Obviously, for a blog with such a Marvel slant (so far), I have to say a few words about Stan Lee.It's not so easy, because Lee's a complicated figure in the whole history of the four-color world. How does one lionize a villain? Or criticize a hero? Because Lee was both, depending on who you ask. Or what your perspective is.
I've stolen a good chunk of this entry form obituaries by Douglas Wolk in Vanity Fair, and Mark Peters in Slate, in part because they said very well what I want to say, in part cause I'm lazy and wanted to get this entry up in a timely manner. I've done this without permission, just so's ya know.
As a kid in the 70's, like most kids in the 70's, I just figured Stan was The Man - the creative genius behind the whole madcap Marvel Universe. I thought so, we thought so, because, basically, Marvel seemed to be telling us so. Sort of. Quoting from Douglas Wolk:
Stan Lee’s name appears somewhere in every superhero book Marvel Comics has published in the past 50-plus years, and in the never-ending parade of movies and TV shows that has come from them. In the 60s, it was lettered in bold type in every story’s credits, almost always giving Lee top billing—no matter whether he had written it, scripted it (there’s a difference), or edited it. Later, “Stan Lee Presents” appeared on the title page of every issue, whether it had passed in front of his eyes at any point or (more likely) not. Later still, it appeared in tiny type in each issue’s indicia; in his final years, he was listed as “Chairman Emeritus.”
Lee’s public persona was perpetually enthusiastic about Marvel’s readers, as well. To read Marvel’s comics, he insisted, was to be part of a cultural moment: he addressed readers as “effendi,“ “frantic ones,” “true believers.” The grandiosity of Lee’s tone was a gag, and one his audience was in on. He could shift from pomp to self-mockery in a heartbeat, as on the cover of 1964’s X-Men #8: “Never have the X-Men fought a foe as unstoppable as Unus! Never have the X-Men come so close to being split up! (And never have you read such a boastful blurb!)” When readers started pointing out errors in Marvel’s stories, he invented something better than a prize: the “no-prize,” awarded to fans who could explain why an apparent mistake wasn’t really a mistake. (It was an ornate envelope with nothing inside it.)
The auspicious branding made Lee his own pop-culture caricature long before he began his string of Marvel movie cameos. In the public eye, Lee, who died Monday at age 95, was generally perceived as the creator of Marvel’s best-known characters, the man who wrote the first decade’s worth of their adventures—injecting wild inventiveness and human depth into the stodgy old superhero genre.
Or, as Mark Peters puts it:
To this day, Stan is Marvel to many people, and his charm and humor are among the reasons why Marvel is beloved. Without Stan’s style, would Marvel have proven such a durable brand? We’ll never know, but I doubt it. There have been many creators with prodigious imaginations in the history of comics, but there’s never been a salesman like Stan Lee.
True indeed. But as Volk continues:
That’s not wrong in every way, but it’s definitely not correct. Lee’s work in his golden decade of 1961-1971 really was brilliant and groundbreaking—just not quite in the ways most people think.
Or, as Mark Peter put it in Slate:
Lee reflects misinformation about what the legend did and didn’t do back in the Marvel heyday of the 1960s. In death as in life, Lee gets too much credit for creating and not enough credit for all the other important jobs he did on behalf of Marvel and geek culture in general.
In truth, as true comix/Marvel aficionados know, and the general publik doth not, it wasn't Stan Lee who did the creative heavy lifting. Volk again:
Most of Marvel’s best-known characters from that decade were created by those artists, with Lee or on their own. (Lee noted, for instance, that Doctor Strange was Ditko’s invention.) To imagine that what we read in Fantastic Four or Iron Man was Lee’s brainchild, illustrated to order by the artists, is flat-out wrong
Yet, Stan was not a villain, and he did contribute to this marvelous mess that is the Marvel milieu, and to comic books in general. Volk again:
...it’s also misleading to think of it as some other creator’s lone genius poured onto the page, then defaced by Lee’s corny gags.
