Search results
Nov 13, 2018 · Later, “Stan Lee Presents” appeared on the title page of every issue, whether it had passed in front of his eyes at any point or (more likely) not. ... So I was saving my name.” But Lee didn ...
Nov 15, 2018 · Stan Lee was undoubtedly a masterful storyteller. His talent in crafting modern mythology is what defined his career as he built a pop culture empire out of the stories he told on and off the page ...
- 4 min
Nov 13, 2018 · If Stan Lee ever got a thing dialogued, he would get it from someone working in the office. I would write out the whole story on the back of every page. I would write the dialogue on the back or a ...
Jun 26, 2023 · Here, Thomas examines Stan Lee, the new documentary on Disney+ that has sparked debate over who deserves primary credit for the success of the Marvel Universe and its heroes — Lee or close ...
- The cold, harsh truth about Stan the Man.
- With Great Power
- Family Matters
- Every Major Comic Character Stan Lee Helped Create
- There Are No Superheroes
By Mike Avila
Updated: Feb 22, 2021 5:18 pm
Posted: Feb 20, 2021 5:05 pm
Stan Lee is arguably the most famous figure in the history of comics. That’s not to say his long career was free from controversy. For decades, he was dogged by allegations that he took too much credit for work he created with others, and shared too little of the spotlight. For most of his long life, however, Lee’s superpower was the ability to avoid taking too many hits to his reputation. That will likely change with the release of the new book, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Abraham Riesman. It offers an illuminating and often harsh look at the life of this American icon, who died in 2018 at age 95, and calls into question many of the key elements of his legacy.Seasoned comics fans are familiar with the long controversy over rightfully assigned credit for the creation of the characters that launched the Marvel Age. As the face of Marvel since the 1960s, Lee has received the bulk of that credit, due to a combination of lazy journalism and his own significant self-promotional skills. There’s no denying Lee’s acumen for public relations. In many ways, his affability was an essential ingredient to Marvel’s success. His talent too was undeniable. His witty, inventive dialogue gave the Marvel line (he scripted most of the comics in the early days) a unique voice that made the books stand apart. That personable touch also helped him establish a connection with Marvel readers through casually charming letters columns and, later, his Bullpen Bulletins. Lee was also largely responsible for the then-novel idea of an inter-connected comics universe -- the continuity that allowed Spider-Man to appear in the pages of the Avengers or the Fantastic Four.
But his knack for making himself the center of every story written about Marvel came at the expense of co-creators such as Steve Ditko and especially Jack Kirby. Lee constantly shortchanged his creative partners and in many ways helped create the impression the Marvel Age was a virtual one-man operation. True Believer establishes a consistent pattern of wildly inconsistent explanations in Lee’s stories over the years regarding how the company’s stable of heroes, from Spider-Man to Thor, were actually invented.
No matter where you stand on the issue of “Who did what?” at Marvel -- and the Marvel Method of comics creation makes it hard to find the definitive answer -- it’s hard to defend Lee’s refusal for decades to give proper due to the artists who helped him create countless characters.
Even the origin of the most famous phrase in Lee’s career -- and perhaps in the Marvel canon -- is called into question in Riesman’s book. “With great power there must also come -- great responsibility!” is the defining tenet in Peter Parker’s life, immortalized at the end of the character’s origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15. Since its publication in 1962, it’s been taken at face value that Lee coined the phrase. But Riesman cites examples that include a 1906 quote from a young Winston Churchill as well as a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt that contain very similar versions of Spidey’s signature message. Could Lee have simply come up with that phrase on his own? Could he have been influenced subconsciously by something he had read years earlier? Perhaps. But Lee’s track record for misrepresenting the truth and claiming unearned credit practically demanded a closer look.
“That [phrase] was a minor point. I didn't want to hammer that too much, but it is something where you just have to go… there might've been antecedents to this and that's not a crime,” Riesman says. “It's fine. But we have this [idea] that that quotation emerged like Athena from the head of Zeus; this brilliant observation [by Stan] that no one else had ever made before.”
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee
11% off $28.00
For Riesman, providing fresh insight on his subject was an inherent challenge when writing about someone who was as famous for as long as Lee was. The author took a deep dive into Lee’s family history, going all the way back to its roots in Eastern Romania. His parents arrived in New York City around the start of the 20th century, and like many of the creators from comics’ Golden Age, Lee was Jewish. However, unlike Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, or Joe Kubert, Lee rarely made mention of his faith or made allusions to it in his work. Through his research, Riesman discovered a man frustrated with his family and, in particular, with his father.
“Stan very rarely talked about his father, but on the occasions when he did, he would say that his father didn't think much of him,” he says. “And I would imagine that a lot of his desire to get away from Jewishness had to do with his desire to get away from his family.”
