A MARVEL-LOUS EVENING WITH STAN LEE
BY DEAN LATIMER
Last January, Marvel Comics editor, Stan Lee, and several of his staff “put on” a program at Carnegie Hall. “Put on” is the correct term, if we are to take the words of Dean Latimer seriously. Dean has written a review which anyone who intends to attend any other such program should definitely read.
As a warning, no less
It was nothing less than mystifying.
That was the reaction that was written on each face of the poor schliemiels who paid upwards from $4.50 at the door to see Stan Lee at Carnegie Hall last month: pure mystification.
Why here?
Why Now?
What did it all mean?
Who’s taking in all the money? The Marvellous Evening With Stan Lee, as it was billed, revealed nothing. The audience left in stunned silence, after often yawning louder than the fabulously fraught festivities.
It wasn’t merely that the evening was boring. Many kids were there – threequarters of the audience was high-school age, with college punks constituting the rest – and many kids there would have settled for boredom, just on the off chance of learning something new about Stan Lee or Marvel Comics, which to them must surely be, Paris in the ’90’s, or worse.
nothing new under Stan’s Ego
But surely they anticipated something new, or special. An announcement of yet another New Trend in Marvel Comics, perhaps. A resurrection of all those dead old Marvel heroes who have fallen into the abyss in the last few years, maybe.
Or old startlin’ Stan might simply come out in his underwear and recite “Shakespeare!” Anything you hear, anything NEW! Anything!
So when all they got was lame sentimental drivel, the same kind of junk you can read every month in Stan’s Soapbox, and the Bullpen notes, you can understand why they were mystified. And bored. So bored, that they sent armadas of paper airplanes winging from the balcony.
Why Carnegie Hall, for the luvva Mike? In Carnegie Hall one expects a certain degree of magnificence, right?
Imagine then our astonishment at seeing the stage decked out like some high school auditorium for Our Town. Stage right, an assortment of plywood tiers upon which sat Chico Hamilton and his rock players, with their instruments; stage center, a little podium for the speaker; and stage left, a big baffle screen that seemed there simply to fill up empty space. The whole thing bathed in muted light, seeking evidently a “spooky” effect.
Well, at first you could’ve been deluded into thinking maybe something snazzy was about to occur. Because first of all, Geoffrey Crozier, the Master Illusionist of all Australia, swept out in his Druid robes, to an accompaniment of hard-rock Space Music by the Hamilton combo, and dashed around like a maniac.
the 3rd time’s the charm!
By and by, after conjuring up flames out of his wrists and stuff like that, Crozier hauled out a huge wardrobe-type box on stage, and opened the door. Nothing inside, right? Ha! We say Ha!, because after closing the door, he opened it again, to draw forth a beautiful girl in a harem outfit. Far out!
Once again, he closes it, to open and draw forth yet another cutie.
And then (third time’s the charm!) he opens it; to haul out Stan Lee! Tough staging, right? Think it’s gonna be a heavy night, hof times in Carnegie Hall, don’t cha?
Well, it was Pretty Disappointing.
Stan maunders on for a spell, standing in front of the little podium all tall and bearded and wise-looking, and then he introduces some other guy; who is it? Why! – It’s Herb Trimpe, who does The Hulk!!! And Trimpe sits down at a little drawing table with a rear-projection gimmick, and sets into drawing the Green Golem himself. And while Humpin’ Herb sketches, some other swain, who was nameless to begin with, reads off the Virtues and Hangups of The Hulk.
It was like nothing we had ever seen before! even in Carnegie Hall! You would think, now, what with comic sales dropping like a stunned falcon for lo these half-dozen years agone, they’d come up with something new, some new riff with which to shill their superheroes.
But no, they’re still trying to tell us how “engaging’ their various freaks are, because they have “human hangups,” which “those DC Superheroes” never had: how the Hulk deep down in his Paleolithic psyche loves all things, but is forever being brutalized by those about him; how Peter Parker is a sensitive kid, and much too good for the foul world in which his alter-ego, Spider-Man, toils; how Captain America isn’t really a flag-waving fascist, but … But I confess | ceased listening by the time they got to Captain America. The whole audience did (some snored).
For one thing, who gives a heck about Marvel Comics anymore? Who really does? When they went “relevant” with their “New Trend,” they hung themselves on their own aimless alliterations. Since they started to preach they lost whatever elements of fantasy they ever had to commend them to us. Besides, ever notice how Marvel lumps together 8 or 15 “Good Guy” superheroes to beat up one “Bad Guy”? – real American sense of fair-play there! That 8 against ONE stuff! The Merry Marvel Mobsters!
put CONAN in Carnegie Hall, by Crom!
Lives there a man with soul so dead these days that he reads any Marvel Comic other than Conan? That’s of a ir”relavent” world they know more about than I do of this real one and it’s just Conan against someone else; no goons from the Marvel-Mafioso Superheroe Clearing-House.
Actually, I shouldn’t have mentioned Conan in a positive context. If the accountants at Marvel ever hear that “bright people” read Conan. they’ll cleave ol’ Conan to the breastbone. And probably take Conan’s budget to re-rent Carnegie Hall.
So it was a drag, and a gyp and a Royal Rip-off, the Marvellous Evening With Stan Lee. The only element of it that was anywhere near new was Lee’s introduction of Alain Resnais, the famous French culture-groupie, and film-maker and advertising chairman for the Marienbad Wall-paper Company, and who, according to Lee, is making a flick which will incorporate elements of Marvel cartoons.
“It’s a weird, lovely, funny, sad flick,” equivocated Stan, “about life and death and love and hate, and – well – everything!”
Chances are, this pencil-pusher speculates, old Stan is letting his editor Roy Thomas or perhaps some far lesser talents ghost who knows the Way-of-the Con-by-book-licking, write the script for that one too, and that Smilin Stan doesn’t really know a heck of a lot about the film at all. I mean; Stan’s latest ish of Creatures On The Prowl Where Boogeymen Stumble was “weird, lovely, funny and sad” – and I can say that, and I didn’t even read it! And I’ll even bet that Where Ghosts Romp or whatever their “horror” comic of reprints from the 1960’s is called, was “about life and death and love and hate and well. everything!”
There was one element of the evening, though – besides Crozier’s sporadic appearances, during which he performed such illusions as skewering girls with cutlasses and setting their heads afire that was pretty nice, and that was the advertised slide show. Joshua Lights, of the old Fillmore East, put it together, and it was Pretty Swell kids: micro-second flashes of Marvel heroes and heroines, hitting you so fast and furious they actually seemed, after a while, to be in some kind of sequence. This is an art form that could bear some more use.
Lord knows there had better be found some new use for comix in the years to come. Leave these loudmouth losers to their own devices and they’ll kill the field once and for all, that’s clear. If the Marvellous Evening With Stan Lee indicated anything, it showed that the reason contemporary “aboveground” comic art is devoid of interest, lies in the deficiencies of its creators. They are a marvel-lously boring bunch, that’s all.