“He’s a Good guy, He’s just Not a GREAT guy”- on 2021’s “TRUE BELIEVER: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee”

It was only four short years ago (as of this writing) that a truly monumental work was published, a work that, for a short time at least, seemed to signal a possible push towards a truer narrative in the long-cultivated myth of comics history that we’re all so used to. That work was the Stan Lee biography “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee” by Josephine Abraham Riesman.

When Four Color Sinners started, I made the naïve remark that I’d inevitably and unavoidably cover every single biographical piece on Lee ever put out– and, by golly, I’m not about to risk damaging my reputation now, o frantic ones. Riesman’s book is indeed engaging and interesting with new areas of research into Lee’s Jewish identity and family origins, as well as the relative novelty of it being a book written by a biographer who wasn’t already a fan or former Marvel acolyte.

(I should note that I won’t be covering every notable anecdote in this book (for there are many), nor will I respond specifically to each excerpt shared, as some simply should be read for a fuller context. Please do the right thing and purchase Riesman’s book if you’re so inclined.)

When True Believer was announced, there was a palpable feeling of curiosity combined with nervous energy, as it was released not long after the memory of Lee’s passing in the collective memory of mainstream culture. This led to some preemptive shade from certain people who were both prominent in the industry and prominent in the fan-press. (Well, “prominent” is arguable depending on which subsect of fandom we’re talking about, but.)

What struck me initially when this book was announced and being publicized was simply that I observed a handful of people who were denouncing it while publicly announcing that they hadn’t read it and wouldn’t read it.

Which is fine, but I still found that sort of baffling if you felt that strongly about it. As readers here know, I will routinely write or review something that annoys me if only to (factually) point out and counter what I find to be contradictory or information that stands to be corrected. (Which, to be fair, Roy Thomas did to some extent, as we’ll see later.)

• “A smart journalist I know named Abraham Riesman has written a probably-controversial book about Stan Lee and it’s being released this weekend. Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the book and answered a number of the author’s questions, but I haven’t seen a copy of it and have no idea what I’m quoted as saying in it. I may not for a while.

Anyway, stop writing to ask me if you should be a true believer in True Believer. I haven’t read it yet.” – Mark Evanier, February 13^th, 2021

• “As for that creep Reisman’s book, I read enough to know he’s just another Stan Lee-hater and not worth my time. Already several people have pointed out numerous errors in his hit job. He can go fuck himself.” – Tony Isabella, April 7^th, 2021

• “In writing his book, Abraham Riesman set out to correct the record, to expose Stan Lee as a fake. He was not the sole creative force at Marvel. As I said, I haven’t read Riesman yet, but I suspect he doesn’t recognize Stan Lee’s rise as largely an accident.” – R.C. Harvey, September 3^rd, 2021

•  “Mr. Riesman does not establish that he actually read any the comics of the Marvel Age, or their competitors, nor does he demonstrate the much knowledge of the comic book industry and how the publishers produced their books. The actual stories are never analyzed or discussed. If you have read any of my blogs you know that I have read all of the comics of the Marvel Age…many times!” – Barry Pearl, February 17^th, 2021

• “As Marvel Comics visionary Stan Lee’s longtime employee and de facto protégé, and as a known student of the history of comic books, I suppose I would be expected to denounce Riesman’s book as scurrilous, a pack of lies.

Certainly, by the mid-’60s at least, whenever a new artist came on board, they knew that choreographing the story, including adding details, was part of the job description of “artist” at Marvel. If they didn’t want to accept that, they were free to work for some other company.” – Roy ‘Forever Boy’ Thomas, showing his compassion for pay-for-hire artists & plotters of stories that he got to dialogue, February 23^rd, 2021

• “I only made it about halfway through, because it’s so grindingly negative…” – Kurt Busiek

Again, I found it rather curious that so many full-grown adults were broadcasting their intentions not to read a book. Could this be that this one was known to not glorify Lee as Fingeroth’s did? Could this be one that brought up indisputable arguments that would make it more difficult for so many fervent true believers to clutch and hold onto their youthful pledges of eternal devotion?

This was a clear case of what is called Selective exposure. Selective exposure theory is frequently used in communication and mass media research that refers to someone’s tendency to favor information and propaganda which reinforces their pre-existing view while they will avoid all contradictory information. (See also: Trump voters)

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug and once practiced heavily by Jenny Blake Isabella, among others. I’ve got to give a special shout-out to perennial Marching Society member Barry Pearl, whose slobbering and fannish argument against Riesman was that Riesman, unlike Pearl, probably didn’t read all the original Silver Age Marvels.

