BOOK REVIEW
TRUE BELIEVER: THE RISE AND FALL OF STAN LEE
By Abraham Riesman
Publisher :
Crown (February 16, 2021)
Language :
English
Hardcover :
416 pages
ISBN-10 :
0593135717
ISBN-13 :
978-0593135716
“Let your motto then always be 'Excelsior',
for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.”
― P T
Barnum, The Art of Money Getting
"What was [Stan] like?" . . . It depends on who you talk to at
what moment."
— Larry Lieber
“. . . I know my father's creativity versus Mr. Lee's creativity, and Mr.
Lee was an excellent marketer, he was an excellent manager, excellent
self-promoter. I honestly don't believe he had any creative ability."
— Neal Kirby (son of
Jack Kirby)
Abraham Riesman, the author
of TRUE BELIEVER: THE RISE AND FALL OF STAN LEE, sidebars his writing to inform
us readers of both the mission and the difficulties of being a biographer. The mission being one that sifts through the
faulty memories, missing evidence, and tries to slice through it all with an
Occam’s razor to find the truth—and in lieu of truth, at least some semblance
of a reasonable viewpoint. I don’t know
if Riesman has been to law school, but he makes sure to drive this point home
to the reader: There is no more
unreliable source for a biographer than the subject of the biography
himself. This is reminiscent of one of
the first things mentioned in both Trial Practice and Professional Ethics
classes in law school: Your client will
lie to you.
This seems counterintuitive,
but it is a truism. The client has a
vested interest in telling their lawyer whatever they think will help their
case and avoiding those facts that might hurt their case. Likewise, when people talk about themselves,
the stories they tell tend to morph to fit the audience they are being told to
and how the storyteller wants the listeners to think about him or her. Psychologically, this can make the job of an
objective biographer quite difficult. Autobiographies
can never be objective, because the authors are writing about themselves;
likewise the usual celebrity biography that springs forth with the cooperation
of the celebrity. These can be
well-written and entertaining, but they are basically just opening statements
in a case that cannot be challenged or rebutted. It is a narrative crafted by someone who has
a vested interest in controlling what is said and how it is said.
I am someone who was born
about 5 years into the Marvel Age of comics, which is recognized as starting in
1961 with the publication of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 by writer/editor Stan Lee and artist
Jack Kirby. So, my childhood on into
adulthood was one that tracked along with the ups and downs of Marvel Comics
and was aware of Stan Lee many years before I ever took note of who Jack Kirby
or (fellow artist and co-creator of Spider-Man) Steve Ditko were. I would wager that I first came to know who
Kirby and Ditko were because of repeatedly checking out from the local library
a 1974 paperback collection from Fireside Books called ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS
that reprinted the first appearances of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Thor, Hulk,
and Doctor Strange. Stan Lee was
credited as the author and he wrote introductions to the stories in his
well-established hyperbolic purple prose.
And as was Stan’s pattern over the years, he told the stories of what
inspired the characters’ creations, took pretty much all the credit for their
conception, then heaped much praise on Kirby and Ditko for bringing his
concepts to life on the printed page.
And this is the narrative that most people who aware of Stan Lee and
Marvel Comics know. Then there are those
who, like myself, have always enjoyed a higher level of curiosity about the
inner workings of the business and, so, enjoy seeking out and reading a lot of
these “inside baseball” type of books and articles about comics history. We are the ones who will go into a book like
this with a pretty good knowledge of the many conflicting stories and claims
about the creator credits Gordian Knot at Marvel Comics. Even with a pretty thorough collection of
information in my own head from decades of exposure to this stuff, I
encountered new facts and new information to add to the complicated image of
Stan “The Man” Lee.
Riesman’s book does a
professional job weaving together a comprehensive narrative that spans
chronologically from Stan’s grandparents through to Stan’s own death and
beyond. He provides no less than 30
pages of extensive citations and notes at the end of the book, which is not
anything I’ve yet seen in a Stan bio, and there’ve been plenty. This is a key distinction for Reisman’s book that
also helps absolve it of baseless assertions that the author has an “anti-Stan”
agenda or is a “hit piece.”
There are certainly quite a
bit of difficult and dark aspects to the book, but the author makes it very
clear that he includes these with personal trepidation. That is, he is not going to avoid including
these things simply because he doesn’t like them or because a reader might see
Stan painted in a negative light. He
lets the reader choose how to weigh the (cited) evidence he is presenting. The writing is engaging precisely because
Riesman infuses his narrative with personal feeling and acknowledgment of his
own discomfort. As such, he reflects the
same feelings that many readers might have.
By doing so, he makes it okay by affirming those feelings but also not
backing off simply because it gets uncomfortable.
To me, the most fascinating
voice in the book is from Stan’s younger brother, Larry Lieber, who offers up a
lot in both what he says but also in what he intentionally avoids saying. The picture I came away with from this book
was a humanized Stan Lee. This is not at
all the Stan that Stan himself would want us to know, but it is probably the
closest we will get to the true Stan.
