Review - [The] Stan Lee [Documentary]

Part One: The Beginning 

(a balding) Lee, Kirby & Ditko circa 1961

Did you know that Stan Lee was bald? Oh you did? I regard him as one of my heroes, possibly the greatest, but I never knew about his lack of hair and if I did I put it out of my head for other more practical thoughts. So that was my only real revelation with this new documentary about the man behind Marvel and that wasn't spoken about, it was just obvious. It didn't need to be mentioned because in 1960, Stanley Lieber was extremely bald and in 1962, Stan Lee had a full head of hair and by 1967 he looked like a groovy man-hippy in his mid-40s. Perhaps, this was his mid-life crisis? If it was it lasted the rest of his life (but you can see in his 90s that it probably was just a hair piece plonked on his head).

In terms of biographies, Stan Lee did pretty much what it sets out to achieve. Stan's early life - as with most of the rest of the film - are in his own words and I'd say there was probably some white lies thrown in to possibly embellish his own importance. I'd say Stan was a proud man and I think he would have looked at the poverty he grew up in - his father was often out of work - and decided he didn't want people thinking he was some kind of bum or low-life from a nothing family.

So much hair!

It quickly moves forward to end of the 1930s when he started work at Timely - the consensus is he wandered into Timely as a 16-year-old and was editor by the time he was 17, because he was essentially the only person left. This is where he stayed, him and a team of artists, writers and auxiliaries knocking out westerns, romances, sci-fi, monsters and anything but superheroes. Atlas was very much in the shadow of DC - a company that was barely mentioned (if at all, apart from a section with the late Julie Schwartz in it).  

He must have done a reasonable job because he was never replaced and Timely, then Atlas and finally Marvel Comics bimbled along, in the shadow of DC, for years and kept Lee comfortable. There are some telling moments when he recalls essentially green lighting anything he wrote so that he could earn the money to keep him and Joan living in a style they liked. There is also this insistence that he wanted to be a writer, which I've always been puzzled about. If you want to be honest, there's nothing in Lee's words that are good, but everything about the message he conveys is. 

I've always been of the opinion that Lee lied about his lifelong desire to be a writer, I think that was a idea he developed that glamorised his youth better. I think Lee was probably of the opinion he'd work in the rag trade and when he got a job at a struggling pulp publisher it was only because he didn't want to repeat his father's mistakes. He had to start writing Captain America and other stories as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon left and there was no one else to turn to. I don't think there was any doubt that Stan was a powerhouse, a man with ideas who turned them into realities. Stan did a pretty good job of being Mr Marvel and that's where I think the problems started...

Part Two: The Middle 

The documentary takes on an element of lies when we reach the 1960s. It is well known that by 1960 Marvel - or Atlas as it was - was Lee, Kirby and Ditko, but there were a couple of other guys who literally were never mentioned in the doc and apart from Flo Steinberg (office bunny) and an almost derogatory reference to his own brother Larry Lieber, you wouldn't have thought anyone else worked there. 

However, it's when Stan starts saying in the narration 'I did this' and 'I did that'. 'I thought up the idea of Spider-Man.' Which, incidentally ended up being two separate versions of how he dreamed up Spidey. There's something about Lee's anecdotes that possibly makes it easier to wonder if he's really telling the truth, yet there were stories that you knew 100% were true because of the way he talked about them - most of which were not references to creations and creators. I felt you could tell what was true to his memory and what was possibly embellished (a word Stan loved). There was something in his voice.

There were also the mentions of co-creating characters - which he admitted to with the X-Men - or even Jack Kirby solely creating the Silver Surfer. The problem was when he was talking about the Fantastic Four, The Hulk and Spider-Man it sounded like he was hiding things; not telling the whole truth. There was also this odd avoidance of certain other characters who Lee (and others) created - Daredevil, Ant-Man, Sub-Mariner and Sgt or Nick Fury - maybe the documentary would have dragged on, made it more about the comics than the man 'creating' them?

There was too much distinct 'I did this' about it, but without wanting to sound like I'm belittling the claims of Kirby, Ditko or others, there was no real evidence [in the film or in life] that the artists were more responsible in the creation of certain characters. However, this is my opinion and I've deduced this from recordings and others eye witness testimonies that both Ditko and Kirby had gone on record claiming because they designed the look of a character and spent 10 times longer drawing it than Stan did writing it, the artist was either the proper 'owner' or joint 'owner' of the character. Both Kirby and Ditko saw it as 'time served' rather than creative integrity. Or at least that's the distinct message you're getting from Jack Kirby in a 1987 phone in where he and Stan Lee 'discussed' who did what.

I want to tell you a story and I want you to tell me who you think created the character:

Fil the Norg

In 1984, myself and a good friend created a comic strip character called Fil the Norg. Now, Fil was a cantankerous old git (based on me) and he was going to have a sidekick called Cloin, who looked a bit like my artist friend. Now, I came up with the idea of Fil but my friend designed his look. He designed Cloin singlehandedly while I came up with his name and his identity. We produced a dozen three-panel newspaper strips, all written and plotted by me and drawn by my friend.

