The editorial policy for this place is that there is no editorial policy. Well almost. I frown upon hot takes of whatever the Current Thing is, but even that I’ll let fly if it is artfully done. I just want interesting stuff, written with a bit of genuine human enthusiasm or emotion. I prefer stuff that feels personal, that is based on real experience rather than secondary sources, assumption or hearsay.
Today’s piece is a good case in point of what I like. Now for me as an individual I don’t particularly go in for comics books much. But that doesn’t matter. Because Phil here does and is able to talk about comic book creator with the interest, warmth and even-handed candour that comes from not only enjoying someones creations but actually meeting the individual in real life. Even if it was on a conveyor belt.
Enjoy.
The recent Stan Lee documentary on Disney+ has been controversial to say the least. A divisive figure in the entertainment industry, you’re just as likely to see someone online pillorying him as praising him.
To some, he unfairly takes credit for being the sole creator of superheroes that have become household names over the years – Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, and the Incredible Hulk to name but a few, playing down the efforts of the artists who brought his written descriptions to spectacular life.
To others, he’s a genius in the fields of both non-fiction writing and marketing who created and led Marvel Comics to become the number one comics company seemingly overnight and oversee its expansion and dominance in merchandise, TV shows and eventually blockbuster movies.
The truth, as is often the case with entertainment giants, is somewhere in-between these two poles of opinion.
In this article, I’ll be expanding on both of these opinions, and describing my experience of a day I will never forget. A day where I got to see how Lee talked and acted over the course of a day in London on Saturday 25th February 2012, from mid-morning to late evening, and interacting with him at three different times.
I’d bought a VIP ticket to the London Film and Comic Con which included a few privileges – a personal photo with Lee, getting one of your comics or books signed by him, access to a live interview in the afternoon, and private access to a special Q&A evening session with each attendee being able to ask him one question.
But before I rifle though my treasured memories, here’s a quick overview of how Lee formed Marvel, and the subsequent controversy over creator rights that plagued him for the rest of his life.
The Origin of Stan Lee and Marvel Comics
Although he invented the origins of a host of popular characters, arguably his greatest (re)invention is his own. Wanting to become the writer of the next Great American Novel, Stanley Leiber’s first printed work was a backup text story in Captain America #3 in May 1941, two years after he’d been hired as an assistant for Timely Comics. Embarrassed by the visible gap between his current work and his ultimate literary goal, he credited this and all subsequent comic stories to a pseudonym based around his first name, and Stan Lee was born. Later he would adopt it as his legal name.
One fact I hadn’t known about Lee that I discovered in the documentary was that, after joining the army, he was tasked with reformatting their accounts training program from long wordy documents to comics and, in doing so, reduced the length of the training from 6 months to 6 weeks. Since I run an Explainer Video company, I found it interesting that we’re now replicating what he did in video form.
Twenty years after writing his first Captain America story, and after Timely had been renamed to Atlas Comics, Lee was tasked with managing publisher Martin Goodman’s challenging goal to create a team of superheroes to compete with DC’s Justice League of America that was flying (sorry) off the shelves. Atlas became Marvel, and, with the help of talented artist Jack Kirby, Lee created Marvel’s first title, The Fantastic Four.
Lee’s scripts for the FF, and later Spider-Man, The X-Men, Thor, Hulk and Iron Man, differed from the straight-forward superhero antics of DC by adding elements of soap opera. His characters were affected by real-world problems and would often argue over everyday things and make mistakes, an approach that was refreshingly different to the seemingly godlike heroes in almost every DC comic. The Fantastic Four acted more like a family with accidental powers than a superhero team.
The Marvel roster swiftly grew, and, with Lee handling marketing duties as well as writing multiple titles each month, and his own ‘Stan’s Soapbox’ column in the letters pages, he relied on what he later called the ‘Marvel Method’ to keep up with the publishing deadlines. To quote Lee’s Wikipedia page:
‘Typically, Lee would brainstorm a story with the artist and then prepare a brief synopsis rather than a full script. Based on the synopsis, the artist would fill the allotted number of pages by determining and drawing the panel-to-panel storytelling. After the artist turned in pencilled pages, Lee would write the word balloons and captions, and then oversee the lettering and colouring. In effect, the artists were co-plotters, whose collaborative first drafts Lee built upon.’
