{"id":5610,"date":"2019-04-19T10:42:28","date_gmt":"2019-04-19T09:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennywilson.org\/?p=4955"},"modified":"2019-04-19T10:42:28","modified_gmt":"2019-04-19T09:42:28","slug":"its-stan-lees-universe-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/2019\/04\/19\/its-stan-lees-universe-2\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Stan Lee\u2019s Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"18-comic-2.nocrop.w1024.h2147483647\"<\/p>\n

Stan Lee died at the age of 95 on November, 12, 2018<\/em><\/a>. This piece was initially published in early 2016.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

People are almost always surprised when I tell them Stan Lee is 93. He doesn\u2019t scan as a young<\/em> man, exactly, but frozen in time a couple of decades younger than he is, embodying still the larger-than-life image he crafted for himself in the 1970s \u2014 silver hair, tinted shades, caterpillar mustache, jubilant grin, bouncing gait, antiquated Noo Yawk brogue. We envision him spreading his arms wide while describing the magic of superhero fiction, or giving a thumbs up while yelling his trademark non sequitur, Excelsior!<\/em> He\u2019s pop culture\u2019s perpetually energetic 70-something grandpa, popping in for goofy cameos in movies about the Marvel Comics characters he co-created (well, he\u2019s often just said \u201ccreated,\u201d but we\u2019ll get to that in a minute) in the 1960s. But even then, he was old enough to be his fans\u2019 father \u2014 not a teenage boy-genius reimagining the comics world to suit the tastes of his peers but already a middle-aged man, and one who still looked down a bit on the form he was reinventing.<\/p>\n

A comic-book Methuselah, Lee is also, to a great degree, the single most significant author of the pop-culture universe in which we all now live. This is a guy who, in a manic burst of imagination a half-century ago, helped bring into being The Amazing Spider-Man<\/em><\/a>, The Avengers, <\/em>The X-Men<\/em><\/a>, The Incredible Hulk<\/em>, and the dozens of other Marvel titles he so famously and consequentially penned at Marvel Comics in his axial epoch of 1961 to 1972. That world-shaking run revolutionized entertainment and the then-dying superhero-comics industry by introducing flawed, multidimensional, and relatably human <\/em>heroes <\/strong>\u2014 many of whom have enjoyed cultural staying power beyond anything in contemporary fiction, to rival the most enduring icons of the movies (an industry they\u2019ve since proceeded to almost entirely remake in their own image). And in revitalizing the comics business, Lee also reinvented its language: His rhythmic, vernacular approach to dialogue transformed superhero storytelling from a litany of bland declarations to a sensational symphony of jittery word-jazz \u2014 a language that spoke directly and fluidly to comics readers, enfolding them in a common ecstatic idiom that became the bedrock of what we think of now as \u201cfan culture.\u201d Perhaps most important for today\u2019s Hollywood, he crafted the concept of an intricate, interlinked \u201cshared universe,\u201d in which characters from individually important franchises interact with and affect one another to form an immersive fictional tapestry \u2014 a blueprint from which Marvel built its cinematic empire, driving nearly every other studio to feverishly do the same. And which enabled comics to ascend from something like cultural bankruptcy to the coarse-sacred status they enjoy now, as American kitsch myth.<\/p>\n

All of which should mean there\u2019s never been a better time to be Stan Lee. But watching him over the last year \u2014 seeing the way he has to hustle for paid autographs at a convention, watching him announce lackluster new projects, hearing friends and collaborators grudgingly admit his personal failings \u2014 it\u2019s hard to avoid the impression that, in what should be his golden period, Lee is actually playing the role of a tragic figure, even a pathetic one. On the one hand, the characters associated with Lee have never been more famous. But as they\u2019ve risen to global prominence, a growing scholarly consensus has concluded that Lee didn\u2019t do everything he said he did. Lee\u2019s biggest creditis the perception that he was the creator of the insanely lucrative Marvel characters that populate your local cineplex every few months, but Lee\u2019s role in their creation is, in reality, profoundly ambiguous. Lee and Marvel demonstrably \u2014 and near-unforgivably \u2014 diminished the vital contributions of the collaborators who worked with him during Marvel\u2019s creative apogee. That is part of what made Lee a hero in the first place, but he\u2019s lived long enough to see that self-mythologizing turn against him. Over the last few decades, the man who saved comics has become \u2014 to some comics lovers, at least \u2014 a villain.<\/p>\n

And, to certain comics fans, something of a joke. Lee may have personally made possible an expansive comics culture populated by idiosyncratic voices telling morally complex stories about relatable characters, layered over with much more darkness than had ever come before (achievements for which he still enjoys occasional bouts of adoration from the mainstream press and casual fans). But hard-core comics geeks greet news of his new projects with a certain degree of eye-rolling. Lee has always had a penchant for overstatement, but his pronouncements have grown increasingly hollow in the past 15 years. When he says he\u2019s doing story concepts for a new superhero movie called Arch Alien<\/a><\/em> and says it \u201cis gonna be the biggest hit of the next year,\u201d or when he says a comic-book collaboration with Japanese pop artist Yoshiki \u201cis gonna be like nothing you\u2019ve ever seen before,\u201d it\u2019s hard not to cringe a little bit. Where is the buzz about these projects? Is anyone really paying attention? A creative radical who made his most significant contributions while still carrying a healthy bit of disdain for a corny medium, he finds himself now, on the other end of the revolution he engineered, casually disrespected by the comics vanguard for being something like, well, corny.<\/p>\n

Still, the greatest salesman the American comics industry ever had, he continues hawking. Lee and the company he helms, POW! Entertainment<\/a> (he left active duty at Marvel in the late 1990s, though he still collects a reported million-dollar annual paycheck from the superhero giant), announce a dizzying number of new projects every year. The last six months alone have seen Lee doing promotional pushes for his British superhero TV series Lucky Man,<\/em> Arch Alien<\/em>, the Yoshiki project, a mobile game called Stan Lee\u2019s Hero Command <\/em>(which actually came out almost a year ago), a big-screen sci-fi take on Shakespeare called Romeo and Juliet: The War<\/em><\/a>, a children\u2019s book targeted at the Chinese market called Dragons vs. Pandas<\/em><\/a>, a co-written young-adult novel series called The Zodiac Legacy<\/em><\/a>, and a co-written memoir (with comics scribe Peter David)* called Amazing Fantastic Incredible<\/em><\/a>. ButGoogle searches for \u201cstan lee cameo\u201d (he still does plenty) dwarf the searches<\/a> for \u201cstan lee arch alien\u201d or \u201cstan lee yoshiki,\u201d and you\u2019ll find hardly any mentions of those projects in geek-news sites.<\/p>\n

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Excerpt from \u2018The Avengers\u2019 No. 5. All of these big-name heroes existed in a shared universe, one of Lee\u2019s many innovations. The note in the top left corner accentuates the fact that you had to read all Marvel comics to truly understand any one of them.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

