Byrne Robotics: Happy Birthday Stan!

There's one trait that I believe Mr Lee and Mr Byrne share: humility. Specifically, they both give credit to others when talking about characters created/comics written.

Not to rain on Stan's birthday parade, and I hope he has many more, but I don't think you can add Captain America to the list of characters he "had a hand" in creating, athough he certainly wrote quite a number of stories featuring or with Captain America.

I recognize that comics are "created" on an ongoing basis, and that the characters evolve. I also think, at some point the break from the past is so complete it's almost a new creation. The Ditko Blue Beetle, for example, falls into that category, although I don't think the previous Charlton version of the character does.

To say that "creation" (or any other word) has different connotations and definitions doesn't mean that the word means whatever one wants it to. To most people, the creator of a character is the originator or originators, not those who added to it. Mort Weisenger didn't create Superman. Did he make a major contribution to the character? Sure.

Was the Captain America who returned in Avengers 4 so different? Let's see. Different costume? No, except for the stripes now going all the way around the uniform. Different origin? No. Different secret identity? No. Different powers? No. In fact, I'm inclined to say the returned Captain America was much closer to the Simon & Kirby character than the guy who was appearing in most of the post Kirby issues of CA, as written by-let's see-- Stan Lee. When the character came back, he was no longer teaching at the "Lee school," for example. When Lee put him in Tales of Suspense in his own series, the first thing he did was retellings of old Simon & Kirby stories. So what Stan did (excluding the possibility of any plotting input from Kirby) was sweep away the post -WW II (i.e., post-Kirby) stuff, kill Bucky, and (not surprisingly) write the dialog in modern Stan Lee style. That may be a big contribution to the ongoing character, but in my book, it doesn't make him the creator. Did he "create" the Sub-Mariner? Stan's version of the Sub-Mariner was at least as different from Everett's as his and Kirby's Cap was from Simon & Kirby's.

"If we get too narrow in our definitions of what qualifies as an act of creation, we might find ourselves having to exclude Jack Kirby from Cap's genesis, giving all credit to Joe Simon!" Sure. Or how about Martin Goodman? Stan himself already essentially went that route, in his Secrets Behind the Comics.

Absolutely true, and absolutely irrelevant to the fact that Stan had zero to do with the creation of Captain America (though much to do with editing and writing his adventures).

Stan's accomplishments rank him as one of the all-time greats of comics, certainly the most influential writer-editor-co-creator of the sixties. Aren't those accomplishments enough? Do we have to dress Stan up in borrowed robes? We diminish him, rather than enhance him, when we give him false credit for what he unquestionably did not do.

This will be my final post on this thread. I thought I was making a simple and uncomplicated factual correction; instead, people seem to be rushing to what is in my view a wholly unnecessary "defense" of Stan, who needs no defending. The thread ought to justly celebrate Stan's 93d birthday. The question of what is meant by "creator" and whether it applies to Stan's work on characters originated before he was employed by Timely comics by virtue of his later work on them can be pursued, I think, in some other thread.

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