Credit Where Credit’s Due
So, although the Marvel Method helped to turn Marvel into the number one comics company, and keep it there, it also made it a lot more difficult in later years to determine who created, or co-created, the various characters and stories. Jack Kirby, and Spider-Man’s artist Steve Ditko, held life-long grudges against Lee for not being given the credit, or royalties, they felt they were due. After battling with Marvel executives for decades, Kirby’s estate was finally awarded a settlement in 2014, 20 years after his death, which also included giving Kirby co-creator credit in various comics, although the settlement fell short of giving his estate creator rights to the various characters that Kirby had worked on with Lee.
But things weren’t that cut and dried. According to an interview with Marvel artist John Romita Sr, who took over the art duties for Spider-Man from Ditko, then Fantastic Four from Kirby: “Stan used to give <Jack> credit all the time; he used to say most of these ideas are more than half Jack's… Every time I took a story in to Stan—and if Jack were reading it, he'd have felt the same way—I had only partial faith in my picture story. I worked it out and I believed in the characters, but I was only half-sure it was going to work. I always had my misgivings. By the time Stan would write it, I'd start to look at that story and say, "Son of a gun, it's almost as though I planned it," and I'd believe a hundredfold more in that story after he wrote it than before—and if Jack would've allowed himself to, he would've had the same satisfaction. I sincerely believe that.”
The Disney+ documentary doesn’t have a presenter, as it’s mainly constructed of soundbites from Lee taken from interviews. The shortcoming of this approach is that we don’t hear the interviewer’s questions or their responses, so lack the full context of Lee’s quotes. For example, we only hear the first sentence in the following exchange from Lee’s interview with Jonathan Ross (at 2:37 in the video link – from a documentary about artist Steve Ditko), when Ross pressed him on whether or not Ditko should have been given co-creator credit for Spider-Man:
Lee: “I really think the guy who dreams the thing up created it. You dream it up and then you give it to anybody to draw it.”
Ross: “But if it had been drawn differently, it might not have been successful or a hit, I suppose.”
Lee: “But then I would have created something that didn’t succeed.”
And then:
Lee: “I’m sorry I said it because I’m happy to say that I consider Steve to be the co-creator. I think, if Steve wants to be called the co-creator, I think he deserves to be called the co-creator because he had done such a wonderful job.”
Ditko had a problem with Lee’s words when he originally wrote in a letter: ‘I have always considered Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s co-creator’ instead of just saying that he was the co-creator. His repetition of those words in the Ross interview years later shows how carefully he had thought of them and held onto them. The phrase would have appeased some people, but not Ditko.
Also, in Ross’s documentary, we see a clip of the opening credits of the first Spider-Man movie from 2002, where Lee had insisted that Ditko’s name was listed alongside his. The on-screen text said: ‘Based on the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’ which, although a positive gesture, but doesn’t exactly say: ‘Spider-Man created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’, which is what the artist had yearned for and never been awarded, by Lee at least.
As the Disney+ documentary points out, Jack Kirby first provided a design for Spider-Man’s costume, but Lee was dissatisfied with it and gave the job to Ditko, whose design was approved. Kirby then drew the iconic cover to Spider-Man’s origin issue, Amazing Fantasy #15, based on Ditko’s design. Lee had a great sense of what would and wouldn’t work, and the world would have been a different place had he chosen Kirby’s more traditional design for the character.
Lee always thought of himself as the sole creator of these heroes despite not actually designing their looks. But did he have a genuine case for this? When someone writes a novel that’s then turned into a comic, movie or TV show, the people who design the look of the characters for that medium aren’t given co-creator credit. The artists who worked for Marvel were on contracts that just paid them a page rate independent on what they drew on that page, unless they were also writing the scripts. So Lee possibly thought that he was going over and above what he needed to do in order to allocate credit.
However, Lee could have made his life much easier, and more adequately ensured that the hard-working artists who created the iconic designs for his characters would be adequately rewarded for their world-class work by giving them the credit they felt they deserved in writing. After all, he never owned the rights to the characters in the first place (much to his regret). However, his pride, and his expertise with words, kept him from going the full distance.
Meeting the Legend
The Stan Lee that I observed over the course of the comic con looked happy, relaxed and was a born storyteller. For someone aged 89, he easily dealt with everything thrown at him, having to sit, smiling, through hundreds of smiling photos, signing hundreds of items, and answering hundreds of questions. I felt full of life just watching him, as if he had a mystical aura that bathed anyone in his presence. His genial manner and good humour made me feel as if I knew him as a friend, which is why I’ll be referring to him as Stan from now on.
The day seemed to run like a well-oiled machine, with a team of assistants making sure that the photos and signatures were processed with McDonalds-like efficiency.