Selective exposure aside, I’d like to tackle Riesman’s biography and will annotate certain passages that I find meaningful and worth sharing. If you haven’t read this yet, whether from defiance or from a lack of time, I’m once again doing the heavy lifting for you. No need to thank me.

• “But also, I came at this using as many of the journalistic tools that I have accumulated in my 15 years in this industry as I could in order to investigate this guy’s life, which… again, I don’t want to speak ill, but previous efforts had often—not always, but often—not really been serious journalistic efforts. They’ve been [about] analyzing his work and talking about why he was great.”  – Josephine Abraham Riesman, February 15^th, 2021

At the very beginning, Riesman quotes Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7:

“I have no spur to prince the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on th’ other.”

• (Hey, I already think that’s a marked improvement over other Lee biographies, considering these guys frequently called Lee things like “the Shakespeare of comics” even though they’d never actually read any Shakespeare. (Trust me- all these comic fuckers read are comic books and message boards. Shakespeare is a metaphor and not a reference at this point.)

Pg. 5-  “Celia and a man named Jack Lieber begat Stanley. Less famously, Celia and Jack also begat Larry, and that was it for their begetting. Stanley, as it turned out, sort of begat himself- he invented a character to play named Stan Lee and never got around to being Stanley again.”

Pg. 6–  “He had different sides to him,” Larry said of his late brother in the near-extinct New York Jewish accent the two of them had shared. “I feel like I’m almost talking about Charles Foster Kane. Who was he? What was he? What was he like?” Larry paused and pondered his own questions. His answer was simple, though entirely accurate: “It depends on who you talk to at what moment.”

Pg. 11– “Stan was an astoundingly poor judge of character and was very susceptible to being conned, or at least woefully manipulated. He lived to regret it. His final year and a half, after his departed wife could no longer act as bulwark against mountebanks, had been a hellish maelstrom of abuse and theft.”

• (I mean, this is true but jeez Riesman, “bulwark against mountebanks” and “hellish maelstrom of abuse and theft” is so wordy- are you starting to write reviews for the online version of The Comics Journal?)

Pg. 12-  “We can be certain of one thing: Stan Lee was far less than truthful about his life and accomplishments. He lied about little things, he lied about big things, he lied about strange things, and there’s one massive, very consequential thing he may very well have lied about.”

• (I know this statement seemed to agitate some of Lee’s public defenders, but the truth is that Stan Lee was frequently recorded contradicting himself as well as repeating blatant untruths. It’s simply factual. While you can’t prove his anecdote with Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, you can prove that his newspaper contest story was massively exaggerated.

• Well, let’s just quote no-less-a-staunch Lee defender than Danny Fingeroth: “Look, Stan’s relationship to the truth is very interesting. I went to Stan’s archives in Wyoming, and I listened to a lot of tapes of his talks and events. I like to say that Stan was a compulsive truth-teller. Because he would often say stuff that was very frank. Of course, sometimes he’d bend the truth or outright lie.”)

Pg. 13- “Stan Lee was, by most accounts, a remarkably pleasant man to deal with. He was charming, self-effacing, kind, warm, and gracious.”

Pg. 26– “At age fifteen, Stan entered a competition for young scribes held by the New York Herald Tribune, a publication that would come to be significant in Stan’s later life on multiple occasions. The challenge was to write a nonfiction piece about the news of the week. “I won it three weeks running”, he said in 1977, “and finally the editor called me down to the Tribune. He said, ‘Will you stop entering the contest and give someone else a chance?”

Pg. 27– “Surely Stan never expected that anyone would bother fact-checking something as trivial as that little anecdote. And a dive into the paper’s archives reveals that young Stanley Martin Lieber had, indeed, competed and won seventh place on May 7, 1938, then netted an honorable mention (as did ninety-nine other kids) on two subsequent weeks. But that was it. No first-place finish at any time, but less a jealousy-inducing streak at the top, which makes the idea of his having an inspirational audience with an editor quite unlikely.”

• (Riesman goes on to logically explain that, since this incident was easily proven as a falsehood, it tends to cast doubt on any other youthful accounts Lee would have offered up. This sort of thing seems to be seen as having an agenda, per Lee’s defenders- it is as if Riesman is just “being mean” by writing a fact-checked piece of journalistic autobiography. But let us continue.)

Pg. 31–  “Most important, there was the afore-mentioned cousin Jean and an uncle from a different branch of the Solomon tree, Robbie. Robbie had been an athlete in his youth and grew up to be, as Larry puts it, “a nice guy,” working for and marrying the sister of publisher Martin Goodman. Jean further solidified the familial connection to Martin by marrying the man. Those two marriages would prove crucial in changing the history of the arts.”

