Stan Lee has written forewords for books I’ve written, but I’ve never really met him.

Oh, decades ago before I turned pro I met him in an autograph line, and I’m pleased to recall I made a joke that made him laugh. But even if Stan didn’t have a notoriously bad memory, he couldn’t be expected to remember that.

By the time that I started working at Marvel, Stan had already decamped for the West Coast to try to turn Marvel properties into movies and TV shows. In the late 1980s there was the Marvel writers meeting I mentioned in my last column, at which I sat only a few seats down from Stan, visiting from Los Angeles, but there was no opportunity to be introduced.

Years after that, I interviewed him over the telephone for the Comic Buyer’s Guide on the occasion of the anniversary of the Spider-Man newspaper strip. I was very surprised by this interview, because Stan never put on his jolly familiar public persona. Maybe he had been alerted that I was a comics pro, not an outsider. Anyway, he was very serious and thoughtful throughout our long talk. But, as you’ll note, we did not meet face to face.

Then, only last year, I interviewed Stan again, this time by remote control. Stan had agreed to appear in the documentary I worked on, Sex, Lies and Superheroes. The film’s producer/director, Constantine Valhouli, was going on a business trip to Southern California, and made arrangements to interview Stan during his trip. I couldn’t go (Constantine couldn’t afford to send me, too), so I wrote up a list of questions, which Constantine took to L.A. and asked Stan. I was delighted when I saw the footage. This was Stan doing his public persona, as comics’ biggest booster, and doing it at his best. It was a master entertainer at work.

Now there is a new unofficial biography of Stan Lee, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, published by Chicago Review Press. There was a panel at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con about the book, but I didn’t see it; I simply couldn’t be everywhere. Later during the Con, I was present when two former Marvel staffers (There are a lot of those nowadays) who had worked personally with Stan raised the subject of the new biography. They expected it to be a hatchet job. After all, wasn’t one of the authors, Tom Spurgeon, associated with the dreaded Comics Journal, archenemy of all that is superheroic in comics?

But no, actually, the book seems quite fair and reasonable in evaluating its subject’s life and work. The authors dedicate the book “For Stan,” and though I can’t imagine he would be happy with everything they write about him, they genuinely seem to feel a certain fondness towards him. Raphael and Spurgeon certainly keep their eyes open to his faults, but at times the even-handed tone of their book gives way to bursts of enthusiastic praise. They declare, “Stan Lee is one of the most important figures in the history of American popular culture.” (p. ix) “The settings and characters that he shepherded into existence are as significant and varied as the cross-media worlds offered up by the likes of George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry, or J.K. Rowling.” (p. 261) (Indeed, one might well wonder to what extent Lucas and possibly Rowling were influenced by Lee’s work.) At their most effusive, Raphael and Spurgeon proclaim, “No pop-culture phenomenon has ever offered its readers more than Stan Lee’s Marvel gave comic-book fans in the 1960s.” (p. 125)

I certainly agree. The classic Marvel comics of the Silver Age (which I will define for this column’s purposes as the period when Stan Lee was writing the superhero titles, from 1961 to 1972) are one of the great treasures of 20th century American popular culture. Marvel’s various owners over the decades may have overestimated the commercial potential of Stan Lee’s legacy in comics, but they have never understood that they are caretakers of an important artistic heritage as well.

Stan Lee is ultimately the man most responsible for Marvel’s creative flowering in the 1960s. One of the principal purposes of Raphael and Spurgeon’s book is to explain just what form that responsibility took. It is not what the general public, or comic fans in more innocent times, assumed that it was. In a sense Stan Lee is indeed like Walt Disney, whose precise role at his company was likewise not clearly understood by the public of his time. Disney did not write, draw or direct his animated cartoons, and, although during his lifetime, he would have liked everyone to believe that he created Mickey Mouse, it now appears that his most famous character was primarily or entirely the creation of animator Ub Iwerks; the relationship between Disney and Iwerks seems a little reminiscent of that between Lee and his leading artist, Jack Kirby. Still, it was Disney who presided over his directors, animators and writers, who had extraordinary talent as a storyteller, and who was ultimately responsible for the films produced under his aegis. Without Disney, none of those films would have existed. In the world of Silver Age Marvel, the same is true of Stan Lee and his comics.

