Sean Howe, author of the wonderful Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, uploaded a recording to YouTube today of Stan Lee speaking at Princeton in March 1966.

There’s a ton of fun stuff you’ll want to hear, such as the boos that erupted when Stan mentioned Steve Ditko’s departure from Marvel and the cheers that arose when he brought up the Silver Surfer.

Plus there’s plenty of ammo for Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby partisans, such as when Stan called Ditko a “peculiar guy” who’s “a little eccentric,” and said that he hadn’t “spoken to this guy for over a year,” or when he talked about how surprised he was when the Silver Surfer turned up in the Fantastic Four, an event which had caused Stan to ask, “Who’s this naked nut running around?”

But what most piqued my interest, and caused me to consider a question I should have asked long ago but for some reason never thought to, was Stan’s explanation of the Marvel method, which begins at the 17:35 mark.

(And don’t worry—the audio quality picks up after the first few minutes.)

For those unfamiliar with the Marvel vs. DC method, DC’s comics at the time were written in the traditional manner—a full script, complete with panel breakdowns, captions and dialogue, would be handed to an artist who was expected to follow it exactly—while over at Marvel, the artist was given a synopsis which had neither page nor panel breakdowns, so that it was instead the artist who set the pacing, and would then deliver pages to which the writer would add captions and word balloons later.

Here’s some of how Stan explained it:

“We don’t work the same as other outfits. To answer your question, normally, the way a newspaper strip is done, or the way comics are done, or the way we did it up until five years ago, the writer writes a script, just as a playwright writes a play, then the playwright gives it to the director who casts it and arranges the settings and everything, and then the director will be the equivalent of the artist. But we don’t do it that way, and we have what I think is a much better system, that we stumbled into because of necessity, and now I marvel that everybody doesn’t do this.

“I had been writing all the stories myself, and I just didn’t have time. If I was writing a story for Jack Kirby, Don Heck might be sitting on his hands waiting to do something, and our schedule is so tight we can’t afford to let Don be sitting around waiting, and yet I had to finish this story, so finally I said, look, Don, I can’t give you a script, I’ve got another day’s writing to do ’cause Jack needs it, but the next story would be Iron Man goes here and he does that, and he meets that guy, you go ahead and draw it, draw it any way you can, I’ll put the copy in later.”

While I’ve always known about the reasons for the Marvel method, it’s never before occurred to me to ask—do we know which was the first comic created that way? Has it ever come out exactly when Stan tossed up his hands and decided to write or tell one of his artists a story, saying, have at it? Because I’d sure love to pinpoint that moment so I could read the tale and see whether the sea change in the way Marvel’s comics were made is a detectable thing.

If Stan ever identified that moment specifically, I don’t think I’ve heard of it. So perhaps we’ll never know.

But—any theories? Any candidates?