For decades, the title page of every Marvel superhero comic said “Stan Lee Presents”-no wonder we want to know who he really was. Even as they dominate popular culture, superheroes-the flawed kind, the weird kind, the kind Marvel pioneered-can stand for exclusion, for queerness, for disability, for all manner of real or perceived oppression, marshalling enough power to blast their enemies into the sun. Americans who can’t identify Achilles or Botswana know Wakanda as a high-tech nation in Africa, Loki as a Norse god who’s up to no good, and Peter Parker as the original Spider-Man. Figures that Lee co-created, or said he created, revived a genre that had been on its last legs, helping to launch them from drugstore spinner racks to the screen. Another reason is honesty: audiences believe that Lee created those characters, and his lifelong habit of taking credit has stoked fans’ and journalists’ wish to get at the truth.Īnd then there’s the cultural dominance that superheroes, especially Marvel ones, have attained. Though Lee gave up his stake in the intellectual property years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe began, money kept flowing his way. Nine of the thirty top-grossing films in history use Marvel characters. Why should we care? One answer is money-lots of it. To give a full account of Stan Lee, as Abraham Riesman sets out to do in a new biography, “ True Believer” (Crown), is to contend not just with his presence in popular culture (the smiling oldster in sunglasses, with a cameo in each Marvel film) but with the fluid nature of artistic collaboration, and so with endless debates over which parts of the comics are his. And company-owned superhero comics are plotted, drawn, scripted, and lettered by different people, with creative teams that change over time. Live-action films require directors and actors.

It also raised big questions about-to use two of Lee’s favorite nouns-power and responsibility, since Lee never created a comic alone. Still, if he was going to make comics, he wanted credit. He said that he was saving his birth name for a more respectable project, like a novel. He was as efficient as his older colleagues at churning out scripts, and already distinguished himself in one way: he put his pen name, Stan Lee, on all his work. There, before and after his Army service, and into the decade that followed, Stanley became one of many typists and scribblers providing copy for word balloons and prose for the books’ filler pages. In the early nineteen-forties, decades before he was Stan the Man, the impresario of the Marvel Universe, Stanley Martin Lieber fetched coffee, took notes, and sat on desks playing the piccolo-or perhaps the ocarina-in the offices of his uncle’s comic-book company.

Sean howe marvel