Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book

By Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Prologue

On a Sunday afternoon in April 2002, one month before Spider-Man was set to open in nearly 4,000 movie theaters nationwide, Stan Lee sat perched on the edge of a stage in the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium. The venue for several Academy Awards shows, the white, Moorish-style building on that day played host to a comic-book convention, a gathering of science fiction and superhero fans flushed from their one-bedroom apartments and suburban bungalows by the lure of panel discussions and a dealer's room full of collectibles. Lee, the man popularly known as Spider-Man's creator, was the convention's guest of honor and most awaited speaker. For this event, like so many others in the last forty years, the fans were out in force to meet "Stan the Man."

Dressed in black jeans and a black shirt opened two buttons down, his thinning gray-white hair combed back, Lee gently leaned forward and watched a large projection television. More than 2,000 fans--some sitting in $8-per-head seats, the rest standing--watched with him. Onscreen, a cartoon version of Lee was terrorizing a comic-book store in faraway fictional Springfield in an excerpt from The Simpsons. The long-running TV satire had finally gotten around to caricaturing the comic-book legend, in an episode that would air later that month. Lee, following the tradition of the show's previous guest stars, had provided the voice-over for his animated doppelganger.

In the episode, the cartoon Stan Lee appears at the comics shop where Bart Simpson tries to sell copies of his self-published comic book Angry Dad. "The creator of Marvel Comics!" Bart exclaims upon spying the loosely drawn septuagenarian. When a nerdy kid picks up an action figure of Batman, a hero owned by DC Comics, Marvel's main rival, Lee enters the scene, bellowing, "Hold it, son! Wouldn't you rather have an exciting action figure?"

"Ahh . . . " the kid stutters, "but only Batman fits in my Batmobile."

"Are you nuts? The Thing fits in there perfectly." Lee wedges the orange-skinned Marvel superhero into the Dark Knight's ride, shoving his legs through the floor. "Look, he's fitting right now."

The Shrine audience laughed knowingly at the lampoon: Stan Lee, in his trademark tinted glasses, shilling ceaselessly and unabashedly for Marvel and its cast of characters. It's a role that Lee has played for more than four decades--first as Marvel's chief writer and editor, later as its publisher, and all along in college lectures and media interviews as its public front man.

It's an image that evokes mixed responses from habitu's of comics and pop culture. Fans soak it up with warm, admiring recognition, happy for any adult who loves to talk up the objects of their affection. Critics denounce it, deriding Lee as a shameless huckster and hopeless company man who greedily stole credit from Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and the other artists who cocreated the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Spider-Man, and the rest of the Marvel Universe.

Good and bad, it's an image that Stan Lee has learned to accept and occasionally use to his advantage. Still on stage, observing his animated alter ego, the flesh-and-blood Lee smiled. It's the smile--broad, cheerful, guileless--that lets the fans know Stan's in on every joke, even the ones at his expense.

The lights went up and a line formed for the question-and-answer session. Lee parked himself on a folding metal chair behind a long wooden table. A teenager with a Spider-Man mask pulled up high on his forehead said, "I feel like I'm talking to Jesus here." The crowd whooped in appreciation. The teen asked Lee if he had a favorite Marvel character. "The one I was working on at the moment, whichever one I was doing," Lee responded, ever the cheerleader. "I loved them all."

Another fan stepped forward and inquired about the status of Stan Lee Media, Lee's shaky Internet venture that only two years earlier had enjoyed a stock market capitalization exceeding $300 million. Without pausing, Lee said, "It is dead, defunct, finito. Unfortunately, it was one of the most successful Internet companies in the world. My partner was less than totally honest. He's now in prison in Brazil, and that's the way it is." Somehow, Lee, enunciating his words with gravelly earnestness, made even the worst defeat of his career sound lofty.

More questions: What does Lee's famous catchphrase "Excelsior!" mean? Why do comic books cost so much? What happened to the original Spider-Man story that Jack Kirby drew for Amazing Fantasy #15? In his long career as Marvel's pitchman, Lee has answered queries like these hundreds of times. These are the kinds of esoteric tidbits that the denizens of the dwindling subculture known as comics fandom have sought since its nascent days in the early 1960s, when Marvel aficionados met in clubhouses and university gatherings and communicated via mimeographed fanzines.