In truth, and Lee made no particular attempt to hide this much, the comics that bore his name were increasingly, after the first couple years probably almost entirely (and certainly by the late 60's entirely) plotted and paced by the artistes, particularly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (who did manage to get a "plotted by" credit). By perhaps `66 on, it's likely Lee was doing little more than making suggestions for story ideas.
Volk again:
He didn’t pretend otherwise, either. A 1966 “Bullpen Bulletins” page explains: “Many of our merry Marvel artists are also talented story men in their own right! For example, all Stan has to do with the pros like JACK ‘KING’ KIRBY, dazzling DON HECK, and darlin’ DICK AYERS is give them the germ of an idea, and they make up all the details as they go along, drawing and plotting out the story. Then, our leader simply takes the finished drawings and adds all the dialogue and captions!”
The proof is in the pudding. Look at any issue of the FF after Kirby left, or any issue of Spidey after Ditko left. Lee simply did not have the imagination to create the wild, exciting sci-fi ideas that fueled Kirby's best stories in the FF, Thor, and Capt. America, nor the colorful villains that Ditko minted for Spidey. Conversely, Kirby and Ditko carried their imaginations and themes forward into their subsequent work.
No, Stan's greatest creation was Stan Lee:
But of all the characters with whom Lee is associated, his greatest—and the only one he created entirely on his own—was “Stan Lee”: an egomaniac who thought it was funny to pretend he was an egomaniac, a carnival barker who actually does have something great behind the curtain. Artist John Romita, who worked with Lee on Daredevil and Spider-Man, put it nicely in a 1998 interview: “He’s a con man, but he did deliver.”
Too, let us add something about Lee's wordsmithing. Volk:
Word balloons and expository narration clog every page of his comics; everyone seems to be hammily speechifying all the time. The voice of Lee’s omniscient captions is weirdly overfamiliar, like a seatmate on a train who’s about to pitch you a timeshare.
... the more time I’ve spent looking at Lee’s language, the more I’ve come to admire and linger over it. It’s overwrought, over the top, in love with its own cleverness—and why shouldn’t it be? Anyone could have called the force that the Silver Surfer commands “cosmic power.” It took Lee, with his ear for grandiose, poetic speech, to invert that to “the Power Cosmic.” (Unless Kirby came up with that bit—though it sounds a lot more like Lee’s diction.)
In the end...Peters again:
In death as in life, Lee gets too much credit for creating and not enough credit for everything else he did.
But … just because the artists were doing most of the work doesn’t mean they were doing all the work. As Hellboy creator Mike Mignola put it on Twitter: “You can debate forever who really created what—Stan or Jack or Steve—but the truth is it was some magic combination of those guys.” Longtime comics writer J.M. DeMatteis voiced a similar sentiment: “And while we’re raising a glass to Stan, let’s raise a glass to the genius of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Together those three men reshaped our popular culture and fired our collective imagination. ’Nuff Said!”
The complexities of the Kirby-Lee collaboration in particular have been pored over for decades. The latest word will come in Stuf’ Said, a special book-sized edition of Jack Kirby Collector. Not even the most ardent Kirbyite or Ditkohead argues that Lee had no part in the genesis and development of Drs. Doom and Strange and the rest.
The truth about Stan Lee—a frustrated, middle-aged, would-be novelist who, just when he was ready to quit the business, helped reshape superheroes and pop culture—really is amazing and fantastic. Lee was equally skilled at making the sausage of monthly comics and selling that sausage as sensational (which it often was). His cameos are such a treasure even DC got in on the fun. He truly was a legend and real-life superhero—and a co-creator. That should be enough.
But I'll give the last word to Mark Evanier, comics writer, expert, historian, and as much as Kirby partisan as you could hope to find:
His achievements in the world of comic books were awesome. I happen to think they're not exactly what a lot of people think but I don't doubt their size and endurance. I knew him since 1970, worked for him a few times, talked with him at length and fielded an awful lot of phone calls from him asking me questions about comic books he worked on. He really did have a bad memory, if not when he first started telling people he had a bad memory, then certainly later on as he turned more and more into the Stan Lee character he'd created for himself.
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