Here … on this lonely little world … I have found what men call … conscience!
—Silver Surfer, in Fantastic Four #50, May 1966
Jack Lieber died on February 26, 1968.
Stan’s recollection of the event, in Excelsior!, read thus:
An unexpected phone call from my brother Larry told us, in a voice trembling with sorrow, that my father, who never remarried and had been living in Manhattan all these years, had died unexpectedly.1
Lee went on to say that the death inspired him and his family to move back into Manhattan from Hewlett Harbor, especially since the now-eighteen-year-old JC was eager to live in the city.
And that is the entirety of the discussion in Lee’s memoir of Jack Lieber’s death. It seems to be all Lee has ever said on the record about the topic. It’s reasonable to imagine that his father’s death had a powerful effect on him. Certainly, Jack Lieber’s passing could not have come at a more eventful and pivotal year in Lee’s life, not to mention in the histories of the United States, and the world in general, for that matter. At eighty-one years old, Jack’s death might have been unexpected—indicating that his health had probably been stable—but, especially by the standards of 1968, eighty-one was by no means a short life.
It’s hard to know what, if anything, to make of Lee’s decision to return to Manhattan, where his father had been residing and where Larry still lived, in the wake of their father’s passing. Certainly, had his daughter simply wished to move into Manhattan after a life in the suburbs, it would have been fairly simple for Stan and Joan to provide her with a nice apartment in a secure building in a safe neighborhood.
Perhaps it was simply Lee’s increasing workload that made it make sense for all three of them to return to Manhattan. Stan Lee’s world in the late ’60s and into the early ’70s was astonishingly event-filled. That kind of busyness can divide someone’s attention into a thousand pieces—and the sudden loss of a loved one added to that could distract even the most focused person, perhaps lead him to not notice things that you’d think he would have …
… such as Jack Kirby’s feelings about the Silver Surfer.
During their careers, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had each created or cocreated hundreds, if not thousands, of characters. In the course of their collaborations, they came up with dozens, if not hundreds. Issues of ownership and financial value aside, it’s interesting to try to figure out which characters might reflect more of one or the other creator’s personalities and sensibilities. Is Reed Richards more the wordy Stan, or is he Jack, whose head was always in the clouds? Is the Thing more Kirby because his affect is that of a Lower East Side street kid, or is he more Stan because of his endless need to crack wise?
With many of their most famous creations, the history of who actually came up with the initial idea is fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. Strangely enough, one of the few characters Lee has, from the beginning, unambiguously credited as being created by Kirby is the Silver Surfer. Nonetheless, from the beginning, there was something about the character that strongly appealed to Lee. He enjoyed writing melodramatic dialogue for this ultrapowerful naïf from beyond. And he found the Surfer to be an appealing vehicle through which to express his personal philosophy.
Indeed, as Lee told Neal Conan in the 1968 WBAI radio interview, the Silver Surfer
doesn’t have to have that surfboard, and he doesn’t have to be silver.… The important thing is that he’s a character who represents something, and stands for something.… And there is a lot of philosophy, and a lot of moralizing, and there’s something you can sink your teeth into if you feel like reading something with meat and possibly, even with a message.2
Earlier in the program, he had told Conan, about speaking at colleges:
These college kids are terrific. And I’m always amazed at the questions they ask, always on a philosophical plane.… I have to become something of an amateur philosopher, myself, in order to have these little lectures.3
And in early 1970, Lee told Mike Bourne in Changes magazine:
As I realized that more and more adults were reading our books and people of college age (which is tremendously gratifying to me), I felt that now I can finally start saying some of the things I would like to say … about drugs and about crime and about Vietnam and about colleges and about things that mean something.4
Later on, in the same interview, he confided to Bourne:
I like to moralize [in the comics stories] as much as possible. I’m always a little nervous and hope I’m not overdoing it and turning people off. But maybe I’m naturally half a preacher at heart. I find I enjoy it. And it’s funny, because it seems that people enjoy it.5
So if he hadn’t yet written the Great American (or any) Novel, Lee was feeling creatively ambitious enough to want to somehow leave a record of his thoughts and feelings about the human condition. The Silver Surfer called out to him as the perfect vehicle for those thoughts and feelings.
