FAN EXPO: Stan Lee - Comic Book Resources: Askwith asked Lee how he came to develop the famous, or notorious, Marvel Method of production.
The publisher’s former impresario explained, “I was writing just about everything and I couldn’t keep up with it. And the artists were freelancers, that means they weren’t getting salaries. So if they didn’t draw anything, they weren’t getting paid. I couldn’t let a guy like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko or John Buscema sit around with nothing to do. But if I was writing a script for Kirby, I couldn’t be writing Ditko’s script at the same time. These guys were good at making up their own stories if they had something to start with, so I would say to Ditko, ‘Look, I haven’t got time to write your script, but here’s what I think the story would be. We’ll get a villain called the Green Goblin and he’ll do this and that and you come up with some funny scenes, I don’t care.’ He would go ahead and just draw whatever he wanted, based on what I told him, and I would finish Kirby’s story. I would just give them the germ of an idea, they would draw it, I’d put in the dialogue later, and that way I was able to write all these books pretty much by myself.”