Lee’s ambition and desire to leave the life he was born into would become a driving force for much of his adult life. “He wanted to be bigger than the average human,” Riesman continues. “And sometimes that, in your mind, can lead you to think, ‘Well, I have to leave behind the people who started it out for me.’”
Larry Lieber is interviewed for the book, and his strangely distant relationship with his more renowned older brother is one of the saddest and most bewildering aspects of Lee’s long life. Lieber, who spent years working at Marvel and co-created such characters as Thor, Ant-Man, and Iron Man, and even drew for decades the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip that Lee wrote, is unable to offer any explanation as to why his brother kept him at arm’s length for much of their adult lives. It was as if Lee was trying to leave any aspect of Stanley Lieber (Stan’s birth name) in his past, including his only sibling.
“Stan never said, ‘Hey, check out my brother, Larry Lieber. He's great,’” Riesman says. “It just didn't come up. He didn't refer to him as his brother in any kind of proactive way. And Larry will be the first to tell you that he and Stan had a very strained relationship. Stan didn't really want [or] have anything to do with him.”
Lieber mentions how hurt he was one year when Lee had come to Manhattan to appear at New York Comic Con and hadn’t even bothered to let his brother know. He also tells the author that his older brother never once told him he loved him. “He and Larry just didn't really have much of a relationship,” Riesman says. “There wasn't some incident that happened as far as I know that caused [the rift]. It was just for whatever reason. Maybe it had to do with [Stan’s wife] Joan or there's any number of motivations that might've been there, but it's somewhat sad to read about.”
Money would be a constant concern for Lee up until his final days, which is remarkable considering he had earned millions during his career.
“
The book makes mention of many of Lee’s high-profile flops… the Mighty 7, The Governator (with then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), a concert series, and even, incredibly, a Stan Lee cologne. We also get new details of his most devastating failure, the dotcom foray Stan Lee Media. If there’s one thing we learn from all these misfires, it’s that Lee was a terrible judge of character and was an easy mark for con men. He was constantly surrounded by people who viewed him as a cash cow. They would attach him to all kinds of half-baked projects to trade on the Stan Lee name, and use his still-strong media appeal for quick publicity. Reading the book, the clear and sad conclusion one comes to is that, without the cameos in the MCU films that introduced him to an entirely new generation of fans, Lee’s final couple of decades of life would have been marked largely by failure and endless appearances at comic conventions.
“Once you start really pulling at those threads and talking to the players, Stan's final years become a horror show and no one would deny that. There was so much abuse,” Riesman says, referencing the elder abuse allegations that arose after Joan’s death in 2017. “There was so much grifting and theft, and whatever you think of Stan’s flaws or mistakes or failings, nobody deserves to be 95 and be abused. It was a really sad ending to that story.”
One of the most notorious people in Stan’s latter-day orbit was Keya Morgan, his former business manager who was arrested in 2019 on charges of elder abuse. (Morgan would plead not guilty.) Morgan was interviewed for the book, and subsequently played for Riesman some disturbing recordings he had made that, as recounted in the book, capture Lee making offensive remarks.
That's the message of this book. If there's nothing else, it’s there are no superheroes, there are only humans.
“
“On a number of occasions, I heard Stan making racist, homophobic, and misogynist remarks either to or in discussion of JC,” Riesman writes in the book of the recordings. “‘I think you’re the dumbest white woman I’ve ever known!’ [Lee] screams at her in one (to which she replies, ‘Fuck you, Stan’). In another, Stan talks to Morgan about JC and says she’s ‘supposed to be an attractive lady,’ but instead she’s ‘like the worst lesbian you can imagine.’ At one point, JC tells Stan she’s going to adopt an African American baby (something that others in the inner circle say became a brief obsession for her), and Stan grunts back at her, ‘The hell you want a black baby for?’”
- Mike Avila
Feb 20, 2021 · After all, “Stan Lee” is the only name of the cover! Between the covers, Lee tells us in his trademark bombast how he came up with a bunch of high-concept superheroes — Monster Superhero! Teen Superhero! God Superhero! Blind Superhero!, etc. — that were then brought to visual life by his trusty sidekicks, artists like Jack Kirby and ...
People also ask
Did Stan Lee write 'Stan Lee Presents'?
Did Stan Lee ever get a thing dialogued?
Was Stan Lee a good storyteller?
Who is Stan Lee?
What happened to Stan Lee?
Did Stan Lee come up with new things?
Stan Lee(born Stanley Martin Lieber[1]/ˈliːbər/; December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018) was an American comic bookwriter, editor, publisherand producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business called Timely Comicswhich later became Marvel Comics.
