Do or Do Not.

[1] Please don’t think I’m leaving out Kirby and Ditko and the rest of the artists who worked with Stan on those books in the 60′s and 70′s. Stan himself freely admits that he’d usually toss off the initial beginnings of character ideas and the artists would do all of the work on the visuals, meaning they had as much to do with the character creation as Stan did. Anyone who knows me knows I would not disrespect the role of the artists in this process–but it’s Stan’s birthday, so he gets the focus. [2] Most of the general population’s images of superheroes as hyper-inflated Boy Scouts who call civilians “citizen,” spout cornball dialogue and generally exhibit all the depth of the paper they’re printed on are based on comics and other media representations from the 1940s and 50s. That’s a stereotype that hasn’t been valid for almost half a century, yet still persists because most people don’t read comics…in no small part because that stereotype still persists. That particular catch-22 really, really gets my Superman Underoos in a bunch. Grr. [3] Not counting someone like Kevin Smith, who started in other media and then came to comics after earning his fame/notoriety elsewhere.