What becomes clear by tracking
along with Stan chronologically through the years is that we begin to see a
very clear picture, at least to me, of a competent writer who was a good editor
but was Barnum level bullshit pedaler with a severe inferiority complex masked
by an over-confident and gregarious character he presented to the world. He was a man who wanted to be famous but was
never talented enough to get out of the low-rent world of the comic book
business, so he made himself the most famous comic book guy in the world to see
where that could take him. You see this throughout
the book, that even while working in comics and presenting the face of Stan “The
Man” to readers, he was incessantly trying side hustles to get himself the hell
out of there. Were it not for the
expensive habits of his wife and daughter, he very well may have stepped out
and tried something else. Unfortunately,
so many of his choices (and life is nothing but cumulative choices) were driven
by the need to keep his wife and daughter in the expensive lifestyle that had
grown accustomed to.
Part of the incongruity in Stan
as a human being is that fame and fortune were such massive driving forces in
his life choices but at the same time, he was someone who would give you the
shirt off his back if he liked you and you needed it. At the same time, he treated his own family
(except his wife and daughter) like detached acquaintances at best. Larry seems the most sad about this in that
Stan would toss Larry work here and there, but in his own sunset years, Larry
seems not very grateful and more resentful that his older brother kind of kept
him on a meager fishing line professionally over the years and now Larry
recognizes that he lost so many opportunities because of that. And now, in his 80s, he lives alone and is
writing his own stories for himself.
Stan and his wife, Joan,
lived a public lifestyle of excess and she was especially known in their
circles for drinking too much and then embarrassing herself and Stan by her
drunken behavior. Stan was devoted to
her but that inferiority complex in him probably contributed to his submissive
support for her outlandish activities and spending. Had they lived in more of a moderate sense,
they could have gone into a retirement quite rich and comfortable. Instead, he had to keep working on into his
nineties just to keep up with his wife’s needs until her death, and his
daughter JC’s even more absurd demands afterwards.
The vast success of the
Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially after Disney purchased Marvel for 4
billion dollars, was a two-edged sword for Stan. It was the realization of the hype he had
been spinning about Marvel since the beginning coming true finally, but beyond
his funny little cameos on-screen, he had signed away the profit margins he
could have had for a yearly stipend instead.
Moreso, he had to bristle a little knowing that back in the ‘90s when
Marvel was in bankruptcy, he passed up a chance to actually purchase the
company which would have finally made Marvel truly his. Sure, he put on his well-practiced smile for
the red carpets, but by all accounts, he never even bothered to watch the
actual movies. He liked the attention,
but he had little to no interest in the characters or the movies
themselves. But that sort of fact doesn’t
fit the narrative that people want to read about.
Watching the “Rise” of Stan
in this book is so fascinating because of reading those years and seeing it in
my head alongside my own experience as a child reading the comics and what my
perception was. I’m not sure how someone
who did not have my own life experience will feel reading those sections, but
it’s a bit like reading the diary of someone you thought you knew and
discovering that their self-perception and life was nothing like you
realized. So much of Stan’s “Rise” was
reliant upon artists and writers with much more skill and creativity than Stan
himself possessed. But one thing he did
possess was the power to spot talent and to hitch his creative wagon to their
horse. He also benefited from a natural
but well-practiced charisma that served him well while putting his extraverted
personality out into public speaking engagements around the country. He was laying the foundation for a particular
persona and self-serving narrative that exists to this day. And the book does not present this as particularly
malicious or intentionally harmful. This
is Stan being Stan and charging through life without introspection and with
blinders on so that he doesn’t necessarily see how his words or behavior might
be construed (or misconstrued) by others.
Stan was incapable of declining credit (there’s that pesky low
self-esteem again) and found it difficult even when pressed about it, to acknowledge
the other artists as even CO-creators.
The one time he gave Ditko co-creator credit for Spider-Man, he could
not help himself from saying it in such a way that Ditko could tell he didn’t
really believe it. When pressed, Stan said
“I have
always
considered Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man's co-creator.” Of course, Ditko was
quick to point out that Stan still did not say Steve Ditko was factually
Spider-Man’s creator but that he had always “considered” him to be. The use of that weasel word was enough for
Ditko to dismiss it. And this is
indicative of Stan throughout his life.
He may not be the world’s best writer, but he would give Clarence Darrow
a run for his money in choosing his words very carefully when he is speaking on
the record.
There are two elements of
the book that are going to be particularly polarizing to many readers. The first is the inclusion of the crazy
stories about Stan’s daughter JC, and the second is the conflict with Jack
Kirby over who created the characters in those early days of Marvel.
