Monday, May 13, 2024

Book Culture - Stan Lee Biography

Review: 
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman 


Forgive me for a moment of self-indulgence...

Back in the 1980s, I entered a collaborative partnership with a friend (who was to become the best man at my wedding). He was a burgeoning cartoonist and I had always wanted to write, so a pairing up seemed to be the logical thing to do, especially as we were spending almost as much time together as I was with the woman who would become my wife. The fruits of our collaboration were limited, probably due to excessive drug and alcohol indulgence, but we had one absolute guaranteed success. A 'daily' three-panel cartoon strip about a misanthropic blowhard, his idiot nephew and an assortment of supporting characters designed to facilitate jokes and add 4th wall breaking comments. The main character was based on a version of me, his nephew on my partner in crime. The characters, strangely penis-like, looked like the people they were based on and to a certain extent were exaggerations of our own personalities.

We had produced about 20 strips and I think we both thought we were going to copy a Northampton-based writer - Alan Moore - by getting our strip in the local papers and kickstarting careers for us both; the 80s after all was a time when if you wanted success you had to get on your bike to do it. 

At the time, I was working for the Northants Community Programme - a Tory government created job scheme that essentially put people into work at a very minimum wage doing jobs where their skills would be appreciated. I was working in the actual Community Programme offices, as a publicity manager and this brought me into contact with a lot of people, including local journalists. One such was Evening Telegraph veteran Anne Jeffries, who I met during a launch in Wellingborough and then kept bumping into her as the weeks and months passed. One day, accompanied by a number of colleagues, we were sitting in the pub and the subject of the comic strip came up and Anne just happened to know that the local Northamptonshire newspapers were hoping to emulate Alan Moore's Maxwell the Magic Cat strip; they wanted to run a cartoon produced by local talent. Anne looked over our 20 samples, took them to her editor and before you know it we were on the cusp of something special...

The commissioning editor of the Evening Telegraph offered us £80 per strip, which would eventually include extra cash from syndication in at least another eight newspapers owned by the people of owned the ET. £80 a day for six strips a week and we would keep copyright and ownership of the characters. This was pretty unbelievable - we were being offered almost a £500 a week - in the 1980s - to produce a comic strip for Northants' second largest newspaper and all the doors that would subsequently open. It was a dream come true and all we needed to do was ensure we had at least a month's worth of inventory, because as Anne said to me, "Once you agree to do this you don't let them down."

Now, the caricature was based on me but was drawn solely by my friend. However, the character, his dialogue, his reason for existence and all of the stories were created by me. The creation of the comic strip was a joint effort - it was in many ways a chicken and egg scenario: the character's look wouldn't have happened without my friend's creation and everything else about the character - his ability to be a comic strip - was down to me and therefore I viewed it as a 50-50 thing; it wouldn't have existed without both of us. Had I not been involved it would literally have been one funny caricature of me drawn by my friend and then forgotten about for the rest of our lives - oddly enough the original sketch appears in my 1986 diary next to words written by me.

However, when the news of our impending employment reached my friend, instead of being over the moon about our great news, he was more concerned about how the £500 a week cheque would be split. His view was it took him about six hours to draw a three panel strip and it took me about six minutes to come up with the story/joke and the dialogue, therefore he would be generous and give me 20% of the £500 and he would keep the other 80%. I said this was a 50-50 deal and he refused point blankly to accept this because there was no way in his mind I deserved 50% of the money for what was clearly not 50% of the work. I explained to him that if we were employed by an actual comic book company, this is pretty much how the deal would be split - we were co-creators and it was fair that we should split the money half each (especially as I'd got us the deal in the first place).

He refused and even suggested that I did nothing more than write the joke and that he was really the sole creator of the character and I had absolutely no rights - despite it being based on me, looking like me and having all the words supplied by me. We reached an impasse, one which not only destroyed our friendship but set our mutual friends on the difficult decision of which one of us they would side with. In the eyes of the layman, my friend did most of the work so he deserved most of the money. It didn't matter how much I argued my side of the case, in the eyes of the ignorant, ownership was based on the amount of work put in not the creative process. 

