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Roy Thomas, Former Marvel Editor, Pushes Back on New Stan Lee Biography (Guest Column) - Hollywood Reporter
Feb 23, 2021 8 mins, 41 secs
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.

Thus nakedly, on the third page of his introduction, does Riesman articulate what we soon discover to be the main thesis of his new book, which chronicles the life and legacy of the talented New Yorker who, from 1941 through 1972, was both the chief editor and a major writer for the company now hailed as Marvel Comics, and who, from the 1980s on, was more a spokesman (some claim a huckster) for Marvel, for comics — and, yes, I'd hardly deny it — for himself.

I soon realized that, as much as he respected the talents and contributions of artists (Riesman would say "artist/writers" and he's right, at least in one sense) such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to the characters introduced in the 1960s, he could never really bring himself, in his own mind, to think of them as "co-creators." The two of us had to agree to disagree, and I never saw any use in bringing it up again.

If I can judge from Riesman's writings, and from other sources over the years, I'm sure I'd have encountered the same kind of blinders-on stubbornness in Jack Kirby (oft-quoted in this book), who saw Stan as little more than the guy who scribbled a few words of dialogue and rode to unearned glory on his back?

(By the way, if someone objects to my referring to Jack Kirby as well by his first name, it's because the two of us were on a first-name basis from 1965 till the last time we met, sometime in the 1980s. I considered him then, and I consider him now, to be by far the greatest superhero artist in the history of the medium, and, along with Stan, one of its preeminent pop-culture geniuses.).

For one thing, just a dozen pages into the book, Reisman informs us that Stan "lied about little things, he lied about big things, he lied about strange things," adding that Stan quite likely lied about "one massive, very consequential thing" that, if so, "completely changes his legacy." (By saying "quite likely," Riesman puts the burden of proof on himself to demonstrate that Stan was lying about coming up with the basic idea for some, if not necessarily for each, of the early Marvel heroes — and he never really does. He simply weighs Stan's statements against Jack's, without offering any real evidence that Jack's memories are any more reliable than Stan's. In fact, he will later cite a number of instances in which they are not, but here he tosses in that "quite likely" just the same.).

Then, on the very next page, he puts flesh on his earlier "bullshitter" depiction by writing: "It's very possible, maybe even probable, that the characters and plots Stan was famous for all sprang from the brain and pen of [artist/writer Jack] Kirby.".

And he weights things toward Jack's viewpoint with statements like the foregoing despite the fact that, for instance, partial synopses written by Stan for two of the first eight issues of the crucial Marvel flagship title Fantastic Four (including No. 1) have been vouched for as existing since the 1960s.

The "significant reason to suspect the synopsis was written after Stan and Kirby spoke" in person about the FF concept.

And 2: Kirby is quoted as once saying of that synopsis: "I've never seen it, and of course I would say it's an outright lie." So on this occasion, Stan Lee is apparently lying by coming up with that synopsis — but Jack Kirby, who Riesman points out told a whopper or three himself, isn't lying when he says he never saw it?

1, at a time when virtually nobody, except me once in a while, was asking him how the Marvel Age of Comics had started, and when there had not yet been any public or private disputes between Lee and Kirby over the creation of the Fantastic Four or other Marvel heroes.

Yet Riesman says it's "maybe even probable" that the Fantastic Four (and much else at Marvel) came solely from Kirby's admittedly fertile brain.  Why is it "maybe even probable"?  No supportable reason is given.

Among them: Susan Storm being an "actress" (there was never any mention of this in the series); Reed Richards' intention of flying his completed rocket "to Mars" (in FF No. 1, they're trying vaguely to make it to "outer space" or "to the stars"); Ben Grimm being listed as a newly hired pilot (he acts more like a longtime colleague in the synopsis); Susan's inability to become visible again (with Stan writing that later she'd have to wear a face-like mask in order to be seen, adding, "Talk to me about that, Jack — maybe we'll change the gimmick somewhat"); and that Grimm "has a crush on Susan" (there was just one passing reference to this — and then never again for the rest of the series.).

