While the era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been key to cementing Stan Lee’s hagiography, even the slightest research into the comic book legend’s history reveals a much more complicated, often troubling legacy. To make an extremel long story short: While Lee was widely marketed (often by himself) as the mastermind behind all things classic Marvel, the charismatic comic book frontman often stole the spotlight from a bunch of other talented writers and artists. Arguably no one suffered more from this than Jack Kirby, who co-created The X-Men, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and several other Marvel fixtures alongside Lee, and who nursed a healthy (if understandable) resentment of “Stan The Man” for the rest of his life.
The fallout between the simultaneously beloved and controversial face of Marvel Comics and Kirby is almost as legendary as some of their superhero icons, and just one of the many fascinating aspects detailed in Abraham Riesman’s new biography, True Believer: The Rise And Fall Of Stan Lee, out today with Penguin Random House. Over at Slate this morning, a new excerpt from Riesman’s book details the comparatively small newspaper profile of the duo that proved to be the final straw for Kirby.
Back in 1965, Marvel Comics was a hot commodity (not yet the multi-billion dollar commodity it is today, but still), and Stan Lee was milking it for all it was worth. When up-and-coming journalist Nat Freedland pitched a piece on Lee, Kirby, and the whole Marvel operation to The New York Herald Tribune, what Freedland naively believed to be simple “day in the life” visit to Marvel HQ turned out to be somewhat of a staged PR stunt on Lee’s part.
“There are little touches I can see now, in retrospect—little touches of being an egomaniac and taking all the credit… But he told me about all the stuff, and I thought it was cute and tremendous. I saw artists coming around, but I didn’t talk to them much,” Freedland recounts of Lee in the True Believe excerpt.
Lee made it seem like he came up with most of an issue’s major plot points, which he conveyed to artists like Kirby, who would make his ideas a reality—which was a stretch. “Indeed, according to Kirby, he was by that point primarily just dictating to Lee what he was going to do in a given story, and those meager plot conversations weren’t even happening in person; they were all over the phone,” writes Riesman. “Freedland knew none of this and didn’t bother to find it out. ‘I was so enchanted by the whole thing,’ he says. The staged scene wound up as the central sequence in the Herald Tribune story.”
As it turns out, Kirby was less than thrilled when the article finally published. As his former assistant and biographer, Mark Evanier, remembered, “Jack’s wife, Roz, read the article early the Sunday morning it came out, woke Jack up to read it… Jack phoned Stan at home to wake him up and complain. Both men later recalled that the collaboration was never the same after that day, and it was more than just an injured ego at work.”
Freedland, to his credit, apparently regrets his shoddy reporting on the Lee-Kirby relationship—but Riesman certainly makes it seem like that relationship would’ve been on its last legs with or without the profile. The superpowered characters Kirby and Lee introduced to the world have managed to recover from more devastating blows, but it’s pretty difficult to ret-con reality, especially when you have writers like Riesman there to investigate.
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47 Comments
exSTEALscior!
Stan the Man(ipulator)!
Face front, MIStruTH believers!
You get a No Prize! (Which is how Lee referred to not giving Kirby any credit for his contributions.)
I have a friend who used to work for one of Stan Lee’s companies back in the early 2000s. Apparently they stiffed him for 2 grand of salary when he left the company, and he had a grudge against Stan Lee ever since.
Wrap it up – close the comments. This one’s the winner.
On a related note, does anybody remember the catchphrase Stan Lee used during those 90s Marvel cartoons? I thought it started with “Greetings!”, but there’s a chance I’m thinking of Jack Horkheimer:
Greetings True Believers?
That’s the one. Many thanks my dear fellow.
It made Kirby so mad that he started eating people and taking their powers!
Let us neither forget the great Steve Ditko.
“even the slightest research into the comic book legend’s history reveals a much more complicated, often troubling legacy.”Ah, yes, Lee’s troubling legacy of… Wait, let me open that link…. Being the victim of elder abuse.
Do you think Lee’s legacy began when the man was in his 90s?No, the troubling legacy Lee leaves behind is more about how he repeatedly took outsized credit for his work at Marvel, overshadowing the work of people like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others. Most of what Lee did was provide basic outlines of stories to his artists, who would then need to come up with the art and dialogue for the issue (in other words, pretty much the entirety of the book). Stan would then sometimes come in and mess with dialogue, add some exclamation points, add a few more exclamation points, and call it a day.The fact that Stan Lee gets so much cultural credit for ‘creating’ the Marvel universe and the fact that he got that credit by standing on the backs of the dozens of artists and writers that worked at Marvel in the 60s, 70s, 80s and even beyond is the troubling part.Stan Lee wasn’t a genius, he just had good PR.
