Sword and Sorcery

"Heroic fantasy" is the name I have given to a subgenre of fiction, otherwise called the "sword-and-sorcery" story. It is a story of action and adventure laid in a more or less imaginary world, where magic works and where modern science and technology have not yet been discovered. The setting may ... be this Earth as it is conceived to have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or it may be another planet or another dimension.

Such a story combines the color and dash of the historical costume romance with the atavistic supernatural thrills of the weird, occult, or ghost story. When well done, it provides the purest fun of fiction of any kind. It is escape fiction wherein one escapes clear out of the real world into one where all men are strong, all women beautiful, all life adventurous, and all problems simple, and nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine.

— L. Sprague de Camp, introduction to the 1967 Ace edition of Conan (Robert E. Howard)

So spake de Camp, pulp hack and defender of fantasy-for-fun.  Actually, I never thought fantasy-for-fun needed any  defending.  There's no reason in the world you can't enjoy escapist art and "serious" art.  I've been doing it my whole life.

I quote from de Camp not entirely out of agreement, but because it provides a reasonable enough defiinition for this particular genre, which was seriously popular in the 70's - a popularity reflected in a plethora of comix titles - almost all of them forgotten today.

Strictly speaking, there had been a few predecessors: in the mid-50's, DC had given us The Brave and the Bold, featuring The Viking Prince, The Golden Gladiator, and The Silent Knight - heroes whose adventures took place in medieval and ancient times.  The stories were more historical than fantastical, though, with Hal Foster's Prince Valiant being the primary incident (Foster influenced every comic book artist born before WWII, bar none).

It took until 1969, when Denny O'Neil gave Night Master a try in Showcase (82-84), for the real thing to appear.  O'Neil openly cited R.E. Howard, Michael Moorcock et al in the editorial page. Night Master was Jim Rook, a rock musician who found himself and his girlfriend magically transported to the land of Myrra, where he was gifted with a magic sword that allowed him to fight like a true swordsman, then sent on a quest against a land of evil magicians.  Night Master didn't exactly set the comix world on fire, not surprisingly - the story was pretty superficial and the anachronisms embarassing. It does feature some moderately interesting artwork from the always-weird Jerry  Grandenetti and a just-starting out Bernie Wrightson.

No, it was Conan the Barbarian, appearing on the stands about a year later (Oct 70), that put the sword-and-sorcery stake in the ground.  It took awhile, though.  After issue 1, the book didn't sell well and was nearly cancelled a year-or-so in.  It took more than a dozen issues for it to finally pay for itself, though it went on to become one of Marvel's biggest titles.

It's not hard to see why it ultimately caught on.  The early Conan issues are decidedly different.  Smith's art is crude, but distinctive and interesting.  Smith's Conan was not a muscle-bound brute but a lean, powerful-looking youth.  Early issues took a reasonable stab at adapting some of Howard's more accessible stories, and did manage to capture the grim power of his best writings.  After the first 10+ issues, Smith's artwork suddenly took a quantum leap, overflowing with art deco designs and spectacular detail, the supernaturally-haunted, decadent Hyborian world seeming to ooze off the page. 

When Conan began to strike some pay-dirt, Marvel wasted no time, grabbing up Lin Carter's Thongor (a disappointing Howard rip-off with some E.R. Burroughs touches thrown in - even a better artist than the usually unpleasant Val Mayerik couldn't overcome the source material), Edwin Lester Arnold's pre-Burroughs Gullivar Jones (who beat John Carter to Mars by a good dozen years), John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian, and Howard's own pre-Conan hero, Kull, who got his own series, which also adapted some of Howard's best stories ("The Shadow Kingdom") and featured some fine art by Marie Severin and Mike Ploog.  They also developed a one-off Howard character into Red Sonja, a female sword-master from Conan's own time and place.  Red made her debut in what is probably Smith's masterpiece, "The Song of Red Sonja" (CTB #24).  After that, she kept popping up until finally given her own series in `75.  By then, unfortunately, she'd mutated from an interesting female hero to a tiresome man-hater in a ridiculous chainmail bikini that probably was more responsible for the sales than the stories.

DC, seeing dollar signs, wasted little time either.  They already had the E.R. Burroughs license, and John Carter of Mars and Pellucidar started appearing as Tarzan back-ups, then jumped to their own shared title, Weird Worlds by fall `72.  WW had a lot of promise and some fine art, but a lack of a committed artist/writer team made it erratic, and the Burroughs stories didn't last long.  After issue 8 the title was taken over by an interesting early Howard Chaykin creation, Ironwolf, which was nominally sci-fi but had plenty of sword-and-planet action.

Gold Key, too, got in on the action, with Don Glut's derivative but fun Dagar in Tales of Sword-and-Sorcery, with impressive and distinctive art by Jesse Santos.  Meanwhile, Warren tried to get into the act, running numerous ironic sword-and-sorcery stories in Creepy and Eerie (actually, Creepy/Eerie had been running such stories from the beginning), including a few stabs at series characters such as Dax the Warrior, whose adventures were uninteresting but had unusual art from Esteban Maroto, and Jim Starlin's Darklon the Mystic, which was space opera+Dr. Strange+swordplay - very strange stuff.  I'll cover the Warren stuff more closely in future posts.  For now, suffice it to say, Warren had its foot in the game.

When Weird Worlds passed on, DC tried again in `73 with Sword of Sorcery, adapting Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser characters.  Unfortunately, sub-standard art by Howard Chaykin and Walt Simonson (good artists, though my take on Chaykin is ... complicated, but then just starting out and not at their best) and rushed stories by Denny O'Neil failed to capture the spirit of Leiber's often-excellent stories.  SoS was laid to rest after 5 issues.

DC then left the sword-wielding crowd dormant for a couple years.  But with Conan, now under the less interesting pencils of John Buscema (inker Ernie Chan added the best aspects), going strong both in his own color title and the black-and-white mag Savage Sword of Conan, which allowed for more of the sex and violence of the Howard stories to show, s&s was far from deceased on the four-color page.

Short-lived rival company Atlas produced two short-lived titles, Wulf the Barbarian and Ironjaw.  Wulf was a blondie, son of royalty in some Norse-like kingdom, forced into exile when an evil sorceror took out his royal parents.  It combined Conan-eque grittiness with Tolkein-esque magic.  The artwork was nice anyway.  Ironjaw roamed an allegedly post-nuclear world, thrown back to medieval culture and full of mutants (he rode on a unicorn).  Ironjaw was dumb as a post but had the distinguishing feature of having his lower jaw replaced by a sawtooth metal prosthetic.  The last three issues had some nice art by Pablo Marcos but otherwise Ironjaw was just another anemic Conan knock-off.