To be fair, the memoir and Zodiac<\/em> have been released, and have produced decent sales so far. But in Lee\u2019s current era of output, they\u2019re the exception. As any longtime Lee-watcher can tell you, it\u2019s anyone\u2019s guess as to how many of his future projects will actually pan out. Ever since Lee took his talents away from Marvel, he\u2019s left behind a trail of unfinished and half-finished work \u2014 which has made readers wonder just how much of those talents lie in narrative craft, and how much in showmanship. In 2005, Lee enthusiastically announced he\u2019d partnered with Ringo Starr to make a cartoon where the drummer became a superhero. It never materialized. He was going to make a movie with Disney called Nick Ratchet<\/em>, <\/em>and it got as far as hiring writers in 2009<\/a>, then vanished. A comics series called Stan Lee\u2019s Mighty 7<\/em><\/a> <\/em>released three issues in 2012 before abruptly stopping on a cliff-hanger (\u201cThe wonderment begins next time, pilgrims!\u201d Lee\u2019s narration read. \u201cMiss it at your own risk! Excelsior!\u201d) and never resuming. The list of mysteriously fizzled efforts goes on and on<\/a>. And within geekdom, people tend not to talk about the stuff that does<\/em> come out. Longtime friends and admirers within the comics industry will tell you, with a tone of embarrassment, that they don\u2019t read or watch the stuff Lee produces these days. \u201c<\/strong>The style of comics today is so different from the optimistic style that Stan has,\u201d says veteran comics writer and Lee collaborator Marv Wolfman, trying to explain the decline in relevance. \u201cStan is very, very optimistic, and we\u2019re sadly living in a very pessimistic world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The costs of that change are not merely to Lee\u2019s reputation. The most troubling aspect of Lee\u2019s current situation is one entirely absent from the brief, glowing, and nostalgia-tinged pieces of press coverage he gets these days: His company is dying. Its most recent filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission<\/a> lamented two years of net losses, could only predict the company would survive through January 2016, and declared, \u201cThese conditions raise substantial doubt about the Company\u2019s ability to continue as a going concern.\u201d <\/em>POW!\u2019s stock currently trades at one cent a share.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a mild October day in Southern California, but the regurgitated air inside the Los Angeles Convention Center is freezing. Lee \u2014 wearing a white shirt, beige vest, tinted shades, and his trademark grin \u2014 seems unfazed by the chill. He nimbly hops into a chair in a makeshift press area set up just a few feet away from the main stage of his annual pop-culture convention, Stan Lee\u2019s Comikaze. At his side is one of his business partners, a media entrepreneur named Terry Dougas. They\u2019re here to announce Dragons vs. Pandas<\/em>. Dougas, wisely, plays the straight man while Stan does one of the things he does best: charm journalists.<\/p>\n

\u201cStan has always been focused, of course, on helping with literacy, helping children and families,\u201d Dougas says.<\/p>\n

\u201cSure!\u201d Lee shouts in a gravelly voice. \u201cThe more kids can read, the more they\u2019ll buy my books!\u201d<\/p>\n

Dougas starts describing Dragons vs. Pandas<\/em>\u2019 complex international rollout plan, featuring a digital release, a printed book, animation, a translation into Mandarin, and more. Lee, perhaps sensing how confusing this all sounds, butts in again.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re gonna do more to create peace in the world between nations than anybody else!\u201d the nonagenarian crows, pointing at a blowup of the book\u2019s cover. \u201cYou may not suspect this, but this little panda is a killer!<\/em> And this dragon is so scared<\/em>. But you gotta read the story to get it all!\u201d<\/p>\n

The biggest laughs come a few minutes later, during the question-and-answer period. I ask him what his and Dougas\u2019s collaboration process is like. \u201cWe hate each other!\u201d Lee says. \u201cHe does all the talking, the girls love him because he\u2019s good-looking, and he just keeps me around \u2014 why do <\/em>you keep me around? I haven\u2019t figured that out yet. No, he\u2019s great to work with. He does all the work, I take the credit. You couldn\u2019t have a better arrangement.\u201d<\/p>\n

That last bit is more than a little remarkable to hear. On the one hand, he\u2019s just doing the typical Stan routine, one he\u2019s been doing for the better part of seven decades: putting an audience at ease via disorienting shifts between self-promotion and self-debasement. But saying he just slaps his name on other people\u2019s work \u2014 well, that\u2019s a topic he usually keeps off the table, even for jokes. After all, it\u2019s unwise to draw attention to the things for which you\u2019re most hated, and since at least the late 1960s, Lee has been accused of stealing credit from two of comics\u2019 most legendary creators, two men who had tremendous creative synergy with Lee before they concluded that he was an unforgivable bastard. Those two men were writer-artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re a comics nerd, there comes a time in your life when someone more knowledgeable than you \u2014 an older kid at school or summer camp, the checkout guy at your local comics shop, a blogger with a vendetta \u2014 lets you in on a secret. You know Stan Lee, right? You love him, right? Well, let me fill you in on some real shit<\/em>. You learn about how he screwed Kirby and Ditko, about how those two were the real<\/em> creative forces behind Marvel. You get told Lee is nothing more than a flashy, empty suit. If you want proof, you dig in to chronicles of his life like Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon\u2019s Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book<\/a><\/em>, or Sean Howe\u2019s masterful Marvel Comics: The Untold Story<\/a><\/em>, and you see ample evidence for the case against Lee. You force yourself to question your assumptions. You have to decide what your personal take on this iconic figure is, and how you can weigh his accomplishments against his failings. Your conception of him is never the same again.<\/p>\n

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Excerpt from \u2018The Fantastic Four\u2019 No. 49. Our heroes face an apocalyptic threat. Lee and Kirby served up a thrilling brew of high-concept sci-fi, fallible protagonists, and scintillating copywriting.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThe story of Stan, Jack, and Steve is the stuff legends are made of,\u201d one of Stan\u2019s oldest friends and collaborators, comics writer-editor Roy Thomas, tells me over the phone. \u201cIt\u2019s on them, more than any other three people, that the whole Marvel thing is built.\u201d Thomas had an experience any comics fan or historian would kill for: He walked the offices of Marvel in the mid-\u201960s, when Lee and Ditko were working together on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange stories and Lee and Kirby were working together on nearly everything else, including The Avengers, The X-Men, <\/em>and The Fantastic Four<\/em>. Here\u2019s the problem: It\u2019s extremely unclear what \u201cworking together\u201d meant.<\/p>\n

According to Lee, it meant he came up with the concepts for all the characters, mapped out plots, gave the plots to his artists so they could draw them, and then would take the finished artwork and write his signature snappy verbiage for the characters\u2019 dialogue bubbles. The artists, in Lee\u2019s retelling, were fantastic and visionary, but secondary to his own vision. According to Kirby and Ditko, that\u2019s hogwash. Ditko has retreated into a hermetic existence in midtown Manhattan, where he types up self-promoting mail-order pamphlets claiming Lee had only the most threadbare initial ideas for Spider-Man, and that Ditko is the one who fleshed the iconic character out into what he is today, then came up with most of the plot beats in any given story. Kirby, from the time he left Marvel in 1970 until his death in 1994, swore up and down that Lee was a fraud on an even larger scale: Kirby said he himself was the one who had all the ideas for the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the rest, and that Lee was outright lying about having anything to do with them. What\u2019s more, he said Lee was little more than a copy boy, filling in dialogue bubbles after Kirby had done the lion\u2019s share of the conceptual and writing work for any given issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cStan Lee and I never collaborated on anything,\u201d Kirby told an interviewer in 1989. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things \u2014 or old things, for that matter. Stan Lee wasn\u2019t a guy that read or that told stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStan\u2019s gotten far too much credit,\u201d says veteran comics writer Gerry Conway, who\u2019s known Lee since 1970. \u201cPeople have said Stan was out for No. 1, and to a very large degree, that\u2019s true. He\u2019s a good guy. He\u2019s just not a great<\/em> guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, from day one, Jack was doing part of Stan\u2019s job, and Stan was not doing part of Jack\u2019s job,\u201d says comics historian Mark Evanier, who worked as Kirby\u2019s assistant and has worked on and off with Lee since the 1970s. \u201cWhen you talk to Stan Lee, when he turns the Stan Lee act off, he\u2019s a very decent human being who is chronically obsessed with himself. He\u2019s very insecure. Those of us who have trouble being angry for some of the things that happened, it\u2019s because we saw the real human being there at times.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of those things where you sit down and you say, \u2018<\/em>You gotta be forgiving of your parents,\u2019\u201d says artist Colleen Doran, who drew Lee\u2019s new memoir. \u201cI don\u2019t know of anyone who knows Stan and doesn\u2019t love him, even if they hate things he\u2019s done.\u201d<\/p>\n