I mean, I kind of dig how Stan developed this larger-than-life persona and I think it did a lot to help grow the Marvel brand but the problem is that he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) figure out a way to do it without taking credit for everyone else’s work. It’s not like he ever stopped – when he was doing press for the X-Men movies in the early 00’s he took all sorts of credit for storylines and character traits that Chris Claremont came up with years after Stan stopped writing Uncanny X-Men.But I think the real disconnect is the way he viewed artists, like they were analogous to typewriters or something, objects that existed between his brain and the paper that his ideas had to go through to take material form. And it’s not like that kind of working relationship isn’t possible – someone like Grant Morrison famously provides pages and pages of description to his artists for how he wants certain panels to look – but Stan would be a lot more hands off and give direction like “a teenager with spider-powers” and leave the entire character design over to the artists and then say “yes that’s just what I was thinking of, I’m brilliant!” when they came back to him with pages.
but Stan would be a lot more hands off and give direction like “a teenager with spider-powers” and leave the entire character design over to the artists and then say “yes that’s just what I was thinking of, I’m brilliant!” when they came back to him with pages.This description makes him sound an awful lot like WWE’s Vince McMahon. Stan Lee should have gone into wrestling promotion, is what I’m saying.
My problem with all of this is that all of this has been known for decades, but noone wanted to talk about it. You bring up what he did to Kirby and Ditko even a few years before he died and you were an asshole for talking about this beloved legend. Now he’s dead and every parasite looking to make a dime or get some clicks want to destroy his legacy, more for the fact that in his 90’s he may or may not have dirty shit to some nurses than what he did in the 60’s & 70s.
Yeah, it was well-known in the industry that what he did to Kirby was just awful, though I guess it did result in Kirby creating the New Gods, so it wasn’t all bad.But you’re right, I feel like even now, criticizing the guy was utter sacrilege to Marvel just because the guy was charismatic and did some cringey cameos in movies.It just sucks that Kirby and Ditko, who were so creative and laid the foundation of comics as an artform more than possibly any other people, are so quickly swept into Lee’s wake.
Exactly. I’m all for Kirby and Ditko getting their due and it should have happened while they were still alive, Stan Lee be damned. The current wave of criticism seems more concerned with the salacious elements of Lee’s life than actually restoring glory to Kirby and Ditko.
It’s been known for decades because it has been written about for decades. Marvel did its best to tamp down on those stories because Stan was always a walking advertisement for the company even when he wasn’t working there. It’s not that this was never out there. It’s just more noticeable now.
I don’t think Jack or Steve wanted to be walking billboards. Stan Lee in his grave is still selling Marvel.
Yeah, but they also may have wanted to receive some credit from their creations and some royalties from the the literal tens of billions of dollars that have been generated from those creations.
How did Stan stop that?
I find it hard to believe that anyone who has read the stuff Lee did with Ditko and Kirby alongside their work without him would come away thinking Lee was just a PR guy.
I didn’t say he was a PR guy, I clearly laid out what Lee did with his storytelling, where he delivered an outline to the artist and had them come up with dialogue and art. It’s called the Marvel Method, it’s well-documented.So even though Lee had very little to do with the actual creation of the comics aside from the initial ideas (which were sometimes little more than a one-page summary or even just a couple of sentences), he gets a ton of unwarranted credit for ‘creating’ these classic storylines and characters.This is why you know James Patterson’s name, but not the dozen or so writers that actually write his novels.
Stan Lee wasn’t a genius, he just had good PR.Be fair, Lee didn’t “have” good PR, he was a genius at PR. That, more than comic book characters or dialogue, was what he was good at doing.
Basically Stan Lee was the Donald Trump of the comic book industry.
I think that crediting him with outlines is being pretty generous, too. Here’s a story from The Life and Legend of Wallace Wood, Vol. 1, as told by Wood to Mark Evanier:Wood: I enjoyed working with Stan [Lee] on Daredevil but for one thing. I had to make up the whole story. He was being paid for writing, and I was being paid for drawing, but he didn’t have any ideas. I’d go in for a plotting session, and we’d just stare at each other until I came up with a storyline. I felt like I was writing the book but not being paid for writing.Evanier: You did write one issue, as I recall—Wood: One yes [Daredevil #10]. I persuaded him to let me write one by myself since I was doing 99% of the writing already. I wrote it, handed it in, and he said it was hopeless. He said he’d have to rewrite it all and write the next issue himself. Well, I said I couldn’t contribute to the storyline unless I got paid something for writing, and Stan said he’d look into it, but after that he only had inking for me. Bob Powell was suddenly pencilling Daredevil.[Later on in the interview] … I saw [Daredevil #10] when it came out, and Stan had changed five words—-less than an editor usually changes. I think that was the last straw.People tend to forget that, on top of being Martin Goodman’s nephew, Lee was also the editor of the titles he “wrote”, and a freelance artist’s ability to get more work was often dependent on their relationship with him. Based on what Wood says here, it appears that he could be rather vindictive towards those who refused to play along.
Being the victim of abuse does not erase past misdeeds. Doing a shitty thing is shitty, even if worse things happen to you, decades later.