E-mail, on-line bulletin boards, and the World Wide Web have changed the dynamics of fandom--and the comics industry as well--but Lee remains a figure of universal interest. After all, he was around in the early days, when Superman and Batman and Captain America roused a nation from the throes of the Great Depression with four-color tales of superheroism and adventure. And he was there in 1961, perhaps dejected and weary and desperate for a hit, but with enough on the ball to pull one final big concept out of his dusty carnival-barker's hat. Hastily assembled and thrown at the public, The Fantastic Four #1 inaugurated the Marvel Age of comics, turning a medium on its ear and reinvigorating a company that would eventually dominate the comic-book industry and boast several billion-dollar properties.

Later, when juvenile interests turned to television, video games, and the Internet, and comics began their long, slow decline, Lee stayed visible, a pop-culture icon aging alongside the medium that made him famous. Comic books were no longer culturally relevant, but somehow Stan Lee still was. Why? For one thing, he answered questions--sometimes truthfully, other times cagily, but always congenially. Lee was charming, quick with a joke, and, like a politician, keenly attuned to his audience, whether it was a lifelong comic-book devotee or a television reporter skeptical of a grown man's enthusiasm for a cosmic-powered space alien who roams the spaceways on a sleek, silver-coated surfboard.

The Shrine interrogation continued. About Spider-Man: Did Lee have veto power over the comic-book title after he stopped writing it? "No, I didn't have any power. You see, I always felt with great power comes great responsibility," Lee quipped. The crowd cheered. Soberly, he continued, "Once I was no longer doing the books, it wouldn't have been right for me to tell other people how to do them." Another question: What was Lee's involvement in the production of the movie? Not much, Lee responded cheerfully. "I'm just like you guys. I see the trailer, I love it, I can't wait to see the whole thing." More applause. It was his room.

Soon it was time for autographs. The crowd pressed forward, hundreds of boys and men, a few women, clutching comic books, posters, and action figures that, once anointed with Lee's signature, would find their way into keepsake boxes hidden under beds or comics-shop display cases or, more likely, onto eBay. Since time was short, the autographs were limited to one item per person. Lee gamely inscribed everything put before him with a felt-tip pen, doling out a minute or so of merriment to each fan.

Thirty minutes later, he was gone.

A few weeks after the Shrine convention, Lee strode along the red carpet at the Spider-Man film premiere, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Hollywood actors Adam Sandler and Will Smith and music stars Steven Tyler and Macy Gray. The seventy-nine-year-old Marvel VIP dined with the glitterati under a web-like tent pitched in an upscale L.A. neighborhood with acrobats performing overhead and red cosmopolitans served out of ice-sculpted martini bars. Kirsten Dunst, the pretty young actress who plays Mary Jane Watson in the film, posed with him for a photograph that was later distributed by the Reuters news agency.

Spider-Man took in a record-breaking $114 million in its opening weekend and went on to become one of the top-grossing movies of all time. It even outpaced Episode II Attack of the Clones, the fifth installment of George Lucas's Star Wars series, once the Tiffany standard of popular imagination. During the summer of "Spider-Mania," Lee was commemorated in dozens of newspaper and magazine articles as the originator of the arachnid magic spilling into the nation's multiplexes and toy stores. The wave of mainstream appreciation for the grand old man of comics rolled through the culture like a gentle wave, evoking bouts of cozy nostalgia in the hearts of middle-aged men who had long ago stopped wishing for superpowers and funky space machines.

For Lee, who once dreamed of being an actor, the webslinger's big-screen success represented a long-delayed affirmation from a movie industry that has drawn heavily from the fount of Marvel Comics' creativity without ever granting its exuberant coauthor an all-access pass. After twenty years in Hollywood and dozens of scrapped or fouled-up movie projects, new opportunities materialized for Lee. Bruce Willis's production company signed a first-look deal with Lee's POW! Entertainment, and Lee announced a pact with former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson to create Stripperella, a TV cartoon series.

It was another good summer to be Stan Lee.

Once upon a time, a young comic-book writer named Stanley Lieber invented a pseudonym by splitting his first name. Dissatisfied and embarrassed by the kiddie material he felt forced to produce, the writer wanted to reserve his given name for the cover of the Great American Novel he hoped to write one day. Decades later, the nom de plume had become his legal name, the kiddie material his artistic legacy.

The story of Stan Lee is the story of a man who reinvented himself into what he'd been all along, and of the uniquely American art form that never failed to provide him a platform.

  • Behemothic Book!
  • Read an excerpt from Chapter 17 at TCJ.com
  • Ordering Information