Pg. 38– “There was the time the Goodman family apparently linked him up with a Jewish employment network that netted him a remote job writing publicity copy for a tuberculosis hospital in Denver called National Jewish Health, although the hospital tells me they have no record of his doing so. He said he did paid acting work in a theater program run by the Works Progress Administration, in no small part because a girl he liked was doing the same- but no record of his being employed there has survived, if there ever was one.”

Pg. 40– “The interviewer was friendly, but he’d done his homework and confessed to Stan that he was a little confused: Wasn’t Goodman Stan’s relative? Was there professional link really the result of happenstance?”

Pg. 41– “That is, except for the fact that he quietly threw the story out the window in his later years, perhaps after being caught wrong-footed in the lie one too many times.”

Pg. 50– “Stan’s chronic abuse of that musical instrument, variously remembered as an ocarina or whistle or some such, left an early negative impression of Stan on Kirby. “I remember him sitting on my desk and playing the flute, interfering with my work,” Kirby later said. “I remember being serious about what I was working on, and Stan was never serious about anything.”

• (I didn’t remember this statement from the first time I read this book (back in 2021), but now I’m struck with how absolutely fitting it is in describing the gulf between these two men and the difference in their outlook and passion for comic books, which is no judgment on Lee. But “I remember being serious- Stan was never serious about anything”- it’s difficult to make up for a bad first impression, they say.)

Pg. 55– “One more notable bit of career foreshadowing came in September 1941’s Marvel Mystery Comics #25, in which Stan penned a text story about various superheroes who were series regulars coming together for a confab. Although it wasn’t superhero fiction’s first crossover- that honor belonged to a Namor and Human Torch epic in issue #8, written by someone else- it was the first to suggest that everyone in Timely’s stable could occupy the same space. Twenty years later, when Stan embellished the endlessly interconnected Marvel Universe, he likely didn’t remember those two pages of prose…”

Pg. 55-56– “This is where Stan comes in, and not necessarily favorably. “We were spending a lot of time in our hotel studio, and one time Stan Lee followed us- like he always did- refusing to be sent back,” Simon recalled. “When he saw what we were working on, we swore him to secrecy.”

• (This statement is astounding. A teenaged Lee refuses to leave, was he really this bold, this curious, or instructed by his relatives that employed Simon & Kirby to go find out what else they were doing? Note this all comes from Joe Simon…)

“A couple of days later, in Simon’s account, a pack of Goodman relatives who worked for the boss (Stan and Solomon were hardly the only ones to get a nepotistic spot on the payroll) surrounded Simon and Kirby in the bullpen.”

• (It’s long been said that Kirby blamed Lee for the rest of his life over THIS incident, and it’s why Kirby had issues and resentment with Lee during their Sixties period. It’s all from the grudge Kirby apparently nursed, but it needs to be said, again- this is completely from Simon’s statements. Why do we accept it, when Simon is the one who reported it in the first place?)

Pg. 57- “In his 1978 autobiography outline, Stan wrote, “MG was father figure to me- most successful man I’d ever known.”

Pg. 58- “Here, too, we see Stan, later in life, ragging on Goodman and convincing his audience that he had eventually bested his Oedipal oft-nemesis by becoming a trendsetter, an inventive creator, and a generally fun guy.”

Pg. 61-62- “Adding further intrigue is the fact that documentation of Stan’s time in the military is notably spotty. There are no extant records of most of his claimed accomplishments in the playwright division, though his accounts seem plausible enough.”

Pg. 65– “As soon as Stan had the opportunity to go back to his full-time job in comic books, he started trying to get out of it.”

Pg. 66– “His schemes for departure from the comic-book trade in the 1940s and ‘50s were varied, but they all hit dead ends for one reason or another: tragic luck, infertile business climate, deficit of inspiration, what have you. As a result, he never quit his day job.”

Pg. 70– “However, Secrets Behind the Comics contained Stan’s first provable commission of a cardinal sin for the arts, one that he would commit countless times, to a degree that would eventually be catastrophic for his reputation: obscuring credit. Secret #12 was all about the creation of Captain America, who was still probably Timely’s most famous creation. It presented, in comics-panel form over the course of a few pages, a dubious narrative never uttered by anyone else.

…The narration then claims, “During the next few weeks, Martin Goodman had the nation’s top writers and artists submitting ideas for a new patriotic type of character, until finally, one character was chosen! Captain America, sentinel of liberty!”

Pg. 74- “Later, when Larry asked Stan if he’d ever thought about writing a novel, the younger brother recalls the elder replying, “I don’t enjoy writing that much. I write because I can do it and I do it easily and to earn a living.”

