MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY
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"A WILD-RIDE ACCOUNT" —The Hollywood Reporter
"EPIC" —The New York Times
"INDISPENSABLE" —Los Angeles Times
"DEFINITIVE" —The Wall Street Journal
"SCINTILLATING" —Publishers Weekly
“FASCINATING” —GQ
"AUTHORITATIVE" —Kirkus Reviews
"GRIPPING" —Rolling Stone
"PRICELESS" —Booklist
"A MUST FOR ANY SUPERHERO OR POP-CULTURE FAN" —NY Post
"ESSENTIAL" —The Daily Beast
"A SUPERPOWERED MUST-READ" —USA Today
"REVELATORY" —The Miami Herald
"AS FULL OF COLORFUL CHARACTERS, TRAGIC REVERSALS AND UNLIKELY PLOT TWISTS AS ANY BOOK IN THE MARVEL CANON" —Newsday
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Rumors are circulating that the villain of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie will be…Ronan the Accuser.
Here’s a page from Ronan’s first appearance, in Fantastic Four #65.
Advertisement for Stan Lee interview in Oui magazine, 1977.
Illustration by John Romita.
Stan Lee’s high school yearbook photo, 1939.
(Posted this a while back, but this is a cleaner reproduction.)
A page from DAREDEVIL ANNUAL #1 by Gene Colan and John Tartaglione.
Quite a few border notes from Colan remain:
AT ONE IN THE MORNING—ANY WAY I’VE (words obscured) FOR THE NEXT D.D. STORY
#3 STAN WELCOMES ME IN HIS OFFICE. AH - IF IT ISN’T THE MERRY (words obscured) HAVE A SEAT
#4 STAN (word obscured) ME YOU’RE ELECTRONICALLY PREPARED FOR THE DAREDEVIL PLOT
#5 OKAY THEN - LET’S SEE - WE LAST LEFT OUR HERO
There’s also a note from Stan to production man Sol Brodsky asking for a correction:
SOL - WHO INKED THIS? GENE HAD DRAWN A DETAILED RECORDER! SEE NEXT PG. PANEL 1
Rob Liefeld and Stan Lee at the Heroes Reborn announcement, December 1995.
Stan Lee holds the art for the cover of Strange Tales #151, 1966.
Unfinished Business
Stan Lee flew to New York for the official announcement. Since Avi Arad’s ascent at Marvel Films, Lee had distracted himself with projects like Excelsior Comics, a modest-sized imprint of titles to be packaged from the company’s West Coast offices. But most of his public appearances of late—like popping up on Conan O’Brien to promote Best of the Worst, a low-budget book of trivia and one-liners—were the extraneous gestures of celebrity life, and had little to do with current Marvel Comics business. Now he returned to his old rah-rah mode: “We’re matching some of the best talent in the industry, with some of the best characters in the industry, to change the status quo and create the stuff of legends!” he beamed to the gathering of journalists at the Grand Hyatt on Park Avenue. The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Iron Man would now be created completely by the California studios of Jim Lee and Liefeld. The news that Marvel was removing control of its characters from its own staff and handing million-dollar contracts (plus profit sharing) to those who’d recently walked out on the company was, in the words of one editor, “catastrophic to morale.”
Even the fictional world of the Marvel Universe was being disassembled. For a multi-title event called “Onslaught,” the outgoing editors, writers, and artists of The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Iron Man were charged with implementing their own obsolescence. The heroes would be destroyed, and then re-created in a “pocket universe,” an alternate world where Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld’s reimagined versions would take over. The “Heroes Reborn” titles, as they would be called, would be renumbered as #1 issues for the first time since the 1960s. Other titles—including Thor, Doctor Strange, and Silver Surfer— would be canceled outright.
(Text from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story)
The whole gang is here. (For the full Ben-Day experience, click here and enlarge.)
From Amazing Spider-Man #43, December 1966. Art by John Romita. Words by Stan Lee. Lettering by Artie Simek.
A page from the first Spider-Man story, from AMAZING FANTASY #15 by Steve Ditko.
In the up-close, you can see where Ditko signed the upper left of the board, and also the roughed-in PART 2 copy.
