In my last column I concentrated on the first two words of the title of Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon’s new book, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, published by Chicago Review Press. But, before I return to the subject of Stan Lee himself, what about the rest of the title?
GIVING US THE BUSINESS
If the duty of a physician is, first, to do no harm, then the duty of someone writing about comics should be to make no errors of fact. As far as I can tell, Raphael and Spurgeon do very accurate work indeed in this book. They do a fine and admirable account of the beginnings of the comics industry in the 1930s and its history through the 1940s and 1950s. While the story of Dr. Frederick Wertham and the Congressional investigation of comics in the 1950s has often been recounted, I was much less familiar with the tale of Marvel’s financial ups and downs through that decade, which the authors cover in detail.
Raphael and Spurgeon also point out just how far the comics business has come in the nearly seventy years since its birth. They may overestimate the degree of respect accorded to comic strip artists in the 1930s through the 1950s: only a few gained the kind of critical respect accorded to George Herriman and Walt Kelly in their day. Still, it brings one up short to consider, as Spurgeon and Raphael assert, that “The purveyors of comic books, on the other hand, were viewed as one step removed from pornographers.” (p. 177) They quote Stan Lee as saying that in the early days, “Nobody had any respect for comics. It was the lowest rung on the creative totem pole.” (p. 17) It must be amazing for the comics writers and artists of that period, the generation that Michael Chabon wrote about in his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to see the kind of respect their early work and the comics medium are accorded in many places today.
Paradoxically, it was when American comic books were least respected and, in the main, producing their least respectable work, that they were at their most popular. Spurgeon and Raphael note that “By 1942, comic books had cemented their place in American pop culture, approaching mass media numbers with 143 titles on stands and 50 million readers per month.” (p. 28) Later, “In the early 1950s, annual comic-book sales totaled 600 million copies; by 1980 that number had fallen to 150 million. Comics were no longer a mass medium. . . Comic books now attracted an audience of older collectors and nostalgia buffs. . . .” (p. 201). And, after the boom of the early 1990s turned to bust, matters would turn far worse.
“The rise and fall of the American comic book,” though, is really far too big a subject for this book, where ultimately it serves as a backdrop for the career of Stan Lee, which, amazingly, spans virtually the entire history of the American comic book industry. As the comics industry begins to expand beyond the Big Two of Marvel and DC in the 1970s, Raphael and Spurgeon no longer cover the evolution of the business as in copious detail as they did for its simpler previous history. DC Comics, the rise of the independents and the direct sales market, the black and white comics boom and crash, the dispute over the ownership of Jack Kirby’s Marvel art, and the creation and decline of Image all are discussed, but anyone looking for, say, a detailed history of the various alternative comics companies will not find it here. Even the changes in editorial administration at Marvel get little attention, with the notable exception of Jim Shooter’s term as editor-in-chief. Spurgeon and Raphael perceptively draw the links between Shooter’s editorial and personal style and that of his mentor, Superman editor Mort Weisinger. They also effectively present the case why Shooter had to be removed from Marvel. (I would note, however, that I never got any trouble with Shooter, that, indeed, when I left staff in the 1980s, he was one of the few Marvel staffers to actually say he was sorry I was going. Moreover, it now seems rather naive that people considered Shooter as great a villain as a boss in comics could be, compared to later Marvel executives, who wreaked such havoc by firing people left and right.)
Spurgeon and Raphael’s recounting of the “comic wars,” with various unpleasant corporate titans doing battle over owning Marvel, seems mostly on target to me. How startling it is to read how close one of these moguls, Ron Perelman, came to bringing about “the almost certain collapse of the American comic-book market.” (p. 244)
As far as Stan Lee’s role goes, I would note that, although Raphael and Spurgeon contend that Lee wanted to get out of doing work exclusively for Marvel, at the time it looked to many of us that Marvel’s owners had nearly shoved Lee out the door. At that time Peter David did a brilliant column postulating that Marvel’s owners were conducting an experiment in how to ruin a once prosperous company and that their latest stroke of genius was to “fire Stan.”
I hadn’t been aware of the turmoil behind the scenes at Stan Lee’s Internet company, Stan Lee Media, that ended in its collapse, or of its co-founder Peter Paul’s criminal past. I do remember, though, when it was reported, as Raphael and Spurgeon attest, that Stan Lee Media stock had risen so high that Lee publicly speculated that maybe one day he would buy Marvel! Now, there’s an alternate reality that would have been interesting.
The Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book part of this book’s title may mislead many readers into thinking that Raphael and Spurgeon are writing about the American comic book’s evolution as an art form. Although in these columns about their book, I am primarily writing about their portrayal of Stan Lee as a person, most of this biography actually reads like a book about business. Stan Lee’s life is primarily viewed through the business side of his career, as editor, lecturer, publisher, promoter of Marvel properties in Hollywood, cofounder of an Internet company, and the like. Though the authors explain how Stan Lee transformed the writing of superhero comics, they devote little attention to how later writers built upon his achievements. Once Lee stops writing monthly comic books, the artistic evolution of American comic books is seen only from a distance and with little detail.
As for the “fall” of American comic books, Spurgeon and Raphael basically contend that It’s All Over. They refer to “the dwindling subculture known as comics fandom”. (p. xiii) and note that “Many towns now lacked a single place to buy comic books,” a fact that those of us who live in New York City, with its major comics shops, need to keep in mind.
Their book ends with a gloomy funeral oration for the American comic book. “The comics themselves are disconnected from any sense of a larger readership… they indulge in recycled thrills made stale by years of repetition in service to their value as licensing properties. Gone forever is the feeling of open-ended possibility, of free-form fantasy willed onto a blank page, of giddy, self-aware and slightly moralistic fun that Lee and his artistic collaborators brought to an art form lacking respect. Comic books are past the point of decline. The top titles struggle to sell 125,000 copies. Kids prefer to buy anything and everything else, and at $2.25 per issue, it’s not certain they could afford to return.” (p. 271)
$2.25?! Hulk: Gray #1, which I review below, cost me $3.50! For only one chapter of an ongoing story! Imagine if one had to buy a novel at $3.50 per chapter! It’s no wonder to me that graphic novels and trade paperback collections are said to be the only growing part of the comics market.
Yet still, though I agree that mainstream superhero titles have been suffering a drought of creativity for years now, there is still good and important work being done in mainstream comics, some of which gets reviewed in this ongoing column. The best of superhero and alternative comics appears to be attracting an unprecedented degree of attention from the mainstream press and mainstream book publishers. I believe that Mark Evanier once observed that the amount of publicity that comics receive (outside the fan press) is inversely proportional to the industry’s sales.
