Marvel Method - Creation and Implementation

Creation and Implementation

When Marvel Comics became popular and expanded in the early 1960s, Marvel's editor and chief writer, Stan Lee, needed to write several titles a month. So he gradually began to provide his primary artists, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, only with the essential beginning, middle and end of a story. Lee did that often in person or via telephone.

The artist would then plot and pace the specific scenes, often adding secondary characters, and turn in the penciled pages, often with margin notes to help Lee follow the action. After approving the artwork and having either the artist or the production staff make any mandated editorial changes, Lee would then add dialog, captions and sound effects.

Comics historian Mark Evanier writes that this "new means of collaboration ... was born of necessity—Stan was overburdened with work—and to make use of Jack's great skill with storylines. ... Sometimes Stan would type up a written plot outline for the artist. Sometimes, not."

It was in place with at least one artist by early 1961, as Lee described in 2009 when speaking of his and Ditko's "short, five-page filler strips ... placed in any of our comics that had a few extra pages to fill", most prominently in Amazing Fantasy but even previously in Amazing Adventures and other "pre-superhero Marvel" science-fiction/fantasy anthology titles. "I'd dream up odd fantasy tales with an O. Henry type twist ending. All I had to do was give Steve a one-line description of the plot and he'd be off and running. He'd take those skeleton outlines I had given him and turn them into classic little works of art that ended up being far cooler than I had any right to expect."

As comic-book writer-editor Dennis O'Neil described, the Marvel Method, "perfected by Stan Lee and his early Marvel Comics collaborators, requires the writer to begin by writing out a plot and add words when the penciled artwork is finished. ... n the mid-sixties, plots were seldom more than a typewritten page, and sometimes less," while writers in later times "might produce as many as twenty-five pages of plot for a twenty-two page story, and even include in them snatches of dialog. So a Marvel Method plot can run from a couple of paragraphs to something much longer and more elaborate".