This might be the most disingenuous take ever.
If Lee was pulling stunts like that then *something* would have caused an irreparable break sooner rather than later – this particular reporter just got to be the means by which the inevitable occurred.
aw, dude was enchanted.
Mark Evanier wrote on his blog today that Friedman told the author that he was actively trying to get a job with Marvel, which also explains his Stan mania in that article.
I mean, just google “Funky Flashman” to see how much that relationship degraded.
I wonder if young Stan Lee looked at his Distinguished Competition, saw their decades-long record of stealing from their artists and writers and justified his own conduct by that.
There’s a pathological need for comic fans to have Stan as this genial “Geek Godfather” figure but no figure in comics had less interest in it than Stan, seeing it as a springboard to escape the medium. It’s also worth pointing out that Stan had twenty years before the Marvel Universe and his writing is uncreative and pedestrian before Kirby returns to Marvel; when Kirby leaves, Stan shortly stops writing and doesn’t create anything of worth ever again. His entire reputation is based on one short burst. Meanwhile, Kirby creates the Fourth World saga (many of those characters appearing in, and driving the plot, of the upcoming Justice League Synder cut), and dozens of other characters and never stopped. It’s just the extremist one or the other argument that sometimes curtails a thorough look at what really happened at Marvel- and how Stan was given the credit as “creator” simply because he’d sign off to the corporate owners of Marvel, therefore protecting their riches. Someone needs to cover THAT.
Have to read this and Jack Kirby: The Epic Life Of The King Of Comics.
There’s this weird inability of nerds/the internet to strike any kind of balance on Lee. He’s either the hero who created all of Marvel’s best bits or a credit-stealing grifter who only ever slapped his name on other people’s work.
Given what we know, there’s some partial truth in both of those statements but neither one is quite accurate. But people like clean narratives, and it’s really hard for most of them to say that the Marvel characters and universe that people love would never have been possible without him, but also that he did some really shitty things. It’s not genius or glory hog; it’s genius and glory hog, and though it’s hard to reconcile those two things, it’s worth trying because it’s the truth.
I agree with you. Stan did actively try and make Marvel stand out from DC by having their characters deal with ordinary lives and frustrations as well as tackling topics like racism. It took the creative powers of people like Ditko and Kirby to make those things work and pop, but Stan did have a guiding hand. Even then, in the last decade or so Stan even admitted that Ditko was drawing Spider-man with even the thought and speech bubbles drawn in. All Lee had to do was write the words, which he said was easy because the story was obvious from Ditko’s illustrations. Still, he was a charismatic leader who cast himself as the creative genius behind the Marvel revolution while giving everyone else the shaft.
Yeah, even if you take the extreme negative side and say that he was a total fraud, it’s undeniable that his brand of promotion and editorial voice was crucial to building Marvel into the success it became.
Like, no one even disputes that he had the idea for Spider-Man. And while a lot of people have very reasonably pointed out that saying “a kid with spider powers and problems” is not the same as creating Spider-Man, and that thought required a lot of uncredited input from Ditko before it became a viable character, the corrective is not to take the equally absurd position that the concept of Spider-Man is not an essential part of the creation of Spider-Man.
I agree, and that “clean narrative” philosophy also affects how people view Kirby and Ditko. For all the claims that Lee was hogging all the credit, Kirby is the one who kept saying he did everything on his own; people just decided to believe his version over Lee’s. If you look at the work we know he did on his own (The New Gods, The Eternals), they are very different than the work he’s credited with Lee. And Ditko was an Objectivist who disliked flawed superheroes, so he probably did not like what Spider-man was turned into.I often considered Lee, Kirby and Ditko to be the Beatles of comics – the best collection of talent ever gathered together. But the Beatles were best friends, the Marvel trio were not. It’s unfair to put on Lee all of the responsibility of their troubled relationship, solely because he was the most popular.
The Thomas Edison of the comics world, as it were.
That’s the way I’ve always looked at it – People are complicated and you can be one thing while also being another.
“It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another.”
Might not be proper form to be quoting a Joss Whedon show right about now, but at the end of the day, I kinda feel like we need our heroes, even if they’re completely made up.
In traditional Marvel fashion, I would like to blame all of this on the Skrulls.
Let’s face it, it was the freakin visuals that made you keep grabbin those publications. When they all finally stood in that circle in The Avengers flick… that was all Kirby. I didn’t buy a thermos and lunchbox because it had something by Stan scrawled on it, it was for Ditko’s drawings. And man, it still kills me for all the year’s of Stan cameo’s, the Kirby celebration that was Taika’s Thor Ragnarok… would it have killed them to put a Kirby cameo in the flick..?
Let’s make it clear: Marvel Studios, the film and television operation, is a multi-billion dollar commodity. Marvel Comics, the publisher of sequential art pamphlets, is a single-billion dollar commodity at best.