Comic books may no longer be a “mass” medium, but the audience for “serious” and more sophisticated comics, whether mainstream or alternative, appears to be substantial. I’ve read that a whole day of this year’s expo for the American book industry was devoted to graphic novels. The annual “New York Is Book Country” street fair on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue this year turned over an entire block to graphic novels. How many people seriously imagined something like this would happen, even a few years ago?
So, no, I don’t know if the market for run-of-the-mill superhero titles such as those Spurgeon and Raphael disdain, will ever bounce back, but I don’t think the American comic book is finished, by any means.
Despite what I’ve said above, if you are simply interested in tracing the twists and turns of Stan Lee’s own career through the history of American comics, you will not be let down.
Spurgeon and Raphael even provide for posterity an account of one of Stan’s earliest ventures into show biz, the disastrous An Evening with Stan Lee at Carnegie Hall on January 5, 1972, a day that will live in infamy. I was there and can attest that Raphael and Spurgeon are accurate in every excruciating detail. It was even worse than they claim. Consider this: Roy Thomas imitating Elvis. I will also say that one of the few bright spots was the appearance of Stan’s daughter onstage. I thought she was a knockout then, and, to judge from the recent photograph of her in the book, she still is. As a critic, I offer this as further proof of Stan Lee’s prowess as a co-creator of work of enduring artistic value.
THE PASSING OF THE REVOLUTION
As Raphael and Spurgeon tell their readers, for the first two decades of his career in comics, Stan Lee seemed to have no interest in making them more than disposable, trivial products for children. But in 1961 Lee decided to take comics seriously, and the Marvel revolution was born. Marvel was gaining a new, older audience; Lee started a profitable sideline of lecturing at colleges around the country; and Rolling Stone featured the Hulk on its cover.
In 1968 Lee was quoted as saying, “We’re trying to elevate the medium. We’re trying to make them as respectable as possible. Our goal is that someday an intelligent adult would not be embarrassed to walk down the street with a comic magazine. I don’t know whether we can ever bring this off, but it’s something to shoot for.” (p. 125) Today, with increasing coverage of graphic novels in the mainstream press, and with libraries collecting graphic novels, we have come closer to realizing Stan’s prophecy than ever before.
It was Stan Lee who launched the revolution that transformed American comics, but that revolution quickly passed him by. The authors point to his appearance at a comic convention in 1978, only six years after he stopped writing comic books. “Standing in front of a comics – convention crowd of devoted – and mostly grown-up – Marvel fans, Lee went on to argue that the market was, as it had always been, made up of twelve-year-olds, and that comic books should continue to appeal to that demographic. In retrospect, it’s clear that Stan couldn’t sense the tremors that were shifting the ground beneath his feet.” (p. 202)
This is actually sad: Only a decade before Lee had welcomed the attention from college students, academics, and even art film directors like Federico Fellini. Now, apparently unable to appreciate the growing sophistication of the comics being written by a younger generation he had inspired, Lee turned artistic reactionary, arguing that comics should turn back to 12-year-olds. Yet this audience was lost; the future was with the older audience.
(Luckily, Stan Lee has since gone back to extolling the unlimited artistic potential of the comics medium. In the indie documentary I worked on, Sex, Lies and Superheroes, Stan talks about what a great comic book Shakespeare and Michelangelo could have done together. I was amused to learn from this book – on p. 166 – that Stan has been using this bit in his interview repertoire since the 1970s!)
Stan Lee gave up writing monthly comic books when he became Marvel’s publisher in 1972, yet he has continued to write over the following three decades: the Spider-Man newspaper strip, occasional comic books like the Ravage 2099 series for Marvel, or, more recently, his Internet comics, screenplays and movie treatments aplenty. And nothing seems to come close to his best work of the 1960s. This, as I said in my previous column, is a puzzle.
Writing about Lee’s many,. many unsuccessful attempts to break into writing movies and television series, Raphael and Spurgeon comment, “Yet Lee’s writing on most of his scripts, cards and treatments reads less like the savvy, sharp work of a writer simply denied his shot at screenwriting stardom than the naive and hopeful jottings of an eager wannabe, like entries in a diary kept by a schoolboy with big studio dreams.” (p. 266)
They describe Lee’s story for The Monster Maker, a film he hoped to do with his unlikely friend, the French New Wave director Alain Resnais. Clearly drawing on his own creative frustration before writing Fantastic Four #1, Lee told the story of Larry Morgan, a producer of mediocre horror films, who “is despondent about his life and his job, and what he craves more than anything is recognition from an adult audience.” (p. 188) So Morgan makes a movie exposing the horrors of pollution, and the book quotes The Monster Maker‘s concluding speech, an embarrassing exercise in bathos. The Monster Maker starts out with a premise with serious promise but then apparently takes a nosedive into naive banalities, confusing preachiness with art.
And yet Lee’s unpretentious tales of a young man dressed in a spider costume trying to cope with the mundane realities of life carries far more emotional and psychological resonance. (And what would Lee make of the fact that nowadays makers of low-budget 1960s horror films like Roger Corman and George Romero receive serious attention from academics and critics?)
That was in the 1970s, but the cutting edge of comics – and of fantasy writing in pop culture – has left Lee even further behind since. Since he admits that he no longer reads comics (I even personally heard him say so at this year’s San Diego Con), he may not even be aware of what the level of today’s most sophisticated fantasy-based comics is like.
At least he has company. When they get to the 1980s in their book, Spurgeon and Raphael point to landmarks in the evolution of the medium: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, Art Spiegelman’s Maus. They observe that “Once more, magazines and academic journals wrote about comics as literature, a discussion that Stan Lee’s Marvel had been at the center of twenty years before. Comic books were buzz-worthy again, but Marvel was generating none of the noise.” (p. 210)
It was in the mid-1980s that the cutting edge in mainstream comics passed from Marvel to DC (along with several important Marvel creative figures). Raphael and Spurgeon are appalled by what they see as the uninspired retreads of Lee’s stories at Marvel from the 1980s onward, but they should not be surprised. Many writers and artists who were inspired to get into comics by the works of Marvel’s innovators were not innovators themselves, and saw their job as merely continuing the tradition Lee and his collaborators had begun. Eventually those who merely reiterate the outward forms of the past rather than imaginatively reanimating the tradition are themselves left behind by the revolution.
THE INTUITIVE ARTIST
Raphael and Spurgeon make observations from time to time that suggest that Stan Lee may not entirely comprehend the strengths of his own best work. Significantly, Raphael and Spurgeon note that “Even Lee’s [movie] treatments of Marvel characters like Thor and the Silver Surfer lack an understanding of the potential of his own work. . . .” (p. 188) Indeed, reading in this book about some of Lee’s ideas for rock operas about such characters is fairly appalling.