Pg. 76– “As it turned out, JC would spend her life singing Christian devotional music with her mother, putting crosses up in her houses, and even going so far as to attempt to record a single about the infant Jesus when she was in middle age.”

• (Included this just because I think it’s awesome and I’d like to hear that single, though I have to defend JC here, is there ever an age when someone can’t record a song?)

Pg. 81–  “There’s just one problem with these “Lee/Wertham debates”, as Stan called them: They don’t appear to have ever happened. Historians have pored over archives to find out about these supposed verbal tussles and have turned up nothing.”

Pg. 83– “Nevertheless, in spite of this public ridicule, Stan continued to come to work, albeit with a provision from Goodman whereby he was able to write from home on Wednesdays.”

• (Note that, even in the 1950s’, Lee was able to come into the Marvel offices on a part-time status. Yet, he was always “too busy”.)

Pg. 96- “Thus begins the duel of narratives- Kirby’s versus Stan’s– that will forever muddy the waters about what happened between the two men from 1958 to 1970. The general public is generally aware of only one narrative of the Marvel Revolution, and that is Stan’s.”

Pg. 97- “In fact, when one does the math, it appears that Kirby likely picked up his first new assignment on Monday, June 9, less than 72 hours after Maneely’s death. Given how close Stan and Maneely were and how crucial Maneely was to the operations of Goodman’s comics publishing, is it not plausible that a devastated Stan may have been shedding tears in the paltry office of a business that was on its last legs?”

Pg. 97– “I was given monsters, so I did them,” Kirby would say in 1975. “I would much rather have been drawing Rawhide Kid. But I did the monsters.”

• (I felt this comment by Kirby was an admission that he was taking what Lee gave him upon his return in 1958, while also backing up Kirby’s claims that it was he that was pushing Lee to return to superheroes and pitching concepts while imploring Lee to tell Goodman the time to return to costumed characters was now. Consider that Kirby had recently just done Green Arrow and Challengers of the Unknown at DC before returning to Atlas/Marvel.)

Pg. 98- “There’s little reason to doubt Larry’s account, as he is explicit about how little he cares about his comics career and is never eager to claim credit for anything. I ask Larry whether Kirby came up with the initial stories without any input from Stan; he replies, “Maybe he did. See, I was never there when the two of them were there.”

Pg. 100– “However, there is at least one instance of Stan’s admitting that Kirby would usually dictate the plot himself. It is a damning one, the closest to a smoking gun that you’ll find. He did an interview around 1965, back when few cared about credit, and said the following:

• “Some artists, of course, need a more detailed plot than others. Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean, I’ll just say to Jack, “Let’s let the next villain be Doctor Doom”… or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He’s so good at plots, I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I. He just about makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing… I may tell him that he’s gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I’ll give him a plot, but we’re practically both the writers on the things.”

• (I find it tremendous that Lee admits he will occasionally give Kirby a plot. 1965 Stan is telling the truth that Kirby is the main generator of the story. I’m also in the minority of Lee critics who believe Lee’s dialogue brought something to the readers of that era, whereas Kirby’s dialogue may have gone over their heads. Consider that I do not mean that as a critique of Kirby’s dialogue but more a comment on the readers of that time, who called Stan Lee the “Homer” of their generation, etc.)

• (I also would like to point out that I’m surprised Riesman didn’t choose here to showcase the Challengers of the Unknown, especially issue #3 from 1958. In this story, Challenger Rocky goes up in an experimental rocket, comes back to Earth and emerges both deranged but with newfound powers such as the ability to generate flames and turn invisible. The closeness with this and the first issue of the Fantastic Four are beyond coincidence. Riesman mentions them briefly a few pages later, but nothing consequential except that Kirby mentioned them “only glancingly”.)

Pg. 109– “But a few years later, Stan started to present a different account, one we might call the Joan version. In this one, it was his wife who promoted him to get the gumption to shake up his process and create the FF. The earliest use of the Joan Version that I can find was published in 1969, when Stan told an interviewer about how he’d been frustrated by his comics work and had been longing to produce things outside the medium.”

Pg. 110– “Then Stan sort of merged these two previous versions into an account that we might call the Martin-and-Joan Version. In 1974, Stan wrote at length about the FF’s real-life beginnings, in a book called Origins of Marvel Comics, and he said the process began during a conversation between him and Joan about comics and his various gigs in other media.”

Pg. 110- “This iteration, too, was tossed by the wayside with time and replaced by a slightly but revealingly altered one, the most commonly repeated one todich we might call the Quitting Version.”

