Been reading early F4 comics and it's funny how Lee pretty much lampshades how Sue is useless and pretty much a background character
60s really was a different time
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To be fair, she was useless
That’s because Stan was borderline incapable of having women do anything that wasn’t crying about men and romance.
Stan and Jack were born in the 1920s, it's not a surprise they'd make women in comics wanting to do stuff be regarded as "oh those wacky dames!"
Lee was only there to ruin Kirby's storytelling
Correct
>Inb4 muh tumblr
Yeah yeah just pretend i bothered to change filenames
Now a version with Lee's dialogue. Here's your marvel method folks
Now post all the pages where Kirby drew Sue, Jean Grey, the Wasp, Scarlet Witch, etc cringing away from the bad guys, fainting, hiding behind the guys, having to be carried in a chase.. Both Lee and Kirby thought of women as less tough in a fight than men.
You didn't post the previous page, where we see Professor X sending instructions to Jean.
That's the point. Kirby plotted and drew the women as capable and Stan undermined it with his dialogue.
Not most of the time. Look at the art and you see the women cringing back or getting behind one of the men when facing a menace. It's a fan trope that Kirby loved strong female characters but except for Big Barda, he sure didn't create any on his own. He was aiming at a readership of boys under fourteen, same as Lee was.
Arguing against that is how successful and long-running all the titles Lee scripted with other artists were. Except for Kamandi, everything Kirby did on his on only lasted a couple of issues. Kirby did all his best work with a partner, either Joe Simon or Stan Lee.
It's also what their readers wanted. Up until the mid-1960s, most comics readers were preteen boys who thought girls had cooties. And, to be fair, Marvel got letters from girls complaining that action heroines weren't "feminine" or "appealing." That all started to change around 1966.
How could've they made her "air" powers useful from the getgo?
Lee sounds based.
In that era, the only competent woman crime-fighter was Hawkgirl, who was a Thanagar policewoman, and Wonder Woman. Readers didn't want two-fisted female characters.
We should judge old things from the 20th century by modern standards all the time
If you could somehow get a bunch of modern comics on the newsstands in 1961, they would cause a nationwide scandal. Attitudes have changed immensely,. Martin Goodman didn't like seeing any minority characters in the art at all because he knew distributors in the South would return the comics without putting them on sale. A big slugfest between two women characters is not unusual today but back in 1961, the comics would be cancelled and both the writer and artist fired. Things have changed.
>Lee did nothing!
>but he's also responsible for all the part I dislike!
Honestly, fans just take Kirby's claims as gospel without actually reading the original comics. You look at what Stan Lee did with many artists for thirty years and then look at what Kirby did (with Joe Simon and Stan Lee as partners most of the time) and it's obvious they were co-creators. If you are a Beatles fan, you can spot which songs were mostly Lennon or mostly McCartney and which had the synergy of them collaborating. Same with Simon and Kirby or Lee and Kirby/
LoSH better.
Gee, Jean was running around fine in the previous panels, why did Kirby draw Cyclops carrying her?
Hey, she beat up Doom pretty early on
She did in fact rescue her teammates in Issue #5 by blowing up a control panel right in Doom's face. Oddly, he never seemed to hold this against her.
Come to think of it, it was Sue who egged Ben into going on that space flight by calling him a coward. But he never blamed her for it, he always blamed Reed. Guess Sue got a PussyPass on that one.
You can tell how Kirby felt about heroines by his omitting them from all his DC comics when he wrote and drew by himself. He had ONE (1) action female character, Big Barda. Other than that, it was an all boy's club. Beautiful Dreamer from the Forever People was completely passive and as useless as her name suggests. Highfather had no queen, there were no female New Gods in the fight, the Newsboy Legion was all boys,. Kamandi's fighting allies were all male, the Demon had no active women. For someone fans like to present as a proponent of strong female characters, Kirby sure didn't create many on his own.
Come to think of it, after he returned to Marvel in 1976, Kirby still wasn't wild about heroines. He created Sersi and Thena for the Eternals but that was it. Otherwise, all men heroes all the time. Black Panther, Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man,. no prominent women characters, Sharon Carter in Captain America was an established character, like the Falcon. As creative as he was, inventing new characters left and right, you'd think he'd come up with a few super-heroines, but no.
>You'd think he'd invent more female superheroes
>No, the ones he invented don't count; don't be silly.
Think about what you're saying for a second. On his own, without Lee's input, he came up with only Big Barda, Sersei and Thena but dozens of male characters,. It seems likely that Lee was the one pushing for female characters, Kirby wasn't interested. Actually, when working with Joe Simon from 1940 to 1956, Kirby didn't create any heroines either. He only drew female superheroines when working with Stan Lee.