In Stan's case it's probably a combination of factors. Maybe he needed a Kirby or a Ditko to bounce ideas off, maybe times and fashions changed and he couldn't adjust his style to match. Maybe his creative powers were just not so good as once they were. Could even be a combination of all three and a few factors I'm over-looking.

For quite a while, Stan caught lightning in a bottle. That's not a trick anyone can just repeat any old time they like.

Yes, he was very important to the Silver Age / Marvel Age, and I acknowledge that he was a great editor who helped to guide and nurture the Bullpen and bring out the best in his staff, but, my question is : Why is it that none of Stan's stuff is acknowledged by fandom overall as being of the same high level after he stepped away as E-i-C ? Striperella ? Stan Lee Presents at DC ? She-Hulk ? The Cat ? Stan Lee Media ?

A great example on a tiny scale:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Line three is for the educated toffs, but Willy doesn't leave the groundlings wondering, giving them line four.

I can't point off the top of my head to any such specific example in Stan's writing, but I do have my memory:

As a young child reading Lee's dialogue, I didn't always understand every word or even every speech balloon, nor every gag or cultural reference or plot subtlety, but I never, ever had difficulty following the story well enough to be drawn along in rapt excitement and curiosity about what was going to happen next.

Read pretty much any Marvel issue from the mid or late 60s (Silver Surfer excepted!) imagining yourself six or eight years old again, with the limited vocabulary and cultural worldview that imples, and see how well Stan looks after you, and how seeing to your comprehension and entertainment (as well as that of the college students who read these comics at the time) is a duty he takes seriously.

For that reason, I'm not sure it's possible to compare Stan (Or any of the early writers) to modern writers except in terms of mastery of their craft - and there's no doubt that Stan was a master. His pacing, plotting and characterisation skills are all excellent, pitched perfectly for the demographic he was aiming at.

As I first really discovered him as an adult, I cannot claim to be a huge fan. but while I don't think he's the best writer in US comics history (That'd be Alan Moore) I do think he's at least top twenty and probably top ten.

Lee's gift for dialog is absolutely staggering. Here the best test: anybody reading this, go write a scene where the Fantastic Four watch a dinosaur egg hatch in Time Square. I'll bet you can do it, even if you're not a trained writer. That's because we can all hear those four very distinct voices in our heads. Now write the same scene with the original Justice League. Hell, try it with the modern Justice League. You might hear Batman's voice clearly, thanks to Denny O'Neil, but good luck with the others. Lee's dialog was so great because it was filled with character and it was so specific. Reed Richards wasn't Bruce Banner. Peter Parker wasn't Johnny Storm who wasn't Rick Jones. In seventy years, no writer has ever given Superman or Wonder Woman that kind of rich character-filled voice to speak with.

MarkAndrew, don't simply praise Bill K. Actually explain this supposed point you vaguely allude to on why Lee's dialog is so good. Actually explain what makes Lee's dialog so good. I find it stilted, and the exposition awkward, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

Almost every writer today can out-dialog Lee

Holy shit. That might be the single most wrong statement I have ever heard on the internet. I am, frankly, in awe.

Does everyone else get what dialog is and what it does or do you need me to explain?

Also very nicely done, Bill K. Although I think a truer gauge of quality is "Is it good" but you need to be aware of your own prejudices and cultural biases to make those kinds of decisions - And I do think that in terms of
creating a specific mood, teetering between horror and comedy and a smidgeon of sublimated sex, this run of Spider-man is as good as anything I've ever read in comics.

And, y'know, I've read kind of a lot of comics. He understated.

It goes beyond Comics. How do you compare Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler to Chuck Palahniuk? Or Dickens to Sarah Waters? Sherlock Holmes to Inspector Morse?

It looks like Miller's Daredevil will be ahead of Ditko's Spidey. To me, that's like preferring Rockford to Marlowe.

I liked Rockford. But Chandler is classic.

Youngsters (and the following certainly applied to me when I was young) who have spent only a short time (say, up to half a decade or so) enjoying a genre or a medium typically absorb the currently fashionable conventions (without really being aware that they are doing so) as if they were laws of the universe instead of just the latest in a long series of artificial and arbitrary collections of formats and styles. Older work can seem clunky or silly or lesser to them at a glance because it doesn't conform to the modern set of conventions, the only set they are really familiar with.

For instance: Musicals used to be a very, very, very popular movie genre; now they are extremely rare. A common complaint against them from audiences who did not grow up surrounded by them goes along the lines of "It's so silly when the characters start singing in the middle of the story! That doesn't happen in real life. Today's movies, which don't do this, are more realistic, and so, better". Breaking into song is a convention that is currently not fashionable, but it is no more artificial and unrealistic a convention than many others that are still in fashion (or have come into fashion), but are invisible as conventions to the majority of current audiences who are immersed in them, in the same way that fish aren't conscious of water, or we (usually) aren't conscious of the air.

