Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and thirty-first installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the weekly three legends.

NOTE: If the CSBG Twitter page hits 11,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow the CSBG Twitter page!

COMIC LEGEND:

Stan Lee apologized for an issue of Avengers within the issue of Avengers itself.

STATUS:

Basically True

I do a regular featured called From a Different Point of View. In the Avengers edition of the feature, Eileen Gonzalez and I chat about issues of the Avengers, starting with the first issue and going from there. Anyhow, just the other day, we spotlighted Avengers #11.

The issue suggests that the Avengers are going to fight Spider-Man...

But in reality, it turned out that they fought a Spider-Man ROBOT created by Kang to infiltrate and then destroy the Avengers from within...

The Avengers, though, had JUST fallen for, like, this EXACT scam, so they were wary...

So the Spider-Man robot used his back-up plan, to pretend to know where a missing Iron Man was...

He leads them to a temple that has been outfitted to be a big trap. He does really well, but somehow the REAL Spider-Man shows up. Which, of course, makes no sense. Spidey then defeats the robot (amusingly enough, he does so by essentially just turning the robot off)...

And the real Spidey then uses his webbing to create a parachute and he just lets the wind take him away without ever actually interacting with the Avengers...

Crazy stuff, right?

Well, here's the thing. You may or may not be familiar with the concept of the "Marvel Method" approach to comic book writing. If you're not familiar with it, the idea is that someone comes up with a plot and then the artist draws a comic book based on that plot and then the scripter comes in and adds the dialogue to the finished pages. That's the THEORY. In practice, though, it was a lot messier than that.

First off, while Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were famous for how good they were at writing comics, that was a lot to expect from other artists, who had been working from finished scripts their entire careers up until this point. Suddenly, they had to be writers as well as artists. It is a lot to ask of these guys.

That's what happened in late 1963/early 1964 when Marvel went almost entirely to a Marvel Method approach for all of their books, with Editor-in-Chief Stan Lee scripting over plots drawn by the artists. Ostensibly, Lee was meant to provide the plots for the artists, but in practice, he would put off as much plotting as he could (it's obviously hard to come up with plots for that many different comic books at once). So he would really encourage the artists to come up with their own plots.

The problem there is that Lee would then complain if he didn't like their plots and make them make changes. Occasionally, he would even go public with his displeasure! A notable example of this was Avengers #11. In the letter column of the issue, Lee pointed out that originally, the comic book was going to just be about the Avengers fighting a Spider-Man robot before Lee felt that that would have been a cop-out, so they added in the real Spider-Man's out of nowhere appearance and hence you get a Spider-Man/Spider-Man robot fight!

Clearly, Lee had Heck (who had joined Avengers with #9) plot out the issue and then got irked at the story after it was almost finished (as Lee could not have been surprised at it not being the real Spider-Man if he had been the one who plotted the issue), leading to Heck having to do a new ending and Lee then apologizing to the readers over what they almost saw.

That's got to be really difficult for an artist to deal with, right? You have to come up with the story yourself, but you're working with your boss who can just jettison pages whenever he feels like it (if Lee was willing to do that sort of thing to Jack Kirby, you better believe he would do it to Don Heck all of the time).

Check out some other entertainment and sports legends from Legends Revealed:

1. Did Back to the Future Always End With “To Be Continued…”?

2. Did Patti LaBelle Really Not Know What “Lady Marmalade” Was About?

3. Was The Simpsons’ Famous Opening Credits Created to Save on Animation Time?

4. Did Barbie Once Come With a Weight Loss Advice Book That Simply Read “Don’t Eat”?

Check back later on Saturday for part 2 of this week's legends!

And remember, if you have a legend that you're curious about, drop me a line at either brianc@cbr.com or cronb01@aol.com!