1 Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, ed. Dan Wakefield (New York: Delacorte, 2012).
2 Mark Alexander, Lee and Kirby: The Wonder Years, ed. John Morrow (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows, 2012).
3 Greg Rowland, “Steve Ditko,” HiLobrow, November 2, 2009, http://
4 Stan Lee, interview with the author, October 24, 2006.
5 Blake Bell, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2008), 15.
6 Craig Yoe, ed., The Art of Ditko, with an introduction by Stan Lee (San Diego: IDW, 2013), 54.
7 Stan Lee, interview with the author, March 7, 2017.
8 Ibid.
9 Stan Lee and George Mair, Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (New York: Fireside, 2002), 10, 17.
10 “Stan Lee on Realism in the World of Comic Heroes,” NPR, Morning Edition, December 27, 2006, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6684820.
11 Ibid.
12 Steve Chapman, “Who Is the Newest, Most Breath-Taking, Most Sensational Super-Hero of All…?,” Harvard Crimson, December 3, 1975, https://
13 Larry Lieber, interview with the author, December 16, 2016.
14 Steve Ditko, “The Silent Self-Deceivers,” The Comics, 2012.
15 Stan Lee, Origins of Marvel Comics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 133.
16 Ibid., 135.
17 Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003), 100–101.
18 Ditko, “The Silent Self-Deceivers.”
19 Steve Ditko, “Tsk! Tsk!,” The Comics!, July 1999.
20 Steve Ditko, “A Mini-History Part 2—Amazing Fantasy #15,” The Comics!, vol 2, #10, 2001.
21 Lee and Mair, Excelsior!
22 Tom DeFalco, Comic Creators on Spider-Man (London: Titan Books, 2004), 13–14.
23 Mark Evanier, interview with the author, October 19, 2017.
24 Steve Ditko, “Roislecxe,” in The Avenging Mind (Bellingham, WA: SD Publishing, 2008), 8–9.
25 Ditko, Avenging Mind, 8–27; Ditko’s rebuttal to Lee’s recollections and opinions in Excelsior! and elsewhere.
26 Raphael and Spurgeon, Stan Lee, 101.
27 Ira Wolfman, “Stan Lee’s New Marvels,” Circus, July 1978.
28 Tom DeFalco, personal conversations with the author.