One obvious example of such a cinematic convention that is so ubiquitous that its artificiality is 'invisible' to most people is the musical score. Another is the extreme amplification of the sounds of impacts in, say, a fist-fight. Yet another are the usual multitude of mysterious light sources in, say, forest night scenes.

So if it's true that modern assessments of contemporary works are significantly fashion-driven (and so, ephemeral), what happens when fashions change? When one has been following a genre or a medium for long enough, one sees it again and again: What was radical and hot and cool and exciting in one decade looks dated and clunky and tired the next. (Then often the decade after that it's cool again as kids discover things from the decade of their birth of childhood). The works themselves don't change, the audiences, and their unconscious sense of what is a fashionable set of conventions, do. (To revert to the fashion-as-air image, we are most aware of air when it is moving around us - some exciting "new" genre approach is even often described as a "fresh breeze" )

A truer gauge of quality, I think, should always seek to judge the work in question in the context of its own time and the then-current set of genre conventions. How well does a work fulfill, and play with the edges of (and so contribute to the expansion and evolution of), the conventions of the genre at the time? THAT gives us a level playing field for comparison, in a way that seeming to compare two works (but really only comparing their respective convention sets instead) cannot.

I'd encourage curious people to think about their preferences and ask themselves - is it the work itself that I think is better, or do I just prefer the older/newer set of conventions it follows because I grew up with them?

Learning a new (to you) set of conventions can take work - but so did learning your first set. You just didn't notice it at the time, and it was spread out over years. A more modest effort may suffice, but only if there is willingness. Yet the efforts can be an excellent investment, as they unlock the treasure trove of the best material of that type gathered over decades. For instance, many modern audiences struggle to enjoy silent movies - the set of conventions is at first glance too different from what they are used to, and the works seem hopelessly outdated and dull because of this. Yet with practice it is possible to learn to watch, then follow, then be absorbed by silent movies. And once this skill has been engendered, all the wonders of Chaplin, Keaton, Murnau, Fairbanks and Chaney, to name a few, lay at your feet for the taking, some of which have not been surpassed, of their kind, to this day.

Ditko/Lee Spidey is standing the test of time, as its appearance here attests. Which modern interpretation(s) will, if any, it is by definition too early to tell.

Sorry for the length of this!

1)Without Lee, Kirby, and Ditko, I doubt we would have the stories of Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Steve Gerber, Frank Miller, James Robinson, Brian K. Vaughn, Ed Brubaker, Mark Millar, Los Bros Hernandez and Peter Milligan

2)Why does everyone assume that once Romita came onto the book, Peter suddenly morphed into that era's Brad Pitt or something?

Theno

What has gotten much better is the level of writing. Some really great writers have entered the field in the last 20 years that have definitely helped to broaden the appeal of the medium and to bring a new freshness that has helped the industry to grow and mature beyond the Silver Age. Some of my favorite writers that I would that IMO have helped to broaden the appeal of the medium include Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Steve Gerber, Frank Miller, James Robinson, Brian K. Vaughn, Ed Brubaker, Mark Millar, Los Bros Hernandez and Peter Milligan more I'm failing to mention. Every one of these authors has placed somewhere on this list of the Top 100 Comic Book Runs.

But I’ll say this: If any one of Stan Lee’s superhero comics WAS the absolute best run that comics has ever produced, that would be pretty sad.

Well, best superhero comic.

But I agree. It is pretty sad.

Independent (non-adventure) comics are a whole other story...

I'm a big fan of Moore & Gaiman (never seen anything too impressive by Morrison). But this is a visual medium...and Ditko was drawing off the wall stuff, and especially a Spidey, that doesn't appear in amy of those writers' works.

Anyone remember Spidey webbing up his shop bought costume in the Goblin/Crime Master sequence? And then it shrinking after he got dunked in the water? Jonah's face leering out of the first Spider Slayer?

Many have tried, but none have matched. In my humble opinion. Of course.

But I'll say this: If any one of Stan Lee's superhero comics WAS the absolute best run that comics has ever produced, that would be pretty sad. Those books were a starting point. Stan's vision was to spearhead this whole movement of comics as modern mythology; he opened the door for it. They were a springboard, which the whole of superhero fiction has taken inspiration and momentum from... but a good teacher's students will always surpass him. If the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man didn't inspire comics that were BETTER than it, it wouldn't be nearly such an important work. Same goes for Kirby, for Byrne and Claremont, for Miller... and someday I hope I'll be reading comics that make Moore and Morrison look like dinosaurs in comparison, because they've taken inspiration from Watchmen and Invisibles and so on, and evolved.

If you really love your Silver Age comics... let 'em go. There's something even better coming down the line.

I think Spider-Man only started to get stale by the 1970s. Despite Gwen Stacy's death being a classic, I always thought Spidey's stories by Conway, Wein, and Wolfman were the ones that were more formula than heart.