Of the Surfer, he told Bourne that his instruction to John Buscema for how to draw the Surfer was:
The closer you come to Jesus Christ, the better.6
As Spurgeon and Raphael have noted:
Lee made the Silver Surfer a poet, a street-corner Romeo tossing out pained commentary on mankind and his own miserable fate … Lee had taken a character with godlike abilities and made him noble but tragic.7
If Lee’s affinity for the character wasn’t clear in the Fantastic Four Surfer stories—where it could be Kirby’s concept of the Surfer as much as Lee’s that readers experienced—then as early as the Hulk feature in 1967’s Tales to Astonish #93, drawn by Marie Severin, it had become clear that Lee felt a special connection to the Surfer. And the Lee-Kirby Surfer backup from the same year’s Fantastic Four Annual #5—the first solo Surfer tale (perhaps a prototype for a Surfer series)—seemed to be setting the stage for an eventual Surfer series. And who else but Kirby—the acknowledged creator of the character—would be the natural partner with Lee to chronicle the Surfer’s philosophy-tinged adventures?
And yet the assignment to draw the Silver Surfer series did not go to Jack Kirby. It went to John Buscema. Why it did remains a mystery.
Kirby’s friend and biographer Mark Evanier offers several possible explanations, all of which make sense.8
For one thing, Evanier feels, it’s possible that Lee did mention to Kirby that he wanted to do a Surfer series, but briefly and offhandedly and, when he got no strong response from Kirby (who might have only been paying partial attention), assumed that Kirby didn’t care who would be drawing it. It’s also possible that Lee might have figured that, with so many characters to his credit, why would Kirby especially care about the Surfer?
Evanier also hypothesized that it’s possible that the schedule-aware editor in Lee didn’t want to take Kirby from any of his regular assignments by giving him another that would require him to jettison a feature that was already running smoothly.
It’s also possible that it might have been a case of yet another Lee and Kirby disagreement over story or character direction, where Lee prevailed because he was the editor. Both Lee and Kirby sensed the Surfer was something special, and each somehow identified with this literal tabula rasa of a character, but their ideas for the character’s origins and direction diverged, and Lee decided that he didn’t want to compromise on this one.
For whatever reason, Lee launched a Surfer series with Buscema that Kirby only found out about, according to Evanier, thanks to an offhand mention of it from an unnamed Marvel staffer.9
The miscommunication on this topic between the two men was apparently so great that Kirby—who, according to Sean Howe, was anticipating involvement in an eventual Silver Surfer series10—had even begun work on an FF story line that would explain the Surfer’s origin and was forced to abandon it. The Surfer story that did appear in the likely period where the origin would have gone was presented in 1968’s Fantastic Four #74–77. It involved the Surfer, fleeing Galactus, who wants him back as herald, and his eventual reuniting with Galactus, the Surfer now pledged to keep that force of nature from consuming planets populated by sentient beings. In effect, Kirby was tasked with creating a prequel—a tale of a noble but doomed attempt to escape one’s fate—to the Surfer series that he was not to draw. The final issue of the FF story line even contained a plug for Silver Surfer #1, on sale at the same time.
It’s tempting for readers to sometimes ascribe more import to certain creative decisions than they warrant. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar—and a comics assignment is just another job. But in this case, it does seem that not getting to do the Surfer series was perceived as a significant slight by Kirby, taking a fair amount of wind out of his sails. As Evanier said, “Kirby especially didn’t like that he hadn’t been given first refusal on doing the new [Silver Surfer] book. His idea had been taken from him in every possible sense.”11
In retrospect, Kirby’s declining interest in providing innovative visual storytelling can be seen by this point in the pages of that FF story line. While filled with action and soap opera to spare, the overall feel of those issues, and certainly the ones that followed, gives the sense that old ideas are being recycled—recycled well and powerfully, to be sure—but lacking the aura of novelty that earlier FF stories had possessed.
For his part, Lee filled the four-part FF story with copious amounts of engaging dialogue and captions, as well as with witty footnotes and asides, making, for most readers, a seamless continuation of the saga that had started with the title’s first issue. What the four issues lacked in novelty—and they only “lacked” compared to previous issues—was made up for by the deft wielding of craft by Lee, Kirby, and inker Joe Sinnott.
So, whether through carelessness, ruthlessness, or plain miscommunication, Silver Surfer would debut in mid-1968, in the middle of Lee’s and Marvel’s evolutions. The details of the character’s origin story, as envisioned in the issue by Lee, altered what little was known of the Surfer’s backstory in an effort to make him more relatable and sympathetic. He was established now as a humanoid alien who joined Galactus to save his homeworld of Zenn-La, and he had, from the beginning, kept Galactus from devouring planets with sentient populations. This was a blatant revision of the unique role Earth had played in the Surfer-Galactus relationship. Concern for the planet was what had made the Surfer rebel against his master, Galactus. The Surfer realized it had been wrong to lead Galactus to sentient-inhabited worlds in the past.
Kirby’s concept of the Surfer as a stoic being of pure energy—as opposed to Lee’s vision of him as a troubled, tragic humanoid alien granted cosmic power and a silver coating—would likely have been too much at odds for a compromise to have been reached if the two creators had discussed it.
