"I was delighted to learn that [Stan] Lee has attained the status of an authority in the comics field. Twenty years of unrelenting editorial effort to suppress the artistic effort, encourage miserable taste, flood the field with degraded imitations and polluted non-stories, treating artists and writers like cattle, and failure on his part to make an independent success as a cartoonist have certainly qualified him for this respected position." - Bernie Krigstein, 1965 "In the shadow world between success and failure, there lives the <b>driven</b> little man who dreams of <b>having it all!!!</b>--the opportunistic <b>spoiler</b> without character or values, who preys on all things like a cannibal!!!---including <b>you!!!</b> Like death and taxes, we all must deal with him sometime! That's why, in this issue, we go where he lives--in the decaying ante-bellum grandeur of the Mockingbird Estates!!---and <b>"Wait for Godot"</b> with <b><i>FUNKY FLASHMAN!</i></b>" - Mister Miracle #6 (Jan-Feb 1972) by Jack Kirby "I'm not noted for always telling the truth, but at least people don't usually catch me at it." - Stan Lee, SDCC, 1975 "Most comic book writers are failed artists, and as a result they simply want to write about what the guys are drawing about, and the trouble with most of the comic book artists is, they really only want to draw what they're drawing. It's not a compromise or any sort of qualification." - Gil Kane, The Comics Journal #64 (Jul 1981) "I see [Marvel/the comics business] as a serpent's nest. And in a serpent's nest, nothing can survive. Eventually all the snakes kill each other. Eventually they'll also kill whatever generated them." - Jack Kirby, Comics Scene #2 (Mar 1982) "Marvel Comics is trying to sell you all on the notion that characters are the only important component of its comics. As if nobody had to create these characters, as if the audience is so brain-dead they can't tell a good job from a bad one." - Frank Miller, 1994 "Lee is greatly aided in his non-serious technique, style, because comics fans, the fan press, and the public-minded prefer to be entertained and to be passive-minded. They choose not to be active-minded, not enlightened or have to do any thinking or questioning or understanding beyond the given to them especially with or about someone who claims to be, or is believed to actually be, the 'creator'. "But that non-serious style also means that nothing like facts, truth, honesty, etc. are to be held really important. There is no need to be serious about anything but the already claimed and believed. There is the only one who could ever really be responsible, be the actual, claimed creator of all the published good things and all the popular, published successes." - Steve Ditko, "He Giveth and He Taketh Away", 2008