Then came what I feel was the crux of the entire argument. I challenged my friend to come up with strips written and drawn by him with no input from me. He failed miserably; so miserably in fact that he didn't produce one single strip and all the time this toing and froing was going on we were losing our window of opportunity. We could not agree on anything until sensing the deal was about to explode in our faces, I reluctantly offered him a 70-30% split, despite knowing that I was 50% responsible for the strip. The problem was even this was too much for the man who by this time was supposed to be my closest friend and had been my best man at my wedding (a very poor best man to be fair, but that's another story).

The deal lapsed; we never got into print and the opportunity was missed. We spent a few years not talking to each other, avoiding each other in social circles, which was difficult as we both had virtually the same friends until one night in the early 1990s, when I was busy running my own comic book shop and had started freelance writing for Comics International, I told him he could have it all - complete copyright control, I would not give him any grief, life was too short etc etc.

Around this time he showed me his latest creation, a strip about a werewolf. He'd done half a dozen of them and, being harsh, they were woefully unfunny; nicely produced but nowhere near publication standard. This was really all I needed to know; without my input he was a man with a huge talent for artwork and almost no idea how to write something. Given how this guy's life went (and mine to a certain extent), I wonder what would have happened had he not been so greedy and egotistical. But that's something that will never be answered and the entire episode is one that exists only in the minds and memories of the people involved. I'm sure if there was ever a serious debate about those 1980s days, we'd both have differing memories of it and anyone of our entourage of friends the same. I'm of the opinion that even though the history of payments and credit for co-creation pretty much falls on my side, most people would still think my old friend was the person who created the character, I just brought it to life...

The first impressions I got from Abe Riesman's biography of Stan Lee was that a similar thing happened between Lee and his long time collaborator Jack Kirby, especially during the early years of Marvel Comics; the difference being that Lee was never shy to take the credit for creating the iconic Marvel superheroes, while Kirby just grew old and bitter about what he saw as the unjust situation that had been created. The main problem with the puzzling question of Who Really Created the Marvel Universe is that every single person connected to it has died and every single story or anecdote has a degree of apocrypha about it. There are many written pieces, transcripts of interviews and even comments made to people about it, but we're never going to know what really happened.

This brings me to the main problem I have with Riesman's book - it's a hatchet job. It's a heavily biased, badly written attack on and at Stan Lee, that scrutinises every single detail about his life, but accepts without the same scrutiny anything negative said by literally anyone else - the book borders on philippic - essentially a 300+ page condemnation of Stan Lee. One would almost think Riesman had been commissioned by Jack Kirby's family to write this book.

The thing is I'm not here to canonise Lee or to even defend some of the dodgy things he did during his long and varied life, but I do think that the expression 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' is probably the best way to describe the controversies in his life. Do I think he solely created the Marvel Universe in the early 1960s? No. But equally I don't think Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko did either. I think they were created largely by committee, possibly even including Stan's secretary Flo Steinberg. Maybe Kirby came up with designs, perhaps Ditko did the same but to say they were the definitive creators of characters and all that Lee did was put some words in their mouths and took all the credit is bullshit.

The truth is probably closer to Kirby and Ditko were pissed off that Lee - a serial carnival barker - took all the credit and had this tumultuous period of history happened at a different juncture, both men would have been thrilled to have been credited as co-creators. There is evidence to suggest that many of the accusations this book levels at Lee are nothing more than that, allegations and the grumblings of old men. Obviously these missives and quotes don't have such prominence in this book, almost put in to try and offer some counter argument and zero scrutiny or aspersions are made. It really is a case of 'Stan said white was white so we asked everyone about it, but Jack said black is black and we took his word for it.' This is literally how the first two-thirds of the book reads, with little or no doubt cast at anyone who said anything disparaging about Lee.

