How Influential was he...

This, he was the face of one corner of comics and shaped the whole industry but wasn't the key player in any part of it. It's like being Aaron Spelling.

>Jack Kirby was key to making everything work.
Plenty of comics from Stan's time as writer and Editor worked fine without Kirby working on them.

he was influential, but his legacy was built on the backs of Jack Kirby and Steven Ditko.

I've always read here that he was notorious for taking credit for creating characters and writing. Is there any truth to that or is it just bullshit spread by haters?

he never took credit, but books wouldnt credit the artist, such was the custom of the day.

im not a expert of marvel but dint he actually worked writing comics for years???

He's the Keiji Inafune of Marvel. Dude didn't really create the characters but he kept the lights on from a producer standpoint.

Oh okay, thanks.

To his credit (haha?) Lee was one of the ones making a push for as many people as possible to be credited within the books themselves. e.g. within the first five-ish issues of FF, it goes from just saying Stan Lee & Jack Kirby to also crediting the inker and artist. The sticking point's legal contracts and shit- Kirby and others sued Marvel later for how much control they took over their work.
His collaborative work speaks for itself with how influential it's been, tho a huge amount's also due to whoever he was working with, like Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Romita, Colan etc. Especially because of the Marvel Method (Writer does outline, artist does plot and illustrates, writer does dialogue/captions and so on). It's complicated.
My answer is yes, he deserves credit, but his collaborators did a lot of heavy lifting. Kirby by nature of his workload was responsible for an insane amount of what drew people to the work and made it entertaining. I'm aware of the criticisms about his own dialogue and shit, and I accept that as a strength of Lee. Kirby was a brillianf ideas man who still had some fun writing tho imo

*inker and letterer

*ideas man and artist, tho that goes without saying
He and his contemporaries produced a lot of great stuff

Stan was exactly the Walt Disney of capes - The charming frontman great at at sales pitches and knowing and connecting with his audience, and getting the artform he loved out there to the masses.

Neither were great artists or writers, but neither really claimed to be. The creatives get mad at them for what they see as taking credit for their work, but without them their work would never have become anywhere near as popular, because artists and animators are not usually also charismatic salesmen. Art needs both kinds of people to work as a business.

I thought the key to the Marvel method was in the writer and artist actively communicating and working together, not just, "Here's a broad outline. Draw it up and I'll put words in the bubbles."

For reference, DC wouldn't start crediting their writers and artists until the early seventies, almost a full decade after Lee pushed for it to happen at Marvel.

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It was mainly done because the owner of Marvel was too cheap to hire anymore writers or editors and Stan was forced to do it all. Giving artists the basic plot was all he had time for, though he started giving less and less to artists he trusted -- there are issues of FF that were mostly plotted by Kirby. Most famous being the Galactus trilogy, which was Stan telling Kirby on the phone "The FF fight God" and that's it.

Well, that's not strictly true - some DC books had stories where artists like Russ Heath signed their names a little while before Atlas became Marvel.