CREDIT REPORT

In the introduction to their book (p. ix), Raphael and Spurgeon set out their basic theme: “Here is the truth about Stan Lee: he didn’t create Spider-Man or any of Marvel’s most famous characters. He cocreated them. The distinction matters, because in that distinction lies the essence of his considerable accomplishments. Contrary to his media image, Lee’s greatest achievement wasn’t in superhero invention but in his clever revamping of an outdated genre.”

Spurgeon and Raphael have carefully considered the question of who did what in concocting the storylines for Marvel’s original Silver Age stories. They explain how due to his enormous workload and small staff, Stan Lee could not have written all the stories that he did in a conventional method: in other words, by inventing an entire, detailed plot and setting it down along with the dialogue in a full script to be sent to the artist. By necessity, Lee devised the “Marvel method,” whereby he first came up with the plot, sent it to the artist to draw, and then added the dialogue. This method actually gave the artist considerably more leeway in staging the action, accounting for the greater cinematic flair that Marvel storytelling had over DC Comics artwork of the same period.

None of this was a secret from comics aficionados. For those who paid attention, it should not have been a surprise that Lee also left it to the artists to work out certain mechanics of the plot. The first Daredevil Annual has an amusing backup story featuring a fictional story conference between Lee and artist Gene Colan. Lee portrays himself enthusiastically pulling story ideas out of the air: this issue Daredevil will fight Baron Zemo! But Zemo’s dead, protests Colan (though somehow I doubt he had been reading Avengers); how do we bring him back? You figure that out, says Stan, who, seized with creative fervor, imagines Daredevil and Zemo slugging it out atop a volcano which suddenly erupts. Colan, bewildered, asks, how does Daredevil get out of there? You figure it out, replies Stan, undeterred.

This backup feature is obviously a joke, but only in part, I expect. (And there really had been a Lee-Colan Daredevil story with an exploding volcano, but with the Owl, not Zemo.) And you know, however they were done, the Lee-Colan Daredevil stories were quite wonderful.

The shock came when comics aficionados began to realize that Lee’s two most important artists of the 1960s, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, at least deserved an equal share of the credit for plotting the stories and creating the characters with Lee. In fact, as time went on, it appears that Kirby and Ditko were doing the lion’s share of the work plotting the stories. Eventually Ditko was listed in the Amazing Spider-Man credits as responsible for the plot, but Kirby was never acknowledged in the credits as plotter or co-plotter of the stories he did with Lee. Who outside Marvel’s inner circles could be blamed if he or she assumed that when Stan Lee was credited as writer for these stories that he was doing all the work in formulating the plots? In fact, I was surprised all over again to read in this book that John Romita, Sr. pretty much plotted the Amazing Spider-Man stories he did with Lee. (I don’t know that that rings true about the early, tightly plotted Lee-Romita Spider-Man stories, but it certainly seems credible about the later years of their collaboration.)

Now, it was Stan Lee who pioneered listing creator credits in comic book stories: he was promoting himself, of course, but also his co-workers. And I don’t know that the word “co-plotter” had even been coined when Fantastic Four #1 came out; it is still a concept that may puzzle people outside comics. Still, Lee could have been more open about Kirby and Ditko’s role in helping conceive the stories and characters.

Matters became worse when Marvel began to attract media attention.

Raphael and Spurgeon accuse Lee of “hubris” (p. 167): both by active and passive means, Lee allowed comics fandom and the larger public to believe that he was completely responsible for the creation of Marvel’s classic 1960s characters and the plotting of the stories in which they appeared.

Raphael and Spurgeon do Lee the favor of coming up with a possible excuse: “It’s as if Lee was gully aware that he’d be unable to explain his contribution in a way that would make sense to a studio audience or a crestfallen host.” (p. 264) But in perhaps their harshest criticism of him in the book, they nevertheless call it a “betrayal” of his collaborators.

