Free Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe Page A

America was wholesome and admirable, just like he’d always been, but now he was prone to bouts of melancholy, and confusion about what had happened to his country.
    Captain America picked an especially disconcerting moment in history to reemerge. Avengers #4 was still in production on November 22, when news came that President Kennedy had been shot. “We were coming back from lunch, and people were listening to their car radios with the doors open,” Flo Steinberg remembered. “We didn’t have a television in the office, so everyone just sort of gravitated to a big room and sat around listening to the radio until they announced that he had died. We all left . . . just wandered.”
    Everyone, that is, but Stan Lee. “He was still working on the comic books,” noted Mario Puzo. “Like that was the most important thing in the world.”
    L ee, once again scripting virtually the entire Marvel line, got his own office—with a door, and a rug—for the first time in seven years. Brodsky and Steinberg shared a desk nearby and were soon joined by another former Atlas bullpenner, Marie Severin. At Atlas, Severin worked in the coloring department under Stan Goldberg, but she was an extremely skilled artist in her own right, and able to harness her wicked sense of humor into withering caricatures. She might have been a star at Mad magazine, had her luck lined up differently. Instead, she was making filmstrips for the Federal Reserve Bank when she decided to drop off her illustration portfolio to Lee. He never looked at her samples, though; he sent her straight to Brodsky for a production job.
    He should have hired her to draw comics. Kirby was at his drawing board seven days a week. Even at his uncanny speed—he could burn through three pages in a day—something had to give, and Lee was casting around for reinforcements. As he had with writers, he first looked to the old hands of Atlas. He’d started making phone calls to Syd Shores, the Captain America artist of the late 1940s, but Shores was busy doing illustration work for magazines. He’d called John Romita, the Captain America artist of the 1950s, but DC was paying him more than Marvel could. It wasn’t just a matter of recruiting people who could draw. The “Marvel method,” as it would come to be known, required that the artists could break down a basic plot into a finely paced, visually clear story over which Lee would write his dialogue. He wanted the panels to function like silent movies, to minimize the need for verbal exposition. Ideally, the artists would also contribute their own narrative ideas—characters, subplots—to the stories, just as Kirby and Ditko did.
    Lee moved around the artists that he did have like chess pieces, trying them out on different titles until things clicked. Dick Ayers settled into comfortable stints on Sgt. Fury and Strange Tales ’ Human Torch stories; Don Heck inherited The X-Men and The Avengers and Giant Man from Kirby; and Ditko briefly took over Tales of Suspense ’s Iron Man from Heck. The Hulk was brought back in Tales to Astonish , reimagined by Ditko so that Bruce Banner’s transformation into the Hulk was caused by Banner’s fits of rage. * Artists were regularly asked to emulate Jack Kirby’s style. When new artists started on a title, Lee would ask Kirby to draw basic layouts for the first issue, providing the rookies with visual training wheels. “Stan wanted Kirby to be Kirby, Ditko to be Ditko . . . and everyone else to be Kirby,” said Don Heck; indeed, when Heck took over The Avengers , Lee wasn’t shy about touting what he considered the Platonic ideal. “Don Heck drew this one with Dick Ayers helping out on the inks,” he roared in the letters pages, “and you’ll be amazed how closely it parallels King Kirby’s great style!”
    During story conferences, Lee repeatedly drilled home the idea of dynamism. Every word, he insisted, should move the story forward. All action should be emphatic; when