"You show me a Rob Liefeld character that people like, and I'll show you the other creators who are responsible for you liking him."
— Linkara, Atop the Fourth Wall
Liefeld will sometimes claim to be the sole creator of Deadpool, but I really don't think that's fair, because writer Fabian Nicieza gave Deadpool that sense of humor in the first issues of New Mutants and X-Force, and that's something that other writers like Joe Kelly and Christopher Priest continued to follow up on. They're the ones that introduced the idea of Deadpool addressing the audience and breaking the fourth wall. Without that, we just have a character that's very close to a ripoff of Deathstroke the Terminator. Very similar costume, weapons, name, powers, so you know, I really think we need to give of lot of credit for who Deadpool is to the writers that worked on Deadpool following Rob Liefeld. I think it's a lot like Bob Kane claimed to be the creator of Batman, but the Batman that he supposedly created is not the same Batman that we see today. A lot of people contributed and changed who Batman was, certainly back in the day when Bob Kane was working on it, writers like Bill Finger and artists like Jerry Robinson contributed a huge amount to the mythology of Batman, and I think other writers and artists did that with Deadpool.
Goofy was originally a sort of stock character in mob scenes, so on, but nobody attempted to do anything with him, so I can’t say that I created Goofy, but I was the first that made him into a character. I liked the character, there was all sorts of possibilities.
— Art Babbitt, John Canemaker's Animated Eye (1975)
"It’s hard to appreciate today just how radical a shift in tone the first Fantastic Four was. But there was another revolutionary aspect of the series, one hidden from the reader but unendingly controversial: It was the first superhero series to use the so-called "Marvel method." To save time while writing a dozen or more comics at once, Lee had recently developed a thrifty alternative to writing out full scripts. He’d merely come up with a rough plot — ”as much as I can write in longhand on the side of one sheet of paper,” as he put it in a 1968 interview —- talk that over with the artist, then make the artist go off and create the entire story from scratch. Every emotional beat, character interaction, and action sequence was now the responsibility of the guys drawing them, who until then had been accustomed to just drawing whatever a script told them to draw. Now it was the artists who built the narrative architecture, and the writers who did something more like buffing up: Once Lee got the artwork back, he’d interpret what he saw and cook up dialogue bubbles, narration, and sound effects. “Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all,” Lee said in that 1968 chat. “I mean, I’ll just say to Jack, ‘Let’s let the next villain be Dr. Doom.’ Or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He’s so good at plots, I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I.” ... There’s also the issue of how the artists were credited on an issue-by-issue basis — something far more provably damning for Lee. As Marvel’s popularity grew, he wisely chose to engage fans by giving specific credits at the front of each issue, something the fly-by-night comics industry had rarely bothered to do. But when readers saw “RUGGEDLY WRITTEN BY: STAN LEE, ROBUSTLY DRAWN BY: STEVE DITKO” or “SENSATIONAL STORY BY: STAN LEE, ASTONISHING ART BY: JACK KIRBY,” they were being profoundly misled. The mechanics of the Marvel method meant that, by any reasonable definition, his artists were actually authoring the stories with him. Their resentment grew.
While it would take them a while to finally acquire Captain Marvel, they got something more important out of it than the character. They got Otto Binder, the writer of those classic Captain Marvel Adventures stories, who would go on to be the definitive Superman writer of the ’50s, and certainly one of the most influential of all time. His tenure at DC saw the creation of some of the most popular elements of Superman, the stuff that’s still in use today. Supergirl, Kandor, Bizarro, the Legion, the concept of the out-of-continuity “imaginary story,” — those are Binder stories. He didn’t create Jimmy Olsen (Jimmy, the Harley Quinn of his day, was an import from the radio show), but he certainly defined his character and with it, the feel of the Silver Age. And he did it by just continuing the style he and CC Beck had been honing on CMA...The irony of DC suing Captain Marvel because he was too similar to Superman, and then hiring a writer to make Superman more like Captain Marvel is staggering.
"As for Mary Jane, I am sure her creator Stan Lee himself never calculated her potential to be so immense. A character who started out as a playful distraction blossoming into one of the every best supporting characters in superhero comics? Especially a character who was a non-superpowered young girl? Unheard of in the early 70s! And yet, Gerry Conway realized just how much promise MJ Watson—a fresh off the Second Wave take on women's representation in a predominantly male targeted medium, had. He sensed she was too good and unique a personality to be marginalized and made his decision to give her a much more substantial and important role in the Spidey mythos."
— Reader "Eve K.", recorded by Brian Cronin in the commentary for the entry
of The Night Gwen Stacy Died in CBR's 50 Greatest Spider-Man Stories, where it is second to Kraven's Last Hunt.
of The Night Gwen Stacy Died in CBR's 50 Greatest Spider-Man Stories, where it is second to Kraven's Last Hunt."And yet, I guess, in away, I am an unusual rabbit on account of...Instead of having hundreds of children, like your ordinary run-of-the-mill rabbit, I had several fathers. Fathers with odd names like, uh, Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones and Bob McKimson, the ones who directed most of my pictures. Fathers like Tedd Pierce, Warren Foster and Mike Maltese, who wrote most of my biography. And, of course, a father named Mel Blanc, who had thousands of voices and was nice enough to give me one of them."
"Miles Morales has been a very mixed character for me, because I appreciate what he's meant to symbolize and the insane amount of potential he has, but I always felt bogged down and annoyed by how little that potential was fulfilled. He was held back because, unfortunately, the guy who created him had no idea how to write him in a way that was satisfying.
I fully believe that as Bendis kept writing this book into the ground with repetitive and uncreative arcs, Miles would have been forgotten by history, like that time Captain America was replaced by an impersonator named the USAgent, or that time Deadpool died and was replaced by a guy named Agent X who had the same sense of humor but was more sociable. This shit happens all the time in comics; ideas don't stick, legacy characters are forgotten, the status quo is restored, and it all becomes an obscure did-you-know fact on a trivia game twenty years later. Under Bendis' writing, Miles would have ended up this same way: forgotten.
Spider-Verse may not have sought out to reinvent him out of spite for the source material, but out of necessity through a lot of happy accidents. I think that made for a much more interesting character who will have staying power. This is the Miles Morales I can see my grandkids buying action figures of, like he's been there from the start. So let's give credit where it's due: Bendis came up with the initial spark, but Lord and Miller, as well as the whole crew of the film, crafted something much greater.
To put it simply: this kid taught us that anyone can wear the mask, but this kid came along and proved it."
I fully believe that as Bendis kept writing this book into the ground with repetitive and uncreative arcs, Miles would have been forgotten by history, like that time Captain America was replaced by an impersonator named the USAgent, or that time Deadpool died and was replaced by a guy named Agent X who had the same sense of humor but was more sociable. This shit happens all the time in comics; ideas don't stick, legacy characters are forgotten, the status quo is restored, and it all becomes an obscure did-you-know fact on a trivia game twenty years later. Under Bendis' writing, Miles would have ended up this same way: forgotten.
Spider-Verse may not have sought out to reinvent him out of spite for the source material, but out of necessity through a lot of happy accidents. I think that made for a much more interesting character who will have staying power. This is the Miles Morales I can see my grandkids buying action figures of, like he's been there from the start. So let's give credit where it's due: Bendis came up with the initial spark, but Lord and Miller, as well as the whole crew of the film, crafted something much greater.
To put it simply: this kid taught us that anyone can wear the mask, but this kid came along and proved it."