DC, meanwhile, was not about to miss the boat.  They spun off a new host of s&s titles. 
First off the presses came Beowulf: Dragon Slayer, followed quickly by Stalker, Claw the Unconquered, The Warlord and finally, about a year later, Starfire.

Claw basically was Conan only with a furry, clawed right hand.  It came from Dave Michelinie and Keith Giffen (mostly).  Claw was pretty forgettable stuff, but ran longer than most of the others, maybe because it was an easy read.  Beowulf was too. But despite being a bit empty-headed, and full of embarassingly dumb jokes, I still have a soft spot for Beowulf.  Maybe its just the nice art, and every issue had a cool monster in it.  In any case, Beowulf was essentially the Beowulf of legend, sent on a quest that took him away from Castle Hrothgar, and threw in the companionship of animal-skin bikini-clad chick warrior Nan-Zee, and The Shaper, a constantly grinning magician. The more sci-fi oriented Starfire, too remains a sentimental fave for me, given a female hero who was a lot more interesting than Red Sonja, and sexier too if you ask me, leading a peasant revolt against a ruling class of cruel, conquering aliens on some distant, future Earth (or was it Earth?  I'm not so sure).  My favorite, though, was Stalker.  Genuinely different, Stalker was a scullery lad who yearned to be a bold knight.  He offered up his soul to a warlike demonic god, and got his wish - he was granted superhuman fighting prowess, skilled with any weapon known to man.  But he'd lost his humanity.  The short-lived title dealt with his quest to get it back.  With striking art by Wally Wood and Steve Ditko and a genuinely different, often eerie story, Stalker was a real gem.  It was laid to rest after 4 issues.

After all of those, it was The Warlord that hit pay dirt.  The Warlord was Travis Morgan, an air force pilot flying a reconnaissance mission over the north pole when he loses control of his plane, plunges through a hole in the earth, and ends up in a hollow-earth world called Skartaris, which is essentially a rip of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar.  Skartaris was a rough place, as every issue reminded us:

"Here, beneath an unblinking orb of eternal sunlight, one simple law prevails: if you let your guard down for an instant you will soon be very dead"

That was because Skartaris was full of monsters (especially dinosaurs - but also yetis, cat-demons, prehistoric animals, and anything else they decided to throw in), warring primitive civilizations, evil wizards, and lots of folks running around with swords and spears.  It followed not only Burroughs-ian ideas, but even Burroughs-ian storylines and structure, with Morgan instantly falling in love with the scantily-clad, sword-wielding Tara, then having to rescue her from evil sorcerer Deimos, ending up tossed into a gladiator pit, then leading a gladiator revolt.  Issue 6 even went with one of Burroughs favorite tricks - time and space displacement, with Morgan returning to the surface world to find that 8 years have passed, then returning to Skartaris to discover that years have passed there!  The next story arc concerned his attempts to find Tara and discover what had happened to the underground world in his absence.  

The Warlord was simplistic as could be, and that was probably part of its appeal.  Stories were straightforward and wrapped up in a single issue, and almost all followed a simple formula: Morgan meets monster. Morgan fights monster.  Morgan rides off into sunset.  That - and the artwork was gorgeous.  It was definitely one of the best-looking comix on the stands in them days, though even D&D-glutted kids certainly must have realized how superficial it was.  It could safely be said The Warlord was all beauty and no brains.  But airheads need love too.

Regardless, as 1975 tumbled into 1976, Conan and The Warlord and Red Sonja were the last swordspeople standing.  Nothing else had taken.  It's not hard to see why, since most of the titles were either Conan knock-offs or half-hearted.  Still it was a glorious time, and you can't have my copies of Stalker.

"Madbomb" ... how did Jack know...?

There's a story about Jack Kirby.  During the 70's, he apparently worked sporadically on a novel entitled The Horde.  Not a whole lot is known about The Horde except that it involved a kind of modern ay Genghis Khan emerging from Asia and waging war against the world.  The story goes that Jack stopped working on The Horde because he was scaring himself.  He would read the morning paper, or watch the evening news, and see the fictional events he was describing coming to pass in the real world.

Others have noted that Kirby's 70's work has turned out to be surprisingly prescient.  Maybe this isn't really so surprising - Jack was an unusually forward-thinking guy who believed in technology - and the human heart - and believed they would guide us, hopefully, into a positive future.

That kind of prescience isn't the result of magic.  Merely logic + imagination.  But, having said that, picking up "Madbomb" in late August 2019, I find myself in the midst of a story that's prescient in some very disturbing ways.  And it's scaring the hell out of me.

"Madbomb" ran in Captain America (and the Falcon) issues 193-200, roughly October 1975 to May 1976, beginning on the eve of the Bicentennial (anyone else out there remember that?).  It was the first new work Kirby had done for Marvel in 5 years.  Although he was welcomed back as a hero, many didn't like Kirby's new stories, or his more extreme art style.  I've written about this elsewhere.  Another grump some fans had was that Kirby pretty much did away with any continuity with Steve Englehart's long run on Captain America.   Englehart's run had been marked by some decidedly subversive themes, with Cap even abandoning the Captain America identity for a time, due to his disgust with Nixon-era America.

Kirby's take on Cap was different.  This Captain America would never turn his back on the patriotic symbols that defined him.  That might have seemed corny in 1975-1976.  But the truth is, what Kirby was up to may have been a lot more subversive than anything Englehart had ever imagined.

"Madbomb" starts with Cap and the Falcon being caught in a riot in the streets of New York.  This leads to a briefing by no less than then-Secretary-of-State Henry Kissinger(!).  It seems this riot was set off by a curious bit of technology called a "madbomb" - a device that blankets an area with sonic waves, causing anyone in range to turn into a homicidal maniac.  SHIELD has discovered that whoever is using these weapons has developed one large enough to blanket the entire US.  Dispatched to some remote region of the country, where several SHIELD agents have disappeared, Cap and the Falc find themselves captured by something called The Royalist Forces of America, and forced to participate in brutal gladiatorial games.

The Royalists are a cabal of fabulously wealthy men planning to unravel American democracy, and replace it with an aristocracy - "men born to be served, who live(d) above the common rabble!"led by a grump named Taurey (in case we missed the joke, his partner is named "Heshin").

The gladiatorial games are witnessed by an unruly mob, completely in thrall to a simulated image of a non-existent leader who exhorts them into a frenzy.  They also encounter the selfish, ruthless, and stupid daughter of a Royalist leader, Cheer Chadwick, who provides some exceedingly grim comic relief.

