two Stan Lee biographies

Stan Lee & George Mair
Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (2002)
While my own personal jury remains out regarding how much credit Lee deserves for strips co-created with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others - because we'll probably never know for sure - the other extreme by which Stan was just some lucky schmo who happened to be in the right place at the right time seems equally unfair. Excelsior! is his side of the story, with linking paragraphs wedged in by George Mair so as to keep it all from degrading into a sort of Borscht Belt James Joyce; and while his side of the story is mostly well known, it's nevertheless worth preserving because it's enlightening and often genuinely funny and Lee comes across as a nice guy with the best of intentions. The extent to which this is the facade of some scheming snake oil retailing mastermind could be debated, but I suspect that if it were a facade, he would have done a better job of it.

 

Abraham Riesman True Believer (2021)
On the other hand, there's True Believer which has the advantage of not actually being written by Stan himself and accordingly paints a quite different picture. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be anything you might term a hatchet job. Credit is given where due, as is the benefit of the doubt, but the bottom line is that this is a scrupulously thorough warts and all biography of a life which is revealed as having been, so it could be argued, mainly warts; which isn't to suggest that Stan was necessarily a bad guy or that he fucked kids or any of that sort of thing, but there's a point at which self affirmation crosses over into something more like mania. I would guess Stan understood this, hence the winning combination of boasting tempered with self-deprecating cornball humour of the stripe which makes Excelsior! so readable.

The creative ratio of Lee to Kirby or Ditko to be found in all of those characters for which he is famed remains debatable, although the success of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the rest is surely at least in part down to Lee's tireless promotional bounce and general inability to shut the fuck up, even for just a second. So he's to be credited for something, and True Believer does as good a job as anything I've read of trying to pinpoint what that might have been. Oddly enough, I feel as though I've known at least a few Stans in my time, albeit none with quite the same level of charm or ability to generate money from thin air, but I recognise the type and this passage, referring to POW - one of our boy's later, admittedly shabbier enterprises - struck an uncomfortably familiar chord.

If Stan had doubts about his own abilities, he certainly didn't let them show. In fact, POW was presenting an image of the octogenarian Stan as a creative powerhouse, capable of churning out a wealth of ideas that could be converted into lucrative entertainment properties. However, POW's primary product was announcements.

Of that which emerged from the mind of Stan Lee in the latter years, most seems to have been on the level of Alan Partridge's Monkey Tennis, with very little transcending the press releases about how great it was definitely going to be. One of the few exceptions was an animated series called Stripperella about a crime-fighting pole dancer with massive tits which, as evidence of Stan's wild imagination as something existing autonomous of Kirby, Ditko or whoever else was sat at the drawing board that afternoon, is pretty fucking thin; but you can't keep a good man down, as they say, and that was Lee's superpower, roughly speaking, coupled with an inability to monitor his own strengths and weaknesses. Comic book history has remembered the archetypal Stan Lee piece as Captain America leaping out of the page with a massive grin and an improbably distended sense of perspective, yet it should probably be one of the captioned photographs from You Don't Say. This one idea - if you can truly call it an idea - to which Stan returned time and again was that of stock photos to which he added side-splitting captions. He published a magazine along these lines in 1963, and there were a couple of others issued to a generally mixed reception a bit later, and yet it was something he tried to get happening over and over like Gretchen's use of the term fetch in Mean Girls, this sort of thing:

 

If you now need to go and change your pants, damage control the coffee fountain, maybe take a shower or whatever, I can wait.

Bizarrely, Stan doesn't seem to have been able to tell the difference between the Fantastic Four battling an underground civilisation led by an evil genius, and a photograph of Jimmy Carter amended with a comic observation about golf, which is ultimately tragic. As, I guess, was his life in certain respects, most of it being spent looking for something he probably never found, believing manic optimism alone would eventually bring it within reach, and failing to recognise anything with which he'd been involved as having been of value - contrary to whatever ludicrous bluster he may have committed at the time. He clearly wasn't a saint by any description, nor even anyone particularly remarkable, but he probably deserved better than he got; and it's hard to imagine there will ever be another account balancing sympathy with unflinching honesty as this one does.