I had an associate who was a senior editor at the Kettering Evening Telegraph and I showed her the strips, she took photocopies back to her bosses and got back to me and said the newspaper wanted to run strips from local creators, they were well up for publishing our strip. They also talked about £200 per strip and they'd want at least 26 weeks worth - up front to ensure they had plenty of lead-in time - and, most importantly, would allow us syndication rights if anyone else wanted it.

I took the proposal back to my friend and said we'd split the fees 50-50 and both of us would clear £500 a week for at least six months. We were set well. Except my friend wanted 90% of the fee, 80% at a push. He refused to accept that we were a creative team, we had created these characters together and just because he put more physical man hours in didn't mean he was entitled to more. It didn't end well and I had to turn down the gig and I fell out with my friend (and we've never really been friends since because I feel he sacrificed our chance of something big by being greedy) and was treated like some kind of despicable shit by our mutual friends, who blamed me for us not becoming famous. None of them understood the creative process and none of them wanted to - it was all about physical man hours, nothing else.

Interestingly, my friend went on to create a number of his own creations and no one was interested in them because they weren't funny or any good. He never accepted that we had a good deal at 50-50 and 20 years after this happened was still adamant that because he drew the characters, he owned them and all I did was come up with some ideas.

Who would you say is the creator of Fil the Norg? I'd always say, we created the character; it was a genuine co-creation.

I believe this is maybe what happened with all these Marvel characters created in the early 1960s. It may well have been Stan Lee rolling into the offices saying, 'What if we had this kid who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and can stick to walls?' or 'How about a good monster?' or 'Why don't we do another superhero team, this time with kids?' Maybe that was all it was and Jack and Steve went away and came back with character designs. If this is what happened in the early 60s then it's quite possible that the artists' ire was created not by the real truth but by the way Stan took responsibility for everything (or nearly everything)? Lee obviously had a massive ego and was full of self confidence (given the wigs he wore); he became the face of Marvel, therefore in corporate speak he was the man who created Marvel.

Of course the problem now is this feud between those who feel Stan Lee is god and those who feel he's a huckster charlatan who stole the ideas from his greatest artists. I've long sat on the fence about this because I believe - as the MCU does - that someone might have come up with the original idea, but every writer, artist, inker and even editor had a part to play in developing those characters to where they ended up. Co-creators the lot of them.

If I wanted to throw an existential spanner in the works, take Adam Warlock. Created by Jack Kirby, originally scripted by Stan Lee, he wasn't know as Warlock for a few years yet. However, when Jim Starlin took control of the character it changed so drastically that 'Him' created by [Lee and] Kirby in 1966 and Adam Warlock are so far removed from each other you could easily think they were different characters. Jim Starlin is, in this instance, the true creator of the Adam Warlock that became iconic in the late 1970s; he didn't think the character up but he made it a success. Out to left field - Alan Moore's Swamp Thing?

The children and grandchildren of the greatest comics artists of an era will argue until the cow's come home over who did what but they did it together; they were a team of people having some fun, there wasn't ever an issue of ownership because everyone worked for the company and the company owned everything. If you're one of the people who wants to continue this pointless argument, carry on, I'm happy believing that they were all responsible and Stan had the loudest voice.

Part Three: The End

After Marvel parted company with Stan in the late 20th century, it seemed like the grand old man of comics would fade into obscurity, however with the surge in popularity in the MCU and the taste for Marvel nostalgia at its peak, Stan was invited back as Chairman emeritus and started his new career as a cameo actor in as many of the MCU films as possible. 

The documentary didn't examine the allegations against Lee's carer and PA, nor did it spend too much time on the lows in his life - the death of his second daughter was almost casually mentioned. It was a celebration of 100 years of Stan 'the Man' Lee the guy called Stanley Lieber, as he was before Marvel.

The film wasn't or at least didn't appear to be a Marvel or Disney production, which suggested to me that they could have delved into some of the controversy a little more, but, just to emphasise this, only a handful of very loud unwittingly angry comics buffs want to keep the creator/owner debate going; it's like they want a message from the grave from Stan saying 'they did it really'. This was just a celebration and it was interesting that Stan narrated it himself. 

There are some anachronistic things about the visuals, which was off-putting to someone who knew the timeline before I sat down to watch and when it was made there were still a few of the 1960s bullpen still alive so it would have been nice if they had said a few things, if able or willing.

This wasn't a hagiography, but it did veer towards it at times. The film also wasn't as universally accessible as I thought it should be; it felt like a film made by a fan - but I suppose anyone who grew up with Marvel is going to be a fan of Stan Lee. Whether you think he was an 20th century icon or a thieving manipulative sociopath, there's no escaping the fact that as a simple comic book publisher, he certainly made his mark.