Here are a pair of additional vintage interviews, one from Stan Lee and one from Roy Thomas, which first saw print in the long running magazine CARTOONIST PROFILES in its November 1969 issue. This is right at the end point of the Silver Age, at a time when Jack Kirby had relocated his family to the West Coast and was looking for a way out. But it’s also a good snapshot as to just what people, creators and readers, were thinking and focused on during those days. One of the aspects of all of this that we fans often tend to over look is that, to the practitioners of these vintage eras, they weren’t so much trying to produce art as they were trying to put food on teh table and keep the lights on. The fact that they often succeeded in making art along the way was somewhat incidental–though nobody was actively trying to give anything other than their best.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Stan never made a secret of how the Marvel Method worked, even in the late 60’s, or how much input the artists had to the stories they produced. Even Romita said that he felt Stan saved comic books by doing things that way:
‘Putting food on the table’ as you say was a common theme back then, going on comments from some of the artists of the day, yet their work was still outstanding when you look back at it, especially in the early days when even these new super hero comics were just the latest fad and were probably going to fade away end up in the bin like all the previous fad westerns/horror/war etc did. Yet when you look at Ditko’s first splash page in AF15 it tells a whole story all by itself (I have an A1 sized copy on my hall wall because of it). Given what we know now and how Spider-Man turned out, I still marvel at Ditkos visual story telling ability. I wonder how different things would have been if they didn’t use The Marvel Method, or if they knew how successful it was going to be and had perhaps thought more about what they were doing and tried harder. In a way I’m glad we’ll never know because what they did was nigh on perfect, and who’d want to risk changing that? A ‘What If I don’t really need to see…
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The issue of Stans as the lead article was on Stan Drake!
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