Landing in the midst of all of this is possibly the strangest Kirby story ever published.  "Captain America's Love Affair" is such a bizarre detour it stands out as odd even in the often odd world of Jack Kirby.  It's also one of the best Kirby comics ever published.

Having rounded up the rank-and-file of the Royalists, Cap, Falc, SHIELD and the US army are still searching for the full-size madbomb.  And they've found a clue in the actions of Mason Harding, a brilliant scientist who's been missing for two years, but now seems to be making appearances at an isolated mansion on the east coast.  On a spying mission, Cap discovers the reason for Harding's visits: his daughter Carol, recovering from an unnamed illness, is convalescing at the mansion, where she's kept largely under wraps.  Figuring the most humane way to keep her safe while SHIELD raids the house, he arranges a rendezvous with her on the beach.  This quiet and thoughtful interlude alternates with scenes of solid Kirby panel-busting action as Falcon and SHIELD tear the place apart, leading to Harding's capture and confession (Harding has been blackmailed into developing the madbomb) and, of course, a final confrontation with Taurey and the Royalist leaders.

"Madbomb" has the usual Kirby problems - stilted dialog, corny monologues by Cap and the Falcon (his attempt to write hip lingo for the Falcon is particularly awkward), odd and not always logical plotting.  And when I first re-read it a couple decades ago, I found the notion of the Royalists a bit silly.  Why would anyone want to re-install a European style, 18th century model aristocracy?  Besides, plutocrats have been gaming the American system since Day 1.

To sit here in 2019 and read the "Madbomb" stories, while watching on the news as our own US president, and allies in congress, openly flaunt not only social norms but the very laws that have held our fragile system together all these years... it's well-nigh impossible not to see the shadow of Trump and his hideous children, the Koch brothers attempts to bankroll a system that guarantees only more wealth and privilege for people like themselves, aided and abetted by the Mitch McConnells, Paul Ryans, and Mitt Romneys and all the other 1% clowns, willfully tossing aside the very laws and values their alleged patriotism is supposes to support. It's hard not to see the image of the Trump offspring in Cheer Chadwick, or the fired-up "crowds" at Trump rallies in the chaotic audience of at the Royalists gladiatorial games.

Kirby grew up poor in Jewish ghetto.  A member of "the greatest generation", he served as a scout in WWII.  In later years, he spoke proudly of Leon Klinghoffer, a childhood friend, who stood up to terrorists in the Achille Lauro incident in 1985 (and died for it).  He believed in those values that Cap was supposed to symbolize.  And he understood how easily they could be taken away.  Re-reading "Madbomb" today, I don't find it silly.  I find it all too prescient.

The Atooooooooooommmmmmmmmmic KNIGHTS!

Well that's how it should be pronounced, anyhow.

Despite being forever banished to Marvel's shadow, it's worth knowing that DC actually had begun producing some slick, innovative and exciting comics a few years before Fantastic Four #1 hit the stands.  Characters such as the re-booted Flash and Green Lantern, and team books including The Challengers of the Unknown (Jack Kirby again), the Sea-Devils, the Suicide Squad, and the re-booted Blackhawks all appeared in the late 50's/early 60's and injected some new and interesting blood into the comix world.  

The Atomic Knights ran as a feature in Strange Adventures for 15 issues between mid 1960 and the end of `63.  SA was a science-fiction-based anthology series that began in 1950 and carried on (evolving in a number of unexpected directions) until the early 70's.  It carried several ongoing series characters, of which the Knights is one of the most fondly remembered.

Atomic Knights told the story of Gardner Grayle (Grail? Geddit?), a soldier who awakens from (a coma? suspended animation? an afternoon snooze? We are never told) with a bad case of amnesia, and finds himself being chased through the ruins of civilization by a gang of feral, desperate men.  He soon discovers that, five years previously, the world suffered a full-scale nuclear holocaust, and only pockets of civilization remain, scraping for survival on some saved canned foods (all plant and non homo sapien animal life was snuffed out).  Gardner finds his way to Durvale, one of those pockets of civilization.  He makes some friends - Douglas Herald, a former schoolteacher, Marene, his cute blonde sister, Prof. Bryndon, "one of the last scientists left alive on Earth!", and Wayne and Hollis Hobard, a pair of twin brothers, ex-military, with a fair bit of skills and a shared happy-go-lucky attitude.

He also finds a half-dozen suits of armor, and makes an interesting discovery.  Fallout from the hydrogen bombs has somehow effected the armor, making it partially invulnerable to radiation.  Thus armed, Gardner, Doug, Prof, Wayne, Hollis, and an unauthorized Marene overthrow The Black Baron, a self-appointed local warlord who's been hordeing food and lording it over Durvale, thug-style, abetted by some high-tech weapons, which turn out to be useless against the Knights' armor.

Having set things right in Durvale, the six agree to carry on as The Atomic Knights, bringing Truth, Justice and the American Way to the bombed-out remnants of civilization.  In an interesting twist, the Knights appeared in every third issue of Strange Adventures, and each story was set three months after the previous adventure.




The Atomic Knights was the brainchild of John Broome, one of the original comic book scribes with a record going back to the 40's, and played a major role in developing DC's sci-fi titles, the revived Flash, and was the driving force behind the revived Green Lantern.  He had a wild imagination, possibly second only to Jack Kirby himself.  Some of his more bizarre inspirations in The Atomic Knights included a giant salt monster, demonic creatures that manifested from the mutating mind of a young woman, and a breed of giant dalmatians which ended up becoming the Knights' preferred mounts.  Art was by Murphy Anderson, best known for his classic Superman.  Anderson lacked the dynamism of the Marvel artists, but his clean, handsome characters and pristine linework fit the tone of the series perfectly.

That tone was a positive one.  I suspect Broome was up on his science fiction (editor Julius Schwartz, who'd cut his teeth as an agent to sci-fi authors, certainly was), and much of the series recalls the fairly tame vision of Pat Frank's Alas Babylon (published about a year before the Knights appeared). Other notable sci-fi works of the time that are referenced are John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, and possibly his later The Chrysalids, and Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow.  

 One could hardly expect a DC comic aimed at pre-teens to depict the horrors of a post-nuclear world - and it doesn't.  Yet, for all its sanitization, issues such as lack of medical care and facilities crop up in the stories, and food shortages remain a major plot point throughout the series.  Still, the tone is one of Kennedy-era optimism.  Durvale continues to rebuild and prosper, and the Knights inevitably set things right wherever they go.  One is left with the impression that the Good Guys will prevail and America will rise again, in all its clean-cut glory.

