The Read: Abraham Riesman, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
Comics. History.
Plus the controversies around Stan Lee have been swirling around my consciousness since the 1970s, so I wanted to see what a deep dive into Lee’s life turned up.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. It’s a very readable biography based on a solid range of research. I especially appreciated the care that Riesman uses to pick through the Lee v. Kirby & Ditko controversies (see below) and his balance of criticism and sympathy (verging on pity at times) for Lee. One of the oddities of Lee’s life is that the MCU movies turned him via his cameos into a sort of corporate mascot, with many younger Marvel fans really having no idea what Lee’s actual contributions were—and about some of the more dubious aspects of his life. I especially recommend the book for them.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I doubt I’ll ever teach a course on comics history, though it’s tempting. And most of what I might write about comics doesn’t require attention to Lee’s life story. But this book would make a great companion piece to a number of other histories of comics.
Quotes
“He bounced from job to job, searching for permanent employment, without any sense of where his future lay. There is a kind of irony in what happened next. When he told stories about those early years, Stan always portrayed his family as ancillary to his own career ambitions and autodidactic sense of purpose…an unexpected bit of nepotism allowed him to set foot on the path towards—to use his words—reaching the top and staying there.”
“‘Roy Thomas had said, ‘We’re thinking of killing Aunt May',’ Romita recalls. ‘Said they wanted to test the fandom, so we’re gonna have to kill somebody.’…Stan started telling people that he’d been out of town when the death warrant was signed and that he had nothing to do with the story.”
“Stan informed Conway that Marvel had signed a deal to make a toy car for Spider-Man and that the writer had to introduce the vehicle in the comic. The ridiculousness of a high-flying web-slinger driving through New York City traffic drove Conway nuts, leading him to write the story such that two loathsome businessmen develop the car and ask Spidey to drive it—one of the gents looked an awful lot like Stan, and his business card bore the real-life address of Marvel Comics.”
“Kirby walked onstage to thunderous, shocked applause, and Stan informed the crowd that Kirby was returning to his old stomping grounds. ‘Whatever I do at Marvel,’ Kirby declared, ‘I can assure you that it’ll electrocute you in the mind!’ Stan corrected him: Electrify, Jack! Electrify!’”
“Stan was used to being disrespected in television and film, but he’d always been able to rely on the fact that he retained an aura of grandeur in the world of comic books. That changed in the eighties. After a decade of lackluster leadership at Marvel and a prior decade of taking credit for things he didn’t do, Stan’s demons were finally starting to catch up to him in public.”
“There’s a whole folder in the Stan Lee archives filled with Stan-penned movie and TV treatments based on Marvel characters—Nick Fury, the Sub-Mariner, Doctor Doom—none of which came to anything. Meanwhile, Stan was working on pitches for his own, non-Marvel projects, some of which survive in the archives.”
“When I ask Junko Kobayashi about the alleged crimes she witnessed or committed while working for POW Entertainment, Stan’s second post-Marvel company, it isn’t long before she starts crying.”
“One by one, people of unstable morals entered Stan’s life, promising him fame and riches, so long as he didn’t ask too many questions about how the sausage was being made—and didn’t worry too much that he, too, might be getting bilked by them…And yet, in a stunning contrast, while Stan became mired in the grime of his private world, his public image shone brighter than ever.”