Pg. 111– “And yet, even in this final version, the story would change. Sometimes Stan said Joan told him to do comics the way he wanted to do them first and then the pitch from Goodman came next; sometimes, vice versa. Sometimes he didn’t even mention the Goodman part, only the Joan part. Sometimes there was a golf game; sometimes it was just information that Goodman had gathered in an undefined way. In short: it’s hard to synthesize what, exactly, Stan wanted his fans to believe about the FF’s creation- though by the end of the line, one message was clear: Other than drawing the characters, Kirby had nothing to do with coming up with them.”

Pg. 118– “The problems with this narrative are twofold. For one thing, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone was inviting Stan onto the radio to talk about Marvel during the time when Thor was conceived. Given the many months required to produce a comic in those days, this supposed interview would have had to occur in late 1961, mere weeks after the debut of the Fantastic Four and before even the Hulk had first appeared.”

Pg. 118– “What’s more, Stan had previously displayed no interest in Norse myths, not even in his own accounts of his youth. In stark contrast, Kirby had a long-standing and public fascination with such legends- indeed, he had already done not one but two comics stories starring different versions of Thor in the fifties, one at DC and one for Goodman.”

Pg. 131– “Perhaps more important, the writer/artists weren’t being paid for the massive amounts of writing they were doing. Stan was getting freelance cash for his writing duties, given that his staff job was still as the editor, but guys like Kirby and Ditko, who were laboring without the benefits of staff positions, were also being denied writer’s fees that were by all rights theirs.

On the rare occasions when writer/artists did speak up, Stan was known to shoot them down.”

Pg. 132–  “Stan began talking trash about his writer/artists, too. In a letter to fanzine editor Jerry Bails, Stan blithely insulted an idea Ditko had proposed. “Well, we have a new character in the works for Strange Tales (just a 5-page filler named DR. STRANGE-),” he wrote. “Steve Ditko is gonna draw him. Sort of a black magic theme. The first story is nothing great, but perhaps we can make something of him- ‘twas Steve’s idea, and I figgered we’d give it a chance, although again, we had to rush the first one too much.”

Doctor Strange would go on to become a key member of the Marvel pantheon, and Stan later claimed it was all his idea: “In July of 1963 I gifted the world with another favorite of mine, Dr. Strange,” he wrote in Excelsior.)

Pg. 134– “In what is possibly his first appearance on film outside home movies, he looks and sounds nothing like the toupee-wearing, bespectacled, hey-now-how-ya-doin’ character he would later become.”

Pg. 141– “O’Neil has a slightly more cynical eye when it comes to his memories of starting out with Stan. “He was the first man I ever knew who really wanted to be rich and famous,” O’Neil recalls. “One of the first jobs he gave me the first week I worked for him was to look into the possibility of him getting an honorary degree. I guess I qualified because I was a college graduate. But I said, ‘I don’t know anything about this, and my impression is, they have to invite you, it’s not something you can apply for.’”

Pg. 144- “While chatting with Freedland that day, Stan tore into Ditko with his signature passive-aggression. “I don’t plot Spider-Man anymore,” he told the reporter. “Steve Ditko, the artist, has been doing the stories. I guess I’ll leave him alone until sales start to slip. Since Spidey got so popular, Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world. We were arguing so much over plotlines I told him to start making up his own stories.”

Pg. 149– “But the period between Ditko’s departure and Stan’s eventual assumption of the publisher’s chair was one in which he lost Kirby, then his writing duties, and ultimately saw his glory days come to a close. This era was as good as life ever got for Stan, but he remain unsatisfied, and, due to events both within and beyond his control, he would never again feel the mix of achievement and respect that the era brought.”

Pg. 152– “That dispute over credit lay in the future, but Kirby was being disrespected and underpaid in the present as of 1966, as well, despite Stan’s efforts at ameliorating the situation.”

• (I just learned a new word, thanks Jo. “ameliorating”- though I never consider myself to be a ‘real’ writer, this sort of thing just smacks me in the face to remind me I’m not!)

Pg. 152– “That year brought the debut of a whole line of Marvel merchandise- T-shirts, posters, and the like- which was fed to a hungry and growing consumer base. The items almost exclusively featured artwork by Kirby. He received no extra payment for this use of his work.”

Pg. 163– “Throughout their marriage, Joan was a profligate spender. By the reports of others and Stan’s own admissions, she had something of a shopping addiction and accumulated piles of jewelry and strange tchotchkes: statues of animals, excavated minerals, and the like. Stan loved his wife deeply and, as such, rarely turned her down.”