To be sure, the series is dated as hell.  There's not a single non-white face (not even in New Orleans!?!).  And Marene, after the first couple adventures, is forever relegated to staying back in Durvale to take care of the home front, where she spends most of her time worrying about Gardner coming home safely, and wondering when he's gonna get off his Dirk Squarejaw ass and propose to her.  Characterization is minimal to non-existent.  The stories are all short (10-15 pages total), thus making them very compact and to-the-point.  A modern reader may find them very terse.  Still, they're a fun read, a relic of a simpler and more optimistic time, and a good look at comic book sci-fi in the early 60's.

DC has published the entire run of Atomic Knights in a nice slim little volume.  It appears to be getting inflated prices these days, though.  A b&w paperback collection: The Great Disaster includes all of the above, plus some unrelated stories, a complete run of the short-lived Hercules Unbound, and Jack Kirby's one-shot Atlas.

Oh, Baby Baby It's a WEIRDWORLD

Summer 1977 was a good time for fantasy.  Star Wars had fired everyone's imagination, of course.  NBC was preparing to air an animated adaptation of Tolkein's The Hobbit, while animator Ralph Bakshi had earlier that year released the odd Wizards, and was busy at work on an even more ambitious project, Lord of the Rings itself.  A strange game called Dungeons and Dragons was turning up increasingly in toy stores, and getting a fair bit of buzz, though no one seemed to know much about it or how it was actually played.  Meanwhile the sci-fi section of bookstores was groaning with Elric, Conan, and other sword-wielding heroes; Conan still stalked the comics racks, and DC had recently tried a slew of fantasy titles (of which only The Warlord was still in action).  Into this world of elves, dwarves, magicians, swords and monsters, Marvel started giving the heavy push that summer to the upcoming Marvel Premiere #38: "Weirdworld".  

An aside: Marvel Premiere and its sibling title Marvel Spotlight were "tryout" books.  A character or series might get one, or several issues, to see if sales justified giving the series/character their own book.  A few made it.  Many did not.

Being very interested in fantasy anway, I had fully intended on buying the issue, should the opportunity arise.  And, arise it did, one hot night at 7-11.  There it was, on the rack, looking even more awesome than expected - snake-monster looming over a pair of diminutive, elfin figures.  "For those who thrilled to J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, an all-new adventure into EPIC FANTASY!" shouted the cover.  Good enough!

You ever have one of those experiences, where something you thought would probably be good turns out to be ever better than you'd hoped?  So it was with Weirdworld.  That issue of Marvel Premiere immediately became, and remains to this day, one of my favorite comics.  

The story (which is actually titled "The Lord of Tyndall's Quest") tells of Tyndall, an elf - not an Orlando Bloom elf, but rather a small, slender, pointy-eared and childlike figure, who has been sent forth from a community of dwarves - more the Disney variety than the John Rhys Davies kind, I might add - alone, with a sword, into a place called The Region of Shadow, a monster-haunted wilderness, to destroy something called "The Heart of Evil".  Tyndall isn't even sure what the Heart is, or how to destroy it, but he doesn't see a lot of options.  

There, in the skeletal remains of some giant monster, Tyndall finds a large glowing egg, which he assumes is The Heart of Evil.  To his surprise, the egg hatches.  To his even greater surprise, it hatches a full-grown elf girl named Velanna.  Tyndall realizes the whole thing had been a set-up.  It was either intended that he'd kill Velanna, or die in the attempt, and either way, there'd be no more elves (Tyndall and Velanna seem to be the only elves in the world).  Together, he and Velanna set out to find a home for themselves.

They are almost immediately captured by Grithstane, a wizened, evil old wizard.  Grithstane has an elf-girl chained up in his caverns, with whom he wants to make elf-whoopie, but is incapable, since she has no interest in making it with his ancient, decrepit self.  He needs the blood of a dragon, and thus, holding Velanna hostage, sends Tyndall of to Klarn, a floating, ring-shaped island in the sky, to get some.  On Klarn (which happens to be Tyndall's apparent point of origin, but of which he knows nothing), Tyndall fights some troglodytic tribesmen, another elf-girl who changes into a swamp serpent (giant swamp snakes, a sample of which is shown on the issues' cover), and finally a dragon.  Returning to Grithstane's, he finds the captive elf-girl had some dark secrets of her own...

Weirdworld was drawn by Mike Ploog, my favorite 70's Marvel artist.  Ploog did lots of great things, but this may well be my favorite (if it isn't, then his issues of Frankenstein are).  Owing more to Ghastly Graham Ingels and (especially) Will Eisner, Ploog's stuff was pure otherworldy fantasy; elegant, dark, funny and scary - often all at the same time.  It's one of the most beautiful comics Marvel published in the 70's.

The author was Doug Moench.  Moench was one of comics' warhorses in the 70's, starting out writing horror stories for Warren's Creepy and Eerie, then rolling into Marvel where he knocked out a slew of titles, most notably Deathlok and Master of Kung Fu.  He was always reliably good and occasionally excellent (particular note goes to his part in the Batman "Knightfall" cross-over series in the 90's).  Weirdworld was special, though.  Moench really seemed to put his heart into this and it showed.  There was simply nothing else quite like it around at the time.

I loved that comic and read it again and again, and waited fervently, hoping Weirdworld would get spun off into its own series. 

It took awhile.  But about a year or so later, Marvel announced, not a new regular book, but a magazine-size Weirdworld miniseries, to be titled Warriors of the Shadow Realm.  What's more, Warriors was to be a bold experiment, with artwork that was not merely colored line drawings, but actual painted color process.  This held the potential to be spectacular stuff.  One disappointment though; Ploog was no longer working for Marvel.  Drawing chores were to be taken by John Buscema.  Buscema was a fine and legendary artist who'd done some excellent stuff when he first came to Marvel in the late 60's, but by the 70's he was largely hacking it out.  Still, the one-panel sample which appeared in Starlog looked pretty great.

Well, Warriors arrived in the early summer of `79 and, if it wasn't quite the spectacular Marvel had promised (when did that ever happen?), it was still a gorgeous piece of work that looks even better today.  Buscema might have been phoning in Conan et al, but he brought his A-game here.  What's more, he showed a side we'd never seen before.  Despite a few standard Buscema faces (Big John had a limited bag of tricks), the art owed less to Jack Kirby and a lot to Arthur Rackham.  Rudy Nebres' inks brought out the best in it, and Peter Ledger's airbrushed and painted coloring was a wonder to behold.  Warriors had a different feel than Ploog's work, but it was stunning in its own right.  

