Even before its publication this week, True believer it was generating conversation, with some of Lee’s fans worried that it might paint a less than rosy image of the backward icon. Still, Riesman asks potential readers to dig deeper before making a judgment on the book.
“This is not a book that tries to destroy anyone,” says Riesman The Hollywood Reporter. “It is a book that tries to make us see more clearly an individual who was human like all of us.”
In fact, True believer paints a picture of a man who was as flawed as his heroes, and he emerges even more human for it.
While working as a reporter in Vulture, Riesman established himself as a must-read chronicler of the comic book industry with pieces about icons like the reclusive co-creator of Spider-Man Ditko, a bare-bones retrospective of the innovative Ultimate Marvel comic line and a profile of Stan Lee. widely read, published in 2016, ended up leading an editor to approach Riesman after Lee’s death in 2018 about the possibility of writing this biography.
In a conversation with THR, Riesman details the winding journey that the biography took him and what he learned along the way.
One of the most impressive things about this book is the time you spent with Stan’s younger brother, Larry Lieber, who worked for Stan and Marvel for years. How did this happen?
I called him out of nowhere. He picked up the phone and started giving me interesting information right away. We met for lunch on the Upper East Side, where he lived. And he talked for about three hours about his life. Your life, not Stan’s. I said, “Can I record this?” and he said, “Absolutely not”, because he is planning to write a memoir. He told me this three-hour life story that is totally fascinating and moving, and I said, “You have to let me write this Larry.” I asked him about five times, and he always refuses.
About six weeks after Stan’s death, you go to Larry’s apartment for a proper interview, and the apartment is not what people would expect from Stan’s brother.
I went to Larry’s apartment on the Upper East Side. It is fascinating. Only the decoration is a shoe box. It is a very, very small studio apartment. It is not the life of a rich man, it is what I am trying to convey. A stark contrast to the lifestyle that Stan led. Talking to Larry was one of the most exciting journalistic experiences I have ever had. I will be forever grateful to him for the degree to which he was open and open with me, and the degree to which he felt comfortable telling me things he had not told anyone before. The book wouldn’t be half the book that it was if I hadn’t been able to speak to Larry for this interview that ended up happening, where I went to his apartment and talked for, I think, four hours. Then we had another interview, a follow-up interview, which lasted about an hour and a half. So there are many records on Larry’s tape. I hope to get his permission, but someday I would like to publish the full interview, because I feel it is a useful document for the history of comics.
Stan is not only a challenging unpacking character, but some of his sources are gigantic characters who can sometimes tell stories that are difficult to verify.. How did you approach this?
Without commenting on anyone in particular, I would say that this was a difficult book to write, as the truth seemed to have been doubled by many people with whom I was speaking. There were things that people said you could easily identify as being fake. There were such fantastic things that you could hardly believe it and there was no way to actually prove whether or not they happened. It was a challenge that I took very seriously. The book was written in a way that I try to draw attention to the unreliability of everyone, not just specific people. The reader may think that some of these people are not to be trusted and others are to be trusted. Well, even trusted people, in quotes, may be forgetting something. Or talking about things that happened a long time ago.
The target audience for this book will already know that Stan’s public persona was different from the private one. They will already know that there is a debate about how much credit he deserves for his creations. Still, are you concerned about the resistance of readers who may not want to see Stan that way?
People are very passionate about Stan and I respect that. I understood that. In this book, I did not set out to write a hatchet job, nor did I. I recognize many things that Stan has done that have been hugely successful and have been a step forward for industry, society or pop culture. That said, I also report things that, as far as I know, are true, or at least I have evidence that other people have presented, that may be difficult for some people to read or hear. All I ask is that people try to pay attention to what I actually said, not what they heard I said or what someone characterized my words as being. And understand that this is not a book that tries to take anyone down. It is a book that tries to make us see more clearly an individual who was human like all of us.
In a strange way, I came to like Stan even more, because of that humanity.
If there is a moral to this book, it is that there are no superheroes. We have this terrible tendency as humans, as Americans, as consumers, whatever, to take the things we like and the people we like and … decide that they are more than human. We have decided that the brand is something that it is worth to dedicate your life totally, or at least take it very seriously. What I mean is that the fans are passionate and I hope you understand that I did my best.
You have deepened in the last 20 years of Stan’s life – an era that, as far as I know, has never been explored in this way before. Did you feel it would be such fertile ground?
Reporting on the things that happened in Stan’s final 20 years from 1998 to 2018 was entering uncharted territory. It hadn’t really been written about it. You had the first Stan Lee biography by Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael – The rise and fall of the American comic, which was published in 2004 and therefore completed in 2003. It was a very good biography that was very critical, but very incomplete when it comes to the whole arc of Stan’s life. I decided, “Well, what if we focus on the things that nobody wants to get into?” That was when I could feel myself getting into things that had not been discussed before, and this is something worth doing on your own, but also in terms of content, you see a lot in these 20 years of not only seeing the character of Stan and see what he was like and the risks he was willing to take and what he was trying to achieve. You also get a sense of the types of relationships he has had. You have the advent of home video, so you have a lot more evidence of what’s going on.
And this is the time when he became famous on an entirely different level.
It’s the 20-year story in which superhero films range from Blade in 1998 until 2018, just a few months before Stan’s death, to Avengers: Infinity War. It is an incredible journey and he was part of it. He’s a character, literally, or a series of characters in him. And it’s the story of how this brand acceleration came about and what Stan’s contribution was. This is something that says a lot not just about him, but about the world he built and, therefore, the world we all live in now. Seeing how these films learned from what Stan had created in the form of the interconnected Marvel Universe, that in itself was something that in the past 20 years you have been gaining great prominence. Even though Stan isn’t making these films happen, for me what makes this situation interesting is that he’s watching it from the outside, which is incredible to think about. Could you imagine someone being basically barred from being a bigger part of the franchise that they at least believe they created? And did other people attribute it to creation? In any other sector, this would be completely unacceptable. Then there is the fact that many interesting characters are in the past few years. It is not that the years prior to this in Stan’s life were uninteresting – far from it – but it is when many of the most colorful characters start to become prominent and well documented. I hoped people would find it as interesting as I did.
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True believer: the rise and fall of Stan Lee is now available at Crown Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House. This interview was edited in its length and clarity.