Spurgeon and Raphael make it quite evident that they regard Kirby and Ditko as creative giants of the comics medium and are very effective in describing the distinctive strengths of each man’s art.

At times I think the authors even go overboard and give their two heroes too much credit. The authors state that on Fantastic Four, “During one period from late 1965 to 1967, Kirby produced enough resonant characters to start yet another superhero line.” (p. 118) This implies that Kirby created these characters all by himself. Well, Stan Lee has stated that he was surprised when he first got the art for Fantastic Four #48 and discovered that Kirby had added a brand new character that they had never discussed, the Silver Surfer. But you may note that Lee never said he was surprised to see Galactus on the last page, so we might assume that they had indeed discussed creating Galactus. Considering Spurgeon and Raphael’s admiration for Lee’s talent for dialogue, surely they would have to admit that even if Kirby did come up with the basic concepts of many Fantastic Four characters, it was Lee who created their speaking styles and through them shaped their personalities; that makes him the characters’ co-creator.

Raphael and Spurgeon persuasively demonstrate that even in the case of Fantastic Four #1, for which Lee’s plot survives, Kirby deserves credit as co-plotter due to the numerous significant changes he made. Yet I find myself still confused by Spurgeon and Raphael’s attempt to explain who did what in creating Spider-Man, and startled that apparently it was Kirby who basically came up with Aunt May and Uncle Ben!

But Raphael and Spurgeon also dismantle Jack Kirby’s more grandiose claims that he was effectively the sole writer of his collaborations with Lee. They also quote Ditko as saying in 1990 that “Stan provided the plot ideas.”

Raphael and Spurgeon come closer to the target when they confess that, due to the fact that key figures have passed away, others are old and have cloudy memories, and proper records were not kept in the 1960s, “. . .the precise creative contribution that Lee made to each individual Marvel character will probably never be known.” (p. 262) They also observe that “testimony from those around both Lee and Kirby during Marvel’s most fertile period indicates that both contributed story ideas during long verbal arguments, neither necessarily listening to the other.”

Spurgeon and Raphael contribute admirable mini-biographies of both Ditko and Kirby within their Stan Lee biography. Kirby comes off at times as very much a sympathetic underdog, or, as the authors put it, “Kirby had become an icon for the mistreated comic-book artist.” (p. 224) They point out that during Kirby’s return to Marvel in the 1970s, Lee was friendly towards him whereas “the new guard at Marvel. . .referred to him as “Jack the Hack.” (p. 180) This is all too true: I was there, though not yet a comics pro, and I heard that phrase myself. I find it sad when the authors quote Mark Evanier, Kirby’s longtime friend, saying that the support from pros and fans persuaded Kirby “he would not be forgotten; that the history of comics would not be written with Stan Lee receiving sole credit for creating all those characters.” (p. 225) To think that Kirby actually feared he would be forgotten!

What little biography we get of Kirby in this book makes a strong case that Kirby should receive a full-length biography of his own. (Hasn’t Mark Evanier been working on one? How is it coming?)

Here, by the way, is something Spurgeon and Raphael missed. They discuss the Silver Surfer graphic novel that Lee and Kirby did in 1978 (the same year as Eisner’s A Contract with God, usually hailed as the first American graphic novel!). That book was copyrighted in the names of Lee and Kirby. How did that happen?

THE IMAGE OF THE CREATOR

So, it seems, Stan Lee is only partly responsible for creating the characters and plots of the many Marvel stories he scripted. That is still a tremendous accomplishment! Still, apart from the importance of giving Kirby and Ditko credit where credit is due, why does it seem to matter so much to the public image of Stan Lee whether he is the sole creator of his stories or not?

The problem is that Stan Lee does not fit easily into the usual conception of a creative figure: the romantic image of the artist, the brilliant man working on his own. Take, for example, Mozart as pictured in the play and film Amadeus, spinning out works of flawless genius that come to him in flashes of inspiration, without struggle, and certainly without collaborators.