Perhaps the synopsis for the remainder of that story was sent to Jack later and wasn't preserved — or maybe it was merely covered in a follow-up phone call with details left to the artist, since the yarn's ending as printed harks back to a horror story Kirby had drawn in the 1950s.

Three pages of typed-out Stan Lee synopsis material seem to still exist from the first year of Fantastic Four — and Riesman doesn't think one of them is worth so much as a mention.

Could it be, I couldn't help wondering, because the heady amount of story detail in the FF part-synopsis undercut his thesis that Jack Kirby did it all, and that Stan Lee "merely" added the precise dialogue and captions that floated over the heads of the characters

Even regarding the story Stan told of his high school days, when he was impressed by an older kid's classroom spiel intended to sell subscriptions to The New York Times, Riesman says that much of the tale "may well be apocryphal" — though he gives not a single reason why we should distrust Stan's account. (That kid definitely existed, at least. Riesman can find a photo of him in my 2018 Taschen book The Stan Lee Story.)

(Riesman dismisses this as "either poor memory or an exaggeration.") Jack also seems to have stated numerous times that he held Stan personally responsible for artist Joe Maneely falling to his death from a commuter train in 1958 — that it was due to "overwork" caused by Stan — a totally unsupported analysis that seems pretty much like sheer vindictiveness on Jack's part, but which Riesman pretty much lets slide

Jack Kirby did do an increasing amount of the plotting of individual stories as time went along and the demands on Stan of overseeing the expanding Marvel line kept growing

In fact, as Riesman's quotes testify, Stan often — not invariably, but often — gave Jack credit for doing much, even most of the actual plotting on individual storylines

By mid-1966, Stan, eager to accommodate Jack, stopped listing himself as "writer" in the credits and readily agreed to the mutual credit Jack suggested: "Produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby." If Jack wanted still more credit than that, it doesn't seem he ever made his wishes clearly known to Stan

To Stan, it wasn't all that important whose idea a particular story was; what mattered was that it sold comic books, and Stan had every reason to believe that both his editorial guidance and his command of the dialogue contributed materially to that popularity

No, Jack may not have gotten rich drawing comics — few of us did — but the decade from 1959 to 1970 that he was employed full-time by Marvel Comics was probably the most financially stable job that he ever had in the comics industry, a field not exactly known for offering long-term security

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

Maybe the later-despised "controversial Marvel Method" (as Riesman anoints it) of doing a story is one reason that Marvel writers' rates generally tended to lag behind DC's for some years: so that the artists could be paid as well as possible

On page 99 of his book, Riesman makes a more-or-less blanket statement that "critically, no script was written" before the artist drew it following "some kind of discussion between writer and artists" — but he's demonstrably wrong on that

Maybe Stan quit writing synopses for Kirby and Ditko (and the credits eventually reflected that), but I myself began scripting for Marvel in July of 1965, and with relatively few exceptions of stories plotted or partly plotted over the phone (usually so an artist could make some money by starting work a day or so sooner on a story), I wrote out my synopses — usually two or three or more pages for a 20-page story

Riesman even either misunderstands Stan's brother, Larry Lieber, on the way many of the early Marvel stories were written — or else, back in 1999, Larry was totally misremembering when he told me in an interview for Alter Ego that, to the best of his recollection, every single story he wrote was done in the script-in-advance format, never by the Marvel Method: "A full script is the only way I know how to write."

All that said: If you slice and dice the more-than-occasional bits of unhealthy fat off Riesman's book — the places where he goes off on unsupported flights of fancy to declare on his own recognizance that "Kirby … may well have been the sole creator of the whole kit and caboodle" of Marvel concepts and characters — you wind up with a book that could be a welcome, even major addition to the handful of Stan Lee biographies written to date

But, no matter how well the Random House publicity machine manages to hype this book, as long as it stands as currently published, with Stan all but written off as an inveterate liar whose most important creation was his public persona (when it was actually the concept and direction of the Marvel Universe, an idea that was anathema to Jack Kirby, as per in-book quotes), it will remain undeserving of the high praise heaped upon it by people who, for the most part, don't really know what the hell they're talking about

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