Stan Lee’s biography undermined the complexity of the Marvel icon: ‘Neither saint nor Satan’

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Stan Lee, seen in 1991, led a life of complexity rivaled by that of the characters he helped create.

David Pokress / Newsday RM via Getty Images

Comic book legend Stan Lee was one of the true titans of pop culture, with his Marvel Cinematic Universe cameos cementing its status as a pillar of the Marvel universe. The man behind Spider man, a Avengers, a The fantastic four and the X-Men went on to delight audiences in numerous interviews and subscribed to comic books for fans who paid $ 50 (or more) and waited hours in line to meet him.

true believer

Abraham Riesman takes a deep dive into Stan Lee.

Penguin Random House

I did just that at Wizard World New York in 2013 and I felt a little awkward when I watched the then 90s legend’s hand shake as he signed my copy of Amazing Spider-Man # 96. It was a flash of the vulnerable human behind a man I practically idolized as a hero since I started reading Spidey’s adventures religiously at the age of 9.

In the years since that meeting, through Lee death in 2018, I read numerous biographies and accounts about him and the early days of Marvel to try to understand the real people behind the fictional universe. These stories became almost as comfortable and familiar as the comics they generated.

So I read Abraham Riesman’s true believer: Stan Lee’s rise and fall, which hits stores this week, and one of the first lines told me that this shot would not be so comfortable.

“Stan Lee’s story is where objective truth dies,” he writes.

Instead of starting with Lee’s family tales from the Depression in New York or his early days at Marvel, Riesman spends little time alluding to Lee’s alleged falsehoods and exaggerations about his role in character creation, the legal difficulties faced for his post -The Marvel companies and the abuse of the elderly he may have suffered in the last months of his life.

It was totally absorbing and deeply uncomfortable reading, so I asked Riesman why he chose not to start with the usual romanticism about the rise of Marvel Comics as we know it.

“If I had started with ‘Bang pow zoom, comics are cool’ – I mean, who cares? It seemed like the natural thing to make the reader situate himself in Stan’s world, with all its different facets,” he told me via Zoom from your home in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Stan was neither a saint nor Satan. He was a human being, he was not a superhero. There are no superheroes.”

Riesman’s origin at Marvel began in the 1990s, after he bought a copy of Megan Stine’s Marvel Super Heroes Guide, a mini-encyclopedia designed to attract young readers to the world of Spidey and friends, at a book fair in the elementary School. The Marvel Action Hour, in which Lee sparked episodes of the Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Hulk cartoons, introduced him to the man himself.

The first real-life encounter came in 1998, when Lee signed his shabby copy of Fantastic Four No. 47 (one of the first In humans history) at the Wizard World convention in Rosemont, Illinois. Riesman’s biography includes a retro photo deliciously taken by his mother from the encounter, but which does not capture a strange moment soon after.

“He looked at me, looked at my mother and said, ‘You immortalized me’ – a very strange thing to say to someone who will eventually become your biographer,” recalls Riesman.

The uncertainty behind who created Marvel’s most iconic characters has been a bone of contention for comic book fans – the late artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko both claimed that Lee received more than his fair share of credit for dreaming of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man in particular. It is a question for which we should not expect clear answers, according to Riesman.

“I don’t think there’s a smoking gun that really tells us who created the Marvel characters,” said Riesman, a journalist who writes for New York Magazine and Vulture. “And that is really difficult for people, because we want certainty. The human brain thrives on making judgments, but it is a complicated and confusing world.”

Part of the problem is in Marvel Method from creating comics, which Lee used with Kirby and Ditko in the 1960s. He would give artists a rough history sketch and let them use their imagination to fill pages and panels with images of action and drama. Then Lee would rewrite the dialogue based on what his collaborators designed.


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This approach created a great deal of ambiguity about who exactly did what, in an era before we all started to leave digital tracks. Kirby was particularly assertive in claiming full credit for creating Marvel’s iconic characters, and Riesman explores this in his book.

“I think Stan and Jack were the only ones who knew … only two people are involved in this top-level creative process,” said Riesman of this pop culture puzzle. “There were two men in a room to some extent, both are dead and had no recordings or notes to substantiate their claims.”

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The Fantastic Four No. 1, by Lee and Jack Kirby, started the Marvel Universe as we know it in 1961.

Marvel Comics

The Marvel Method also makes it complicated to use the comics to get an insight into Lee, as we don’t know how much he contributed to individual issues and story arcs. Riesman chose to focus on the reality of life, rather than seeking any profound autobiographical revelations in the lives of Bruce Banner, Peter Parker or Reed Richards.

“I don’t think you can learn as much from these comics as many people thought,” said Riesman. “I don’t think it’s as important as looking at the concrete facts of your life and its impact.”

Ultimately, the author wants this biography to help people accept that ambiguity is “the order of the day” when it comes to Lee or anyone else’s life.

“We really risk making the world a worse place when we turn real-life people into superheroes, whether they are politicians, singers, actors or industry titans,” said Riesman. “Once you start putting people in those categories, you are really divorcing reality. And God knows, we spend a lot of time these days completely divorced from reality.”

If there is one thing I learned by diving into biographies like Riesman’s, it is that the people behind the legends are always more fascinating and complex than the stories they have told. If you obsessed with every detail in every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie or show – and the people who participated in many of them – you owe it to yourself to understand the ups and downs of real life stories that laid the foundation.

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