Pg. 166- “The deal was a mixed bag for Stan. On the one hand, Ackerman had made it clear to Goodman that he very much wanted the ever-more-famous Stan to stick around as the public face of Marvel Comics. But at the same time, other than reportedly getting a five-year contract (probably the first formal employment contract he’d ever had) with provisions for a raise, Stan would not share in the windfall profit that Goodman had coming to him, despite all his labor over the decades.”

Pg. 167- Stan’s dialogue played with fire, putting words like “whitey”, “Uncle Tom”, and “soul-brother” into black characters’ mouths and depicting Peter (Parker) as telling them to see the administration’s side of the story and yelling, “Anyone can paint a sign, mister! That doesn’t make you right!”

Pg. 173- “To the audience’s surprise, Stan used some of his time to denounce comics in bitter terms. “I would say that the comic-book market is the worst market there is on the face of the Earth for creative talent, and the reasons are numberless and legion.”

Pg. 173– “The article revealed that, at this point, Stan was actually coming to the office only two days a week- Tuesdays and Thursdays- and was spending the other five days at home, writing.”

Pg. 179– “The plan was for Chip (Goodman) to take over as publisher of Marvel Comics. “Stan was very unhappy about that,” recalls Roy Thomas. “They just didn’t get along well and Stan was increasingly restive at that stage.” Stan, it seems, executed a plan to seize control and expel the Goodmans from his professional life, once and for all. “Martin had his son working there, and he told Cadence that he wanted the son to be the publisher after he left,” Stan would recall late in life. “I said to Cadence, ‘If he’s the publisher, I’m quitting.’”

Pg. 184– “All of these comics bore a new heading on their title pages: STAN LEE PRESENTS. Even when he wasn’t doing anything to directly create a given comic book, his name still came first in the credits.”

Pg. 185– “He signed with a lecture-coordination agency called the American Program Bureau, which put together promotional materials touting his genius: a one-sheet text biography recounting the origin and evolution of Marvel (Jack Kirby was nowhere to be found and Goodman wasn’t mentioned by name, only as “someone else” who used to run the company) and a goofy comic strip in which a superheroic Stan was envisioned as “Speaker-Man:, flying to the rescue of program directors.”

Pg. 189– “Stan and Martin Goodman were estranged all the way until Goodman’s death in 1992, and the former would often denigrate the latter in interviews as the years wore on. Near Stan’s own death, he did an onstage interview where he was particularly blunt about the relative without whom he would never have had a career. In recounting the origin story of Spider-Man, he said Goodman had been initially skeptical about the character- that part Stan had said many times before- but punctuated the anecdote by saying, “I got to do the kind of books I wanted to do, not the kinds of things that moron wanted.” The audience laughed and cheered, but Stan didn’t crack a smile. “As you can tell,” he said, “I was not his biggest fan.”

• (I’ve never understood Lee’s seldom but consistent modern slagging of Goodman and can only speculate it’s a psychological thing in that Lee knew how indebted to Goodman he was and resented it.)

Pg. 191– “When I ask (Gerry) Conway for his general estimation of Stan, he pauses for a moment and replies, “He’s a good guy. He’s just not a great guy.” That comment is revealing. Talk to anyone who worked for Stan in his days as publisher and they’ll tell you something similar or at least allude to it.”

Pg. 199– “He also got to taste success in a medium he’d once tried to escape to: newspaper comic strips. January 1977 saw the debut of The Amazing Spider-Man in newspapers across the country, with art from Romita and writing from Stan- at least ostensibly. In fact, despite his writing credit, Stan was just doing the meager dialogue each strip contained, while a succession of Marvel Comics writers came up with the plots- for a fraction of the pay Stan was receiving from the strip’s syndicate. It was the Marvel Method multiplied, but no one seemed to mind much.

Pg. 205– “But when he made his rare visits to the Marvel offices in New York, he demonstrated that he was completely out of the loop as to what was going on in the comics he was ostensibly publishing.”

Pg. 215– “It’s hard to overstate how much of an impact these sorts of statements had among people who took comics seriously. Previously, you had to have dug pretty deep and made some wild extrapolations to believe that Stan wasn’t the primary writer on the classic Marvel stories. Now, here was the only other man in the room when the books were hashed out, telling the world that Stan had virtually nothing to do with what was put on the finished page. Kirby was a trusted and venerated figure- in no small part due to the cult of personality Stan had built up around him- so his words carried substantial weight.”

Pg. 216– “What was Stan’s response to this full-frontal assault? For the most part, it was condescension. “Well, I think that Jack has taken leave of his senses,” he told an interviewer.”