The story, though much more ambitious than "Tyndall's Quest", still retained the fairy-tale charm that had made the original so special, with Tyndall, Velanna, and their new companion, a cranky, hedonistic dwarf called Mud-butt (if he had a real name, it was never given) moving into a much larger and more dangerous world, and battened by forces (in this case, more evil wizards and demi-gods) way beyond their comprehension.  Adding in features such as a lengthy essay by Moench on the origins and intentions of Weirdworld (in which it was revealed that there had actually been one earlier Weirdworld story, a short-short titled "An Ugly Mirror On Weirdworld", which was written in `73 but did not see print till three years later, when it showed up as filler in Marvel Super Action #1, a b&w mag devoted primarily to reactionary "superhero" The Punisher), behind-the-scenes features and a couple of lengthy and informative articles on fantasy in art, the three issues of Warriors of the Shadow Realm were a real highlight of the summer of `79, and some of the best mags Marvel ever produced.

Despite some good reaction (I guess) and many promises, Weirdworld then lay dormant for nearly three years, before finally reappearing in the pages of Epic Illustrated, Marvel's early 80's attempt to compete with Heavy Metal.  

"The Dragonmasters of Klarn", a 4-part serial, couldn't compete with Warriors for sheer artistic grace - mainly because Marie Severin's inks didn't reproduce well (I've seen shots of the b&w originals and they look terrific, and Marie was one of the all-time greats), and Steve Oliff's paintings just couldn't compete with Peter Ledger's glorious colorfests.  Still, the story maintained the tone of the earlier tales, which was what made them special, and even managed to advance it a bit: Velanna, under the influence of an(other) evil magicians' spell, turns into a cold-hearted bitch, while a hurt and confused Tyndall is forced to finally graduate from brave boy to courageous man, and learns something about himself in the process.  All in all, it was a worthy next chapter.

After that, Weirdwold wasn't seen again for several years.  In 1986, a partially completed first third of a three-part story - "The Weremen of Lord Raven", originally started by Ploog and Moench in 1979, before Warriors of the Shadow Realm, was dusted off.  Pat Broderick worked up the final two installments from Moench's script.  This story pre-dated Warriors, and in fact told of Tyndall and Velanna's first meeting with Mud-butt.  The story was still a winner, but Ploog's art on part 1 was less polished than his other works, and Broderick's work on the remainder of the story lacked the luster of Ploog or Buscema's art.  It was still Weirdworld.  By then Moench had fallen out with Marvel and was over at DC, working on Batman.  Weirdworld as we know it was never seen again.

In the first issue of Warriors, Doug Moench told his own story of the genesis of Weirdworld, which, he says, came to him almost spontaneously, and owed more to the fairy tales of his childhood, and to Walt Disney ("an imaginary, unmade Disney film recalled from childhood - but existing only in my mind") than to Tolkein.   He also recounts the difficulties he had getting those first two stories published and placed.  It's doubtful that many saw "An Ugly Mirror on Weirdworld", or that many Punisher fans would have considered it anything but stupid, so the Marvel Premiere had to have been a labor of love.  It also must have done pretty well, for Marvel to take on such a costly and risky project as Warriors of the Shadow Realm.  Based on the low-profile follow-ups, and long intervals between them, for Weirdworld, I'm guessing Warriors didn't exactly set the comics world on fire.  

That's a shame, but maybe not a surprise.  In Moench's own words, Weirdworld was always "...different... there was no real place for it in the market for which it was written.  it simply did not belong."  And that's probably true.  Certainly it didn't fit the mold art-wise - Ploog or Buscema, it looked like nothing else out there.  Even moreso, it didn't fit the mold character-wise.  Tyndall and Velanna were small, slight, childlike, almost powerless, and hopelessly innocent and naïve.  They didn't have much in common with Conan or Wolverine, after all.  Stephen King once noted that the greatest fantasies are about characters who acquire power.  The lesser ones are about characters who merely wield power.   There's some truth in that, and that's very much the point of Weirdworld.  Tyndall in particular becomes braver, more knowledgeable, and more confident as the stories progress.    That's not what comics fans are used to.  That, and their childlike appearance and demeanor may well have thrown off fans.  And indeed, such characters risk becoming cloying.  That never quite happens, but it was a close call sometimes.  Initially, I found Mud-butt intrusive, but reading the stories now, its clear he brought a necessary edge of cynicism and humor to the proceedings.

 If Weirdworld resembles anything out there in comics-land, its Richard and Wendy Pini's Elfquest, which also combined gorgeous art, fantasy, and childlike-looking characters.  But Elfquest (which started appearing not long after that Marvel Premiere issue - I doubt that it was influenced by Weirdworld, but I'm sure the Pinis were aware of it) is still harder-edged, and far more epic in scope.  Also the Pinis were self-publishing, and thus not at the mercy of a corporate entity with its eye one the bottom line.

Given the growth in popularity of fantasy, and Dungeons and Dragons, throughout the 80's, it's surprising to me that Marvel didn't give Weirdworld another try (apparently head honcho Jim Shooter did meet with the TSR people over a possible D&D comic, but nothing came of it).  Then again, by 1983, Moench had bailed on Marvel, along with many of the other 70's-era gang, and it may simply be that Weirdworld no longer had a champion at the Bullpen.  Perhaps, too, Weirdworld was too much of a personal project for Moench, who had been at loggerheads with Shooter, and Marvel didn't care to risk another lawsuit ala the infamous Howard the Duck debacle.  Or all of the above.  Interestingly, though he's been interviewed a number of times, Moench seems not to have said much of anything about Weirdworld.  Perhaps its lack of acceptance was hurtful to him, or perhaps he simply moved on.

But I suppose,  the story is told.  Weirdworld is ultimately about Tyndall and Velanna's quest to find their place in the world.  And if that isn't quite where it leaves off, the final Weirdworld story does a more mature, wiser and confident Tyndall, who's at least beginning to find answers.

In 2015, Marvel began another series titled Weirdworld.  Alas, it had nothing to with this series.  

Also in 2015, they published a paperback collection, Weirdworld: Warriors of the Shadow Realm, which collects all of the above and most of the extra features from the Warriors issues as well.  It's a nice collection and great to have everything under one cover, but the artwork from Warriors is not well reproduced (smaller than its original print size, and darker), so if you're really interested I recommend picking up the original issues as well (they seem to go for between $5 and $10 apiece).

Ka-Zar, the Confused...

I've always had a soft spot for Ka-Zar, Marvel's Tarzan in Dinosaur-land, ever since I picked up a few issues as a kid.  

Ka-Zar was, as I said above, basically Tarzan.  With a twist.  Instead of darkest Africa, he ran around in The Savage Land, an isolated lost world found in a remote part of Antarctica, with a tropical climate and a population of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, primitive tribesmen, and lost civilizations galore.  Instead of a chimp, Ka-Zar palled around with a sabre-tooth tiger named Zabu.  Okay truth be told, Ka-Zar himself wasn't all that interesting - just your basic macho-muscle-man.  But the dinosaurs, lost civilizations and Zabu were more than enough for me when I was 8/9/10.