To understand the nature of Lee\u2019s bitter blood feuds, you have to take a step back and understand who Lee was before <\/em>the Marvel phenomenon: a dispirited, middle-aged company stooge working in a dying industry, with no reason to believe anything could change. To understand Stan Lee, you must understand that his is one of the more remarkable second<\/em> acts in American culture.<\/p>\n

He was born Stanley Martin Lieber in Manhattan\u2019s Upper West Side on December 28, 1922, the first child of middle-class Jewish parents. Stanley\u2019s father, Jack, had been a dressmaker but suffered from chronic unemployment during the Depression. \u201cSeeing the demoralizing effect that his unemployment had on his spirit, making him feel that he just wasn\u2019t needed, gave me a feeling I\u2019ve never been able to shake,\u201d Lee wrote in his first memoir, Excelsior!<\/a><\/em>, published in 2002. \u201cIt\u2019s a feeling that the most important thing for a man is to have work to do, to be busy, to be needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Poverty drove the family to cheaper rents in the Bronx, where the bookish Stanley attended DeWitt Clinton High School and adopted the nickname Stan Lee. He took to writing around then and snagged a few creative gigs: He wrote advance obituaries for a news service, did publicity material for a hospital, and briefly performed with the New Deal\u2019s WPA Federal Theatre Project. His family couldn\u2019t afford college, but as luck would have it, his cousin was married to a publisher named Martin Goodman, who had leaped into the nascent-but-booming world of comic books, a medium only invented in 1933. Lee got a gig as an editorial gofer at Goodman\u2019s Timely Publications in 1940 and soon started writing scripts for its burgeoning lineup of titles. He usually signed them as \u201cStan Lee\u201d because \u2014 so goes his oft-told anecdote \u2014 he wanted to save his real name for when he would someday write the great American novel. He\u2019s earned a paycheck from the company, in its constantly shifting forms and names, ever since.<\/p>\n

Upon entering the building, Lee met the most significant man in his life, someone whose partnership and eventual spite will haunt him forever: Jack Kirby, the pen name of a rough-and-tumble Jewish boy from the Lower East Side, Jacob Kurtzberg. He was a writer-artist five years Lee\u2019s senior and already a leading light in the budding comics industry, lauded for co-creating the smash-hit superhero Captain America alongside Timely editor-in-chief Joe Simon just a few weeks prior. From the very beginning, Lee and Kirby were a study in stark contrasts. The younger man was cheerful and animated, prone to leaping around the offices while playing an ocarina; the older pro was quiet and perpetually hunched over his drawing board. Lee was healthy and handsome; Kirby was husky and shrouded in cigar smoke. And while Lee was immediately eager to please the powers that be, Kirby and Simon ran afoul of Goodman and angrily left the company in 1941. Lee, not even 19 years old, was abruptly named editor-in-chief at one of the hottest publishers in comics.<\/p>\n

He would hold that position for two decades<\/em> \u2014 a full professional career, really \u2014 before Timely transformed into Marvel (two decades <\/strong>characterized by diminishing returns for the business as a whole). Lee had a brief Army stint from 1942 to 1945, serving Stateside as a copywriter (both of his memoirs proudly recall the crafting of a poster reading, \u201cVD? NOT ME!\u201d), and though he returned to his job at Timely afterward, he was never truly satisfied there. With good reason. <\/strong>Goodman was a shameless trend-chaser: When superhero series like National Comics\u2019 Superman<\/em> and Batman<\/em> fell out of fashion and Gleason Publications saw success with a cops-and-robbers series called Crime Does Not Pay<\/a><\/em>, Goodman\u2019s company cranked out laughably obvious knockoff versions named Crime Must Lose!,<\/em> Crime Can\u2019t Win, <\/em>and Lawbreakers Always Lose<\/em>. Same went for Westerns and horror when the market shifted toward those genres. Lee dutifully supervised and wrote scripts for these also-rans, drifting through corporate stability and silently seething about the material. \u201cWe\u2019re not talking War and Peace<\/em> here,\u201d he wrote in his first memoir. \u201cIn fact, I was probably the ultimate, quintessential hack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, in the mid-1950s, the industry collapsed under the weight of a moral panic about the medium\u2019s supposed promotion of juvenile delinquency (which prompted infamous,<\/strong>vicious congressional hearings). Goodman was a poor businessman and a worse boss, hemorrhaging cash and forcing the genial Lee to tell staffers they were fired. To make matters worse, death stalked Lee: He and his wife Joan\u2019s second child died three days after birth, then his closest friend at the company, artist Joe Maneely, died after falling in front of a commuter train. As the staff dwindled, Lee was forced to stand alone as the sole writer and editor of virtually everything his boss published. \u201cI was like a human pilot light,\u201d he wrote in 2002, \u201cleft burning in the hope that we would reactivate our production at a future date.\u201d Everything was in free-fall; everything was up for grabs. Lee, at age 38, had little to lose.<\/p>\n

There are two accounts of what happened next, and they\u2019re impossible to reconcile. According to Jack Kirby \u2014 who died in 1994 \u2014 the revolution began with uncontrollable weeping. He had returned to Martin Goodman\u2019s company on a freelance basis in 1958, and he recalled a fateful day when the place hit rock bottom. \u201cI came in and they were moving out the furniture, they were taking desks out,\u201d he said in an infamous 1989 interview with The Comics Journal<\/em>.<\/a> \u201cStan Lee is sitting on a chair crying. He didn\u2019t know what to do, he\u2019s sitting in a chair crying \u2014 he was just still out of his adolescence. I told him to stop crying. I says, \u2018Go in to Martin and tell him to stop moving the furniture out, and I\u2019ll see that the books make money.\u2019\u201d In his telling, he then single-handedly conceived the characters and plot of The Fantastic Four<\/em>, the quirky, iconoclastic, epoch-defining superhero series that kicked off the resurrection of the company and the industry.<\/p>\n