Of the comics professional of Lee’s generation, it is Will Eisner who best fits the popular idea of a major creative figure. He did brilliantly innovative work in his youth, especially on The Spirit. He wrote and drew most of The Spirit by himself, although he had important assistants later in its run, like Jules Feiffer. From the start Eisner was determined to refine the form of the comic book story into a serious artistic medium. He has a sharp analytical mind, can articulate his concept of the medium (“graphic narrative”), and has written books expounding his principles of comics storytelling. In late middle age he made a new, artistic breakthrough, creating the first true American graphic novel. A Contract with God. And now in his eighties, Eisner continues to write and draw important works, and still striving to push the envelope of the artform. When he appears on panels with younger graphic novelists, he is not simply a honored inspiration, he is one of them, still arguably on the cutting edge.

Stan Lee is different in virtually every respect. This does not mean that he is not as important a creative figure in his field as Will Eisner; in fact, Lee has obviously had considerably more impact on popular culture than Eisner has had. What it means is that Stan Lee’s creativity operates in a very different way.

COLLABORATION

Some time back, The New Yorker published a review of Live from New York, the oral history of Saturday Night Live. The reviewer also questioned the romantic image of the solitary creative artist, like Van Gogh in the film Lust for Life. Instead, he argued that the great wellsprings of creativity came from communities of people working together, linked by both social and professional ties. This is true, the reviewer argued, not only in the world of high art, as with the Impressionists, who were friends and colleagues, but in popular culture as well, as with the original cast, writers and associated creative figures of the early years of Saturday Night Live. In communities such as these, creators are encouraged by their friends to come up with new ideas, and those ideas inspire other people in the group to come up with their own, and to build on these new concepts.

This surely applies to Marvel in the 1960s as well, with the synergy between Stan Lee and his artists, later joined by new recruits like Roy Thomas. Indeed, I think this was true of Marvel in the 1970s and 1980s as well, as a new generation enthusiastically entered the field, back at a time when there was far more connection, both in and out of the office, between editorial staff members and freelancers. Having observed Marvel in the late 1970s and 1980s, I can confirm Spurgeon and Raphael’s observation that “Despite its smaller size and lower pay rates, Marvel was the place to be. DC was a solid company, an institution, but Stan Lee’s Marvel was hip, happening, cool.” (p. 155) Of course, the enemy of this sort of creative atmosphere is the corporate mindset. (It’s been many years since those big Friday night gatherings of DC and Marvel editors and freelancers at Manhattan restaurants.)

But back to the 1960s. Spurgeon and Raphael are quite correct that Lee’s writing from 1941 into 1961 is distinctly forgettable. It is no wonder that in the early 1960s Lee suffered what was clearly an early midlife crisis, frustrated by his lack of creative satisfaction in the comics business.

But in 1961 Stan Lee began the most fertile creative decade of his life, the years of the works that made him an icon of American popular culture. One of the principal factors behind his creative late blooming is surely the fact that he was now part of a uniquely talented creative community. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko had become his leading artists and were deep fonts of creativity waiting to be tapped. Lee was the man who did just that. Much of his own creativity lay in his ability to direct other creative figures.

Spurgeon and Raphael declare that with the end of the Sixties, “By 1970 Stan Lee had proven himself to be a great comic-book editor, perhaps the most successful in the medium’s history.” (p. 125) As the sole editor at his company, the authors contend, “Stan Lee’s most significant contribution as an editor of American comic books was to use his relative autonomy to facilitate greater contributions from the artists.” (p. 94) By enabling Kirby and Ditko to participate so greatly in creating characters and stories, Lee devised a “way of working with them that maximized their talents, not just as imaginative artists but as storytellers.”

But Lee did not just allow his artists, even Kirby and Ditko, to do whatever they wanted. He was indeed the editor, separating the good from the not so good.

