“I Always Had So Many Outside Interests”- Stan Lee’s Love of Comics

We often see Stan Lee described with sobriquets such as the “Geek Godfather” and “Comics Maestro” and it’s truly understandable that the general public would keep up their association with this collective image of the man. But what occurs to me as someone who has spent years and years reading through nearly every article and/or interview with this apparent great man of literature, is just how often Lee displayed genuine indifference or palpable disinterest in the medium and the titles he was involved with.

• “…I retained the viewpoint of a person who liked comics in a different way than Stan did who had never been a comics fan, you know… to Stan it was a job, he kind of enjoyed it, but he wasn’t a comics fan…” – Roy Thomas, May 2022

I started to ponder how many times I’d read interviews with Lee in which the question inevitably gets to Lee still reading comics or what he thinks of the then-current product. On every occasion, Lee explains he doesn’t read comics, doesn’t have the time, and, depending on which publication is interviewing him, either assures the audience that what he does see “looks great” or moves on to talking about potential television products.

Let me state that it’s certainly not a crime that Lee wouldn’t be a fan of comic books and didn’t read them. Not at all. It’s simply considering the perception of Lee and how it’s enforced and enabled, when in reality it goes against his actual habits and outlook.

Marvel themselves offered up this blushing blurb:

• “His outspoken love for comics even extended to a series of college campus talks; given any chance to educate and illuminate on the industry, he took it.” – Marvel.com 2018

“His outspoken love for comics”…? Damn, that’s some serious shit. Let’s take a closer look at just a few– and trust me, these are really just a handful of the many times Lee displayed his lack of interest in comic books, especially once he made it to California- of the many recorded instances of Lee’s indifference towards the industry that helped make him a celebrity for the massively uninformed.

• “I can’t understand people who read comics! I wouldn’t read them if I had the time and wasn’t in the business. I might look through them and read something good in comics but I’ve got so many other interests…” – Stan Lee, 1969

• “I would say that the comic book market is the worst market that there is on the face of the earth for creative talent, and the reasons are numberless and legion. I have had many talented people ask me how to get into the comic book business. If they were talented enough, the first answer I would give them is, why would you want to get into the comic book business? Because even if you succeed, even if you reach what might be considered the pinnacle of success in comics, you will be less successful, less secure, and less effective than if you are just an average practitioner of your art in television, radio, movies, or what have you.

• It is a business in which the creator, as was mentioned before, owns nothing of his creation. The publisher owns it… Unfortunately, in the comic field, the artist, the writer, and the editor, if you will, are the most helpless people in the world.” – Stan Lee, 1971

• “No, today, I don’t have a chance to read comic books. I’m so busy traveling and writing my own material and doing millions of other things I seem to do, so to answer the question, I don’t have time. I certainly wish I did have time…” – Stan Lee, 1978

• “I don’t really have time to read the books now.” – Stan Lee, 1981

• “I don’t know (what’s new with the characters) because I don’t have time to read ’em. Sometimes, I’ll thumb through a few pages at a meeting maybe, if they hand me some of the newer books when I have to go there. Frankly, I don’t have the time.” – Stan Lee, 1986

• OCR: “Do you read the new releases from Marvel all at once, or-?”

• SL: “No, no I don’t read them at all actually, I don’t have the time. I know they’re doing good things, and the books look terrific, but I never really read a comic book unless I was writing it. What I try to do is, if I’m taking a call, I’ll flip through a few pages just to keep an eye on it.”

• OCR: “Was that a result of having your fill from writing so many stories for all of those years?”