It is possible that Lee was a bit of a crook and a glad hander, but it's also possible that all he was trying to do was create a success from something he almost felt he was trapped in - the comics industry. He'd toiled at it since before WW2 and made friends and enemies along the way; he maybe realised by the mid 1950s that the ambitions he harboured were becoming increasingly unlikely to happen, so when these 'Bullpen' inspired creations hit the newsstands and were a huge hit, all he was trying to do was make a success from something he, deep down, didn't really have a lot of belief in. One thing Riesman struggles to avoid are the many anecdotes about what a generous and loyal editor he was in the 1950s, making sure his artists got good rates and recognition. Part of me suspects this is what he did in the 1960s rather than attempt to steal others ideas and I wouldn't be at all surprised by the time the 1970s rolled around and he had started taking absolute credit for Marvel that this might be down to the ungrateful and negative comments made by the disgruntled Kirby and Ditko.

You see, when you're dealing with that specific era it becomes more interpretation and guess work than something that's absolute. I have no doubt the artists and comics people who doubled down behind Kirby from the 70s onwards did so because Lee was a famous millionaire figurehead and the man who inspired many of them was old and relatively poor. It was maybe down to fairness rather than truth. I'm aware that Steve Ditko was a serious misanthrope, but he also appears to be the only person championing his contributions to Marvel, because all the serious creators had thrown their weight behind Kirby, even down to suggesting he was the true creator of Spider-Man. If you take an even handed approach to the Lee/Kirby/Ditko imbroglio you, in my humble opinion, come back to that six of one, half a dozen of the other analogy.

It also should be noted that as the book ploughs its deeply offensive furrows, the author cites The Daily Mail on a number of occasions - which that alone should cast huge doubts on the voracity of the claims (especially to anyone in the UK who is familiar with this particular pro-Nazi Comicbook) and then goes on to cite the Bleeding Cool website, home of comics' most despised shitmonger - a man about as trustworthy as a starving shark in a swimming pool of babies. 

As for Lee's later life, which we of course see as cameos in MCU films, but was actually dogged by dodgy dealings, illegal activities and some people might argue humiliatingly karmic failures, Riesman seems to want to forget that we were talking about a man in his 80s. Now, I know a few compos mentis octogenarians but I also know as many who are now maybe not as sharp or as careful as they might once have been; but the author of this book gives Lee no mitigation, if he's not making direct accusations, he's suggesting it; implying that Lee might have pleaded and played ignorance but if you believe all the other nasty things I've insinuated about him then you have to accept that Stan Lee was essentially a shitbag who fucked people over as often as possible.

I didn't expect a hagiography; I think there are grounds to believe that more than one person created Marvels icons, but I'm not prepared to believe that Lee was a scheming manipulative bastard who shafted anyone and everyone he worked with right up until his 90s. He was a man who had created a persona and simply kept running with the same ball, not really thinking how his soapbox hyperbole might affect the people he inadvertently trampled over. I do not believe Lee was the bad man Abraham Riesman suggests he was and I do not accept that his co-conspirators at Marvel in the early 60s did anything more or less than co-create the company's legacy with him. Yes, people lost out financially, but I struggle to see why Lee is being castigated as the boss of the company when we live in a world where bosses of companies exploit their workers considerably more than 'The Man' ever did and are almost treated as role models.

In conclusion; a friend of mine once said, read Riesman's biography of Stan Lee, it's all you need to know what really happened. I have done and I found it deeply offensive, badly written and heavily weighted in favour of anyone who crossed Lee's path who possibly didn't receive recognition at a time when no one received recognition. The book overlooks or simply ignores some of the other good work Lee did as Marvel's figurehead; everything from his continued promotion of the company to the creation of such things as Marvel UK or Lucky Man, a successful TV series with his name attached, or even how he remained approachable almost his entire life, happy to have a chat with anyone about comics and possessing a remarkable, almost encyclopaedic knowledge of people and events. 

It is a nasty, pernicious biography that makes no apologies for being like that. I feel sorry for the (mainly now dead) people involved at Marvel during that iconic period who feel they were undervalued, misrepresented or without the recognition they deserved, but I really do not believe you can blame Stan Lee for it. He was a contributing factor, for sure, but he seems to be being blamed for the work culture that was comics at that time, when if he had never been the man he was, the comics 'industry' might not even exist in 2024.


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