Lee, as you would imagine, absolutely refutes that story and has his own oft-told version of the path to The Fantastic Four<\/em>. Here\u2019s how he put it in his 1974 book Origins of Marvel Comics<\/em>: \u201cMartin mentioned that he had noticed one of the titles published by National Comics seemed to be selling better than most. It was a book called The Justice League of America<\/em> and was composed of a team of superheroes,\u201d Lee wrote. \u201cWell, we didn\u2019t need a house to fall on us. \u2018If The Justice League<\/em> is selling,\u2019 spake he, \u2018why don\u2019t we put out a comic book that features a team of superheroes?\u2019\u201d Lee didn\u2019t want to keep churning out trend-following swill, so he said he dreamed up a superteam \u201csuch as comicdom had never known,\u201d with characters who were \u201cfallible and feisty, and \u2014 most important of all \u2014 inside their colorful, costumed booties they\u2019d still have feet of clay.\u201d He then, so the story goes, conceived the idea for The Fantastic Four<\/em> by himself, typed out a pitch, and selected Kirby to draw it. Kirby, Lee said, had nothing to do with the initial idea.<\/p>\n

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An excerpt from \u2018The Fantastic Four\u2019 No. 1. This kind of infighting was very unusual for a superhero narrative, and just one of the things that made this issue revolutionary.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

This is a pattern you run into for nearly every one of the characters that followed: There\u2019s Lee\u2019s charming, witty account of events; there\u2019s Kirby\u2019s dour, workmanlike one; and never the twain shall meet. The men kept few written records from the time, and the debate over how much credit Lee deserves is the single most controversial matter in the history of comics. These matters aren\u2019t just fanboy quibbles either: In 2009, when Marvel began to rake in cash from its film studio, the Kirby family legally declared Jack was co-creator of all those extremely lucrative characters \u2014 and that, because work-for-hire standards were so vague in the early \u201960s, they were entitled to a share of the copyright on all those properties. The case went on for five years and very nearly made it to the Supreme Court before Marvel settled under terms that are believed to be quite generous. (To be fair, Lee doesn\u2019t hold the copyrights either \u2014 he\u2019s just remained employed by the company that does.)<\/p>\n

But when The Fantastic Four<\/em> No. 1 hit stands on August 8, 1961, all anyone outside Goodman\u2019s offices knew was that the 25-page tale was unlike any other comic book in the medium\u2019s 23-year history. Superhero stories were supposed to be about genial people who happily stumble upon superhuman abilities, then go on their merry way toward justice. That mold was forever broken in the four-page sequence where powers are forced onto the titular quartet \u2014 forced upon them quite painfully. Scientist Reed Richards takes his friend Ben Grimm, his girlfriend Susan Storm, and Susan\u2019s brother Johnny on an experimental rocket trip, but they\u2019re bombarded by \u201ccosmic rays.\u201d There are six panels of claustrophobic, crimson-shaded agony: \u201cMy \u2014 my arms are heavy \u2014 too heavy \u2014 can\u2019t move \u2014 too heavy \u2014 got to lie down \u2014 can\u2019t move\u201d is Ben\u2019s panicked staccato.<\/p>\n

They slam back into Earth and immediately find their situation has gotten even worse. Susan starts to turn invisible and screams as she looks at her disappearing flesh. Ben\u2019s skin melts and expands until he resembles a misshapen pile of orange stones; he immediately blames Reed and tries to beat the tar out of him. Johnny calls his friends \u201cmonsters\u201d before levitating and bursting into flame. Reed\u2019s limbs stretch away from him like distended rubber, and he howls, \u201cWhat am I doing?<\/em> What happened <\/em>to me? To all<\/em> of us?\u201d The characters seem trapped in a horror fable. Eventually, they calm down and decide to use their powers to help mankind \u2014 but as they do so, Lee\u2019s dialogue has them tossing passive-aggressive taunts, and Kirby\u2019s pencils show them bearing miserable expressions. The whole thing doesn\u2019t feel like a traditional superhero comic; it\u2019s more like a David Cronenberg movie or a booze-soaked fight at a Thanksgiving dinner. This mix of wild sci-fi invention and human drama continued in the ensuing monthly installments: One issue, the Four would save Earth by transmogrifying alien invaders into cows; just a few months later, they\u2019d face eviction from their headquarters because they\u2019d run out of rent money.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to appreciate today just how radical a shift in tone the first Fantastic Four <\/em>was. But there was another revolutionary aspect of the series, one hidden from the reader but unendingly controversial: It was the first superhero series to use the so-called \u201cMarvel method.\u201d To save time while writing a dozen or more comics at once, Lee had recently developed a thrifty alternative to writing out full scripts. He\u2019d merely come up with a rough plot \u2014 \u201das much as I can write in longhand on the side of one sheet of paper,\u201d as he put it in a 1968 interview \u2014 talk that over with the artist, then make the artist go off and create the entire story from scratch. Every emotional beat, character interaction, and action sequence was now the responsibility of the guys drawing them, who until then had been accustomed to just drawing whatever a script told them to draw. Now it was the artists who built the narrative architecture, and the writers who did something more like buffing up: Once Lee got the artwork back, he\u2019d interpret what he saw and cook up dialogue bubbles, narration, and sound effects. \u201cSome artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all,\u201d Lee said in that 1968 chat. \u201cI mean, I\u2019ll just say to Jack, \u2018Let\u2019s let the next villain be Dr. Doom.\u2019 Or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He\u2019s so good at plots, I\u2019m sure he\u2019s a thousand times better than I.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Marvel method gets a bad rap in the comics community these days because it allowed Lee to claim he\u2019d written stories that were actually co-plotted by the artists, but at the time, it was an artistically fertile game-changer. The tyranny of full scripts was over, and artists were free to come up with graphic ideas that worked for them. \u201cI realized that comics from a script was absolutely paralyzing and limiting,\u201d says John Romita Sr., an artist who worked extensively with Lee in the \u201960s and has remained a close friend ever since. \u201cWhen you had the option of deciding how many panels you\u2019d use, where to show everything, how you pace each page out, it\u2019s the best thing in the world. Comics becomes a visual medium!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEven before the sales totals were in, we knew we had a major success because of the amount of enthusiastic fan mail,\u201d Lee says in his new memoir, and Marvel feverishly fed this newfound demand. Over the ensuing months, Lee and Kirby cranked out stories about one eccentric superhero after another. Self-loathing scientist the Incredible Hulk, maimed war profiteer Iron Man, literal god Thor, and ostracized freaks the X-Men all appeared in the space of just two years. Lee had writing chores for as many as eight series at a time and was editor of all of them. That was an incredible burden, but also a creative opportunity: When Lee decided to have all these new characters periodically run into each other in their fictional New York City, he was able to keep that new shared universe straight in his head.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to overstate the significance of Lee\u2019s invention of the idea of a comprehensive shared universe. It was a genius way to move product: If you wanted the full story of what was going on with your favorite characters, you had to buy series that starred other characters. But it was also a creative coup: Marvel was suddenly crafting a massive, unified story in which a reader could totally lose themselves. (It\u2019s no wonder today\u2019s movie studios are all rushing to follow the Marvel model and create their own shared universes filled with Jedis or raptors.)<\/p>\n