In early `81, Ka-Zar the Savage showed up on the racks over at Cosmic Comics, and, soft spot still very much in place, I grabbed it.  Now, I had fully intended on adding Ka-Zar to my list of regular titles, cuz at 14 dinosaurs and a sabre-tooth tiger companion were still reasonable selling points for me.  But by the time I had finished reading ish 1, there was no doubt in my mind.  Because Ka-Zar the Savage was not only quite different from what I'd expected - it was quite different from any other comic I'd ever read.

To explain that, I have to back up a little and clarify what Ka-Zar had been, prior to 1981.  KZ made his bow in X-Men #10 at the beginning of `65, in which the X-Men discover The Savage Land and take KZ for a possible mutant.  He isn't.  But they do find a place full of dinosaurs and neanderthalic cavemen.  KZ initially fights them, then helps them rescue Jean Grey from being sacrificed to the cavemen's Tyrannosaur/god.  It wasn't much of an issue, but it did feature dinosaurs, some great Kirby prehistoric vistas, and the bizarre vision of the X-Men and Tarzan-clone Ka-Zar fighting antediluvean beasties.  As for Ka-Zar, he wasn't much, being mostly irascible and not very bright (most of his dialog consisted of lines like "Ka-Zar powerful! Ka-Zar strong! Ka-Zar mightiest of all!" etc).  After that, he popped up every year or so, in Spider-Man, Daredevil, and The Hulk, and later a single issue of Marvel's first "tryout" book, Marvel Superheroes.  Along the way he was given a back-story: KZ was actually Kevin Plunder, son of a rich British explorer, lost in The Savage Land after the death of his father, having grown up in the wild - all very Tarzan.  It was also revealed that he was, in fact, intelligent and articulate - he just liked playing the role of a moronic savage.  Okay....

In 1970, with Marvel expanding, KZ got a part in Astonishing Tales, a new "split" book (each issue contained one half-length story) which he shared with Dr. Doom, Marvel's #1 baddie ("now in his own series!").  His run there lasted 20 issues, with Dr. Doom being pushed out after issue 7.  He then spun off into his own title, Ka-Zar, Lord of the Hidden Jungle which also lasted 20 issues.  Just for good measure, he also had a series in the b&w magazine title, Savage Tales.  These stories were marked by a more "mature" approach (translation - they had naked wimmen in them), but were otherwise mostly interchangeable with the stories running in AT and KZ.  All of them suffered from the same problems:  Ka-Zar had a fun setting, but wasn't a particularly interesting character himself.  An even bigger problem: all of them suffered a revolving door of artists/writers.  Some strong work was done by Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, Barry Smith and (especially) Russ Heath.  Unfortunately, much uninspiring work was done by Herb Trimpe and John Buscema, who seemed uninterested, and, towards the end, some very ugly stuff by Val Mayerik.  Story-wise, few seemed to know what to do with Ka-Zar, or care much.  The stories remained pastiches of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, with Ka-Zar encountering a slew of lost civilizations, while fending off greedy scumbags who came to the Savage Land bent on exploitation.  Periodically, when ideas ran out, they'd spirit him back to NYC, where he'd spend most of his time complaining about the loathesomeness of urban society.  It was often fun to read, but never classic stuff,

After Lord of the Hidden Jungle bit the dust, KZ wasn't heard from much for several years, though he reappeared in a very memorable X-Men (#114-116) story set in the Savage Land (all in all, though, his role was small and the Savage Land setting was actually the more compelling element).  


So, into all of this comes Ka-Zar the Savage.

The ish opens with Ka-Zar watching dispassionately while a pack of wolves brings down a wooly rhino.  Instead of intervening, he ponders the futility of life in the Savage Land.  This in and-of-itself is hardly a typical opening.  Hearing a scream, he runs off to help (that's more like it), and finds Shanna (the She-Devil) (a minor, near-forgotten character from Marvel's brief attempt to net more female readers, Shanna was an NYC veterinarian who'd turned her back on civilization and gone full jungle queen - first in Africa and then later in the Savage Land - she'd made several guest appearances in the Savage Tales stories), recuing a dinowhatsis from a tar pit.  Ka-Zar lends his shoulder, but all the while debates Shanna on the point of the whole thing, since the little dino will doubtless get eaten by a predator soon anyway.  Huh?? This was not exactly expected hero behavior.  

Shanna and Ka-Zar proceed to have a debate about their jungle lifestyles, and whether they're simply afraid to join civilization.  Shanna ends the debate by throwing mud in KZ's face and letting him chase her into the jungle, where she quite willingly makes love to him.

Six pages, a third of the way in, and so far we've had philosophical debates and surprisingly explicit (though by no means graphic) sex.  This comic was not following the normal script.

Ka-Zar heads off the next morning, in search of Zabu, who's gone missing (!!!).  He soon finds himself in a previously unknown part of the Savage Land, where he finds a woman being molested by a bunch of primitive goons in animal skins (now things are returning to normal).  However, instead of rushing in to help, he seriously considers minding his own business (WHAAAT??).  He changes his tune once he gets a good look at her, and, since she's a hot number, he decides to rescue her.  This kind of caddish behavior is definitely not the KZ we know and love.

The hot chick turns out to be Leanne, Queen of Zarhan, an "ivory metropolis of glistening crystal towers".  Leanne it seems is out looking for her pet sabre-tooth, Felina, who's also gone missing.  Figuring this might be a lead to Zabu, Ka-Zar agrees to help, even though Leanne tells him to his face that he's an imbecile.  Ka-Zar and Leanne go looking for the village of the tribesmen, while KZ tries unsuccessfully to get Leanne to give him some.  They find Felina about to be sacrificed, but a last-minute intervention by Zabu (and then Ka-Zar, who's still more interested in getting laid) saves the day.  Seeing that Zabu and Felina are actually a couple (thus explaining their recent absence), Ka-Zar pledges his undying love to Leanne.  She accepts, being as he's her hero now and all.

But the trip to Zarhan does not go well.  Leanne, put off by KZ's barbarian ways, dumps him at the gate, telling him he could never fit into her ordered society.  A disgusted Ka-Zar and a sated Zabu walk off into the distance.

Superficially there was a lot of standard Ka-Zar fare here.  Lost civilization, primitive straw-men for KZ to knock over, dinosaur fight.  But Ka-Zar's indifferent and cynical attitude, the sexual byplay, and the unexpected twist (Leanne might be a bitch, but she's actually right about KZ) was something very different indeed.