And it did seem that Lee genuinely had big ideas he wanted to express, even if they boiled down to permutations of the Golden Rule. Maybe it was the sense that this was indeed his chance—perhaps the only one he’d ever have—to make his mark on the world as something other than a word-slinger in a disdained branch of publishing. His father was gone, having left no discernible mark in the world. That was a fate to be avoided. Lee was now in his forties. He had not written novels or screenplays. The greatness he longed for, the literary achievement he dreamed about, despite his undeniable impact on the overall culture, was still out of reach. Perhaps, somehow, the Surfer would give him, for lack of a better word, class.
After all, crowds of college students—students from prestigious universities—wanted to hear what Stan Lee had to say. Whether many had much interest in his thoughts beyond the hour or so that his lecture and Q&A sessions lasted is hard to judge. But the fact is, they did turn out to hear him, and many of them did ask him about the deeper meanings of his comics. Apparently, all this attention did get him thinking, and either he solidified thoughts and ideas he’d been mulling for a while, or he decided he needed to come up with answers that were more than wisecracks—and Silver Surfer would be his comic book outlet for expressing his deeper views on life.
One of the clearer examples of Lee’s usage of the Surfer comic as a podium can be found in issue #5’s story—cover-dated April 1969—“And Who Shall Mourn for Him?” In it, a courageous African American physicist, Al B. Harper, brings the Surfer—knocked unconscious trying to free himself from the Galactus-imposed barrier that keeps him from traveling into space—to his home to recover. Later, he explains to the revived hero that he did it because he “knows how it feels to be pushed around.” Though Lee portrayed Harper as a guy who just happened to be black, with that remark, the writer briefly hinted at a difficult past the character had had to overcome. At the story’s climax, Harper sacrifices his life to save Earth.
In a letter about the story, in issue #7’s letters page, a reader complained that
there has been a recent trend by Marvel to put the Negros [sic] in the spotlight.… when you start your own civil rights protest, well, I’m against that.… For months you’ve been knocking “us” (you know who I mean).… I’m not a racist, just a concerned Marvelite who doesn’t want his favorite comic company to be ruined.
An editor doesn’t run such a letter unless he or she has a specific response in mind. And, indeed, the response from the editor—if not written by Lee, then undoubtedly read and approved by him—could as easily have come from the Surfer himself:
But such matters as racism and equality do concern us … We think that many people … have too long turned their backs or averted their eyes to the more unpleasant things that are going on every day. Maybe we felt we could do something … to change things just a bit for the better.
Lee’s point was clear. Marvel Comics—Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics—were not going to ignore “the more unpleasant things” that were “going on every day.”
On a certain level, Lee could be accused of taking himself too seriously, not to mention risking alienating segments of the buying public. By the same token, though, this was new territory for Lee and for comics, so serious might well have been the appropriate approach to take. Choosing to run that letter and then giving the response that was given was no small step. But what was it a step toward? That would remain to be seen.
It definitely was, though, another step away from an editorial stance that played it safe. Was Lee here expressing a genuine, personal point of view, one that—because it was the right thing to do—he didn’t care who liked it or not? Or was he just putting forth views that he thought would go over well with his college audiences? It would take an extremely cynical evaluation to find no sincerity in his words at all.
Was showing in the comics some measure of his true feelings the right step for Stan Lee to take? Well, eight years earlier, Marvel nearly ceased to exist. Eight years in the future—who knows?—it might be just a memory. There were no guarantees for anybody. Why not let the Surfer be a vehicle for Lee to express his personal beliefs? If he couldn’t take a risk like that now, when would he ever be able to?
In the entertainment world of 1968, Marvel Comics was still the proverbial small pond, even if Stan Lee was getting to be a bigger fish in it with each passing day. But outside that pond, there were still plenty of people who, even when they saw the value of associating with Stan Lee and the Marvel phenomenon, took neither of them particularly seriously.
For instance, Lee made one of his first national TV appearances on the May 30, 1968, episode of The Dick Cavett Show, a New York–based talk and variety program on the ABC network. On it, regular guest Pat McCormick had facetiously remarked, “One thing I like about those comic books is that they’re easy to turn while you’re sucking your thumb with the other hand.”
Lee seemed to let the insult slide off his back, simply parrying with, “Can I change seats?” But later on, when Cavett asked McCormick, “Have you ever seen a copy of Mighty Thor, Pat?” Lee cut in with, “It has two-syllable words, so you might have a little difficulty.”
Interestingly, the famously intellectual Cavett himself treated Lee with a reasonable amount of respect and seemed to have some familiarity with the comics. He and Stan had this interesting exchange:
CAVETT: Do you ever worry about the amount of power you have with that gigantic circulation?
