Stan Lee Biography Undermines Complexity Of Marvel Icon: ‘Neither Saint Nor Satan’

Comic book legend Stan Lee was one of the real titans of pop culture, with his Marvel Cinematic Universe cameos cementing his status as a mainstay of the Marvel Universe. The man behind Spider Man, the Avengers, the The Fantastic Four and the X Men continued to woo audiences in countless interviews and signed comics for fans who paid $ 50 (or more) and stood in line for hours to meet him.

I did just that at Wizard World New York in 2013 and felt a little strange watching the 90-year-old 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 adored almost as a hero since I started religiously reading The Adventures of Spidey at age 9.

In the years since this reunion, by Lee’s deaths in 2018I’ve read countless biographies and stories about him and the early days of Marvel to try and understand the real people behind the fictional universe. These stories had almost become as comfortable and familiar as the comics they spawned.

Then i read Abraham Riesman’s True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, which hits shelves this week, and one of the front lines told me this grip wouldn’t be as comfortable.

“Stan Lee’s story is where objective truth is going to die,” he wrote.

Instead of starting with the familiar accounts of Lee’s childhood in New York City during the Depression or his Marvel debut, Riesman wastes little time hinting at Lee’s alleged lies and exaggerations about his role. in the creation of characters, the legal difficulties encountered by his position. -The wonderful societies and elder abuse he may have endured in the last months of his life.

It made for an extremely gripping and deeply uncomfortable read, so I asked Riesman why he chose not to open with the usual dawn romance of Marvel Comics as we know them.

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

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

Riesman’s Marvel origin began in the ’90s after purchasing a copy of Megan Stine’s Marvel Super Heroes guide book, a mini-encyclopedia designed to draw young readers to the worlds of Spidey and his friends, when ‘an elementary school book fair. The Marvel Action Hour, in which Lee teased episodes of Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Hulk cartoons, introduced him to the man himself.

The first real-life encounter was in 1998, when Lee signed his battered copy of Fantastic Four No.47 (a Inhuman story) at the Wizard World convention in Rosemont, Illinois. Riesman’s bio includes a delightfully retro photo of the meeting taken by his mother, but one that doesn’t capture an eerie moment in its immediate aftermath.

“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,” Riesman recalls.

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

“I don’t think there’s a smoking gun that actually tells us who made Marvel characters,” said Riesman, a reporter who writes for New York Magazine and Vulture. “And it’s really hard for people, because we want certainty. The human brain thrives on judgments, but it’s a complicated and messy world.”

Part of the problem lies in the Marvel Method comic book creation, which Lee used with Kirby and Ditko in the ’60s. It gave artists insight into the story and let them use their imaginations to fill pages and panels with action images and pictures. drama. Then Lee would come back to write the dialogue based on what his collaborators had drawn.

This approach created a major ambiguity about exactly who was doing what, at a time before we all started to leave digital trails. Kirby was especially assertive in claiming full credit for creating the iconic Marvel characters, and Riesman explores that in his book.

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

The Marvel Method also makes it difficult to use the comics to better understand 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 deep 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 a lot of people thought,” Riesman said. “I don’t think it’s as important as looking at the hard facts of his life and its impact.”

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

“We really run the risk of making the world a worse place when we make superheroes of real life people, whether they are politicians, singers, actors or industry titans,” Riesman said. “Once you start putting people in these categories, you really separate yourself from reality. And Lord knows, we spend way too much time these days, completely separated from reality.”

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