When they introduce Roy Thomas, the first major writer that Lee recruited into 1960s Marvel, Spurgeon and Raphael explain how Thomas, a former English teacher, could apply methods of literary analysis to Lee’s stories. They state that “Thomas helped Marvel arrive at a grander conception of itself.” (p. 117)
Later, the authors quote Gerry Conway, the first major Baby Boomer writer to join Marvel, about Lee’s innovative method of breaking the fourth wall to address the reader in his stories. “Stan was the first writer to bring an ironic distance to the material, but he was unconscious of doing that,” they quote Conway as saying. “His models were the sitcoms and soap operas – their inherit silliness – rather than an intellectual awareness that what he was doing was self-referential.” (p. 156)
And what about this quote from Stan Lee? “I think the only message I have ever tried to get across is for Chrissake, don’t be bigoted.” (p. 165)
Well, certainly, Stan’s classic Marvel stories have a lot more to say than that! He deals with moral responsibility, the role of the individual in society, love, guilt, family, the divided psyche, concepts of God, and much more.
I think that Stan Lee, like Jack Kirby and other creators in comics, is an example of the intuitive artist: the creative figure who can draw up characters and stories from his or her fertile subconscious, but who may be utterly unaware of their deeper levels of meaning.
Let me illustrate this idea with some anecdotes. A comics writer I know once gave the following advice to an artist who wanted to try his hand at writing: be careful, because what you write will inadvertently reveal things about yourselves to readers that you did not intend to tell them.
When I was in high school I read a story by Isaac Asimov in which William Shakespeare was transported to the 20th century by a time machine. Shakespeare took a course about his own plays and flunked. I suspect that Asimov was trying to argue that academics read meanings into works of literature that are not really there. I read the story differently, to say that works of literature contain levels of meaning that the authors may never have consciously been aware of.
There’s a similar, true life anecdote about Alfred Hitchcock helping a young girl, his granddaughter, I think, on a paper for school on one of his own most important films, Shadow of a Doubt. The girl received a C.
Then, in a documentary I saw, the great film director Howard Hawks says, in seeming bewilderment, that film scholars keep asking him why he put certain things in his movies, and he tells them it was just because he liked them. Hawks’s movies were all created to be Hollywood mass entertainments, and yet the themes that film critics detect in them, such as attitudes towards male bonding, professionalism, and liberated women, are unmistakably there.
The ability to create stories and the ability to analyze them are separate talents; the same person may not have equal portions of these talents. In superhero stories, one is dealing with mythic characters, situations and story lines, and myths may have meanings beyond any one individual’s interpretation of them.
In Stan Lee’s case, there was a happy juxtaposition of his innate talent as an editor and scripter with the circumstances within he found himself in the 1960s: gifted collaborators at the height of their creative powers, his drive born of midlife crisis to prove his talents as a writer, an affinity for the changing attitudes of the Baby Boomer audience of the 1960s, and a time in the history of American comics when readers did not mind if a script seemed corny or overblown at times as long as there was the writer’s imaginative fire to bring it to life. Lee knew that he was treating superhero stories and their characters more seriously than writers had before. Basically, though, he was a storyteller and an entertainer.
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko were cocreating mythic stories and characters, yet surely never thinking along the lines that, say, Spider-Man is a trickster figure recast for 1960s urban America, or that the blond Captain America being free from suspended animation in ice is like a mythic sun god released from the grasp of winter. They just knew they were coming up with good stories and characters that they and their readers could relate to more deeply than to the cardboard superheroes of the past. And for that one decade of Marvel’s Silver Age of the 1960s, it worked superbly.
THE MASTER OF DIALOGUE
Summing up, Spurgeon and Raphael assert that “Stan Lee’s primary artistic contribution was in the dialogue. Lee was a great believer in characterization, as were Kirby and Ditko.” (p. 262) But Lee had a facility for dialogue that Kirby and Ditko lacked, despite their immense talents for plotting stories. Earlier, Spurgeon and Raphael explain, “Indeed, Lee had to focus on dialogue. It was his main tool for shaping the story in the direction he wanted it to go., a way to infuse some of his own personality back into the intense artwork submitted by Kirby. Lee drew on his skill with romance and humor books to provide livelier and more fulsome dialogue than had ever been seen in a superhero title. . . .At his best, Lee gave each major character a verbal stamp of identification equal to the visual imprint made by the artists.” (p. 97)
But just as Raphael and Spurgeon understandably devote little space in their book to tracking the artistic evolution of the comic medium, they spend all too little time evaluating Stan Lee’s ability as a writer. They tend to discuss his writing in terms of craftsmanship: it was “lively and conveyed character.” But what exactly does Lee convey about character, or any of his many other themes in his superhero work?
Every once in a while, Spurgeon and Raphael hint at the depths of Lee’s best work. They speak of “Lee’s introspective dialogue, grounding the tale with illuminating truths about love and faith” in the Silver Surfer graphic novel he did with Kirby. (p. 182) Writing of Spider-Man, the authors enthuse that “Together, Lee and Ditko were exploring what it meant to be a heroic, responsible adult making Spider-Man a character with true emotional resonance for teens, and this title the first to genuinely explore the deeper meanings of its genre.” (p. 101) The authors make an observation about Lee and Kirby’s Hulk stories that I’d never seen before: “Taking on a superhero’s role messed up his life in the way of a massive drinking problem, with many of the same symptoms – blackouts, trashed apartments, ripped clothing, and a hazy memory.” (p. 99)
Commenting on an issue of The Comics Journal devoted to Lee, they report that “Critic Earl Wells more deeply explored Lee’s creative presence in the early Marvels by contrasting their themes with those explored by Kirby in his solo work at DC.” (p. 230) The thematic differences between Lee and Kirby! Had Spurgeon and Raphael gone into this subject, they could have shown just how much of the characterization and philosophy of those early Marvel stories derived from Stan Lee and proved that he was not simply taking credit for other people’s plots and suggested dialogue.
In their introduction, Raphael and Spurgeon say about Lee, “But a satisfactory account of his life and artistic career has been sorely missing.” (p. x) The authors do a great job of tracing the public side of his life, but as for a book that satisfactorily analyzes and appraises the ideas and themes of Stan Lee’s artistic career, that still remains to be done.