The authors quote the late Gil Kane as saying about Kirby and his art, “When he brought these things in, Stan would look them over and very often be critical of the material. He would ask him to change some of it. . .” Kirby would make the changes but afterwards “would just be raging!” (p. 215) To my mind, the real point of the story is that Lee was exercising his authority as head of this creative enterprise to make changes, when he deemed it necessary, even in the work of his most talented collaborator.

The truly bizarre “Clickable Stan,” which originally ran in Ken Plume’s June 2000 interview with Stan Lee – click on different areas of Stan and watch him change position and expression.

Reflecting on Kirby’s 1970s work at DC, Spurgeon and Raphael note that “Kirby, for all his mastery of plots and pencils, needed an editor, someone to restrain his more outlandish impulses and to clean up his clunky dialogue.” However beloved The New Gods and other late Kirby works may be by comics enthusiasts, they did not have the widespread appeal of Kirby’s work at Marvel in the 1960s. Nor, I would argue, does The New Gods or The Eternals, however much I admire them, reach the heights of Kirby’s best Marvel work of the 1960s, done under Stan Lee’s editing and scripting.

Similarly, Raphael and Spurgeon report “some resistance” from Marvel artists of the 1960s when Lee urged them to make their storytelling styles more like Kirby’s. But here again, Lee was doing his job. The Marvel revolution of the 1960s lay not just in the writing but in the development of a new, more dynamic style of action-adventure comics artwork. By urging his artists to draw more like Kirby, Lee was actually encouraging them to make their artwork more cinematic, kinetic, and powerful.

This did not force the artists to lose their individual styles. I now find accusations of the time that Marvel had a “house style” laughable. Look at the artists of Silver Age Marvel – Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita Sr., Gene Colan, Gil Kane, John and Marie Severin, Bill Everett, Wally Wood, Don Heck, John Buscema, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams – and you will see a wonderful variety of styles. Then contrast this with mainstream comics of the 1990s, when so many artists voluntarily followed a pack mentality, with everyone imitating the Image founders, and then anime and manga. How many truly individual art styles – or styles of enduring value – emerged in mainstream comics then?

Spurgeon and Raphael declare that “Lee was a magnificent comic-book editor.” who “helped move the American comic book. . .back into a love affair with its roots as a compelling visual medium, at once decorative and cinematic.. . Motivating underappreciated artists such as Kirby and Ditko to produce groundbreaking work was a major accomplishment. But equally impressive was Lee’s ability to get less distinctive artists such as Don Heck and Werner Roth to work in close approximations of these styles, while encouraging idiosyncratic visual stylists such as Jim Steranko and Neal Adams to build on them.” (pp. 263-264).

The authors also note that it was in the 1960s that Stan Lee “also did the best writing of his career.” Surely this is in large part due to being inspired by the concepts and artwork that Kirby, Ditko and others contributed. This is how creativity in a community can work: creative work by one person sparks inspiration in another, who builds upon it.

I have much more to say about Lee’s talents as a writer, but for now I want to turn to another aspect of the popular image of the creative individual.

TIME LIMITS

It’s satisfying to contemplate the careers of great men in the arts who were still producing masterpieces, arguably some of their finest, towards the ends of their careers: Shakespeare and The Tempest, Verdi and Otello and Falstaff, Wagner and Parsifal, the late films of Luis Bunuel, and, as noted, Will Eisner and his graphic novels.

But this is actually a rare occurrence. In an interview in The Village Voice (Oct. 1-7, 2003) Quentin Tarantino laments that “It’s a sad cliché that most every director ends their career with a whimper.” This is not even a fate restricted to the old. Earlier in the same article, Uma Thurman, the star of Tarantino’s latest film, Kill Bill, Vol. 1, reflects on the six years of Tarantino’s seeming inactivity between completing Jackie Brown and starting Kill Bill: “But you know, creative life and work is kind of mysterious like that. People do get lost. People do lose the fire. People’s energy does go elsewhere. But that’s just the mystery of being alive.”

(By the way, speaking of Tarantino, did anyone else notice that the news that Bill Jemas was being replaced as Marvel’s publishing head came on the same day that Kill Bill, Vol. 1 was released? It’s another demonstration that God has an ironic sense of humor.)