LEE: Well, no, not really. We kind of enjoy it. I like to think, if somebody has to have power over the young people today, and a degree of power, it might as well be us.… We’re trying to do whatever we can to make things a little better.
So here was Stan Lee, holding his own against Harvard-educated Pat McCormick—a well-known comic and comedy writer, and a large, physically imposing individual—and making sparkling conversation with Yale alumnus Dick Cavett, while getting across the message that Marvel comics contain philosophy, satire, and commentary that mark them as more than mere kids’ stuff. And all this while also answering questions from fellow guest Diana Sands (who had recently starred in an acclaimed production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan) about Little Lulu.
Lee was in the big leagues now. The Cavett appearance wasn’t exchanging quips with Sol Brodsky and Marie Severin. It wasn’t even arm wrestling over plot points and ethical undertones with Kirby and Ditko. And it wasn’t even negotiating around Martin Goodman’s moods and whims. Those were all done in the familiar confines of the Marvel offices. And even the smartest college students he would pontificate to were still kids, still in awe of seeing Stan Lee in person.
No, this was a whole different thing. This was a whole different Stan. Or at least, an evolved one, moving onto a national and world stage. But there seemed to be more to it than simply the pursuit of money and fame. It was evident in what he wrote in the comics stories themselves. It was evident in what he was writing in the Bullpen Bulletins. And it was evident in the unusually proprietary interest he took in the Silver Surfer’s development as a character.
Something was happening to Stan Lee. Maybe it was yet another midlife crisis. In 1968, he was forty-five years old. He had transformed a reasonably steady, but somewhat lackluster, career into a small amount of celebrity. While Marvel comics readers had some vision in their mind of who Stan Lee was, the general public—like Pat McCormick—didn’t really know or care. If his silly comic books were a little more sophisticated than some of the others on the stands, that still wasn’t a big deal and didn’t even register with most people.
And yet these comics had given him a chance to elevate himself—as well as the medium in which he had toiled for nearly three decades—at least somewhat into the category of “things to be taken seriously.” Now was his chance to … well, to do what, exactly?
Even by the standards of the ’60s, a decade famous for change, 1968 was a head-spinning year. The country was buffeted by assassinations, riots, civil unrest, seismic cultural shifts, and the ongoing war in Vietnam. But closer to home for Stan Lee, besides the death of Jack Lieber, things were shifting in ways both personal and professional.
In the world of business, the late ’60s were characterized by corporate acquisitions, where conglomerates would add to their portfolios, with charm-bracelet randomness, companies that had often little or no synergy with each other. National Comics had been recently purchased by Warner Communications, which had been purchased by Kinney Parking, which was originally a funeral home and limousine rental operator. As part of the new order at DC, where sales were softening, veteran artist Carmine Infantino, who had been designing the company’s covers, was chosen to run the editorial department. Infantino would bring a sensibility to DC’s comics that was more visually driven than had been that of past regimes, which were run by editors who were not artists.
Around the time of this changing of the guard, a number of DC’s longtime freelance writers and artists decided that it was appropriate to politely demand that they be given some basic benefits, such as health insurance and pensions, despite the fact that they were not technically staff members. Before too long, most of these creators found that not only were their demands not met, but they were also no longer receiving regular assignments, while younger freelancers started showing up in the credits. Insiders differ on whether this was a calculated reprisal by management or simply a response by the company to changing audience tastes. Either way, it was made quite clear to the veterans—and anyone else in the comics business—that comic book creators were expendable and replaceable, no matter how many years of high-quality work they had provided.
It was also plain to industry observers that Martin Goodman was shopping Magazine Management around. And in large part because of the success of Marvel’s comics, Goodman had found a buyer for his entire publishing operation who was willing to pay what Goodman felt was a fair price. Relatively young—he was sixty years old in 1968—Goodman had been in publishing for close to forty years. Ads in trade journals bragging of Marvel’s high sales were thinly veiled For Sale signs. With the glamour of Marvel’s comics leading the way, the company was ripe for picking. To sell, Martin had a demand that seemed to have been as important to him as the money offered. He wanted to ensure a future for his son, Chip, who had already been working at the company. Martin wanted Chip to succeed him as publisher.
So when Perfect Film & Chemical Corporation offered $14 million and agreed to make Chip publisher after Martin himself would serve in that role for another four years, Goodman took the offer. Part of the assurance that Perfect Film (later to rename itself Cadence Industries) wanted in order to make the deal was the guarantee of the continuing services of the one comic book professional whom they considered irreplaceable: Stan Lee.