STAN LEE AND CHARACTER
According to Raphael and Spurgeon, in 1961, “As much as he tried to inject a sense of playfulness into the work, Lee’s comics writing remained unsophisticated and hacked out, both by market dictates and publisher decree, . . he was now filled with a sense if letting down fellow professionals for whom he could no longer provide freelance opportunities. . . Approaching forty, Lee could sense nothing in his accidental profession that would continue to sustain his interest, let alone provide avenues to the wealth and respect he still dreamed of attaining.” (p. 71)
Then came the moment that Lee himself has long described as the turning point in his life, and Spurgeon and Raphael agree that this is no apocryphal anecdote. After Marvel owner Martin Goodman assigned him to create a superhero book, Lee’s wife Joan urged him to take writing the book seriously, and to write the kind of book he himself would want to read. This piece of advice led directly to Lee’s cocreation of Fantastic Four #1 and to the revolution it began in comics.
Stan Lee’s most remarkable achievement was a single decision: to write the characters of his new superhero stories as multidimensional personalities. Spurgeon and Raphael agree that Lee was good at conveying character, but I think they underestimate the full impact of this decision he made, a turning point not just for him personally, or even for Marvel, but for the American comics industry.
In my last column I mentioned watching a videotape of the Museum of Television & Radio’s seminar on “Writing the Fantastic for Television,” which included a number of writers for science fiction series old and new, including Harlan Ellison, Babylon 5‘s J, Michael Straczynski, The Twilight Zone‘s Richard Matheson, Star Trek‘s D. C. Fontana, and others. The participants unanimously agreed that the heart of their stories lay in characterization: they utilized the genre elements of fantasy and science fiction in order to show how characters would behave within certain situations. Characterization is the key. By committing himself to moving the characterizations in superhero comics beyond the cardboard stereotypes of the past, Stan Lee opened the door for the artistic progress that has been made in mainstream American comic books from that time onward.
STAN’S STYLE
Let’s accept the idea that, as time went on, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and John Romita, Sr. became the primary plotters of the stories they drew that Stan scripted. Let us also accept the idea that Stan’s other artists participated to greater or lesser extents in working out the plot mechanics of the stories. Nonetheless, Silver Age Marvel comics do not read like a collection of stories by different creative personalities, with disparate themes and kinds of characterizations. No, the Marvel books of the 1960s read as individual components of a single creative body of work. Sure, the stories drawn and co-plotted (or fully plotted) by Kirby and Ditko are, more often than not, more brilliantly inventive than the rest. But all of 1960s Marvel is united by one single creative personality, and that is Stan Lee’s.
Jack Kirby may be largely responsible for the personality of the Thing, just as Steve Ditko greatly shaped the character of Peter Parker. But can anyone seriously ignore the many similarities between these two characters? There is undeniably a type of character we can identify as the Stan Lee hero: flawed, troubled, beset by insecurities, misunderstood and alienated from the world, in some characters’ cases relieving his frustration with wit, but driven by a sense of moral responsibility. The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Daredevil, the X-Men – no matter who was co-plotting and drawing the stories, all of them fit this mold. Romita succeeded Ditko on Spider-Man, and while Peter Parker grew handsomer as a result, he remained identifiably the same personality. Stan worked with a succession of artists on Daredevil – Bill Everett, Joe Orlando, Wally Wood, John Romita and Gene Colan – and yet Stan’s portrayal of Daredevil’s personality gave the series unity through the years. In the Silver Age there was something odd about books like Justice League and World’s Finest: the world of Batman, as edited by Jack Schiff, seemed so different from Superman’s world in World’s Finest, edited by Weisinger, or Justice League, edited by Schwartz. When Spider-Man crossed paths with the Fantastic Four, it did not seem strange at all. No matter who drew the book, this was the world dominated by Stan Lee’s artistic personality. This unity is what made the Marvel Universe possible.
Stan Lee’s style of writing – his styles of characterization, his brand of humor, his sense of drama – are thoroughly, distinctly his own, and very different than anything in superhero comics before the Marvel Age of the 1960s. Yet what may be even more remarkable is that it is a style within which other distinctive writers’ styles can flourish. For four decades other comics writers have taken Stan Lee’s concept of the hero and his kind of dramatic structure and turned them to their own purposes. At present day Marvel superhero stories are being written by such disparate artistic personalities as Brian Michael Bendis, Chris Claremont, Peter David, Neil Gaiman, Pete Milligan, Grant Morrison, Kevin Smith, J. Michael Straczynski, and Mark Waid. Each one of these men has a distinctive, individual writing style, and each one has different themes in his work. And yet, to a greater or lesser extent, each one of them is clearly working within the frameworks of characterization and storytelling established by Stan Lee.
HULK: GRAY, DIALOGUE: DIFFERENT
Since Raphael and Spurgeon hail Stan Lee’s scripting abilities, let me diverge from reviewing their book for a while to examine the question of how Lee’s legacy as a writer will endure. I’ll return to the biography after I look at Lee’s influence in the first issue of a new Marvel limited series, Hulk: Gray, written by Jeph Loeb and illustrated by Tim Sale.
Loeb and Sake have done commendable work together on Batman and in recent years have done contemporary retellings of classic early tales of Spider-Man and Daredevil and even of John Byrne’s 1980s revision of Superman’s origin
Hulk: Gray #1 uses the framing device of a session between Dr. Bruce Banner, the man cursed to be the Hulk, and his psychiatrist Dr. Leonard Samson, who is himself a superhero who derives his powers from gamma radiation, Doc Samson. In the first issue Banner retells the story of how he first became the Hulk. Though Banner alludes to the damage to his psyche wreaked by his abusive father, an addition to the legend made by writer Bill Mantlo, Hulk: Gray #1 is really a retelling of part of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s origin story from The Incredible Hulk #1, published in 1962.
The issue has many nice touches. Banner is depicted as a slight, thin man, more in keeping with the 1960s stories and his decidedly cerebral, nonathletic personality. At the moment of the gamma blast, Sale shows Banner’s skull and parts of the rest of his skeleton becoming visible, underlining the theme that his initial transformation was a symbolic death and dark recreation. General Ross notes that Betty is “only allowed at this facility as a courtesy to me,” finally explaining what the heck she was doing there. Banner hypothesizes that he has paid for creating a “weapon of mass destruction” by becoming one, in the form of the Hulk. Loeb thereby articulates an implicit theme of the original Hulk story. Surely, too, in the wake of September 11 and the Iraq war, Loeb’s uses of the terms “ground zero” and “weapon of mass destruction” in this issue are not coincidental.
