I have a lot of e-mail this morning about the documentary just mentioned, and it's being debated in many crannies of Ye Olde Internet. Of those who think it was biased or unfair, about half seem to think it bent too heavily in favor of Stan Lee and about half think it leaned too far towards Jack Kirby. I'm not even sure what I think but I was greatly amused by this. A person I don't know at all, and who I suspect is hiding behind a bogus handle, wrote me angrily that I was too critical of Stan Lee. Among other things, he wrote…
Nowhere in the show do you say Stan was important. Nowhere do you admit that without both Stan and Jack, the Marvel Universe would never have existed.
It's usually a waste of time with these people but just for the heck of it, I wrote him back and, first of all, reminded him that I was interviewed for, like, forty minutes. The producers picked out which six or seven sentences of mine would get on the air out of hundreds I said in front of their cameras. "You don't know what I said that they didn't use," I told him and then I pointed out —
Near the beginning of the show, you hear an unidentified voice say, "If you didn't have Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the right place at the right time, we wouldn't be talking about Marvel Comics today." That's me.
They lifted the audio of something I said and put it over a photo of Stan and Jack, which is fine. I thought what I wrote would cause the guy to write back to me and say something like, "Oh, sorry." Instead, what I received was…
You criticized Stan for not defending Kirby more but you didn't have the guts to say that on camera.
I am reminded of a time one of my college professors was debating some point with a student who didn't want to listen and only wanted to insist over and over again that he was right and everybody else in the whole friggin' world was wrong. The prof said, "It's like arguing with a hamster."