Stan Lee Tributes, From the Marvel Universe and Beyond [UPDATED]

This is a really good article about the impact and legacy of Stan Lee, not really sugarcoating anything. The entire mainstream comics owes a lot to Lee, including the fact that he insisted the entire creative team be credited for their work (something that DC Comics had never done at the time and took years to finally do).

There’s definitely a self-serving aspect to that, of course. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if you told me Stan Lee started the practice of naming the writer first and the artist second, I’d believe you without even questioning it. Still, it’s revolutionary. At the same time when that jackass Bob Kane was still claiming that he wrote and drew every Batman story, when readers only knew Carl Barks as “the good Duck artist,” Marvel books listed writer, artist, inker and letterer. Imagine what a crazy shift that must’ve been for fans. Imagine, just for a second, not actually knowing who Geoff Johns or Brian Bendis or Jim Lee were, and having to guess at who made your favorite comic because this story looked a lot like that story, and the dialogue was similar to one you’d read last year. That’s essentially what it was like. If you want to know who wrote an issue of Detective Comics from the early ‘60s, there’s a chance you might have to go look up the records to see who actually got paid for the work. If you want to know if Sam Rosen lettered the Galactus trilogy, that dude’s name is right there on page one.