• (Pg. 231–  I am fascinated by a list of pitches that Lee created for Whoopi Goldberg in the nineties, after meeting her at Fabio’s birthday party– that’s a sentence I never thought I’d type, I’m sure Riesman felt the same way- and, apparently, Goldberg made small talk with Lee and said she’d like to be a superhero. (I genuinely wonder if she was just being polite?)

• Lee’s pitches are- I’m not kidding- Femizon, a “waitress who drinks a concoction made by an eccentric nutritionist and gains supernatural strength”, Chasity Jones, the offspring of an alien and human whose power is “to be sexually irresistible to men”, which Lee states “It’s a power any woman would want!”, before concluding with- wait for it- Baaad Girl, the child of a woman impregnated by Satan. I wonder if any of these 21^st century companies putting out “new” Stan Lee concepts will go for any of these characters?)

Pg. 246– “Simultaneously, Stan was in negotiations with Marvel to establish a new contract with them, and, on November 17^th, 1998, they signed a deal whereby Stan would continue to act as a figurehead for Marvel in exchange for $810,000 a year, with annual raises capping at $1 million, pensions for Joan and JC, $125,000 a year for the still-ongoing Spider-Man newspaper strip, stock options, and a 10 percent cut of Marvel’s film and television profits.

However, there was also a clause that would prove problematic in the future: He signed away to Marvel “forever throughout the universe all right, title and interest solely and exclusively which you may have or control or which you may have had or controlled” to the characters he claimed to have created in his work for them. In Marvel’s eyes, this meant an extra layer of reinforcement in the foundations of their edifice.”

• (This secures what Cadence began in 1974 with Origins of Marvel Comics and, again, the corporation buys out Lee and places him as figurehead/creator for the sole fact of controlling and owning intellectual properties actually largely created by freelance work-for-hire artists. Also, note that Lee was getting $125,000 a year for the Spider-Man syndicated strip and Roy Thomas began ghostwriting it around 2001 and later stated Lee never ever gave him a raise “for the entire 18 and a half years I did it”, as Thomas put it. LOL!)

Pg. 249– “So Stan and (Peter) Paul issued an open letter, published in August 1999 on Stan Lee Media stationary for anyone to see, in which Stan declared, in part, “I have always considered Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s creator.” This failed to satisfy Ditko, who put out a pamphlet in which he made a compelling point about the presence of Spidey, whom he visually designed, on Marvel’s official documents: “Check Marvel’s stationery, mailing labels. Which creation is used? Word or art? Name or costume?”

That may seem like a pedantic distinction, but Ditko turned out to be on to something: In subsequent years, Stan made it clear that his use of the term “co-creator” was a purely formal effort, one that he didn’t truly believe in.”

Pg. 277– “A few months after the merger, the first book-length biography of Stan was released, Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael’s Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book. If the Arturion shareholders read it, they would not have been pleased, given that the slim volume contained skepticism about Stan’s creative claims at Marvel. Stan had agreed to be interviewed for it and, near the end of the tome, one could find yet another quote from him about how he wished he’d been successful in a bigger venue: “I didn’t have any big compulsion to write comics. It was a way of making a living,” he said.

Pg. 282– “It also appears that Stan looked the other way when Anderson was convicted of abuse again and served probation in 2010, this time for choking and hitting his son with a belt. Anderson, who had to undergo court-mandated counseling, would later claim to be repentant and a changed man, but rumors of his violent tendencies never stopped circulating.”

• (Included because of the incident I have alluded to in the past when having to mention Max Anderson; he did indeed try to get tough with me in 2008 at a private function- one day I will tell the whole story but let me again reiterate I was not even speaking and certainly not to Anderson when he began randomly berating me (of all people) in a loud voice out of nowhere.)

Pg. 282-283– “The process of creating these products could be bizarre, rocky, and slipshod. For example, in the mid-aughts, the Sci-Fi Channel signed a deal with POW to make a movie called Stan Lee’s Harpies, but, as with Stripperella, the title was literally all the creative direction that the initial deal consisted of.”

• (It is still utterly amazing to me that 100% of every Stan Lee “project” in the late 20^th/early 21^st century was greenlit purely and completely on vague public awareness of his status as a creator of Marvel Comics of the past.)

Pg. 284- “They took a meeting with (Gill) Champion present, in which Lester presented the concept: a movie about a superpowered werewolf, tentatively titled Werewolf. “You can always sell werewolves and vampires,” Lester recalls Stan saying.”

• (I included this excerpt just because I found it funny. Imagine how broke you or someone you know is right now and then imagine the tens of thousands of dollars spent on Stan Lee and his cronies pitching the most absolute fucking dreck in Los Angeles, just to fund POW! Entertainment.)