The new Ka-Zar was helmed by Bruce Jones, a relative newcomer to Marvel.  Jones wasn't a superhero guy.  His main project was helming Pacific Comics, a short-lived San Diego based publisher - Jones was publisher, editor-in-chief, and head writer on the EC homages Twisted Tales and Alien Worlds.  His writings tended to feature adult emotional and sexual situations not usually seen in comics at the time.  Marvel, indifferent to a title they were only publishing in order to preserve copywright, gave him a free hand.  He used it.

The biggest change was Ka-Zar himself.  Formerly mostly void of personality, he now had a distinctly unusual one for a superhero.  Bored, sarcastic, and cynical, he seemed tired and burned-out - on himself, the Savage Land, the clichés of his old storylines.  He'd wade into the inevitable dinosaur battles making wiseass remarks about the senselessness of the whole thing.

The centerpiece, though, was the relationship between KZ and Shanna.  Endlessly debating, bickering, one-upping one another, blatantly sexual and decidedly tempestuous (allegedly Jones drew inspiration from his actual relationship - must've been a difficult one).  

Jones upended the series, setting most of it not in the Savage Land, but in Pangea, another lost world, adjoin the Savage Land.  Zabu came dangerously close to disappearing (Jones had a tendency to forget about him, and had to shoehorn him in after the editor reminded him that KZ had a loyal sidekick).  Still, his appearances were usually memorable and, by way of making up to any frustrated Zabu fans, he even got a back-up series, "Tales Of Zabu", with surprisingly good art by the erratic Val Mayerik, which was pure retro and a lot of fun.

The stories poked fun at themselves and at comics in general, abounded with pop-cultural references, and took decidedly odd turns.  One story arc involved discovering the all-too-real origins of Dante's Inferno.  One issue was devoted to analyzing a nightmare.  Another involved the use of hallucinogenics, and diverted into film noir fantasy, with Shanna turning into a springbok(!).  Another dealt with the death of Tongah, KZ's long-time bosom buddy from back in the 70's.  It might be stretching things to call Tongah a beloved character, but his demise was genuinely tragic.

For all that, Ka-Zar the Savage's heyday was fairly short.  After the first dozen or so issues, things began to get a bit stale.  The constant bickering between Shanna and Ka-Zar was starting to become tiresome.  Even moreso was their constant two-timing.  Ka-Zar fell stupidly into relationships with Leanne (see above), a bird-woman, and Ramona, an explorer who turned out to be working for AIM (a longtime Marvel villainous organization) and shot him in the head.  In other words, KZ perpetually thought with his dick.

Unfortunately, Shanna's response to all of this wasn't exactly what one would expect from a survival-trained jungle adventurer.  She promptly turned around and rubbed in KZ's face her affairs with Dherk, Buth, and Mele.  The fact that Dherk was an android, Buth a bird-man, and Mele a monkey-tailed chimp-man was even more unflattering.  It made Shanna seem like an angst-ridden teenage girl.  Her portrayal reached a nadir in the 9-issue long aforementioned "Ka-Zar gets shot in the head" story, in which, thinking KZ dead, Shanna becomes a raving lunatic, then catatonic.  This story arc was overlong, and unpleasant as hell, though I confess the portrayal of guest star Spider-Man as a manipulative, sexually obsessed creep was certainly original.

A bigger problem was the decline of the artwork.  The first dozen issues were nicely drawn by Brent Anderson, a young, Neal Adams-influenced artist.  By issue 15, Armando Gill took over inks, and his linework began to overwhelm Anderson's.  Soon after he left the title.  His replacement, Ron Frenz, turned in work that rushed and indifferent looking.  Frenz was eventually replaced by several other newcomers, all of whom turned in crude and unattractive work.  Jones left the series after issue 27, with Mike Carlin taking over.  The stories reverted to routine stuff, though Ka-Zar's bad attitude was retained.

In it's final issues, some attempt to return to the quirky storytelling was made.  Issue #32 interrupts a fairly run-of-the-mill adventure with Ka-Zar's musings about his upcoming domestic life with Shanna - depicted by the great Marie Severin in a series of comic vignettes based on I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver, and The Honeymooners.  

The final issue (#34) also took an unexpected turn.  Following another routine adventure, a strange epilogue features Ka-Zar being chased through the jungle by some decidedly familiar silhouetted figures, among them The Silver Surfer and Jack Kirby's Devil Dinosaur.  He finds himself chased into a great hall, filled with characters from cancelled titles, who shout "Welcome to the land of cancelled heroes!"  Breaking the fourth wall, Ka-Zar tells us that he Will Be Back.

He was, though it was many years later, and the innovations of Jones' run had been wiped out.

Ka-Zar the Savage wasn't a great comic, but it was a genuinely surprising and innovative one, extremely well-written at it best, and certainly the best title Ka-Zar ever had or likely ever will have.  Who'd have thought Marvel's most unusual and unpredictable title in the early 80's would be the story of Tarzan in Dinosaur-land?  

The first five issues of Ka-Zar the Savage have been collected in a trade paperback, Ka-Zar: Savage Dawn.  It's unlikely there will be further volumes.  Back issues are, however, widely available and cheap.  The earlier stories are sporadically collected (the Astonishing Tales run and some of the rest) in two volumes of Marvel Masterworks: Ka-Zar. 

R.I.P. Stan Lee

Obviously, for a blog with such a Marvel slant (so far), I have to say a few words about Stan Lee.

It's not so easy, because Lee's a complicated figure in the whole history of the four-color world.  How does one lionize a villain?  Or criticize a hero?  Because Lee was both, depending on who you ask.  Or what your perspective is.

I've stolen a good chunk of this entry form obituaries by Douglas Wolk in Vanity Fair, and Mark Peters in Slate, in part because they said very well what I want to say, in part cause I'm lazy and wanted to get this entry up in a timely manner.  I've done this without permission, just so's ya know.  

As a kid in the 70's, like most kids in the 70's, I just figured Stan was The Man - the creative genius behind the whole madcap Marvel Universe.  I thought so, we thought so, because, basically, Marvel seemed to be telling us so.  Sort of.  Quoting from Douglas Wolk:

Stan Lee’s name appears somewhere in every superhero book Marvel Comics has published in the past 50-plus years, and in the never-ending parade of movies and TV shows that has come from them. In the 60s, it was lettered in bold type in every story’s credits, almost always giving Lee top billing—no matter whether he had written it, scripted it (there’s a difference), or edited it. Later, “Stan Lee Presents” appeared on the title page of every issue, whether it had passed in front of his eyes at any point or (more likely) not. Later still, it appeared in tiny type in each issue’s indicia; in his final years, he was listed as “Chairman Emeritus.”