My first appointment with Stan was to get a book signed. I’d brought my slightly dented A4-size hardback Captain America UK annual from 1981, which reprinted his classic 3-issue story that was illustrated by legendary artist Jim Steranko, and passed it to the assistant, showing him where I’d like the signature to be. This was in stark contract to many of the people in the queue who held valuable American comics in the hope that their price would rocket after he’d scribbled on the cover. My annual wasn’t worth more than £5 – something for me to treasure rather than sell.
When the assistant handed him my annual, holding the book open and pointing to the area to sign, he at first looked surprised and then smiled at me before he signed it. Unfortunately, there was no time to say anything to him other than ‘Thank you’ after he handed me the book back because the assistant was pushing forward the next comic for him to sign.
The photoshoot was a similar conveyer belt, with people being asked to stand right next to Stan when called. I did manage to say to him: ‘That’s another thing off my bucket list’ before the photo was taken, which he laughed at, and afterwards he said ‘Well done’ as if I deserved a prize for looking the happiest I think I’ve ever looked.
In the afternoon, he was interviewed in front of an audience by Duncan McAlpine, who had written various iterations of The Comic Book Price Guide in the 90s before eBay and the speculator market ruined any chance of an annual price guide being remotely accurate. The interview lasted about an hour, but Lee was quick to respond with joviality and an amazing memory. The audience loved it.
Unfortunately, the recording of the interview that I thought I’d taken on my trusty on my Zoom H1 recorder was missing (though you can see it posted by someone else on YouTube here), but luckily I found one audio file of interest…
The evening session, starting around 8pm, was held in a rectangular room, with a circle of chairs set up at the far end, and the VIP ticket holders congregating at the other end, waiting to be called. Stan sat with his assistant in the centre of the circle, the assistant helping him if he didn’t quite hear a question, which happened often. Once someone had had their question answered, they exited the circle and someone from the waiting group was shown to the empty chair.
I’ve found a recording of 26 minutes of what was at least a 90-minute session. I was one of the last people to ask him a question, so started recording when I was shown to my seat so that the mic could pick up his voice (yes, it took 26 minutes for the whole circle to ask their questions).
You can listen to the recording of the session here. I’d asked my question at 24:20. It was about his new line of comics for children, since most superhero comics are now for ages 13 and over, and I’d raised my concerns about the industry not nurturing younger readers in 2011. Stan said that he always tries to ensure his stories could be enjoyed by both adults and young children, which I feel is a lost art these days, and the audience for superhero comics has dwindled as a result.
I admired Stan for having the energy, both mental and physical, to answer quick-fire questions from a large group of people after having spent the day being moved from pillar to post and expected to perform on demand, all while keeping a smile on his face.
And he did it all again the following day! You can find videos on YouTube of the Q&A session on Day 2 posted by SilverAgeFan (here’s the link to part 1 of 4 videos), but this time everyone was standing in a circle, so that he could walk up to each individual and hear them more clearly.
Stan’s Final Years and Legacy
All in all, it was a very special day that I’ll never forget, and I’m grateful to see Stan when he was still seemingly still in the prime of life.
I was unable to see him when he returned to London 2 years later, aged 90, but people have reported that he looked tired and had clearly aged, so maybe the long working days were starting to take their toll. In 2018, a disturbing video of him at Silicon Valley Comic Con was posted where someone in his entourage was telling him his name each time he was handed a book. He looks as if the life had been knocked out of him. His wife of almost 70 years, Joan, had died the year before and it was reported by The Daily Beast that he had since become a victim of crooks and hustlers who were using him in his final months to make more money when he should have been resting. He died a few months later.
He never got to write the Great American Novel but, having dedicated most of his life to entertaining people, and with his characters and stories introducing new readers to the joy of superheroics, he has, and will continue to, create many more happy memories than he would have done as a novelist.
And that’s the paradox of Stan Lee. Though some may say that his legacy is as a con man, and he clearly enjoyed being held in high regard (and the money that came with it), his comic characters, stories, and the Stan Lee character that he adopted for most of his life have created arguably the greatest legacy in the history of entertainment.
And while the business-side of him (Stanley Leiber?) could be regarded as selfish, his millions of fans, especially those who met him like I did, could see that the entertainer Stan Lee was selfless.
The fact is, without Stan Lee, there would be no Marvel Comics. And the world would be a lot worse off had neither been created.
Great recollection! I hadn't realized that Kirby was also asked to design the Spider-Man costume, interesting contrast between the two looks.