Young people flocked to newsstands to pick up Marvel comics. College groups would write to Lee, begging him to come speak about the nature of comics art. Newspapers and magazines started writing profiles of Marvel \u2014 usually with Lee at their center. He did the talk-show circuit. Filmmakers Federico Fellini and Alain Resnais sought audiences with Lee to tell him how highly they regarded his work. Lee wasn\u2019t a radical leftist, but he knew how to tap the Zeitgeist: He and Kirby created a hyperintelligent black hero, the Black Panther; their female characters were often pugilists, not just pinups; and stories would often depict youthful rebellion and protest sympathetically. Lee was a genius at making fans feel cared for, addressing Marvel\u2019s \u201cTrue Believers\u201d directly in his delightful letters pages and in missives sent to a Lee-created fan club called the Merry Marvel Marching Society<\/a>. By 1965, Marvel boasted that it was selling an estimated 35,000,000 comics a year \u2014 one comic for every five people in the United States. \u201cHe saved the comic-book industry,\u201d says Michael Uslan, producer of the Batman films, comics writer, and historian. \u201cHe allowed comic books to grow up and find an older audience. And as we grow up, instead of leaving comic books, we stay with them for the rest of our lives. That\u2019s an incredible thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Stan did in the \u201960s was really to go out there and evangelize, to be a P.T. Barnum or a Sol Hurok, a promoter of the fact that comics weren\u2019t just a children\u2019s medium and certainly not just a stupid children\u2019s medium,\u201d says longtime comics writer, executive, and historian Paul Levitz. \u201cHe seized on every bit of evidence that could be developed: the movie director, actor, the singer, the implied endorsement, the opportunity to talk on college campuses. He certainly enjoys the sound of his own voice and enjoys performing, but he\u2019s really, really good at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The version of that voice that made it into print was another game-changer. Prior to the Marvel revolution, the top superhero series were DC Comics\u2019 tales of characters like Superman, Batman, and the Justice League \u2014 and the characters never talked like human beings. (\u201cGreen Lantern<\/em>, the power ring<\/em> \u2014 it\u2019s glowing!<\/em>\u201d \u201cThat means somebody has stolen one of the objects I marked with an invisible aura! Let\u2019s go!<\/em>\u201d) Lee\u2019s characters used slang, told jokes, and sounded distinct from one another. His narration often broke the fourth wall. And in the comics\u2019 letters pages, Lee spoke to readers like a close friend, directly stoking their enthusiasm and giving them a personal relationship with him. To pick one of hundreds upon hundreds of examples: In Avengers<\/em> No. 12, there\u2019s a letter from a Steve Lucero of Laramie, Wyoming, who wrote to \u201ccompliment you on all<\/em> your Marvel mags,\u201d say his mom was happy to see him reading so much, and end with a hope that \u201cthis letter wasn\u2019t too long and boring.\u201d Lee\u2019s reply: \u201cAw, you know us, Stevey! No letter is ever boring when it\u2019s flattering us! And be sure to tell your mom \u2018hello\u2019 from the guys in the bullpen!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was coming at a time when the baby-boomers were teenagers,\u201d says Lee biographer and comics journalist Tom Spurgeon. \u201cIf Stan hadn\u2019t been doing those stories that were for teenagers and not kids, comics would have disappeared. DC was very much doing stories for people under 13, and he was going more for 18.\u201d This is an important distinction, one that helps explain Lee\u2019s significance, as well as his awkward place in current comics geekdom. When you\u2019re a grown-up, you\u2019re going to lump kids\u2019 comics and teen comics in with one another as childish pap. But when you\u2019re a teenager, the difference between the two is massive. In the \u201960s, he who controlled the hearts of teens could control the marketplace.<\/p>\n

Lee\u2019s most important contribution might also have been his most exemplary case-study:Spider-Man. He swung onto Marvel\u2019s pages in 1962 in a story drawn by a tremendously talented and camera-shy artist named Steve Ditko. In that first adventure, you can see Lee using his unique voice right away with some self-deprecating, fourth-wall-breaking narration: \u201cLike costume heroes?\u201d the first panel asks in thick black ink. \u201cConfidentially, we in the comic mag business refer to them as \u2018long underwear characters\u2019! And, as you know, they\u2019re a dime a dozen! But, we think you may find our Spiderman<\/em> just a bit \u2026 different!\u201d He was, indeed. The tale of nebbishy Peter Parker and the spider bite that gave him strength and stickiness is well known now. But it\u2019s like listening to early Beatles singles: They sound dull today because their iconoclasm became a new template.<\/p>\n

The story bucked convention in two key ways: The protagonist was a teenager (previously, teens were nearly always sidekicks), and he was prone to being a smart-aleck asshole. After showing off his newfound powers on TV and blowing off a bunch of admirers (\u201cSee my agent, boys! I\u2019m busy!\u201d), he blithely lets a criminal run past him and tells an astonished police officer, \u201cSave your breath, buddy! I\u2019ve got things to do!\u201d Of course, the criminal then kills Peter\u2019s uncle, leading him to realize that \u201cwith great power there must also come \u2014 great responsibility,\u201d perhaps the nine most famous words Lee will ever write. That balance of unconventional humor and emotional agony had never been tried in comics before, and Lee and Ditko deployed it month after month in The Amazing Spider-Man<\/em>. There was a fundamentally relatable message at the core of the series: No matter how strong you are, you can\u2019t punch your personal flaws.<\/p>\n

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Excerpt from \u2018The Amazing Spider-Man\u2019 No. 29. Ditko provided wild action sequences while Lee gave Spidey a constant string of quips and references.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Speaking of which: Lee\u2019s role in Spider-Man\u2019s creation is the most disputed story of all. For decades, Lee took unequivocal full credit for the character concept, variously saying he was inspired by seeing a spider or remembering a \u201930s pulp hero called the Spider. Ditko refuses all interviews, but if you mail a $40 check to a friend of his in Washington State, you can get a stack of Ditko-written manifestos saying Lee just came up with the name and that every other aspect was Ditko\u2019s idea. In a 2001 pamphlet, he rails against the idea that Lee was the sole creator: \u201cSo for 30-plus years, the \u2018one and only creator\u2019 theme continued to pollute various publication outlets. The subjective and intrinsic mentalities continued their unquestioning, unchallenging, and self-blinding support of the non-validated claims.\u201d (Ditko has a penchant for purple prose.) To make matters even more confusing, Kirby claimed he<\/em> crafted every aspect of Spider-Man on his own before giving the project to Lee and Ditko.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the issue of how the artists were credited on an issue-by-issue basis \u2014 something far more provably damning for Lee. As Marvel\u2019s popularity grew, he wisely chose to engage fans by giving specific credits at the front of each issue, something the fly-by-night comics industry had rarely bothered to do. But when readers saw \u201cRUGGEDLY WRITTEN BY: STAN LEE, ROBUSTLY DRAWN BY: STEVE DITKO\u201d or \u201cSENSATIONAL STORY BY: STAN LEE, ASTONISHING ART BY: JACK KIRBY,\u201d they were being profoundly misled. The mechanics of the Marvel method meant that, by any reasonable definition, his artists were actually authoring the stories with<\/em> him. Their resentment grew.<\/p>\n

