Stan Lee In The 1940s And ’50s
17
in the winter of 1942. He’d started out as an office boy under editor Joe Simon in 1941. His first writing assignment had been a two-page text story in Captain America Comics #3 (May ’41), and he was soon was writing “real” comic book stories. Thanks to the new series of Marvel Masterworks reprints from this era, we can finally see for ourselves what Lee wrote in those days.
Off To See The Whizzer
Separated At Birth? (Left:) Stan Lee (as drawn by Ken Bald for the former’s 1947 book Secrets behind the Comics). (Right:) Steve Allen. [Art ©2009 Stan Lee.]
his famous Q&A audience interviews, he turned his subjects’ answers on their heads by deliberately misunderstanding them—often by taking them too literally. When an audience member said she couldn’t follow him, he responded with a literal interpretation of that phrase: “Well, somebody’s been following me for the past five days... a short dark man in a grey sweater.” Allen also applied this trick to the implied social meaning of certain phrases people commonly use. When a lady in the audience spelled out her name for him (“I’m Mrs. Holt. H-O-L-T.“), he took it as a clue for some unknown social rule and replied: “Very well. W-E-L-L.” These are examples of what I would call a “literal mind”—someone who has the ability to hear the words in a phrase apart from their context.
What’s In A Signature? To see these tendencies in Stan Lee’s work, we have to take a broader view of his writing career than just his work as a super-hero scripter. After all, when The Fantastic Four #1 was published in mid-1961, he was already 38 years old and had been writing and editing comics for half his life. How much he has written isn’t 100% clear. He signed some stories he wrote and didn’t sign others. And since he also devoted a considerable portion of his time to being the editor of Timely/Atlas/Marvel (even if at times he had other editors such as Don Rico, Vince Fago, and Al Jaffee working under him), and Timely was the most prolific comics company of much of the ’40s and ’50s until the ’57 collapse, it is clear that he wrote no more than a fraction of the company’s output.
That first Lee text story, “The Traitor’s Revenge,” seen in the two hardcover reprintings of Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941), is nothing special, as you can easily check for yourself—but the lone illustration may well be by Jack Kirby, which would make it the first Lee-Kirby “collaboration.” Stan’s second signed text story seems to be the one in All Winners Comics #1 (Summer ’41). In it Stan introduces a comics fan called Johnny Blake, who wishes he could meet his Marvel heroes Torch and Toro, Sub-Mariner, The Angel, Black Marvel, Captain America and Bucky—who also just happen to be the stars of All Winners. One by one they turn up in his bedroom (see Vol. 1 of Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age All Winners). Finally Johnny wakes up and realizes it was all a dream. Stan Lee then pulls it all together with a little twist, using the literal meaning of the title of the story: “Gee, I wonder who did win the contest, though. But what am I saying? Nobody could have won, because Cap, the Marvel, the Torch, the Angel and the Sub-Mariner are all winners! Yes sir, ALL WINNERS!” There’s a similar text story by Lee in All Winners #2, reprinted in the same hardcover volume. It ends with the other heroes learning that the super-fast Whizzer—now featured in the comic—has been in the room with them all the time, simply moving too quickly to be seen. In Les Daniels’ 1991 history Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics, Lee says of The Whizzer: “I don’t remember if I made that up, but I remember writing it, because I wrote them all.” Whatever that means, precisely. Around the same time, Lee also wrote a text story introducing a number of new heroes to the reader in U.S.A. Comics #2 (Nov. 1941), which has likewise been reprinted in the Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age series. At a meeting of the mag’s heroes, Captain Terror proposes they “award a prize for the best story of the month,” with the best one to be announced in the following issue. But, apparently the editor (by then Stan
In fact, over at the Timely-Atlas-Comics list on Yahoo, where all things Goodman are discussed, Dr. Michael J. Vassallo has stated that any story that wasn’t signed by Stan Lee (or one of his early-’40s pseudonyms) probably wasn’t written by him. If so, that would yield a lot of bylined horror stories, a couple of science-fiction tales, numerous Westerns, Snafu, and a lot of dumb-blonde and funny-animal comics, but virtually no crime books, a genre he does claim to have written in the late ’40s. Doc V. also throws out all stories which have a job number with the prefix “SL.” By the time Lee got out of the US Army, Timely had begun using job numbers for every story, as a way of tracking payment. The earliest job numbers have an “R” prefix, which means they were handled by Don Rico. Soon after Stan was discharged on Sept. 29, 1945, and returned to the company, job numbers with an “SL” prefix begin appearing. But since that prefix also appears in the job numbers of Harvey Kurtzman-written “Hey Look!” pages, the simple appearance of his initials doesn’t imply authorship. In this instance, I agree totally with Doc. I am less certain about the work done before Lee went into the Army
Hey Look! A Stan Lee Job Number! “SL-163” is handwritten in this final panel of Harvey Kurtzman’s very first “Hey Look!” one-page gag, which appeared in Jeanie #17 (Jan. 1948)... but there’s no doubt that artist Kurtzman, not Stan Lee, wrote it. Doubtless the prefix was for the purpose of editorial trafficking. Reprinted from the Hey Look! collection published in 1992 by Kitchen Sink Press. [©2009 Estate of Harvey Kurtzman.]