According to Lee, Goodman made him verbal promises—including of a grant of “warrants” in the company that would set him up for life—to induce him to sign a multiyear contract. Not insisting that the promise regarding the warrants be put in writing, Lee went ahead and signed the contract, anyway. Beyond a pay raise, the promises would never be kept.12
Was Lee naïve to sign? He has said, in his memoir, that his close friend, businessman Marshall Finck (whose wife, Edith, was said, in her 2017 obituary, to have been the model for the FF’s Susan Storm), advised Lee that he could use his leverage to get Goodman to sign off on just about anything he wanted. And yet he didn’t push Martin anywhere near as hard as he could have. That could certainly be seen as naïve, as well as one of the pitfalls of working for a relative. By the same token, not that long ago, Goodman’s entire comics division had been on the brink of extinction. To have not just survived that period, but to have thrived in the ensuing years, must have seemed like some kind of miracle to Lee. Would asking for more have seemed greedy? Would it be tempting fate?
To add another twist to the entire situation, Goodman himself had signed an agreement to stay on for four years as publisher. He would have the supervisory power he’d had before, but none of the risk. The company would be owned by a conglomerate but would still seem like the same family operation. The number of Goodman relatives employed by Magazine Management would stay exactly the same as it had been before Perfect Film & Chemical bought the company. Day-to-day life would be much the same as it had been.
Except it wouldn’t.
Lee was now in unexplored territory. He had security for three (or by some accounts five) years—but then what? By the time the contract expired, he’d be pushing fifty. What then? Anything could happen by the end of that contract—and there would be no relative to backstop him then.
And what would become of his audience—including the college students? They still seemed to love Marvel’s comics. But there were now underground comics (or “comix”) that were exploring topics that Lee and Marvel couldn’t—and wouldn’t, even if they could, if simply because they didn’t understand them. It was one thing to be admired by rock bands and filmmakers, but there seemed to be a secret youth language, something truly underground, that was clearly something that a trendy beard or stylish toupee couldn’t help you translate. Publications like R. Crumb’s Zap Comix, which debuted in early 1968, were appearing, with the potential to change everything. It wasn’t just the freedom to portray more explicit sex and violence that those comics possessed. It was an insider’s familiarity with the ever-evolving youth culture, a culture that was impenetrable to most people over thirty.
Perhaps nothing symbolized the conflicting currents at Marvel—the pull to explore new areas versus the imperative to not rock the boat—so much as the departure of Flo Steinberg. A genuinely beloved, highly competent employee, Steinberg had also become a part of the Marvel mythos, thanks to Stan’s creation in letters pages and Bullpen Bulletins of Fabulous Flo. Fans cared as much about her as they did any of the artists and writers that Lee had made familiar names. Equally significant, Steinberg counted among her social circle the very underground cartoonists and downtown tastemakers that a company like Marvel needed to stay current. And yet, reportedly over a request for a five-dollar-a-week raise, Goodman chose to let her go, his logic being that her position in the company structure mandated she could not earn over a certain set amount, no matter how important she was to Marvel’s functioning and image.
And so, in the September 1968 Bullpen Bulletins, it was announced that
with heavy hearts, we announce the departure of one of the Bullpen’s most popular pixies—Fabulous FLO STEINBERG who bids us a fond farewell to seek her fortunes in another field of endeavor.
In other words, she was so annoyed at being denied the raise, she left without having a job to go to.
In a conciliatory gesture, the Bulletins would announce in the February 1969 dated comics that
Fabulous FLO STEINBERG, our former Gal Friday, has a great new job at Rockefeller Center, not too far from our own offices here—and wants to thank her many friends out there in Marveldom for their letters and good wishes.
Flo’s replacement was a woman named Robin Green, who would go on to write a 1971 article for Rolling Stone magazine about her time at Marvel and would notably go on to write and produce TV shows such as Northern Exposure, The Sopranos, and Blue Bloods. In her Rolling Stone article, she said of Stan:
Because he worked so hard, tried so hard, was so enthusiastic, you’d want to make it easier for him. He’s got a one-man show going, he won’t delegate, which is why he works so hard.13
Interestingly, while Lee would have numerous assistants over the years (Green only worked for him for about six months in 1968), he would never again grant any of them the pivotal role in the imagined bullpen that he had given to Steinberg.
And so, in this work environment that was in transition from family business to corporate behemoth, Stan Lee found himself in a situation that was at once secure and yet precarious. There were two things that seemed certain, though.
One, of course, was that the comic books had to keep coming out. As a matter of fact, even more comic books had to come out. Several months prior to selling the company, Goodman had negotiated a better distribution deal with Independent News. He was now free to increase his comics line, which had been gradually growing all along. And before too long, Cadence would own Curtis Circulation and be free of Independent altogether. Lee was now overseeing more than twenty titles a month, as well as experimenting with different formats, such as a Mad magazine–sized comic magazine staring Spider-Man.14
The other thing that seemed certain was that he had to keep advancing the Stan Lee brand. The new owners’ needs and the public’s tastes and desires were impossible to predict. Hell, the entire world seemed to be changing before his eyes. The change all seemed to be coming from kids—teens, twentysomethings—many of whom were inclined, at least for now, to think that Stan Lee had something to offer them. But how long could that last? Besides, having a plan B had long been part of his career strategy. Now that he was some kind of celebrity, why not see where it could lead?