So, though Lee gained the world, he lost the partners who helped him seize it. The principled and eccentric Ditko successfully lobbied to get plot credits in The Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> but still felt underappreciated by Lee. The two stopped speaking and Ditko quit Marvel outright in 1966. That same year, Nat Freedland of the New York Herald Tribune<\/em>\u2019s magazine section (the predecessor publication to New York<\/em>) stopped by to report an infamous feature story called \u201cSuper Heroes With Super Problems,\u201d which took a hip New Journalism approach to describing the hot company. Hipness recognizes hipness, so Freedland focused almost entirely on Lee, \u201can ultra\u2013Madison Avenue, rangy look-alike of Rex Harrison\u201d who \u201cdreamed up the \u2018Marvel Age of Comics.\u2019\u201d But Freedland was cruel in his descriptions of Kirby, calling him \u201ca middle-aged man with baggy eyes and a baggy Robert Hall\u2013ish suit\u201d and saying, \u201cIf you stood next to him on the subway, you would peg him for the assistant foreman in a girdle factory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat article did enormous damage to Jack, personally and professionally,\u201d recalls Evanier, who knew Kirby better than most. \u201cIt convinced Jack he couldn\u2019t get the proper recognition there.\u201d Kirby stayed put for a while (he\u2019d later say he wanted to leave but had to earn money to support his family), but abandoned Marvel to work for DC in 1970. Almost right away, he wrote and drew a short story about a thinly veiled Lee analogue named Funky Flashman. Funky is a verbose fraud who orders around a Roy Thomas pastiche named Houseroy and constantly declares his own greatness without ever producing anything. \u201cI know<\/em> my words drive people into a frenzy<\/em> of adoration!!\u201d he insists. \u201cImage<\/em> is the thing, Houseroy!\u201d Kirby\u2019s anger was shared by other people in the industry who disapproved of Lee\u2019s methods: A DC comic called Angel and the Ape<\/em>featured a comics editor named Stan Bragg, who asks a creator, \u201cWhy are you so ungrateful? When you write good stories and do good artwork, don\u2019t I sign it?\u201d A satirical series called Sick<\/em> featured a strip in which comics editor Sam Me tells an artist to make some arduous revisions before reminding him, \u201cAnd don\u2019t forget to sign my name to it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Lee felt hurt by this kind of caricaturing, telling Thomas he couldn\u2019t get why Kirby in particular would be so mean to him. But none of the criticisms shook Lee enough to get him to apologize. In fact, he seemed confused as to why his beloved artists departed. \u201cHe\u2019d say, \u2018I never fully understand why Jack or Steve left,\u2019\u201d Evanier says. \u201cSteve\u2019s reasons were pretty obvious, and so were Jack\u2019s, and I\u2019d explain them to Stan. He would nod. And then three months later he\u2019d say, \u2018Can you explain to me what Jack is upset about?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Lee remains maddeningly stubborn about Kirby and Ditko to this day. He sings their praises louder than anyone, saying they were the most tremendous collaborators a guy could ask for and that their art was museum-quality. But he refuses to admit he did them wrong, even as, in the past decade or so, he\u2019s started billing himself as \u201cco-creator\u201d of Marvel\u2019s core cast. Take, for example, this exchange with BBC host Jonathan Ross in a 2007 documentary about Steve Ditko:<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you, yourself, believe that he co-created it?\u201d Ross asks, referring to Spider-Man.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lee sighs lightly. A beat. \u201cI\u2019m willing to say so.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not what I\u2019m asking you \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

Lee cuts him off. \u201cNo, and that\u2019s the best answer I can give you.\u201d He goes on: \u201cI really think the guy who dreams the thing up<\/em> created it! You dream it up, and then you give it to anybody to draw it! I mean \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if it had been drawn differently, it might not have been successful or a hit,\u201d Ross counters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen I would have created<\/em> something that didn\u2019t succeed,\u201d Lee replies.<\/p>\n

At the back of Comikaze\u2019s main floor in the Los Angeles Convention Center, you find a row of black curtains below a massive sign that reads, \u201cStan Lee\u2019s Mega Museum.\u201d If Lee is doing an autograph session in there, it\u2019s impossible to enter unless you\u2019ve paid $80 in advance for his signature (for $25 more, you can get a certificate with a holographic sticker saying the signature is official). But when he\u2019s off doing something else, you can walk through the aisles and see an odd array of objects, nearly all of them signed by Lee. One thing you don\u2019t<\/em> see there is any evidence of the dozens and dozens of superhero characters he\u2019s made since he left Marvel\u2019s daily writing trenches in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n

The shift in Lee\u2019s fortunes and reputation began in 1972. In that year, for the first time since he was a teenager, Stan found himself not writing comics every day. Marvel had new owners, and they wanted him to oversee the empire he\u2019d been so instrumental in building. He was made president and publisher of Marvel Comics. He left the president position soon after, but stuck around as publisher and never returned to the writing trenches he\u2019d spent his life toiling in.<\/p>\n

He never found a truly comfortable new normal at Marvel. Right from the beginning, he didn\u2019t quite know how an executive is supposed to act. Roy Thomas recalls an incident in which Lee had a minor quibble about the way a writer had done a bit of Thor dialogue, and cornered that writer in the hallway to address it. The writer, understandably, was terrified that one of his employer\u2019s top men was criticizing him \u2014 and doing so out in the open, no less. \u201cI said, \u2018Stan, you\u2019re the publisher!\u2019\u201d Thomas says. \u201c\u2018You\u2019re the guy who created this whole thing! You come down like a ton of bricks on him, they\u2019re not gonna think this is just a little correction, they\u2019ll think that it\u2019s all over for them!\u2019 It\u2019s different when you do it as a publisher and people don\u2019t have a lot of day-to-day interface with you.\u201d The C-suite chafed Lee.<\/p>\n

He would still occasionally dip his toe in the tide and write a comic or two, but they never garnered the kind of acclaim he\u2019d received when he was cranking out nearly a dozen every month. Part of the problem was that Lee was a victim of his own success. He\u2019d spent a decade lobbying for comics to be seen as more than kids\u2019 stuff, and, as a result, comics became increasingly inappropriate for youngsters. And while the stories he\u2019d turned out in his golden period were darker and weirder than what had come before, a decade later, they seemed timid by comparison \u2014 as did Lee himself. Conway wrote a Spider-Man story in which Peter Parker\u2019s girlfriend is thrown off a bridge and dies, and though it was a bold and buzz-creating sensation, Lee broke Marvel ranks and denounced the decision to kill off a beloved and innocent figure. But that was the trend in comics from the mid-\u201970s, well into the early \u201990s: tales in which death stalked at every corner and heroes became antiheroes. Lee put out stories about spacefaring philosopher the Silver Surfer, but the public was more into blood-soaked tales starring characters with names like the Punisher and Son of Satan. What\u2019s more, the so-called \u201cunderground comix\u201d scene of R. Crumb and his cohort was proving that the art world could take comics seriously \u2014 but only if the comics were about sex, drugs, and rock and roll instead of superheroes. Lee even tried to collaborate with some underground comix artists to make a Marvel comic featuring them, but that was a sales flop and only lasted five issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cStan was pushing the limit of what his voice could do,\u201d says Conway. \u201cSome people, like a Frank Sinatra, can learn to phrase around<\/em> a song so you don\u2019t have to sing the notes you can\u2019t sing anymore. But for comics, you can\u2019t do that. Comics are a visceral, gut art form. You\u2019re doing it because you absolutely have to do it, and there\u2019s no reason to do it otherwise. And Stan didn\u2019t have to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also set his sights far beyond comics. He had Marvel\u2019s owners put out a magazine called Celebrity<\/em> that largely existed to get him in photos with movie stars. He did advertisements for Personna razors and Hathaway shirts (\u201cWhen you create super-heros [sic<\/em>], people expect you to look like one. I wear Hathaway shirts\u201d). He even pitched an erotic comic strip to Playboy<\/em>, starring characters with names like \u201cHigh Priestess Clitanna\u201d and \u201cLord Peckerton.\u201d It was to be drawn by Romita, but the deal fell through: Romita believes he scuttled it when he told Lee, \u201cI don\u2019t wanna do stuff that I\u2019m ashamed to show my grandchildren.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The letters page from \u2018The Amazing Spider-Man\u2019 No. 39. Lee wrote these, and was an expert at making readers feel like he was speaking to them personally. Also note the banner ad for the Lee-created fan club the Merry Marvel Marching Society.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Lee then aimed for Hollywood, moving to Los Angeles in 1980 to convince studios that his beloved superheroes could thrive onscreen. It was hard going, and Marvel\u2019s owners at the time didn\u2019t share his confidence about superhero fiction\u2019s chances in live-action. \u201cHe was just a lone figure in the wilderness,\u201d Spurgeon, the biographer, says. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t take a paper out of his jacket pocket and work out a deal there with anybody. He was a PR and concepts guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that legendary interview with The Comics Journa<\/em><\/a>l<\/em>, Kirby was even harsher. \u201cI could never see Stan Lee as being creative,\u201d Kirby said, and \u201cI think Stan has a God complex,\u201d and \u201cI\u2019ve never seen Stan Lee write anything,\u201d and so on. Those words became gospel for a generation of cynical fans who had grown out of their childhood awe, and the Journal <\/em>launched a kind of holy war on Lee, dedicating its October 1995 issue to scathingly critical essays and interviews about him. The irony was bittersweet: Lee had long campaigned to have comics be treated seriously as high art, and the Journal<\/em>\u2019s high-minded writing was proof that he\u2019d been successful; but the generation of fans who saw comics as a legitimate medium also thought of him as a childish relic.<\/p>\n

