I will continue to celebrate Stan Lee's legacy in comic books (and more) with this series, The Life and Times of Stan Lee.

Generally speaking, the two most notable ways to write a comic book are the "Full Script Method" and the "Marvel Method."

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In the full script method, a writer will write out a comic book script somewhat similar to a film screenplay, describing each panel for the artist to then draw. Some writers, like Alan Moore, get extremely detailed in what they want to have drawn on each panel. Here is a Moore script page from The Killing Joke, which he did with artist Brian Bolland...

The writer would then add dialogue to the finished pages (sometimes the writer would have already noted the dialogue that they are thinking of for the panels, but not always).

Then there is the Marvel Method, which involves the writer either delivering a general plot for the comic book issue to the artist, the writer and artist collaborating on a general plot for the issue or the artist coming up with the plot by themselves. These general plots can be all over the place in detail. They could consist of a written plot synopsis or it could be delivered verbally. The artist would then layout the pages for the story based on the plot and then the writer would add dialogue to the finished pages.

As you can easily see, the artist is obviously doing a whole lot more of the aspects of the comic that people traditionally associate with the "writing" of a comic book in the Marvel Method. They are the ones who figure out how to lay out a given plot as they draw the comic book. They might know that the issue involves Spider-Man fighting against Doctor Octopus over a weapon that Doctor Octopus stole from the Army, but the artist has to figure out how to go about having that theft and fight actually occur.

Here's the thing, though, that method was literally how Jack Kirby had been doing comic books since the 1940s! For years, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon worked together in a comic book partnership, where they would put out a series of comic books together. First they worked at Timely Comics and when Martin Goodman reneged on royalty payments that he promised them over their hit comic book creation, Captain America, they moved to National Comics (now DC Comics) where they were some of the first comic book creators popular enough that they actually had their names put on to the covers of the books to promote the fact that the comic in question was a Simon and Kirby comic book.

After World War II, the pair continued to work together for other comic book companies. They were essentially a modern day packaging studio. A comic book company could have their entire comic book line put out by Simon and Kirby and they knew they were in good hands. The two produced so many comic books that they tended to have a bit of an assembly line approach. Since Kirby could draw so much faster than Simon, the approach tended to be that Kirby would plot out his comic books (and sometimes help Simon plot out his comics) and then Kirby would draw his issues, with Simon later scripting Kirby's books and inking Kirby's books (Simon might have also occasionally co-plotted with Kirby on Kirby's books).

When they added more artists, obviously other artists would also ink Kirby and Simon (who still drew his own comic books, as well, just not at the same pace as Kirby).

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So when Jack Kirby came to Marvel in the late 1950s, that's just how he did comic books. If you were lucky enough to have Jack Kirby doing comic books for you, that's how he would work. He would plot and draw the comic book and then someone else would script them. However, Kirby came to Marvel at a low point in his career. He had to leave National/DC over a dispute with his editor, Jack Schiff, and the comic book industry in general was not in good shape. So when he went to work at this new company, he would not do the plots for all of his comics.

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Once at Marvel, Kirby began to collaborate with Stan Lee on plots for Marvel's then-most popular series of books, the Marvel Monster comics.

Collaborating, though, in this context mostly just meant Lee discussing the story with Kirby. Kirby would be laying the issues out all by himself. In fact, he did a number of anthology stories for Marvel where he even scripted himself.

Around this same time, Stan Lee realized that Steve Ditko, a relatively new hire for Marvel in the late 1950s, could also be relied on to lay out a story by himself. So Lee began to work in the "Marvel Method" with Ditko, as well. There it seems pretty clear that Ditko and Lee were definitely collaborating on the plots. With Kirby, it is difficult to even know for sure that Lee was talking to Kirby about the plots of those old monster comics. It is a possibility that Kirby was plotting the stuff all by himself and then Lee (and other writers) were just adding dialogue later. With Ditko, though, Ditko has been open about the fact that he and Stan collaborated on plots back then.

Lee liked Ditko's ideas so much that he ended up giving Ditko his own comic book titles, Amazing Adult Fantasy, because Ditko's stories would always be overshadowed by Kirby's more popular monster stories in the anthologies (if you have Jack Kirby available, he's going to be your cover artist, ya know? So Ditko's stories were always back-ups).

These were more Twilight Zone-esqe stories.

Okay, so Kirby was doing his own thing, Ditko was doing his own thing but the other artists at Marvel were still working under the traditional full script method.

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In the early 1960s, Marvel transitioned to superhero titles. The same writing format continued, with Lee working full script with some writers and just plots with Kirby and Ditko. In the early days of the Fantastic Four, it is again unclear just how much input Lee had in the plots. From what we know from other artists around them, it seems like Lee did at least do story conferences with Kirby about Fantastic Four plots in the early days of the Fantastic Four and Ditko was clear that Lee would do story conferences with him on plots of the early Spider-Man stories.