Stepping beyond the bounds of the comics pages, Lee took a tentative step into an unfamiliar but logical seat in the fall of 1968: television talk show host. In that period, sometime after the summer’s Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions, but probably before the election of Richard Nixon as president, Lee was the host of a pilot for a political / current events TV talk show. The pilot focused on a discussion of, among other things, the Columbia University student protests of April and May of ’68, as well as the August conventions, and alludes to the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Panel-style topical talk shows were popular on TV in that era, running the gamut from the erudite intellectualism of David Susskind and William F. Buckley Jr. to aggressive provocateurs like Alan Burke and Joe Pyne. In the pilot, Lee seemed to be leaning more toward the first type, positioning himself as what he was: a concerned, aware suburban dad who was trying to understand just what it was “these kids today” wanted.
He had addressed that topic to some degree in Thor #154, which was on sale in April, in which the Thunder God chides a group of hippies for dropping out of society:
’Tis not by dropping out—but by plunging in—into the maelstrom of life itself—that thou shalt find thy wisdom! There be causes to espouse!! There be battles to be won! There be glory and grandeur all about thee—if thou wilt but see!
As he said of the sequence on the Cavett show:
At the time the little page was written [likely in February], it was a good little sermon. Today, fortunately, I don’t think it is as necessary. Youth today seem to be so much more activist, which I think is a healthy thing. This business of dropping out seems to have gone by the boards for the most part.
It was a sign of the times that Lee’s observations about “youth today” could change so significantly over just a few months, from the February writing of the dialogue to the late May Cavett show.
The “youth” that were on the pilot with him were definitely not the dropping-out types. The show (viewable on YouTube), was a panel-type program, shot in black-and-white.15 If it had a title, that has been lost to history. On the show, Lee sported his full beard and a genuine-looking toupee. Forty-five years old, he could pass for a decade younger. (Asked about the pilot in 2017,16 Lee had no memory of it at all, even after viewing it, so could shed no light on how it came to be.)
Clearly, someone had in mind that articulate, quick-witted, affable, and charming Stan Lee could be the host and moderator of a current events discussion show. The show, it seems, would cover topics having almost nothing to do with comics, aside from the fact of them being the source of Lee’s celebrity and credentials. Based on the pilot, the show was intended to cover events that would probably be of interest to Marvel’s audience, especially its older members, but would also appeal to anyone with an interest in society and politics, perhaps even Lee’s fellow confused parents.
Lee’s guests on the show were Jeff Shero, editor of the underground newspaper Rat Subterranean News; Chuck Skoro, managing editor of the Columbia University student newspaper, Columbia Daily Spectator; and Skip Weiss, editor of The Daltonian, the student newspaper of the elite Upper East Side Dalton School. With all present being editors, Lee was the only one not helming a newspaper of some kind. But he wasn’t trying to compete with his guests’ journalistic specialization. He was, for the most part, playing the “everyman” role. The conversation, if anything, was representative of countless conversations of the era, held around countless dinner tables.
Here’s how Lee, in his opening remarks on the pilot, described his and the show’s mission:
I’m Stan Lee. I’ve been writing stories for the younger generation for thirty years, and … I have received about two to three hundred fan letters every day—probably as much as the Beatles. I spend most of my time reading the mail, and quite a lot of time answering it.
I think I’ve learned a lot about what younger people think. More importantly, I think I’ve learned a lot about what young people are. Today, we’ve come to a time in history when there definitely is a generation gap. It seems to us that perhaps anything that can be done to bridge this gap, anything that can be done to help present the point of view of these young people … would be … beneficial …
Today’s show will cover topics that we feel are uppermost in the minds of young people.
So the aim of the pilot (and, we can assume, of any ongoing series that would have emerged from it), was to give a voice to young people—with Stan representing the older generation.
Like many talk shows—and many dinner-table conversations—the show’s back-and-forth was wide-ranging and free-flowing, with many of the panelists’ contributions turning into speeches or pronouncements. And yet it’s possible to hear, in Lee’s moderate moderating, the same voice that informs the Bullpen Bulletins and Stan’s Soapboxes, with the notable lack, for the most part, of Lee’s trademark wisecracks. The show is remarkably devoid of humor, a sign of the times, perhaps, but also of Lee’s needing to have the show—and himself—taken seriously. He might also have been concerned that the panelists might have perceived more than token attempts at humor by Lee as him—representing the Establishment—not taking them seriously.