The thing about including
the stories about JC is that they are absolutely necessary to any objective
biography that deals with the final decade or so of Stan’s life. That last 10 to 15 years of Stan’s life is a
minefield of fraud, mismanagement, theft, and abuse. Where Stan’s “Rise” is a fascinating view
into how he somehow succeeded in the 80s and onward at making himself the
patron god of a business that he had no real involvement in or use for other
than as a propellant for his rocket to Hollywood fame and fortune. Stan’s “Fall” is a heartbreaking tale of
somebody desperate enough to involve himself with shady and criminal types in
scheme after scheme defrauding investors and consumers for years and
years. It is a tale of a man who is
tired and broken and taken advantage of by those same people, then others, and
always his daughter who allegedly was both physically and verbally abusive to
him as she would swing from one bipolar episode to another. Stan is even on the record near the end of
his life incapable of even confidently saying that his own daughter loves
him. If that makes you sick to your
stomach to hear, it should. Stan was a
human being and by the end of his life, he had been drained of every last drop
of life by a circle of vampires, including his own daughter who took him to
court to get the controlled trust Stan set up for her broken up so that when he
died she could get everything and not have to go through a third-party trustee. Riesman makes very sure that anything he says
about JC has sources cited, even if the source is not publicly available (such
as the private audio recordings of the two of them that were shared with the
author). In any objective biography, the
relationship with JC is a necessary component of understanding Stan, so she and
their relationship is absolutely essential to this work.
The conflict with Jack
Kirby, that in and of itself, is a subject worthy of a book. And there have been those as well. In comics fandom circles, there are those who
take the position that Jack created everything, those who say Stan created
everything, and then there are those who say it was something in the
middle. Riesman says that none of those
are very helpful to a biographer. A
biographer is not comfortable speculating that it must be something in the
middle simply because he can’t make the case one way or the other. It is a question that can never truly be
answered precisely because at the time those original comics were being cranked
out by a hack writer and his stable of fast-drawing freelance artists, they
were considered throw-away children’s entertainment. Nobody was keeping records of meetings or
notes about plots and very few, if any, scripts. There’s not even a lot of the art around
because it was not seen as valuable.
They stored the pages away in warehouses where, over the years, much of
it was destroyed by water, fire, rodents, or stolen by the occasional
employee. It was not until the late ‘80s
and early ‘90s that Marvel finally got around to cataloging and returning what
art they still had to the artists from the ‘60s. It is notable that Ditko, according to
first-hand reports from people who visited Ditko in his office after that, used
those returned Spider-Man pages as cutting boards for himself. As horrifying as that sounds, it does
indicate the mindset of the ‘60s work-for-hire freelancer. The art was done for that month’s paycheck
and never thought about again. There was
no after-market for the art yet.
Riesman does a good job of
giving the reader Jack’s side of the story and Stan’s side of the story. (Sidebar: If anyone wants an exhaustive
resource for Jack and Stan’s own words on the topic, I recommend the ‘STUF SAID
oral history book from TwoMorrows publishing.) He does interject as the author
to point out how unhelpful both men’s memories are on this topic. Both Jack and Stan could contradict themselves
in the same breath while telling us their “absolute truth” about who did
what. But there are indicators that help
present a bit of the picture that lets us know that Jack maybe contributed a
bit more than Stan wanted to admit, but also that Stan contributed a bit more
than Jack wanted to admit. The most
obvious indicator is that once Jack left Marvel to write and draw his own
comics at DC, back at Marvel, and other publishers, his own writing style is
demonstrably distinct from Stan’s and even his own pacing and plotting is
notably different. Jack’s FOURTH WORLD
books, or THE DEMON, or OMAC; for example, do not track with the types of plots
and storytelling that we were used to seeing on, say, FANTASTIC FOUR for 100
issues in collaboration with Stan.
Likewise, Stan fairly quickly transitioned out of writing and onto the
editing only side after Jack bolted for DC.
It’s not like Stan only collaborated with Jack up till then, but from
the way Riesman tells it, it does appear like Stan had become quite reliant
upon Jack even if it was just to bounce ideas off of him—or get some. Jack bolted sometime in 1970. Stan stopped writing by 1972 and his creative
output after that was particularly telling—especially his unyielding commitment
to try and make putting funny word balloons onto photos into something people
want or his penchant, when riffing creatively, of going into rather racy and
sexually immature directions. In the
end, we are left with a writer who was not particularly creative but had a
knack for exuberant and outlandish self-promotion and an artist who was very
creative but was very uncomfortable tooting his own horn. Together they tapped into a magical synergy
that formed the foundation for a new way of telling stories within the
constraints of corporate owned properties and without which the multi-billion
dollar Disney/Marvel monster would not exist.
If your only
experience with Stan Lee is his public persona, then this book should be
eye-opening. This is not a book that
presents Stan as a bad person. It
presents Stan as full person. Someone
who could be funny and charming and gregarious (sometimes to a fault) but also
someone who could be moody, spiteful, mean, duplicitous, and selfish. Much like you and I, he was complicated, and
Riesman has written a fairly definitive biography of Stan Lee that will stand
the test of time.
Also, before
I wrap this review, I want to say that this book should be made into a movie
promptly by the writer and director behind the Oscar nominated THE BIG SHORT,
Adam McKay. And they should hire Sam
Rockwell to play Stan.
That’s my
free Hollywood advice.
Excelsior!
