It’s been a little while, but who could ever forget our old friend Ego-Man, the ridiculously inside baseball strip parodying Stan Lee in the pages of SICK Magazine in the late 1970s. Exactly who these stories were meant for (apart from creators Arnold Drake and Jack Sparling) is anybody’s guess, but they didn’t run for very long–and in true comic book fashion, Drake and Sparling killed the character off in his final adventure. Here, then, is the Death of Ego-Man.
This is the shortest of the Ego_Man adventures, clocking in at a mere three pages. I can’t say whether Drake and Sparling were running out of steam, or somebody had told them to cut it out, or what. It’s not impossible that Lee’s people sent Charlton a Cease and Desist letter, since doing something like this one time is parody, but doing it on the regular might constitute defamation.
I have to say, the title “Death of a Talesman” is really sharp.
The complaint here appears to be that Marvel has killed funny comics, which is a bit of a stretch–particularly since all of the characters depicted as being irate at Ego-Man were newspaper features rather than comic book characters originally.
And that’s all she wrote for Ego-Man.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 