Another part of the popular romantic image of the great artist is that he is great from start to finish: he started out as a child prodigy, produced great work in adulthood (even if it goes unrecognized in his lifetime) and in his old age produces masterpieces that sum up his career.

Stan Lee does not fit this pattern, either. His work before 1961, even by his own admission, is mediocre and forgettable. Unfortunately, he won’t be remembered for most of his work after 1972, either.

“Lee was briefly the most interesting creator in the comic-book art form,” state Spurgeon and Raphael, and “briefly” is the key word (p. 267). It was a decade full of great and memorable work, but in 1972 it was over. Kirby and Ditko had left, and as Raphael and Surgeon say, “By the early 1970s, Lee’s writing had become more competent than innovative.” (p. 130) Perhaps that was because he no longer had Kirby’s and Ditko’s work to inspire him. Or perhaps in any event he simply could not go any further in pushing the boundaries of comics writing; that was the task of the younger writers who followed in his path. Perhaps one of the reasons he stopped writing comic books regularly in 1972 was because he himself realized he’d run out of new ideas for superhero comics.

But it is unfair of us to expect more. Think of the hundreds of classic comics stories to which he contributed in the 1960s! How many other mainstream comics writers have a body of work that even comes close to the size and artistic level of Stan Lee’s oeuvre? Could he have “burned out” on writing comic books after doing them for thirty years, and after doing such brilliant work, and so very much of it, at the top of his form, every month for the last ten years? Again, this is a remarkable achievement, practically miraculous.

For that one decade, Stan Lee had reached a point of maturity in his own creative development, had the right collaborators in the right working environment, and was in enough sympathy with the cultural atmosphere of that time, to produce works that not only touched a chord with the readers of that time but have proved to be classics. I’ve twice heard Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada call Stan Lee’s 1960s stories “quaint.” I see his point, but Stan’s 1960s Marvel stories still sell in reprint volumes. How many of today’s mainstream comics stories will still have an enthusiastic following forty years from now?

STRIPPERELLA

In one way it is so admirable that Stan Lee is still writing and conceptualizing new projects. But it is also disappointing, because the high profile projects we see fall so short of the standards that he himself set in his greatest creative period, now over three decades ago.

Now, when the tremendous success of movies like Spider-Man and the X-Men films have brought Stan Lee new heights of acclaim from the mainstream media, why must he undercut his own reputation through his connection with Spike TV’s animated series, Stan Lee’s Stripperella?

Here’s a series about a strip tease dancer who moonlights as a super-spy/superheroine. In one episode, all too typical, it would seem, Stripperella clashes with a villainess unsubtly named Queen Clitoris, leading to endless and tiresome double entendres based on the latter’s name. Spike TV may bill itself as the “First Network for Men,” but I think that in practice sniggering adolescents may be the actual target audience.

It’s as if Lee and the other people behind this series could not understand why adult men read superhero comics and decided it must be because they find it erotic to look at big-breasted superheroines in tight, skimpy costumes. (Considering how the Image founders and their followers drew women, perhaps the Stripperella people had reason to think this. And then there was Bill Jemas’s insistence – before Uma Thurman and her sword got to him – on doing comics about “bad girls for fan boys.”)

Stripperella pretends to be part of the contemporary vogue for self-reliant action-adventure heroines, a trend that had some of its beginnings in Marvel comics, notably Chris Claremont’s X-Men and Frank Miller’s Elektra stories. This new movement has resulted in Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias, Lara Croft (in videogames and movies), the revival of Charlie’s Angels, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and more. But Stripperella is devoid of the female empowerment themes that animate and drive these other characters’ movies and TV shows. Stripperella might just as well be swinging on her pole in her stripper’s act as leaping about in her fight scenes. All of her gyrations have no other purpose than to try to arouse whatever pathetic male viewers might actually find this tawdry character sexually appealing.