• SL: “I never really looked at any books I wasn’t writing or editing. I always had so many outside interests.” – Orange County Register, 1987

• MA: Stan, do you still read Marvel Comics?
• STAN: I must say that I don’t really have the time to thoroughly read all of the books that are sent from New York. They’re shipped to me every month, and I try to thumb through as many as possible.
• MA: Are there any particular books that come out that you look forward to next?
• STAN: Not really. As with anybody else, one month a certain cover will attract me. The next month it’ll be the cover of a different book. I never know which will be the most exciting. It’s always a surprise. But I tell you, in every batch of books there are always a lot of them that I say, wow, if only I had time to read this! I know damn well if I were a comic reader I would buy ’em because they’re good.
• MA: Earlier on Jim (Shooter) mentioned that at one time he had felt that he had put comic books behind him, and it pained him to look at comic books, and you said, “Well, I understand that feeling”.
• STAN: That is important. Yes, you’re absolutely right. If you’ve left a place, and you feel that you’re finished with it and you’ll never come back to it, it could almost be unpleasant looking at what you’ve done. You force yourself to try not to care about it. Sure, I can understand that.
• MA: But you don’t feel that you’ve put Marvel Comics aside?
• STAN: Oh, no, I just scan the books the way I do, instead of reading each one thoroughly because I physically don’t have the time. I would love to read them. — MARVEL AGE # 8, 1983

• CI: There is sort of a feeling “out there” that you don’t keep up with the comics anymore and are removed from the field. Do you read comics? Do you follow them at all?
  STAN: I am sorry to say, there is a little bit of truth to that. We publish- what is it?- forty comics a month, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to read them all. I would love to, but I can’t. – Comics Interview #5, 1983

• JM: It was known as the Golden Age…
• SL: Oh, this shit about the Golden Age, the Silver. I don’t know what is what. People give them names.
• JM: What do you think of comic books now?
• SL: I can’t answer that because I don’t read them. I don’t read them at all because I don’t have time.” – Interview with Jim McLaughlin, 2005

• “But Lee doesn’t think of himself in those terms. He doesn’t read Marvel’s comics anymore. He says it’s because he doesn’t have the time to read anything besides the daily paper and the Hollywood trades. But the father also has no interest, literally or financially, in checking on the progress of his sons and daughters.
  “If they were my children—if I owned Spider-Man or the others—of course I would be checking up,” he says. “They would be very precious to me. But I don’t own them. They belong to Marvel Comics, and I have absolutely nothing to say about them. So, to me, it might as well be Superman or Batman. They’re not mine.” – Dallas Observer, 2013

It really does seem that once Stan Lee got job protection due to his back room dealing with Cadence Industries, once he was established as a known figure in entertainment due to the Sixties press interest in Marvel Comics, and- maybe most importantly- when Jack Kirby left Marvel in 1970- any excitement or engagement for the field that Lee had seemingly dried up.

A much better writer than I could ever hope to be, Abraham Josephine Riesman, sums it up quite sufficiently:

• “According to private accounts from his archives and the words of those who knew him, Lee really couldn’t stand — and didn’t read — comic books. In conversations with creatives such as Alain Resnais and Francis Ford Coppola, in his memoir and even in speeches to his colleagues, he spoke at length about how he had no innate love for the medium and had merely taken it up through happenstance. It was just a hustle for him, one he repeatedly tried to escape through schemes to make it big in movies, poetry, even encyclopedias.

• He spent much of his post-’60s career trying to pitch non-superhero ideas in various non-comics formats. According to his former manager and his former bodyguard, he loathed superhero movies and probably saw only about two of them in his life. (He typically left their premieres after walking the red carpet.)” – Abraham Josephine Riesman, 2020

There’s your idol. There’s your figurehead. All of the misplaced sentimentalism and arrested development, all of the nostalgia fueling grown men into blind enablement of a guy who wouldn’t stop to talk to them if he wasn’t benefitting from it- the real Stan Lee didn’t care about this stuff. He repeated the same usual lines for an endless succession of happy, uninformed “journalists” over five decades. Open a comic book? It’s the last thing he would want to do.

We don’t judge him for that. We judge you for projecting that and keeping the totem going, long after the magic has passed.

This post dedicated to BARRY PEARL. Photo above courtesy of Richard Spiegelman.