In his years writing the Hulk, Peter David had Betty Ross explain her feistiness by saying that she was raised as an “army brat.” In contrast, in depicting the Betty of the time of the Hulk’s origin, Loeb and Sale bring back the Lee and Kirby version of Betty, quiet, shy and introverted in the looks in her eyes, her facial expressions and her body language. She is clearly dominated by her father, even somewhat infantilized, as she still addresses him as “daddy.” Loeb and Sale not only give her the 1960s pillbox hat from Hulk #1 but even put her in a dress whose length is more evocative of the repressed 1950s than the 1960s. General Ross criticizes her for not living up to his macho standards (“You’re a general’s daughter, dammit.”) just as he does Banner. One can see why a bond developed between Banner and this version of Betty: they are outwardly two of a kind, though she seemingly lacks his buried capacity for rage. (Then again, maybe that 1970s story in which Betty gained her own aggressive, green-skinned alter ego, the Harpy, wasn’t so ridiculous after all.) Nonetheless, she is quietly persistent, wearing down her father’s resistance to telling her “the truth,” so perhaps there is steel beneath her child-woman facade.
The best, most incisive moment comes when Doc Samson asks Banner to react to photographs of people from his past. Banner accuses General Ross of hating him and Rick Jones of blaming himself for Banner’s being transformed into the Hulk. However, Samson’s questions suggest that Banner may be projecting his own unconscious emotions onto them. Perhaps Banner hates General Ross, and why shouldn’t he? As we see later in the issue, Banner certainly thought Rick was foolish to drive out onto the gamma bomb test site, so why shouldn’t Banner subconsciously blame Rick for what happened there. After all these years, Banner, it seems, is still not in touch with the subconscious emotions that the Hulk incarnates.
For me, though, the framing device is marred when Loeb has Doc Samson twice saying “merde,” the French word for excrement, as if Loeb and company are taking a childish glee in sneaking a disguised four-letter word into a superhero comic. Perhaps this is part of the same mindset displayed in Marvel’s Max books, wherein foul language is somehow regarded as a signifier of literary sophistication.
That reminds me: I see this box reading “Marvel PSR” on the covers of both Hulk: Gray #1 and 1602. I take it this is an example of Marvel’s own new rating system, instituted since the Jemas administration decreed that Marvel would no longer abide by the Comics Code. So, let’s say that I am a parent, or a comics buyer who doesn’t keep up with Marvel press releases, or a prosecutor in one of those trials of comics shop owners for selling inappropriate material to the underaged. Would I have any idea what this box is for, or what the letters “PSR” mean? (I’d like to think it means “Peter Sanderson’s Right,” but no.) So just what good is this rating system?
Loeb and Sale depict the initial version of the Hulk as gray. Indeed, the Hulk was colored gray in his first story, but Stan Lee quickly changed his mind and had the Hulk colored green from Hulk #2 onwards. For many years Lee and other writers, when they retold the Hulk’s origin, made him green from Day 1. The assumption was that the gray color in the first issue was a mistake, and that he should have been colored green. It was John Byrne, in his brief run on The Incredible Hulk in the 1980s, who first established that the Hulk really was grey in his first appearance, as well as smaller and less strong than the most familiar version of the character. This, perhaps, was an extreme example of the attitude that anything that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and their contemporaries did in the original Silver Age Marvel stories was set in stone. On the other hand, Al Milgrom and especially Peter David were able to use the idea that the original gray Hulk was different from the usual green version as a springboard for new kinds of Hulk story lines. (I’d guess that when Loeb has Banner begin to reflect on the color changes and says, “But I digress,” this is a nod to Peter David and the title of his Comic Buyer’s Guide column.)
I find it interesting that Loeb and Sale choose not to go back to showing Banner sitting in the control room before racing out to save Rick from the gamma bomb blast. Perhaps they are simply trying to be concise and to give the flashback a literally explosive beginning. On the other hand, maybe they are trying to avoid the whole question of Igor, the spy who failed to halt the countdown. Even Igor’s last name is in dispute: he’s been called “Sklar,” “Starsky,” and, the more accepted version, “Drenkov.” According to the way “Marvel time” works, no matter what year it is now, Bruce Banner has only been the Hulk for a decade or less, and certainly not for nearly forty years. So if the Hulk’s origin no longer took place at the height of the Cold War, who was Igor working for? In the 1990s John Byrne tried to solve the problem by revising the origin to make Igor into an alien Skrull. Once Byrne had left the series again, Peter David pointedly wrote a scene in Captain Marvel that had Rick Jones guffawing at seeing the Skrull revision in a comic book, but Marvel, as far as I know, has not explicitly overturned the Byrne revision in a story. As with Byrne’s Spider-Man: Chapter One and X-Men: Children of the Atom, this was a revision that, I was told at the office, is not considered canonical, but since Marvel does not state this in print, how are readers, writers, and future Marvel editors to know this?
Loeb and Sale are mostly quite faithful to the events of Hulk #!, but Loeb feels free to change all of the original story’s dialogue in the scenes he recreates from the first story. In the new version, on first seeing the Hulk, Rick asks him. “What are you?” and the Hulk replies, “The strongest there is.” This strikes me as more a literary device than the credible first words of an angry newborn monster. Nonetheless, though this version of the Hulk is gray, for the rest of this issue he talks more like Stan Lee’s familiar green version of The Hulk from the later stories in Tales to Astonish (“Army bad.” “Hulk smash.”). Oddly, in Loeb’s version it is Rick Jones who is responsible for the Hulk’s name, not an anonymous soldier; this seems a change merely for change’s sake.
In the small handful of stories I’ve written that recapped past Marvel history, the rule I set for myself was that I would never rewrite the previous author’s work, whether it was Stan Lee or anyone else. I might not use all of the dialogue from a scene, and I felt free to invent additional dialogue, but I would not change the preexisting dialogue. If the scene from a previous story was part of the canonical continuity, I believed, then so were the words that were spoken during that scene. It was not for me to discard the dialogue that better scripters than myself had conceived and labored over.
Of course, I approach this issue from the point of view of a critic and historian. I suspect that many comics writers and editors today regard the dialogue of past stories, and even the stories themselves, the way that television and movie producers, directors and, in many cases, writers regard scripts: as malleable works to be rewritten at will. And yes, I know that Loeb has been using this approach of writing new dialogue while basically remaining faithful to the plots of classic Marvel stories for a while now, in such commendable series as Daredevil: Yellow and Spider-Man: Blue.
But, however good these series may be, it still bothers me. What, then, did the characters say during the Hulk’s origin tale? Who did come up with the Hulk’s name – Rick Jones, as in Loeb’s version, or an anonymous soldier, as in Lee and Kirby’s? Has Jeph Loeb’s version now supplanted Stan Lee’s? Or does any Marvel writer who retells the origin now have carte blanche to make further changes in Lee’s and Loeb’s versions? Does anyone at Marvel think it matters?