Some excerpts from the episode give a sense of the generational rift. For instance, in this exchange between Lee and Rat’s Shero about putting across messages in print:
STAN LEE: If I were editing an underground newspaper … and I had some sort of a message … I would want to present it in a way that would give me the widest possible audience. Now, the magazines that I edit have all sorts of subliminal messages … but we don’t do anything … that would turn any segment of the readership away from us.
JEFF SHERO: I think that’s an old-fashioned view, because it assumes that people have power.… The only people that have any effect on where the country is going … are people that have committed, and people who sit at the top and have the reins of power. It’s only young people that are committed to changing society, and so the Rat is attempting to talk to young people.
Shero was the most radical—and most talkative—of the bunch, the one, perhaps, most connected to the self-described “counterculture.” The other two were students, but Shero was a working journalist, who had started the edgy Rat that spring.
Lee attempted to challenge Shero’s radical notions:
JEFF SHERO: Law and order means keeping down black people.
STAN LEE: Isn’t it possible that law and order could mean law and order? People feel there is too much crime in the nation today and they would like law and order. Why does this necessarily have to be a racist remark?
Shero, needless to say, was not convinced.
In the most heated exchange of the show, Lee and Shero demonstrated just how far apart their sensibilities were:
STAN LEE: I think I’m a member of the Establishment [and] I find that at root, there isn’t that much difference between what the Establishment wants and what you young people want.
JEFF SHERO: I think that’s absolutely wrong. The Establishment doesn’t want to end the [Vietnam] war. You talk about the corporations—
STAN LEE: Well, wait a minute. How can you possibly make a remark like that?
JEFF SHERO: How can I make that remark? Because the war has been escalating consistently over the last five years—because the peace candidates, who had the popular following, were eliminated from the election.
Here, Lee—intentionally or not—failed to take the bait of Shero’s loaded remark about the “peace candidates” being “eliminated from the election.” The peace candidates were Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. Shero was implying that the former was somehow not allowed to win the Democratic nomination by “the Establishment,” and, more darkly, that the latter’s assassination was committed at the behest of that Establishment.
During the pilot, although he would never do this in the pages of the comics, Lee took a definitive stand on the Vietnam War:
STAN LEE: I must admit, I would never defend the war in Vietnam. I think it’s an utterly indefensible war. I think it’s a ridiculous war. I think I agree with the word you used before, I think it’s an obscene war.… But I think you’re being equally obscene when you say that the Establishment … doesn’t want the war to end, I think that’s just a ridiculous statement.
JEFF SHERO: What concrete steps do you see?
STAN LEE: Well, isn’t it possible that, just as the young people today are floundering … that the Establishment is [also] confused … I think the only way we can be led out, and certainly the young people are the only hope for the world, but only through a legitimate legal manner. I don’t think anarchy is the answer.
Shero and Lee then agreed that it would be difficult for America to just abruptly leave Vietnam, although Shero attributed that to more nefarious reasons than did Lee:
JEFF SHERO: The problem with the politicians that run the country [the United States] is, are they going to recognize the legitimacy of the National Liberation Front? And are they going to turn over control to them?… Bringing about peace in Vietnam means turning over the country to those people. And so it’s a contradiction that the politicians can’t deal with.
Shero even called Lee’s entire career into question:
JEFF SHERO: You edit Marvel comic books, and if your private opinions were reflected in Marvel comic books, you’d be in a hot spot. Your comics, for instance, build up war and the excitement of battle … and you’re saying you’re against—
STAN LEE: We present war in some stories, but we don’t try to make it fun.
JEFF SHERO: Some really do kind of exalt it.
Lee’s attempts at bringing a “realistic” adult point of view were constantly challenged during the broadcast, here by Columbia’s Skoro:
STAN LEE: My sympathies, really, are with the liberals, but the minute the liberals get too much power … or become too much of a threat, the nation will swing toward conservatism, and the very things I think you’re trying to accomplish are apt to be crushed.
CHUCK SKORO: Liberal is sort of a dirty word in the radical movement. To call someone a liberal, if you happen to be a member of SDS, is like really calling him a nasty thing.… A liberal is a person who saw kids in the streets getting beaten savagely [outside the then-recent Democratic convention], and said, “Well,… they deserved it.”
STAN LEE: I thought of a liberal, obviously, in a different way.… To be a liberal is almost to be a conservative, by your definition.
Shero, in a 2016 Facebook message to historian Sean Howe, recalled about the video that “it was shot as a pilot for a Stan Lee show, but they said he let me talk too much and didn’t express his opinions enough … so the show was a no go.” (Who the “they” Shero refers to was, is unknown. In the pre-cable, pre-internet days of 1968, it’s likely that would mean a production or syndication company hoping to sell such a show to independent TV stations, such as New York’s WPIX or WOR.)