I wonder exactly how much Stan actually has to do with this series. I would have thought nothing except lending his name, until I read this book. Now I know that Lee and John Romita, Sr. actually once tried to sell a ribald comic strip called Thomas Swift to Playboy (p. 175). Could it be that Lee envied Harvey Kurtzman’s success doing Little Annie Fanny for Playboy all those years? And is that really a kind of success worth envying? (Little Annie Fanny seemed to me quite a descent for the innovator behind the serious war dramas of EC’s Two-Fisted Tales.).

So perhaps Lee did have a role in concocting the concepts for Stripperella. Still, all of us who have read Stan’s comics know his sense of humor; Spider-Man writers have been imitating it for three decades. Nothing in Stripperella sounds like Stan, so it seems to me unlikely he has much to do with the actual making of the show.

I wish I could say that Stripperella is an embarrassment, soon to be forgotten. But, alas, it is already been announced that Stan has joined forces with another 1960s cultural icon who has lost touch with the zeitgeist, Hugh Hefner, to create a new show, Hef’s Superbunnies.
JUST IMAGINE

Before writing this column, I read through the first volume of trade paperbacks collecting the recent limited series, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe. The idea behind the series was that Lee would devise new characters based on the names of familiar DC characters and certain associated concepts. So this series would show us what would happen if Stan Lee had created a character named Batman or one called Superman.

It seems to me that this series was doomed to be a disappointment. I can certainly see why DC did it. It was a feather in DC’s proverbial cap to have Stan Lee, the man most associated with their competitor, Marvel, to write a high profile series for them. This is something that most of us never thought would happen (and further proof of George Bernard Shaw’s maxim that if one lives long enough, he will see everything happen!). It also demonstrates the foolishness of a previous Marvel administration in not only whittling down Lee’s role at Marvel but in making it possible for him to work for the competition.

Lee himself cautions us in the series, “Please don’t think for one minute that this is an attempt to improve on any of the truly great characters. . . The new versions in this series are merely a fun exercise, a chance to work with some of the best artists in comicdom – a chance no writer could refuse.”

But, of course, deep down any comics aficionado must have been hoping for something great and revolutionary. This is, after all, Stan Lee, the man who redefined the superhero genre, the co-creator of the only costumed superheroes who truly rival DC’s own greatest heroes, like Superman and Batman. But this is Stan Lee thirty years after his peak period as a comic book creator, and without the collaboration of his most inventive artists of that period.

The stories fail because, ironically, of their uninspired characterizations. So many classic DC heroes are important for their powers rather than their personalities: that is why the Flash could be Jay Garrick in the 1940s, Barry Allen in the 1960s, and Wally West today. Significantly, in the case of DC’s most important heroes, the personalities are essential to the concept: Superman must be Clark Kent, the survivor of Krypton raised with Middle American values, and Batman must be Bruce Wayne, orphan and driven avenger. With Stan Lee’s great co-creations, the personality is again primary. Lee and Ditko could have given Peter Parker the powers and costumed persona of some entirely different animal, but as long as he retained the same personality, he would probably still have been just as popular with the readers.

So Stan Lee’s versions of Wonder Woman and Green Lantern are standard-issue brave individuals with no apparent character flaws who gain super-powers: just the sort of characters who populated superhero comics before Lee’s own revolution of the genre. According to artist Adam Hughes, who designed Lee’s Superman, Stan wanted him to be “sort of a Kryptonian Clint Eastwood.” That he is, albeit diluted so considerably as to render him a cliché of the tough cop. Lee turns Lois Lane into Superman’s hyperactive agent/manager. This makes her amusing, even more so in her backup story, but she remains a one-dimensional caricature, and it hard to see how she could possibly evolve into Superman’s romantic interest.

Lee’s dialogue in the stories is woodenly expository, with characters continually announcing what is going on and how they feel about it. There are story elements that are utterly ludicrous. The new Green Lantern has somehow gotten a position as a professor of archeology despite publicly contending that aliens may be responsible for building the pyramids. Stan’s Superman’s motive for fighting crime is the hope that if he somehow wipes out all crime on Earth, an utter impossibility, then the governments would spend money on their space programs instead, enabling him to get back to his home planet. (Oh, come on, they’d just push through another radical tax cut instead.)

