New Stan Lee Bio ‘True Believer’ Shatters The Myths Surrounding The Marvel IconFrom Forbes.comWhen Stan Lee died in November, 2018 at age 95, he seemed to go out on top. The avuncular spokesman for Marvel Comics was celebrated around the world for his creative achievements that helped birth multi-billion dollar superhero franchises that dominate the media landscape. Even into his mid-90s, Lee radiated charm and good humor when he appeared at comic conventions to packed rooms of fans cheering his immortal catch-phrases like “Excelsior!” and “Face Front, True Believers.” While troubling reports of abuse and decline began surfacing in his final year, following the death of his wife of 70 years, Joan, in 2017, Lee’s reputation and fortune seemed secure, and his story of scrappy persistence, mid-career creative renaissance, and long twilight basking in the fruits of his labor became the stuff of legend.
The problem is, Lee’s jaunty public persona and beloved cameo appearances in Marvel movies concealed a rat’s nest of troubles under the surface. Since departing Marvel for Hollywood in the 1980s, Lee involved himself in one failed or disappointing venture after another, with a veritable rogues gallery of villainous business partners. More significantly, his creative legacy came under increasing scrutiny. How much, if anything, did Lee, who served as Marvel’s editor and was credited as writer, contribute to the characters and stories that cemented Marvel superheroes in the public imagination? Within some quarters of the comics community, Lee’s outsized share of the credit constituted an act of theft from his collaborators, notably Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Both men died without receiving even a fraction of Lee’s public acclaim, much less the financial rewards their work brought to Marvel and later Disney.
Journalist Abraham Riesman first investigated this question in a profile story in Vulture in 2016, when Lee was still alive, active, and popular as ever despite the rot that was starting to appear at the edges of his empire. The warts-and-all profile was both alarming and prophetic of Lee’s sad final 18 months. That story eventually led to True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, Riesman’s book-length biography due out from PenguinRandomHouse on February 16.
True Believer is part for-the-record biography and part an effort to balance the scales between Lee’s public reputation and the more complicated truth underneath. The book delivers a wealth of details on Lee’s later life, unearths a few stories that blemish his reputation, and generally paints Lee as a restless and unsatisfied man whose own definition of success always lay just beyond his reach.
Lee, born Stanley Lieber in New York in 1922, was ambitious, gregarious, and shamelessly hungry for attention from an early age. Like many first and second-generation Jewish Americans who came of age in the Depression, he had his eye on the main chance. While some doors were closed to him by the attitudes of the time, he was able to latch on in comics publishing through a family connection to Martin Goodman, the publisher of poverty-row pulp magazines and comic books in the 1930s and 40s. Lee ended up in the editor’s chair in his early 20s after the company’s two creative dynamos, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, departed when they discovered Goodman was cheating them out of their share of the profits of their creation, Captain America.
Lee labored in Goodman’s publishing salt mine for two decades before an unlikely career renaissance, which is itself the subject of varying, Rashomon-like accounts. Whatever the real story, Fantastic Four – which Lee is credited with writing and creating along with artist/storyteller Jack Kirby – became a breakout hit and set the stage for Marvel’s decade-long march to the top of the comic business on the back of their concept of “superheroes with human problems.”
Riesman gives comparatively short shrift to this pivotal phase of Lee’s career; a fuller exploration of the popular appeal of Lee’s contribution to Marvel in the 60s can be found in Danny Fingeroth’s 2019 Lee biography A Marvelous Life. Riesman does, however, track down the writer of a notorious feature story that ran in the New York Herald Tribune in 1966 which first planted the myth of “Stan Lee the creative mastermind” in the popular imagination.
In the piece, Lee demonstrated the “Marvel method” – where he concocts the plots to the story, explains it briefly to the artist, then adds dialogue to the drawn pages – to credulous journalist Nat Freedland. The resulting story portrayed Lee as the larger-than-life mastermind and relegated Jack Kirby, who often ignored Lee’s skeletal guidance and gave reign to his own titanic visual imagination, as a tired-eyed workman who could, in Freeland’s deathless phrase, be mistaken for the foreman in a girdle factory.
That New York Herald Tribune piece led to a permanent fracture in the Lee-Kirby relationship, with Kirby eventually leaving the company in 1970 to work for competitor DC. Though Marvel prospered on the back of Kirby’s characters, dynamic style and storytelling approach for decades, Lee was never the same creative force, and Kirby’s bitterness over the experience lingered until his death in 1994, still fighting for the credit, respect and money he believed he was due. Unearthing the background details of this incident is, on its own, a significant contribution to comics history scholarship and one of the most interesting sequences in True Believer.
The second half of True Believer puts Lee’s post-Marvel career under the microscope. This portion of Lee’s life - constituting more than 40 years - has been noted but not highlighted by Lee’s previous biographers, partly because his late-career efforts are much less creatively significant than his Marvel work, and partly because it is frankly embarrassing that a man of Lee’s reputation and previously-demonstrated ability would involve himself in such awful projects (Striperella?) or with such crooks and conmen. Best to just look away and chalk it up to the follies of age and ego.
But in Riesman’s account, these misadventures are as central to understanding Lee’s true character and career as his celebrated work at Marvel. True Believer documents the bitter saga of Stan Lee Media, a 90s-era digital media company spearheaded by entrepreneur Peter Paul, whose side of the story is told at length for the first time in the book. Like most of Lee’s late-life ventures, SLM traded on Lee’s public reputation to sell hackneyed and outdated superhero concepts, and eventually collapsed amid finger-pointing and financial shenanigans.
True Believer also explores Lee’s personal life, painting a less-than-flattering portrait of Joan Lee, as well as detailing the troubled relationship between Stan and his only child, daughter J.C. Lee. These personal issues help explain why Stan continued to plot get-rich-quick schemes well into his 80s and 90s, and fell in with an increasingly unscrupulous circle of handlers and managers.
The last year of Lee’s life does not make for easy reading. Failing health and declining mental faculties, plus the loss of Joan, left him helpless against the vultures circling over him. Meanwhile, Disney had settled a lawsuit with Jack Kirby’s estate in 2014 that finally secured credit (and a healthy financial payout) for Kirby’s heirs, reopening the matter of Lee’s true role in Marvel’s heroic origin story.
Riesman’s unsentimental reportage, and his discovery of some troubling details that complicate the picture of Lee as a generally liberal, tolerant man, may seem gratuitous given the humiliations Lee experienced in his final years and the genuine joy he and his work brought to millions of people.
But Riesman’s careful debunking of the tall tales isn’t a takedown of Stan Lee as much as a takedown of the myth of the heroic creative genius – a myth that is not without consequences. Lee’s collaborators toiled and often died in obscurity while he basked in the limelight. The association of Marvel characters with Lee’s crowd-pleasing persona almost certainly contributed to their appeal both in comics and in the wider media universe, and the story of Lee as father-and-creator of the Marvel Universe papers over some messy creative rights issues facing companies like Disney.
True Believer may not be the book that Stan Lee’s fans want, but it’s a book that anyone concerned with the hard truths of human nature and the business of popular culture over the last 80 years needs.
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Abraham Riesman, comes out February 16, 2021, from PenguinRandomHouse.