“Stan had no affection for what he was watching. ‘Stan hated superhero films,’ Morgan recalls, nothing that Stan probably watched only two or three all the way through. Stan’s bodyguard, Gaven Vanover, backs up this assessment: ‘As soon as we made it to the end of the red carpet,’ he says, ‘it was, let’s get out of here’.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Riesman adds a ton of detail and texture to something I always felt I could see around the edges of Lee’s self-presentation as Marvel’s pitchman wherever I encountered it. (I started reading comics after the initial period of Marvel’s rise, so I think maybe the first time I really became conscious of Lee was his mini-essays addressed to Marvel fans in various comics and through books like Secret Origins that reprinted some of the classic early stories.) Namely, that for Lee, being known as a comics writer and executive was on some level humiliating, that he spent much of his life desperate to break out and be a mainstream writer or creator, or at least to work in a different genre of popular culture. This despite the fact that in the 1970s, his work at Marvel had led numerous respected writers, artists and intellectuals to celebrate him and his work and gave him an endless series of bookings on college campuses. And Riesman’s pretty gentle about this, but the huge pile of pitches, treatments, proposals, scripts, stories, ideas and so on in the Stan Lee archives are pretty damn awful, and enough to provide additional fodder for those who think Lee wrote very little of the comics work that he claimed credit for. Also there’s a kind of squicky dirty-old-manish thread through a lot of those pitches; you get the sense that one of Stan Lee’s spirit animals was Hugh Hefner.
I have to admit that the material about Lee’s family life—his relationship with his brother and his daughter especially, but also his business partner Peter Paul—is sometimes painful. Lee’s shortcomings in this sense are both banal (his self-involvement, his distance) and of a piece with the rest of his life, but it still feels uncomfortable to read. (Along with moments like Stan breaking down and crying when Ike Perlmutter offered him a two-year deal to remain as a Marvel mascot for $500,000 a year, saying that he couldn’t possibly live on that—in the late 1990s!) The last third of the book that deals with the details of Lee’s last few years is really ugly, and yet it does feel like this is what awaits anybody who has trouble making strong reciprocal friendships with others, if they’re unlucky enough to also attract vultures seeking their money or reputation.
I’d love to read a book that took on the histories embedded in Lee’s biography, and in other histories of Marvel and the TV and film industry, to make some new arguments about the peculiarities of the intersection of capitalism, corporations, and creators. I don’t feel that anybody has a really good grasp on those intersections—on the oddities of ownership, on the strangeness of the corporate boardrooms involved, on the ways that cultures of risk and reward misalign persistently. The sometimes gross details of Paul and Lee’s business venture (“Stan Lee Media”) and its intersection with the accidentally fateful ownership of Marvel by Avi Arad and Ike Perlmutter strikes me not as unusual but typical of the kinds of things that happen in entertainment industries.
I first encountered the attack on Stan Lee’s role at Marvel through the Comics Journal in the 1980s and 1990s. Gary Groth’s editorial vision sometimes bugged me—it could be overbearing and the Journal often came off as intensely overanxious to assert the artistic quality of comic-books. It became an important venue for what I would call “Kirby orthodoxy”, the view that Jack Kirby was nearly 100% responsible for the success of early Marvel comics, along with Steve Ditko, with Lee just worming his way into the picture from the management side. I think Riesman does a great job of picking through the long history of the disputes around Lee’s contributions to arrive at a portrayal that feels like the truth. First, Riesman points out that while Lee’s public recollections and statements about Kirby and Ditko (and other Marvel creators) ranged between overtly false and substantially misleading, Kirby’s numerous public narratives were also often demonstrably wrong on a wide range of details and frequently overreached (for example, Kirby sometimes claimed to have created Spider-Man, despite Ditko’s strong claims to the contrary). I think when it’s all laid out, it feels pretty plain that the tonality of early Marvel, which had so much to do with the company’s success, had a lot of Lee’s fingerprints on it. Dialogue, some of the plot turns and tropes, some of the characterizations, all have Lee’s imprint. I think in part you can see just how much Lee contributed by looking at Kirby and Ditko’s post-Marvel work. Ditko maybe just got consumed by the intensity of his devotion to Ayn Rand’s work and his creative capacity went down that wormhole with him, but Kirby without Lee plainly had little ear for dialogue or narrative—his books crackled with visual invention and with great character ideas but they struggled with storytelling on many other fronts. The problem for Lee is that he was even more hapless than his collaborators when he was on his own—his own ideas were half-baked salvage from the garbage substrate of popular culture, and he ran away from the work that was his accidental best.