Pg. 305– “We were the mercenaries”, says Jonathan Bolerjack, a Southern lilt in his voice.

• (I know what use of the word ‘mercenaries’ Bolerjack means, but it’s still hilarious to consider him saying it with a hint of machismo and implied danger, like a dork like him or Max Anderson could ever be perceived as dangerous, soldier-of-fortune types. And it’s generous of Riesman to say his voice has a “Southern lilt” rather than “obnoxiously fucking nasal” which is the correct way to describe Bolerjack’s grating voice.)

Pg. 306– “I guess the one skill you needed was to be a really good bullshitter”, he says with a smile. “That’s what you needed to get in. You needed to know either how to kiss ass or bullshit your way into something. But also- it’s like anything else- nepotism. Someone liked you.”

• (Wow. This is pretty blatant admission from Bolerjack, and distinctively different in how he describes his role and intentions in 2025, when he’s hustling a terrible documentary. I’m gonna hazard an educated guess that Mark Waid also didn’t read “True Believer” in 2021, so he didn’t know about Bolerjack’s bullshitting when he endorsed Bolerjack’s as-yet-unreleased film.)

Pg. 306– “There is no way to sugarcoat Stan’s final act. From the minute Joan died until his own passing sixteen months later, he was beset by malign forces that sought to extract maximum value from an ailing and depressed man in his nineties.”

Pg. 316- “It is within this category that some of the most troubling audio exists. On a number of occasions, I heard Stan making racist, homophobic, and misogynist remarks either to or in discussion of JC. “I think you’re the dumbest white woman I’ve ever known!” he screams at her in one (to which she replies, “Fuck you, Stan”). In another, Stan talks to (Keya) Morgan about JC and says she’s “supposed to be an attractive lady,” but instead, she’s “like the worst lesbian you can imagine.”

At one point, JC tells Stan she’s going to adopt an African American baby (something that others in the inner circle say became a brief obsession for her), and Stan grunts back at her, “The hell you want a black baby for?”

Pg. 323– “Another public shock arrived after Morgan took Stan to the Silicon Valley Comic Con on April 8^th and set him up for his autograph session. Bystanders took cellphone video of Stan signing, and it quickly went viral in geek circles. The footage showed a near-passed-out Stan struggling to hold his pen and having to be told by a looming, dark-suited, and bowler-hatted Morgan that his name was spelled S-T-A-N L-E-E-.

Pg. 330– “Less than a day after news of his death went worldwide, JC appeared on the television show of online ultra-tabloid TMZ to enthusiastically talk about how she was going to soon unveil a new superhero that she and her dad had created (though insiders say it was just her) called Dirt Man. That same day brought an announcement from POW’s parent company, saying that fans shouldn’t worry, because plenty of Stan Lee products and projects were still on the horizon.”

…all in all, this book was a success, but I was somewhat surprised to see that it did not herald in a new understanding and approach to covering Lee. The response from Disney/Marvel and compromised comic professionals doubled down almost in a proactive campaign towards any prospective new readers picking up Riesman’s book and figuring out that Stan was not always The Man they’d been told he was.

I did not find Riesman at all unfair or with a sinister agenda and, in retrospect, am surprised that people like Busiek and Brevoort (who, admittedly, can be less harsh and dismissive in public discourse than creators like Isabella) found it overwhelmingly negative. Was Larry Lieber’s actual real-life experiences just too negative to bear? Riesman approached it with less sentimentality and more journalistic tendencies, which bore out results as we find no factual documentation of many of Lee’s claims. What was Riesman to do then? Share the results and report the facts.

As many other writers have suggested, there isn’t any “Rosebud” for Stan Lee- he did not contain multitudes per se, and the only layer of complexity was his own feeling that he was above the industry that made him a global icon, that toiling in the comics medium was beneath him. Literally, this is how he felt. How he reconciled it and how he resented Martin Goodman is all the depth you can plumb with this guy.

Now that I think of it, it makes complete sense that new generations of “geek culture” would embrace and anoint someone as transparent, if genial, as Lee to be their Godhead. As he really stood for nothing outside of sustaining his position and had no great creative passions to define his character or output, he can be whatever they imbue him with, a symbol of endless regurgitated hype and nostalgic comfort. An empty mask, celebrated by legions of people who, like their hero, also have no original ideas of their own.

Thanks to Josephine Abraham Riesman, Jordan Raphael, the late Tom Spurgeon, JC Lee, and legions of Merry Marvel Marching Society members. Max Anderson would like to send thanks to ME for not beating the shit out of him in 2008.