The problems with the pilot that Shero cited don’t seem like they’d necessarily have been insurmountable. Lee didn’t seem hesitant to counter his guests’ remarks, although his statements—like theirs—did seem to regularly devolve into vague, albeit profound-sounding, jargonizing. By this point, though, Lee had had lots of experience verbally sparring with college audiences. It’s not inconceivable that he could have learned to further polish his style for an ongoing TV show.
It’s harder to imagine, though, that he’d have been comfortable having to live with the consequences—financial and personal—of the likely alienation of large segments of his comics-reading audience that would result from his regularly and consistently taking even mild stands on the issues of the day, much less espousing an all-out condemnation of the Vietnam War.
That he did make the effort to do such a show indicates a willingness by Lee to try to redefine himself or at least to stretch the possibilities of what his ever-developing position in the culture could be. Concern over what to do with his newfound celebrity, and with his seemingly genuine concern for where his society was going, marked Lee as more than simply the overseer of a line of comic books. But who and what he would evolve into was yet to be seen.
Shero, today known as Jeffrey Shero Nightbyrd, has stayed true to his countercultural roots and writes of them on his website. Charles Skoro died in 2016 at age sixty-eight, having spent a career first as chairman of the Economics Department at Boise State University in his native Idaho, and then as campus minister for Saint Paul’s Catholic Student Center on the university campus and as a deacon at Our Lady of the Rosary Parish. Skip Weiss’s life story and career are unknown.
For his part, Stan Lee would eventually host TV shows that made it to the air, but never again would he attempt to do so outside his popular culture / entertainment comfort zone. It was a limit that he would rarely step beyond.
Indeed, in art, as in life, real and metaphorical limits—and the struggle against them—would come to define Lee’s career.
In the 1966 Lee-Kirby Galactus Trilogy, the Silver Surfer’s punishment for doing the right thing—turning against his master in order to save the Earth—was to be banished forever to Earth and the skies surrounding it. An invisible barrier now kept him from realizing his full potential to experience the boundless freedom of space. In his subsequent appearances after that, he bemoaned being trapped on “the mad, orbiting prison which men call Earth,” as he would refer to the planet in the August 1968–dated Fantastic Four #77. The same month, in Silver Surfer #1, by Lee and John Buscema (with inks by Joe Sinnott), the Surfer lamented that
trapped upon this world of madness … stand I! How much longer am I destined to endure a fate I cannot even comprehend?
So strongly did Lee feel about the Silver Surfer that, for the next two decades, he mandated that he would be the only writer allowed to script the Surfer’s adventures. And for those two decades, the Surfer would remain imprisoned on Earth. His potential would be limited—though within those constraints, he would see and achieve much. And yet, he would always yearn for what he imagined were the endless possibilities of a larger—an infinite—field on which to play.
Perhaps this straining against limitations was the part of the appeal to both Lee and Kirby of the character, why both so closely identified with him. The Surfer’s greatest challenge was not other superpowered beings or tormented interpersonal relationships, though he had both. It was the limits placed upon him, against which he endlessly struggled—and which Lee chose not to remove.
Lee and Kirby both felt limited to, and trapped in, not just the comic book business but, specifically, Marvel Comics. Each man, in his own way, saw his career hemmed in by forces seemingly beyond his control. For each of them, the comic book business felt like a confining, albeit comfortable, prison. They were the biggest fish in a pond that—compared to movies, TV, and novels—seemed tiny. Their fame and fortune, as well as their creative achievements, could only go so far.
Like the Surfer, they each explored and exploited their limited realm as best they could. Like the Surfer, they longed to discover and conquer new worlds, to be free of the ups and downs of comics, of the fickle moods of their employer and their audience. Their struggles became the Surfer’s struggles, and his theirs.
But who was their Galactus? Who was, in real life, keeping them from freedom, from reaching their potential? Or were the limits self-imposed? Were they simply afraid of taking a risk?
Lee’s efforts to break free of those limitations included projects like the talk show pilot. In the coming years, he would test his boundaries both within Marvel—experimenting with different formats and types of subject matter—as well as outside its confines. But could he ever completely leave?
For his part, Jack Kirby, in early 1969, moved his family from Long Island to Los Angeles, spurred largely by his daughter’s need to live in a dry climate. Even three thousand miles away, though, he was still in Marvel’s orbit, still bound by invisible barriers.
But Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom, commemorating the Children of Israel’s escape from bondage, was approaching. And while Moses wasn’t coming to the Kirbys’ family seder, someone almost as good was.
His name was Carmine Infantino.