It is decidedly ironic that Raphael and Spurgeon acclaim Stan Lee for his skill with dialogue and point to his dialogue as his principal contribution to his classic Marvel stories and his primary means of asserting his creative personality within them. And yet writers who retell Lee’s classic stories feel free to dump his dialogue altogether.
Ah, but here’s another level of irony altogether. The October 20, 2003 issue of The New Yorker contains an article about screenwriters’ credits on movies, which laments the way that writers may get inappropriate levels of credit or no credit at all for the work they put into a movie project. The principal example used in the article is this year’s Hulk movie. It seems that James Schamus wrote his screenplay for the movie pretty much from scratch, but because it parallels previous versions by John Turman and Michael France, perhaps inadvertently, they share screenplay credit.
The article states, “James Schamus, of course, made Banner’s father into his script’s brooding centerpiece, whereas Turman’s Banner had an abusive father whom, in flashbacks, we saw arguing with his mother, and France’s had a father who killed his mother ‘a little bit every day until it finally added up.’ Schamus’s had a father who killed his mother one day all at once with a carving knife.”
Hulk comics writer Bill Mantlo, who created Banner’s abusive father and established he killed Bruce’s mother, goes unmentioned, as does Peter David, who built upon Mantlo’s idea. And, though the Hulk comics are repeatedly mentioned throughout the article, the names of the Hulk’s creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, never are.
Talk about writers not getting proper credit.
IF THERE HAD BEEN NO STAN
There are certain individuals about whom one can state, if not for their work, there would be no American comic book industry today. Alternative comics aficionados may not like it, but they must surely recognize the fact that it is the mainstream comics, primarily superhero comics, that keeps the direct sales comic book market afloat. Without Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman, there would be no superhero comics. Except for Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, superheroes disappeared from the stands by 1951. Hence, another figure of key importance is DC editor Julius Schwartz, who spearheaded the Silver Age superhero revival, and one must keep in mind that Stan Lee co-created The Fantastic Four to compete with Schwartz’s Justice League of America. If there had been no Julie Schwartz, and if DC had failed to revive its classic superheroes in the mid-150s (as Timely failed), there would have been no “Marvel Age of Comics” in the 1960s.
And Stan Lee is yet another of these key figures. What if, out of his increasing frustration with comics, he had left Timely/Atlas/Marvel by 1961 and found writing work elsewhere? What if Marvel owner Martin Goodman had put someone else in Stan’s place as editor, someone who merely imitated what Julie Schwartz and his writers were doing over at DC? Or, worse, did new versions of the same kind of superhero juvenilia that Timely had published in the 1940s?
Perhaps then Marvel’s attempt at reviving superheroes would have failed. But let’s assume that it succeeded. The early 1960s was the height of the Silver Age, a period of great creativity at DC, that produced hundreds of classic stories. But by the end of the 1960s, DC’s Silver Age superhero writers were running out of steam, reworking old, once brilliantly original ideas to lessening effect, in some cases falling into laughable self-parody; a number of DC’s top writers ended up leaving in a dispute with management. The older writers and editors were also out of touch with the 1960s generational shift in taste, as sharp in comics as it was in politics, fashion and music.
It was Stan Lee’s Marvel that opened superhero comics up to an older audience. Thanks to the greater sophistication of his writing, kids no longer necessarily “outgrew” comics when they entered high school or college.
Moreover, Stan Lee’s comics fired the imaginations of a new generation of comic book writers. Before the Marvel revolution, people wrote or drew comics if they could not get enough work in what were thought to be more respectable fields, like magazine illustration or even newspaper comic strips. Now brilliant young writers and artists wanted specifically to work in comic books because Stan Lee had demonstrated the potential of the medium to them.
Without that new generation, what would have happened to the American comics industry? Would the older generation of editors, writers and artists, most of whom entered the field in the 1940s and 1950s, simply have kept churning out the same kind of material, falling ever further out of step with their audiences, and failing to advance the superhero genre any further?
Ah, you might say, but Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko would still have been around. Sure, but would they have gotten the opportunities to do their most creative work that Stan gave them? By deciding to give his characters multidimensional personalities and to address serious themes, Stan gave his collaborators the openings and impetus to do the same. What if Kirby and Ditko had wanted to plot superhero stories with complex, flawed heroes, but no comics editor would let them?
It was because of Marvel’s success, and because of the new influx of writers and artists influenced by Marvel, that DC began to transform itself at the end of the 1960s. The writing tradition of John Broome and Gardner Fox gave way to the styles of the new generation, who increasingly wrote DC characters as if they were Marvel creations. So Batman became dark and driven; Green Lantern and Green Arrow discovered social and political issues in the “real” world, and so forth. Marvel-trained writers and editors, dissatisfied with Marvel editorial policies, defected to DC and completed the transformation: Frank Miller, John Byrne, Mike Carlin, and more. The new ethos that comic books in genres like superheroes or horror could serve as mediums of personal expression made possible the DC work of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and those who followed in their path.
So, what if Stan Lee had not revolutionized Marvel in the early 1960s? Marvel might never have become a genuine competitor to DC. After comics sales plummeted following the end of the boom inspired by the Batman TV show, DC might never have found new directions with which to rebuild its audience. Far fewer young writers and artists would have entered comics. No one in a position of power in comics might have realized in time that the superhero genre could be retooled to reach older, more sophisticated readers. Without those older readers, the network of direct sales shops would not have arisen to compensate for the disappearance of the “mom and pop” stores that used to sell comics. Without the direct sales stores, there would have been nowhere to sell alternative comics. (Graphic novels had to become established in the direct sales market before they made the leap into bookstores like Barnes & Noble.) Think of how often this Stan Lee biography shows that the comics industry fell into serious financial trouble. Then imagine whether the industry could have survived without the Marvel superhero books.
In short, without Stan Lee, I suspect that today’s comics industry would consist of little more than those pocket-sized Archie collections you see at supermarket check-out counters.
THE MAN WITH A SECRET IDENTITY
Who is Stan Lee, anyway? Ideally a biography should not simply tell the reader what the subject did, but give the reader a sense of who he is as a person.
Throughout Raphael and Spurgeon’s book, I feel that I am still regarding Stan Lee from a distance. The book mostly chronicles the public actions and public statements of a man who, as Raphael and Spurgeon point out, has carefully crafted and steadfastly maintained a public persona, like a role that an actor would play. Just like his superheroes, Stan Lee created a costumed identity for himself, in his case, complete with the trademark sunglasses.
Still, at various points in their book, Spurgeon and Raphael provide hints as to what the private Stan Lee, the man behind the “Smilin’ Stan” persona may be like. Here I am going to follow some of these clues and see where they may lead.