Lee’s public persona was perpetually enthusiastic about Marvel’s readers, as well. To read Marvel’s comics, he insisted, was to be part of a cultural moment: he addressed readers as “effendi,“ “frantic ones,” “true believers.” The grandiosity of Lee’s tone was a gag, and one his audience was in on. He could shift from pomp to self-mockery in a heartbeat, as on the cover of 1964’s X-Men #8: “Never have the X-Men fought a foe as unstoppable as Unus! Never have the X-Men come so close to being split up! (And never have you read such a boastful blurb!)” When readers started pointing out errors in Marvel’s stories, he invented something better than a prize: the “no-prize,” awarded to fans who could explain why an apparent mistake wasn’t really a mistake. (It was an ornate envelope with nothing inside it.)

The auspicious branding made Lee his own pop-culture caricature long before he began his string of Marvel movie cameos. In the public eye, Lee, who died Monday at age 95, was generally perceived as the creator of Marvel’s best-known characters, the man who wrote the first decade’s worth of their adventures—injecting wild inventiveness and human depth into the stodgy old superhero genre. 

Or, as Mark Peters puts it:

To this day, Stan is Marvel to many people, and his charm and humor are among the reasons why Marvel is beloved. Without Stan’s style, would Marvel have proven such a durable brand? We’ll never know, but I doubt it. There have been many creators with prodigious imaginations in the history of comics, but there’s never been a salesman like Stan Lee.

True indeed.  But as Volk continues:

That’s not wrong in every way, but it’s definitely not correct. Lee’s work in his golden decade of 1961-1971 really was brilliant and groundbreaking—just not quite in the ways most people think.

Or, as Mark Peter put it in Slate:

Lee reflects misinformation about what the legend did and didn’t do back in the Marvel heyday of the 1960s. In death as in life, Lee gets too much credit for creating and not enough credit for all the other important jobs he did on behalf of Marvel and geek culture in general.

In truth, as true comix/Marvel aficionados know, and the general publik doth not, it wasn't Stan Lee who did the creative heavy lifting.  Volk again:

Most of Marvel’s best-known characters from that decade were created by those artists, with Lee or on their own. (Lee noted, for instance, that Doctor Strange was Ditko’s invention.) To imagine that what we read in Fantastic Four or Iron Man was Lee’s brainchild, illustrated to order by the artists, is flat-out wrong

Yet, Stan was not a villain, and he did contribute to this marvelous mess that is the Marvel milieu, and to comic books in general. Volk again:

...it’s also misleading to think of it as some other creator’s lone genius poured onto the page, then defaced by Lee’s corny gags.

In truth, and Lee made no particular attempt to hide this much, the comics that bore his name were increasingly, after the first couple years probably almost entirely (and certainly by the late 60's entirely) plotted and paced by the artistes, particularly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (who did manage to get a "plotted by" credit).  By perhaps `66 on, it's likely Lee was doing little more than making suggestions for story ideas.

Volk again:

He didn’t pretend otherwise, either. A 1966 “Bullpen Bulletins” page explains: “Many of our merry Marvel artists are also talented story men in their own right! For example, all Stan has to do with the pros like JACK ‘KING’ KIRBY, dazzling DON HECK, and darlin’ DICK AYERS is give them the germ of an idea, and they make up all the details as they go along, drawing and plotting out the story. Then, our leader simply takes the finished drawings and adds all the dialogue and captions!”

The proof is in the pudding.  Look at any issue of the FF after Kirby left, or any issue of Spidey after Ditko left. Lee simply did not have the imagination to create the wild, exciting sci-fi ideas that fueled Kirby's best stories in the FF, Thor, and Capt. America, nor the colorful villains that Ditko minted for Spidey.  Conversely, Kirby and Ditko carried their imaginations and themes forward into their subsequent work.

No, Stan's greatest creation was Stan Lee: 

But of all the characters with whom Lee is associated, his greatest—and the only one he created entirely on his own—was “Stan Lee”: an egomaniac who thought it was funny to pretend he was an egomaniac, a carnival barker who actually does have something great behind the curtain. Artist John Romita, who worked with Lee on Daredevil and Spider-Man, put it nicely in a 1998 interview: “He’s a con man, but he did deliver.”

Too, let us add something about Lee's wordsmithing.  Volk:

Word balloons and expository narration clog every page of his comics; everyone seems to be hammily speechifying all the time. The voice of Lee’s omniscient captions is weirdly overfamiliar, like a seatmate on a train who’s about to pitch you a timeshare.

... the more time I’ve spent looking at Lee’s language, the more I’ve come to admire and linger over it. It’s overwrought, over the top, in love with its own cleverness—and why shouldn’t it be? Anyone could have called the force that the Silver Surfer commands “cosmic power.” It took Lee, with his ear for grandiose, poetic speech, to invert that to “the Power Cosmic.” (Unless Kirby came up with that bit—though it sounds a lot more like Lee’s diction.)

In the end...Peters again:

In death as in life, Lee gets too much credit for creating and not enough credit for everything else he did.

But … just because the artists were doing most of the work doesn’t mean they were doing all the work. As Hellboy creator Mike Mignola put it on Twitter: “You can debate forever who really created what—Stan or Jack or Steve—but the truth is it was some magic combination of those guys.” Longtime comics writer J.M. DeMatteis voiced a similar sentiment: “And while we’re raising a glass to Stan, let’s raise a glass to the genius of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Together those three men reshaped our popular culture and fired our collective imagination. ’Nuff Said!”

The complexities of the Kirby-Lee collaboration in particular have been pored over for decades. The latest word will come in Stuf’ Said, a special book-sized edition of Jack Kirby Collector. Not even the most ardent Kirbyite or Ditkohead argues that Lee had no part in the genesis and development of Drs. Doom and Strange and the rest. 

The truth about Stan Lee—a frustrated, middle-aged, would-be novelist who, just when he was ready to quit the business, helped reshape superheroes and pop culture—really is amazing and fantastic. Lee was equally skilled at making the sausage of monthly comics and selling that sausage as sensational (which it often was). His cameos are such a treasure even DC got in on the fun. He truly was a legend and real-life superhero—and a co-creator. That should be enough.

But I'll give the last word to Mark Evanier, comics writer, expert, historian, and as much as Kirby partisan as you could hope to find:

His achievements in the world of comic books were awesome. I happen to think they're not exactly what a lot of people think but I don't doubt their size and endurance. I knew him since 1970, worked for him a few times, talked with him at length and fielded an awful lot of phone calls from him asking me questions about comic books he worked on. He really did have a bad memory, if not when he first started telling people he had a bad memory, then certainly later on as he turned more and more into the Stan Lee character he'd created for himself.