Of the four principal stories in this first volume, the only interesting one is Stan Lee and Joe Kubert’s recreation of Batman. In part this may be because it comes closest to the origin of the “real” superhero on whom it is based: here is another man, orphaned through the actions of criminals, who devotes his life to vengeance. Here Lee had the brilliant idea of changing the boy who would become Batman from a Caucasian multimillionaire to an African-American member of the working poor. Moreover, as you can see, there is a genuine character here: it’s the “real” Batman’s, given a new twist by Lee.

What strikes me most strongly about this revamped Batman origin is the utter darkness and despair from which the hero, Wayne Williams, emerges. His father is murdered by criminals; he is forced into working in a dead-end job; he is repeatedly humiliated by a local gangster, who nearly breaks his hands; he is framed for robbery and sent to prison; while he is incarcerated, his mother dies of neglect and a broken heart. The bat, when it appears, is not the ominous figure of omen that it is in the “real” Batman’s origin, but a kind of pet in whom Williams sees himself, or rather, the person he will become. Prison becomes his school, in which Williams molds himself into a powerful athlete. In an echo of Spider-Man’s origin, on leaving prison, Williams becomes a costumed wrestler, in his case masquerading as a bat. Whereas Spider-Man was thwarted in his dreams of show biz success, Williams makes a fortune, which he utilizes to launch his crusade against crime.

This Batman really does dress to resemble a bat, in a costume designed by Joe Kubert. Sometimes Kubert makes the bat costume look genuinely eerie and grotesque; other times, especially in action scenes, it looks ludicrous, demonstrating the rightness of the decision to have the “real” Batman dress as a stylized costume that evokes the image of a bat without duplicating it.

Perhaps Lee is lucky that he is not writing an entire series about this new Batman, since his concept might fall apart if the story went any further. Once the new Batman gains vengeance on the gangster who framed him, Handz, what motivates him to continue his vigilante war on crime? Is it really possible that this Batman, who has become a celebrity, could keep his identity secret? How does he get paid? Wouldn’t newspapers be trying to ferret out his identity? How about the I.R.S.? Doesn’t the fact that this Batman has licensed his image for use on cereal boxes undercut his ability to frighten criminals? (Between this Batman who merchandises his image and superagent Lois Lane, I think we can see Stan’s own concept of success infiltrating his stories.) Then there is the wealthy Mr. Williams’ decision to let his Caucasian mentor pretend to be the real multimillionaire, while he, a black man, poses as his servant. I’m really surprised that Lee and DC are demonstrating such a tin ear on racial issues here.

Ultimately this Batman origin is not a successful story, either. Yet this is the one in the book in which Stan Lee is most clearly digging into his own psyche and giving us something more than run of the mill superheroics.

Where does this Batman tale’s bleak vision of life come from? Perhaps after all this time we have become overaccustomed to the darkness in Stan’s best work and don’t really notice how deeply it goes. Spider-Man’s origin not only entails the murder of the man who raised Peter Parker, but Peter’s realization that he himself is implicated in this Oedipal killing. Bruce Banner goes from respected scientist to homeless outlaw. Likewise Stephen Strange, arrogant surgeon to the wealthy, suffers the crippling of his hands and becomes an alcoholic derelict. Tony Stark desperately labors to create his first Iron Man armor as his own mortality inches steadily closer, in the form of the shrapnel inexorably making its way into his heart. In the curse of moving from the 1940s to the 1960s, Captain America, in effect, loses his surrogate child – Bucky – to death.

There is darkness in these new Just Imagine stories as well: Wonder Woman loses her father, and Superman his wife. It is the Batman story, though, in which the bleakness becomes most intense, and not even the death of Handz at the end lifts the atmosphere of gloom.

It seems, then, that even in Stan Lee’s late work, there are still intriguing depths lying beneath the surface. I shall return to this subject and to Spurgeon and Raphael’s new biography of Stan Lee, in next week’s column.

-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson

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