STAN THE BOSS
I am well aware that Stan Lee is not always easy to work with. Back in the 1970s Roy Thomas and George Perez collaborated on a Fantastic Four issue in which that shapeshifting alien trickster, the Impossible Man, visited the Marvel offices. (There are in fact a number of Marvel comics stories of the past in which Marvel editors, writers and artists appear, that celebrate the sense of community at the company. DC did a few, too. It’s hard to imagine such a story being done at either company nowadays.) Lee, surprisingly, seems to be in a continual fit of temper (whereas, in contrast, Jack Kirby is portrayed as a placid, imperturbable sort of comics Buddha); one letter writer later pegged the Stan Lee of this story as the real life J. Jonah Jameson. (In a cartoon reproduced in this book, Denis Kitchen even draws Lee as Jameson.) Even in my phone interview with Lee years ago, I could detect an edge in his voice when I ventured unwittingly into a subject he would rather avoid.
So I was happily surprised by the warmth of various co-workers’ reminiscences about Lee in this book. His temper is noted, but it also observed that his bursts of anger do not last long and rarely have lasting effects.
Now, Spurgeon and Raphael make it clear that Kirby “raged” at changes that Lee had him make in his work, that Kirby long felt bitterness towards Lee, and that other artists of Lee’s generation resented his efforts to have them change their styles to become more Kirbyesque. So Lee was certainly not universally beloved.
But Spurgeon and Raphael also tell us of Lee’s popularity with co-workers not only of his own generation but of younger ones. It’s the writers who worked with Lee at Marvel in the 1970s are quoted in this book as speaking quite well of him. Speaking of Lee at 1970s Marvel, Spurgeon and Raphael observe that “As a boss, Lee was easygoing and friendly. . . Around the office, Lee displayed a delight in the moment and a knack for making his recruits feel special. He was also prone to acts of exceptional kindness.” (p. 153)
Even as Stan Lee Media was collapsing around them, it appears that the creative people working there still felt warmly towards Lee himself. Reading DC’s Just Imagine volume, I am struck by the testimonials by Jim Lee and Dave Gibbons about collaborating with Lee on some of the stories therein. Here were two people who idolized Stan Lee as they were growing up, finally got to work with him, and could not have been happier with the experience: their idol lived up to their expectations.
Spurgeon and Raphael also note that “the majority of his employees respected and revered him, and, despite the sometimes crushing workload, they relished the freedom he gave them. “One of the signs of a good leader is the ability to delegate responsibility and step back, and Stan was good at that,’ [Len] Wein says.” (p. 152) Here is a lesson that certain other parties who later ruled over Marvel editorial never learned.
There is a theme, perhaps unintended by the authors, that turns up in this book again and again. Even when Marvel was a family-run operation, headed by Lee’s relative Martin Goodman, the dark side of the corporate mentality was in evidence. In 1950 Goodman fired the entire in-house art staff; later, in 1957, he decreed that Lee could no longer hire freelancers.
Marvel has since fallen into the hands of a series of corporate owners, and further cases of mistreatment of staff and freelancers. Raphael and Spurgeon report former 1990s Marvel artist Rob Liefeld’s claim that Marvel executive “Terry Stewart compared the artists to faceless field hands recruited to pick cotton on a plantation.…” (p. 235) If true, that is particularly disturbing, since Stewart was considered one of Marvel’s more benevolent top executives.
In sharp contrast, Stan Lee is characterized over and over in this book as a humane boss, who looked out for the people who were loyal to him. “He was, by all accounts, a loyal editor, even hiring older artists who had done good work for him in the past and giving them assignments despite their diminished capacities.” (p. 265)
One of Lee’s fears from early in his career was of what might happen if the comic book business collapsed. “And what skills could a thirty-year-old editor and writer of America’s least-respected form of creative expression hope to bring to more legitimate industries?” This is a question that surely haunts comics pros trying to make career changes today. “The specter of failure, of being let down by his field and, in turn, letting down those who depended on him, would continue to haunt Lee in palpable fashion until the early 1970s.” (pp. 18-19) Here the authors are perhaps only referring to Lee’s immediate family, but it soon becomes clear that he worried about his co-workers as well.
When Lee was ordered from above to get rid of employees, it literally made him ill. When Goodman had him let people go in 1957, “Lee was devastated, particularly as it was up to him to communicate the change in the line to the various freelancers who counted in him for part of their living. One industry account said Lee went to the restroom after each face-to-face meeting and vomited.” (p. 61)
Even as late as the collapse of Stan Lee Media in 2000, the authors tell us, “On the day of the layoffs, Lee was reportedly so distressed that he collapsed.” (p. 256)
Consider the devastation in the comics industry over the last decade. As Raphael and Spurgeon remind us, “in the financial turmoil caused by [Marvel under Ron Perelman’s] aggressive pursuit of power, hundreds of people who had made their living at Marvel, and in businesses for whom Marvel was the most important client, lost their jobs.” Someday, perhaps, someone will write about the personal cost to the many who have been cast adrift by the comics industry in this and other incidents over the years. Perhaps this incisive comment by John Byrne, quoted by the authors with reference to Marvel’s treatment of Jack Kirby in the 1970s, applies here, too: “The industry is notorious for not taking care of its own. We eat our young and abandon our old.” (p. 180)
Stan Lee, on the other hand, appears to have been a boss with a conscience, with a sense that he and his co-workers were part of a community. It seems he believed that with great power – as an employer – must come great responsibility, to coin a phrase.
STAN LEE AS THE ENERGIZER BUNNY
Here’s a puzzler: just why does Stan Lee keep working so much?
Stan Lee makes a million dollars a year basically to act as Marvel’s good will ambassador. (That’s twice as much as Bill Jemas did before Quentin Tarantino’s Bride and her terrible swift sword sent him to keep company with the San Diego Con’s Marvel booth.) He’d be far busier than most octogenarians just by giving interviews and making convention appearances.
But no, that’s not enough! He writes yet another autobiography. He starts his own Internet company. He writes a series of comics for DC. He lends his name to tacky projects like Stripperella.
But why? He’s in his early eighties now, and surely has put more than enough money away to keep himself, his wife, and their daughter in the lap of luxury for the rest of their lives. His reputation as a major figure in the comics medium is secure; he’s arguably more famous than ever. No one would think ill of him if he chose to just rest on his laurels.
Is it just an urge to accumulate more and more money? Raphael and Spurgeon quote Lee as saying about his doomed Internet venture, “If it didn’t pay anything, I would still want to do it.” Can we believe this? I think in part at least, we can, but why?
