Why some comics fans are mad over an episode of Disney’s Marvel 616 documentary

Marvel 616 on Disney+ takes fans behind the scenes of the comics business, and some fans don’t like what they’ve seen.

Marvel 616 is a documentary series on Disney+ that shows fans how the Marvel sausage is made. That includes an episode all about the “Marvel method,” which was pioneered by Marvel luminary Stan Lee back in the ’60s, when he was writing pretty much all of the company’s comics. Lee would send artists a rough outline of the plot and let them fill in the panels with their imagination, later adding dialogue according to what they drew.

Today, writer Dan Slott still uses that method, although times have changed. He’s not writing the bulk of the company’s comics — the episode in question follows him as he struggles to come up with a plotline for the first issue of Iron Man 2020, blowing deadlines and coming down to the wire as editor Shannon Ballesteros, artist Pete Woods, dialogue writer Christos Gage and letterer Joe Caramagna sit on the edge of their seats waiting to be able to do their jobs, and then having to rush at the last minute when inspiration finally strikes Slott.

The whole thing is played for laughs — oh those wacky Marvel people scrambling to finish their book — but some of it sounds inordinately stressful, with Caramagna talking about “begging and pleading” for pages so he doesn’t have to kill himself finishing days before press. Ha ha.

Naturally, some folks online were aghast, wondering how this kind of work process is still allowed — for the record, most of the comic book industry has moved away from the Marvel method to the “full script” method, with writers giving their colleagues more detailed descriptions of what to put in the panels, together with dialogue.

And so on.

On the other side of things, people in the industry have rallied to Slott’s defense:

The people involved in the actual episode defended him, too, including dialog writer Christos Gage:

A couple of them, including Slott himself, emphasized that the depiction of his slow work speed was played up for the cameras:

And finally, poor Joe Caramagna laughed things off by telling a story about a time he had to letter an issue of a comic while his wife was in labor…wait, what?

Wait, is that a reason to let the whole thing slide or a reason to look at it closer?

You can watch the entirety of Marvel 616 on Disney+ now.

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h/t CNET