for the wisecracking/tortured split of Spidey (Stan's own attempts to write humourous newspaper strips were DISMAL)

I'm pretty sure Ditko would *never* say, 'Yeah, Peter Parker was me.' So anyone who infers that it just making an interpretation, and probably mostly based on him being a skinny, dark-haired guy with glasses. (Though Peter did shed the glasses fairly quickly; Ditko didn't.)

SD has done humour strips, though whether or not they're actually funny is another matter (um -- subjective!). My guess is, his attitude toward Spidey wisecracking would be, 'That's an unlikely reaction to the deadly serious circumstances.' And he'd be right, though it's kind of fun to read. In very small amounts. (That IS just a guess, Steve. Sorry if I'm completely wrong!) (No, he doesn't read this board! But his newphew does a bit of surfing here and there.)

The style's just a reflection of Lee's overall glibness. What's to analyse? That'd be like saying Stan was having profound thoughts when writing those things, which... er, obviously isn't the case.

Who knows? One thing's for sure - Kirby was definitely the Thing...