Spurgeon and Raphael point to “his depression-era work ethic.” (p. 172) Well, yes, but how many other members of his generation are still hustling and bustling in their late seventies and early eighties? The redoubtable Ken Plume has suggested to me that Stan Lee was always an “overachiever.” But again, how many “overachievers” are still at it so long past the age at which most people retire?
Is it a compulsive longing for fame and the public spotlight? That must be part of it: the authors assert that “national celebrity” has been one of Lee’s goals since 1972. (p. 131) But still, wouldn’t many of us, as senior citizens, be more than content just giving interviews for articles and TV shows that praise our past accomplishments?
Perhaps the real answer lies in Raphael and Spurgeon’s indication that Lee himself does not really feel that his great achievements in the comics medium are ultimately that important. “He had landed in comics by accident,” they note, and quote him as saying, “I didn’t have any big compulsion to write comics. It was a way of making a living.” (p. 269)
“After more than twenty years of false starts and dead ends, Lee was still chasing his Hollywood dream,” the authors observe about Lee’s continuing efforts to launch new projects. “For all that he had accomplished as a comic-book writer and editor, all the artistic triumphs and fame, he still felt incomplete.” (p. 269)
They quote Lee as saying that if his friend, artist Joe Maneely, had not died in 1958, he might have left Marvel and collaborated with him on something else. The authors quote Lee as saying in 1978 that he wished he had gotten out of comics twenty years before. In either case, take note, his Marvel comics of the 1960s would never have come to be. The authors even quote Lee as saying in 2002 that he wished he had been a screenwriter, a Broadway playwright, or the writer of a great novel.
Speaking of the 1970s, Raphael and Spurgeon comment that “Although comics had made some inroads among academics and the tastemakers of cool, they still lacked the sustained intellectual output and the critical vocabulary of a true art form. There were few comic-book works of serious merit being produced, and even fewer individuals with the interest or ability to provide the critical judgement necessary to evaluate the medium in a literary framework. There was no Pauline Kael of comics to bestow distinction upon Lee or anyone else. He would have to find it in another field.” (p. 173)
Now, three decades later, there are considerably more “serious” comics out there, and the medium is receiving increasing academic and critical attention. But still, there is far too little serious comics criticism in the mainstream media: looking at today’s New York Times, I am reminded that it regularly runs reviews of videogames, but I probably shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them to review Endless Nights (which I get to next week), or, even this biography, for that matter.
Now, maybe Lee is of two minds on the subject of the comics medium’s artistic value: after all, there is that wonderful quote in his repertoire asking what if Shakespeare and Michelangelo had done comics. Still, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that, considering how comics have been condemned or condescended to for most of his life, even Stan Lee seems to think, at least at times, that comics are inferior to novels or plays or movies. This is sad: the accidents and circumstances of life led him to the field that proved best suited to his talents, where he created work of enduring importance, and wreaked an artistic revolution that permanently changed the course of an artform, and yet he still seems to feel that he hasn’t achieved true success.
On the other hand, one should admire Stan’s persistence in remaining an active force in today’s media world. I have a friend, who is looking for work (as so many friends do nowadays), who was asked by a potential employer, why should I hire you when I can hire a 22-year-old who would work for much less money? My friend is only 30. This is a dispiriting anecdote for someone like me, middle-aged and looking for steady work at a time when neither the comics industry or anyone else seems to be hiring.
Yet here’s Stan Lee, now in his early eighties, a man who could so easily settle back into retirement, and he is still amazingly active, giving interviews, making “surprise” appearances at comic conventions, and collaborating on animated series. In part he is lucky that so many people still seek out his talents in a capitalist, youth-oriented society which usually condemns people as being over the hill once they’re past fifty. But in part it’s surely also because Stan keeps active, keeps pushing forward, setting an example to us all not to give up, not to let age keep us from launching new projects and exploring new ideas. As Lee himself says in the book, “Somewhere inside of this old body, there’s a young guy trapped, trying to get out.” (p. 270)
STAN LEE MEETS MIKE MURDOCK
There is finally one overwhelming reason why I think that Raphael and Spurgeon’s book ultimately views Stan Lee not from inside but from a distance. The book fails to answer one major question: just where did those heroes in Stan Lee’s work come from?
Does anyone really doubt that Stan Lee used his classic comics of the 1960s as his platform for personal expression? Don’t his stories, from Spider-Man through The Silver Surfer, express his own opinions about right and wrong, the relationship between the individual and society, human frailty and nobility, and so much more? Does anyone doubt that the “Stan Lee hero” embodies Stan Lee’s vision of what a human being should be, or that it is a projection of his own hopes, despairs, ideals and insecurities?
So, therefore, there must be aspects of Stan Lee’s characters within Stan Lee himself. The outward facade of the huckster and the showman can’t be all that there is. Somewhere beneath the persona that Jack Kirby caricatured as Funky Flashman, there must be something of Peter Parker, too. (And I suddenly recall that before the murder of his Uncle Ben, Spider-Man did his best to go Hollywood and gain fame and fortune. Hmm.)
This is a big subject: how can the same person who inspires controversy by being a Marvel “company man,” who seems so interested in the material aspects of success, also sincerely give voice to the impassioned idealism of the Silver Surfer? Just how do Stan Lee the artist and Stan Lee the executive interrelate?
Back in the 1960s, when Stan was writing Daredevil, Matt Murdock’s friends Foggy Nelson and Karen Page had stumbled over the fact that he was secretly Daredevil. In an audacious attempt to throw them off the track, Matt told Foggy and Karen that Daredevil was really his twin brother Mike Murdock. (Of course, Matt was actually an only child.) Soon thereafter Matt turned up at his office as “Mike,” a brash, happily egotistical version of himself, wearing loud clothes, cracking corny jokes, needling Foggy and flirting with Karen. Even as a kid, it was obvious to me that “Mike” was a caricature of Stan’s public persona.
Within a few years Stan “killed off” “Mike Murdock,” and subsequent writers seemed to find “Mike” an embarrassment since no one ever brought him back (although Frank Miller once told me he rather liked “Mike”).
But I find “Mike Murdock” not only memorably funny but significant for what he may say about his creator: the extroverted, fast-talking showoff that serves as the facade hiding the more serious man underneath. Perhaps Stan has a “secret” identity behind his public persona as well. That gives a new layer of meaning to all of those stories of Stan’s in which Peter Parker – or one of his other heroes – escapes from the mundane troubles of his ordinary life into the costumed identity of a wisecracking hero who can triumph within the fantasy world of comics.
Who is the real Stan Lee? Just who was that man I once spoke to on the phone, anyway?
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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