Lee claims he had a final reconciliation with Kirby at a comics convention shortly before Kirby died in 1994, but Evanier and Spurgeon say the interaction likely never happened.<\/p>\n

Then a fork in the road appeared. In 1998, bankruptcy proceedings voided Lee\u2019s contract with Marvel and, after some tense negotiations, he negotiated an extremely lucrative new agreement: an $810,000 annual salary just for being a figurehead, 50 percent of his base salary as an annual pension for his wife, and 10 percent of any profits Marvel would ever make off of movies and TV. He could have used the money to settle into easy elder-statesmanship, even if Marvel never took over Hollywood like we now know it would.<\/p>\n

But Lee couldn\u2019t stay out of the game, partly because a persuasive criminal made him an offer he couldn\u2019t refuse. Lee had become friends with a genial professional fund-raiser named Peter Paul, and Paul found out Lee had a clause in his new contract that allowed him to make his own entertainment firm. \u201cHe said, \u2018Hey, Stan, now you\u2019re free! Lemme build a company,\u2019\u201d Lee gleefully recalled at the time. The company was called Stan Lee Media \u2014 SLM for short \u2014 and it was a complete disaster.<\/p>\n

The plan was to put Lee\u2019s creative genius to work on brand-new characters that he would own, and to push those properties out as comics, movies, toys, video games, and the buzzy new medium of animated \u201cwebisodes.\u201d What\u2019s more, there would be brand synergy with hot young entertainers like the Backstreet Boys and the Wu-Tang Clan (\u201cMaybe, in our own way, we can turn them away from gangsta-rapping,\u201d Lee said of the Wu). Lee cooked up one superhero after another: Thunderer! Oxblood! Imitatia! The Streak! Paul raised $1 million in seed money and projected annual revenue of $119 million within five years. It was, in other words, a classic example of a dot-com boondoggle.<\/p>\n

Early on in the existence of SLM, Paul admitted to Lee that he had a bizarre and checkered past: He\u2019d served time in federal prison after getting busted for cocaine possession and an attempt to defraud the Cuban government. Lee forgave him for this sin, but what he didn\u2019t know was Paul had already embroiled him in another insane scheme: He was using the Stan Lee brand to rob SLM\u2019s investors. Profits were being exaggerated, there were shady stock sales, and the SEC eventually swarmed SLM to bust Paul for fraud in 2001. He escaped to Brazil, only to be extradited and convicted. Lee was cleared of wrongdoing, but he was humiliated and swiftly severed all ties to SLM. Lee\u2019s new comics-format memoir devotes exactly one panel to the SLM affair. \u201cIt ended badly,\u201d a sullen-looking drawing of Lee says, \u201cand the less said, the better.\u201d<\/p>\n

While SLM was in its death throes, Lee partnered with two of his friends \u2014 producer Gill Champion and lawyer Arthur Lieberman \u2014 to form a new venture: POW! Entertainment (short for Purveyors of Wonder!, exclamation point mandatory). Lee wasn\u2019t destitute, but he needed money for legal fees: In addition to the SLM fallout, Lee claimed that Marvel had failed to honor the stipulation of his 1998 contract that called for him to receive a percentage of the company\u2019s film and TV profits. The subsequent lawsuit was a surreal spectacle \u2014 like Colonel Sanders suing KFC, as one commentator put it at the time. Movies based on Lee\u2019s co-creations had started to take off at the box office, with 2000\u2019s X-Men<\/em> and 2002\u2019s Spider-Man<\/em>, and Lee had made onscreen cameos in both. But his relationship with the company he built had become fraught.<\/p>\n

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According to historian Sean Howe, Marvel\u2019s newly installed and notoriously prickly owner Ike Perlmutter despised Lee, resented paying him a pension, and had demanded that Marvel stop featuring the phrase \u201cStan Lee Presents\u201d in issues\u2019 credits pages. The legal battle lasted for three years, concluding with a settlement in 2005. Though the details are secret, Marvel appeared to have made a onetime $10 million payment to Lee. But <\/strong>his profit-sharing for film and TV was ended, just a few years before Marvel started to dominate the box office. If Marvel had kept up its end of the percentage deal, Lee would be making tens of millions of dollars for The Avengers<\/em>, Guardians of the Galaxy<\/em>, and the like. He just barely missed the boat.<\/p>\n

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While in town for Comikaze, I asked POW!\u2019s publicists repeatedly if I could visit the company\u2019s offices. I was only ever given silence or vague allusions to it being a possibility. Finally, as my trip was nearing its close, I decided to make a last-ditch effort and just show up at the address listed on Google Maps. As I was about to leave my hotel, one of the publicists wrote to inform me that I wouldn\u2019t be allowed inside, but I figured it was worth a little peek. I took a bus to the nondescript Beverly Hills office building where POW! resides, tentatively sneaked up to the floor it\u2019s on, and walked to the suite in question. All I found was a windowless wooden door, adorned only with a printout of the company logo. The printout was torn on one end and listing off at a haphazard angle. It felt like an apt metaphor.<\/p>\n

Business has never been Lee\u2019s forte, and his past missteps weigh heavily on him. His representatives declined to give me an interview despite more than a dozen attempts over the course of six months, but I was allowed to send a handful of questions via email. The only interesting response came when I asked him what he\u2019d do differently if he could live his life all over again: \u201cI\u2019d have been a better businessman and attempted to gain a share of ownership of the characters I created.\u201d<\/p>\n

