return to Trevor

True Believer: The Stan Lee Documentary

Last year was the summer of superheroes. Four of the best films the genre ever had to offer all came out within a few weeks of each other. I have even argued, that much like Jaws before it, The Dark Knight deserved to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. As good as Slumdog Millionaire was, and it was great, 50 years from now people will still be talking about Chris Nolan’s epic and Heath Ledger’s performance while Slumdog will disappear to the world of Oliver! and Crash. While we are in a bit of a dry spell right now, with only the dog in milk bone underwear known as Wolverine to entertain audiences, there is a whole swell of films just over the horizon, including Wonder Woman, The Flash, Namor, Green Lantern, Captain America, Thor, Dr. Strange, The Silver Surfer, Ant-Man, Green Arrow, Luke Cage, Shazam, and The Justice League, plus the next installments of our current favorite superhero franchises. If that was not enough, some of the most creative filmmakers and actors in Hollywood have been influenced by comic books including Thomas Jane, Joss Wheaton, Clive Barker, Guillermo Del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Howard Stern, Jerry Seinfeld, Kevin Smith, Sam Raimi, Sam Mendes and Nicolas Cage. Graphic novels have made great cinema, with non-superhero fare like Ghost World, 300, Sin City, A History of Violence, American Splendor, 30 Days of Night, and Oldboy. (Netflix or rent Oldboy. Trust me, one of the greatest pieces of cinema made in the last decade.) Like it or not, it is one of the reasons that Stanley Martin Lieber, aka Stan Lee, the former President and Chairman of Marvel Comics, is an important part of popular culture. Yet, the real question is, is Stan Lee a beloved, goofy, grandfatherly icon loved by fanboys and Marvel zombies for giving the world such characters as Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men or a corporate toadie who screwed the real creators, artists like Jack Kirby, John Romita, Gene Colan, and Steve Buscema, out of the royalties and credit due them, a glory hound, hack, and attention whore who never met a microphone or camera he did not like. Just because it is superheroes in spandex and tights, children’s fare, does not mean that real people did not get hurt in the hardball, mafia controlled world of comics.

Stan Lee got his job the old fashioned way, nepotism. With the help of his uncle Robbie Solomon, a teenaged Stan got a job as an assistant at Timely Comics, owned by publisher Martin Goodman, who was also married to Stan’s cousin Jean. Timely, a minor comic book company in the 1940s, had for their biggest creations: Captain America, The Human Torch, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. Dreaming of being a real writer, the teenager did not want to soil his real name with the mark of having written comics, so he used the more Aryan sounding pen name of Stan Lee. (Remember the 1940s were still a time when open anti-Semitism was permitted and promoted in many circles.) Young Stan did office chores and wrote filler, and eventually created his first superheroes, the Destroyer and Father Time, to fill out the first issue of Captain America’s USA Comics. (Never heard of them? There is a good reason. They were awful.)

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the creators of Captain America, were the creative forces at the company, but quickly got into a fight with Goodman over pay. In order to make sure that he did not have future problems and management walk outs, Goodman put his 19-year-old family member in charge of the operation as interim editor, much to the chagrin of many on the staff. Blood is thicker than water and Stan would make sure the artists and writers knew their place. A year later, Stan was drafted and writing safety manuals and training films for the army, but the young man knew he had a job to come back to in 1945.

Timely, or as it would eventually become known, Atlas, then Marvel, was not one of the elite companies in the industry. They were a company that followed whatever trend was hot at the time. If superhero comics were big, they mined that field until it went dry, then jumped to the next hot trend, be it humor comics, romance stories, westerns, horror tales, medieval adventures or funny animal strips. What they produced was harmless garbage, and it was this ability to change and adapt that probably saved the company. Most of the other publishers washed out and closed up shop in the aftermath of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Long before television, music, internet, and video games were blamed for ruining children, comics, thanks to psychologist Fredric Wertham, were seen to be harmful to kids. In order to save themselves from government regulations, publishers agreed to put on themselves a Comics Code of what could be shown and not shown in the pages of their colored and paneled world. Overnight most of the readership disappeared and lean times laid ahead for artists and creators who could not find another field and comics gained the stigma of being a children’s genre.

In the late 1950s, superhero comics came back into favor thanks to the creative work of DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, who had never stopped publishing Batman and Superman, and had added a whole bunch of science based superheroes to his stable like The Flash and Green Lantern. Yet, his biggest success was partnering up all his good guys into one big band called the Justice League of America and these books sold like gangbusters. When Schwartz informed Goodman, while they were playing golf together, how much this team-up book sold, Goodman knew he had to jump onto that bandwagon. Lee, who was thinking about quitting to pursue other fields, was given the assignment. With the help of Jack Kirby, who had returned to the company, the Fantastic Four (FF) was born. Unlike their DC counterparts, the FF bickered and fought like a family. (Anyone who has studied Kirby’s work can see his archetype fingerprints all over this new team.) They were an instant success and Goodman wanted more. Using the Marvel method in which Lee would dictate general story ideas, the artist would flesh out the stories and ideas and Lee would do the dialogue, Marvel became a hotbed of creativity. Kirby worked on Thor, Iron man, X-Men and the Hulk. Bill Everett, the creator of Namor, came up with Daredevil. Steve Ditko cranked out Doctor Strange and Spider-Man. Kids loved these new superheroes on the block, because like them, they were not perfect. They had troubles, heartache, and real life issues. More importantly, unlike the adult run DC, Stan played to his juvenile audience, giving the artists and writers wacky nicknames, inserting a Bullpen Bulletins page and a Stan’s Soapbox column, which included letters from readers and friendly, chatty replies from Stan “The Man” Lee. Marvel was a tree house club with trademark phrases and in-jokes. They were the hip read compared to the square, clean DC world. While DC was a nameless, faceless giant, Lee was front and center, appearing at conventions, doing interviews, and always taking the lion’s share of the credit for the Marvel revolution. Goodman loved Stan being Stan, because Stan was loyal, and more importantly if Stan was credited as the creator of these new superheroes, the artists who did the backbreaking grunt work would have a harder time suing the company to get the rights and paychecks they deserved.

So who is the real Stan Lee? The problem is, Stan is still with us doing cameos in every Marvel release and appearing on Sci-Fi television as the beloved face of Marvel. Much like Elizabeth Custer who, for as long as she was alive, kept anyone from criticizing her husband, George Armstrong Custer, as long as Stan is the biggest Marvel cheerleader and his zombies fall all over themselves, the real truth will never be found. As he has gotten older, Stan has admitted that the artists were a bigger creative force than he would have admitted in the 1960s and 70s, and it is clear that he has not been able to repeat the success of his boom period at Marvel, with three failed companies in his wake since then. He is the Music Man, Harold Hill, selling his dream to a generation of children and maybe, just maybe, he is the Piped Piper, who really did produce the music. The documentary True Believer does not give the answers, just a nice beginning to find the answers.

Verdict: A Nice Fanboy Overview of Stan