RELATED: How Stan Lee Fought To Keep Spider-Man An 'Everyman'

There would be certain books where Lee would plot a comic and then his brother, Larry Lieber, would actually script the book.

That is how both Thor and Iron Man were created...

The issue there, though, is what role did Jack Kirby play in those plots? Kirby drew Thor's first appearance and Kirby did the cover for Iron Man's first appearance, with Don Heck drawing the comic itself. Did Lee plot the story with Kirby first? Did Kirby come up with the idea first and then plotted it out with Lee? These are the sort of things that we will probably never know (Kirby's role in the creation of Iron Man, in particular, is very much up in the air. Heck credited Kirby with designing the armor, as the cover came before Heck drew the story, but did Kirby also work with Lee on the plotting of the issue? It is hard to tell 60 years later).

Obviously, eventually Kirby and Ditko began to just do their own plots on their books without Lee's direct input, with Lee coming aboard later to dialogue the stories. That probably came a bit sooner for Kirby than it did for Ditko, as, again, Kirby was used to doing that sort of thing for years while Ditko was not.

Around 1962/1963, fans were noticing a big difference between the comic books with Stan Lee dialogue and Kirby/Ditko plots and the comic books that were plotted and scripted by guys like Larry Lieber and Robert Bernstein and drawn by Don Heck, Dick Ayers and Stan Goldberg (who was drawing Marvel's teen humor comics). And the fans wanted the former a lot more than the latter.

So Lee got rid of those writers and began doing all of those books himself, with those artists all moving over to the "Marvel Method" as well (which was a pretty crazy thing for all of them to get used to at once). It changed Marvel for decades.

Lee then did nearly all of Marvel's output in this format until he finally started passing some titles off to writers like Roy Thomas and Denny O'Neill in 1965 and 1966.

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In his deposition in the Kirby Family's lawsuit against Marvel, John Romita did perhaps the best description of the change from full script to Marvel Method.

On the 1950s full script style:

It was a shooting script similar to a film shooting script. It was a script with a title and a certain amount of pages allocated and they would say page 1, panel 1, the man walks through the door of the building and tells people “good morning everyone,” that kind of thing. There are three people in the room. They give you — they gave you directions on what is appearing. Then they had a caption at the top nine times out of ten which said “early one morning,” something like that, “next day,” and then there were balloons to the characters. So I would have to decide on the size of the panels, depending on what was going on, where to place the captions and the balloons to the people, the dialogue balloons, and allocate the space for the illustration to explain what was happening in the story, to describe it.

On the "Marvel Method":

Stan and I would get together in a room and say, okay, the villain is going to be The Lizard and The Lizard is going to turn into The Lizard on page 3. He is a doctor, a one-armed doctor, and he turns into The Lizard and his family is kidnapped and he is now tearing up the city trying to find his family. That’s about all we would get. And then I would have to do the nuts and bolts sequential between every episode — every little thing that happens you have to tie them together and make them sensible, so the artist’s problem -I was terrified because I had always worked with a script. This was the first time I was deciding what was going to go on the splash, what was going to go on page 2, what was going to go on page 3. It was very difficult for me, very hard, but it turned out to be the greatest thing for the industry and for me, because the comic — the comic medium had been a script first and visual second and this made it visual first and script second, which was probably the greatest innovation, completely done for expediency sake. Had nothing to do with anything except expedience. They didn’t — he didn’t have time to write the scripts. So he was feeding plots to artists to keep them busy temporarily. At first he used to say “I will send you a script in two days, so start the story,” and it ended up being the entire story would be verbally dictated over the phone or in a personal interview with the artist.

This is the point where the "Marvel Method" became synonymous with Stan Lee, as suddenly Stan Lee was seemingly writing every Marvel Comic book. Even the fans of the era realized that that there had to be something up with that and so Lee was open (well, as open as Stan Lee could get) with how the "Marvel Method" worked and that is how the "Marvel Method" became famous. In the 1960s Annuals, there were even a number of back-up stories that showed the "Marvel Method" at work.

The most fascinating of these stories was one written and drawn by Jack Kirby that showed a "typical" Lee/Kirby story conference, which is interesting because by this point in time, Lee and Kirby really were no longer doing story conferences. So this is more Kirby's version of what the two of them used to do, which does lend credence to the idea that Lee did, at one point, work on plots with Kirby for the books that they did together...

Lee was famous for how animated he would get when he plotted out a story. Generally speaking, these parody stories are important because when people are making fun of others, they tend to be a bit more believable as to what is actually going on. For instance, if person X says that person Y used to do action Z, that would be one thing. We could believe or not believe it. Now, if person X makes fun of person Y for doing action Z, then that tends to be a lot more believable, as you typically don't poke fun at people for stuff they don't actually do. Therefore, these parodies of Marvel story conferences are very valuable historically.

By the end of the 1960s, fans naturally thought of Stan Lee when they thought of this method of writing comic books and it has stuck ever since.

I'm sure you all have a lot of things that you'd like to see me cover regarding Stan Lee, so if you have any ideas, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com