With POW!, he would. The problem was the characters. The firm\u2019s first high-profile project was Stripperella<\/a><\/em>, a cartoon with an accompanying comic book, both released in 2003. It was done in partnership with Pamela Anderson and men\u2019s-interest TV network Spike, and it followed the titillating tussles of Erotica Jones, a ludicrously buxom woman who pole-dances by day and fights crime by night. It was a spiritual successor to that failed Playboy <\/em>pitch, filled with ribald wordplay (episode titles included \u201cYou Only Lick Twice\u201d and \u201cThe Curse of the WereBeaver\u201d) and a tone that placed its tongue firmly in its cheek. Lee, apparently, wanted to push the envelope pretty far: \u201cStan wanted nudity,\u201d Anderson tells me. \u201cI didn\u2019t.\u201d It failed to find an audience, and though Anderson says she had a great time doing it and loves Lee, she couldn\u2019t devote too much focus to it. There was never a second season.<\/p>\n

For the rest of the decade, the company cranked out a lot of projects on a lot of different platforms, but very few of them managed to make an impact. There was a project released in children\u2019s-book and direct-to-video movie format, Stan Lee\u2019s Superhero Christmas<\/em><\/a>. There was a direct-to-cable movie about a superpowered spy played by Jason Connery called Stan Lee\u2019s Lightspeed<\/em><\/a>. There was a reality show on the History Channel called Stan Lee\u2019s Superhumans<\/em><\/a>, in which Lee sent the show\u2019s host off on adventures to find real people who can do unusual things like push needles through themselves or survive venomous snakebites. There was a truly bizarre partnership with the NHL in which Lee came up with superhero mascots for every team in the league. (They were all a little on-the-nose: The Florida Panthers\u2019 hero was the Panther, the Toronto Maple Leafs got a tree-powered crusader named the Maple Leaf, and so on.) And the underwhelming releases kept rolling out: a mobile game called Stan Lee\u2019s Verticus, a comics\/cartoon project targeted at the Indian market called Chakra: The Invincible<\/em><\/a>, and so on.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a crucial thing you have to know about how Lee approaches these products: He\u2019s not an absentee landlord. He\u2019s always substantially involved in the projects bearing his name, <\/strong>in part because he isn\u2019t happy just playing the role of showman \u2014 he wants the airtight creative credit that, <\/strong>in recent decades, has come into question, thanks to Ditko and Kirby. <\/strong>So while Lee\u2019s <\/em>brand is slapped on so many products that you might imagine he\u2019s become like Krusty the Klown or the members of KISS, letting any random product get the Stan Lee seal of approval for the right price,<\/strong> this is very much not the case.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most arresting example comes from veteran superhero-comics writer Mark Waid. He was in charge of managing a line of three comics series based on story and character concepts from Lee and executed by respected industry talent. Waid tells of meeting with Lee to show him a rough draft of an upcoming issue, which Lee read with consternation. \u201cHe got to end of it and said, \u2018I can\u2019t have my name on this,\u2019 and my heart sank,\u201d he recalls. Luckily, Waid made revisions, and Lee enthusiastically endorsed the finished product \u2014 but Waid has never forgotten Lee\u2019s unwillingness to brand something he didn\u2019t like.<\/p>\n

Of course, none of this is the most famous stuff Lee has done in the past 16 years. The most famous stuff is the cameos. Going back to the years before Marvel movies took off, he began appearing in Marvel-based TV shows and Saturday-morning cartoons about his co-creations, and he\u2019s remained visible onscreen ever since. In nearly every movie based on a Marvel comic, Lee briefly appears in a zany fashion, playing a mailman, a strip-club owner, a drunk war veteran \u2014 that sort of thing. He gets to attend the premieres and do interviews about what he was thinking when he created the characters that have made it to the big screen. He gets executive-producer and co-creator credits on them. Romita says these connections to the Marvel movies are huge for Lee because fame outside<\/em> the eternally disdained world of comics has always been one of the man\u2019s ultimate goals. \u201cIf there were never any successful Marvel movies, Stan would\u2019ve been gone, he would\u2019ve retired,\u201d he says. \u201cIt changed everything. It legitimized it. It satisfied him.\u201d<\/p>\n

That may be true, but he\u2019s not so satisfied that he\u2019s willing to slow down. \u201cY\u2019know, most people, when they retire, they say, \u2018At last, I\u2019ll have a chance to do what I\u2019ve always wanted to do,\u2019\u201d Lee said in a CNN interview a few years ago. \u201cBut I\u2019m doing what I\u2019ve always wanted to do! I\u2019m working with artists, writers, with directors. I\u2019m working on creative things. I\u2019m having fun! I mean, don\u2019t punish me by making me retire.\u201d<\/p>\n

Near the end of the Dragons vs. Pandas<\/em> press conference, Lee abruptly starts talking about the guiding philosophy that drives his work. \u201cWhen I used to go to bookstores, the only books I would pick out were ones that looked like they were different than anything I normally read,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have always tried to come up with things that nobody else is doing. Now, of course, you can do things that nobody else is doing, and the reason nobody is doing it is because they\u2019re stupid ideas<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearing Lee speak at the convention, my mind was cast back to the first and only time we\u2019ve had a one-on-one interaction. It was at the 1998 Wizard World Chicago Comic-Con, when I was 12 years old. I\u2019m honestly not sure when or how I first became aware of Lee \u2014 he just seemed omnipresent for anyone who cared about superheroes \u2014 but by that age, I was a true believer in his mythology. So I waited in line for nearly an hour to get his signature on a tattered copy of Fantastic Four<\/em> No. 47. When I finally reached the front of the line, it was like I was in the presence of God. I asked someone to take a photo of the two of us on a disposable camera. The flash went off and he crowed, \u201cYou\u2019ve immortalized me!\u201d I could tell it was a joke, but that word, immortal<\/em>, lingered in my ears. Because that\u2019s just how he\u2019d always seemed to me: somehow above the rest of us, watching with paternal awe at the world he\u2019d made.<\/p>\n

Before reporting this article, I\u2019d never had to come up with my own estimation of what Lee means to the world, much less to me, and I had whiplash-inducing changes of heart while reading about him. But his greatest sin was probably overreach: He accomplished so much, but he wanted to claim more; he was a brilliant craftsman in his prime, but he kept creating when he might have been better suited to retirement. Like the superheroes whose stories he wrote, he is a flawed being, capable of pettiness and hubris. But he\u2019s put too much love and joy into the world \u2014 into my<\/em> world \u2014 for me to even come close to deriding him.<\/p>\n

This puts me in league with the friends and colleagues of his that I interviewed. We understand that he erred, but that only forces us to try harder to understand him and see the man in full. \u201cI think he\u2019ll be remembered as the guy who gave the world the Marvel universe,\u201d says Thomas. \u201cI know various others of us \u2014 Jack and Steve \u2014 were very important in that. But without Stan Lee, there is no Marvel universe. He\u2019s the one who had the vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one of his final Comikaze appearances, Lee is onstage having a chat with some younger comics pros, and one of them \u2014 Marc Silvestri \u2014 tries to rib Lee about being so old that he probably hung out with Moses. Lee seems to take it in stride (or doesn\u2019t hear it, since his hearing isn\u2019t what it used to be), but Silvestri is getting it all wrong. Lee, in a way, is<\/em> a kind of Moses: a charismatic leader who saved a genre and led his acolytes through the harsh world of mainstream entertainment for decades \u2014 only to see his people finally enter the promised land of Hollywood billions without him. So now he stands on the border, smiling and welcoming people in, but always making sure to give them a little tap on the shoulder before saying, Tell ya what, True Believer \u2014 if you like this, you\u2019re gonna <\/em>love the brand-new promised land I\u2019m building just around the corner<\/em> \u2026<\/p>\n

*A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the memoir was ghostwritten.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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