True Believer

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

True Believer is as the subtitle indicates: the story of the rise and fall of Stan Lee.

I've been a comic fan for about 40 years now. I originally encountered Stan Lee as the narrator of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. In the years since, my opinion of him has evolved into thinking of him as a huckster used car salesman and glory thief. This book did nothing to enhance his reputation in my eyes.

The book chronicles the life and death of Stan Lee, from his birth as Stanley Lieber during the Great Depression to the sad shit show his life became after the death of his wife. People criticize Abraham Riesman's take on Stan Lee but I've read other books that paint him in a similar light so I don't really see why this book is getting the attention it does. Maybe because the Marvel movies are so huge and Stan's death is fairly recent?

Anyway, Riesman puts it all out there, every shitty thing that Stan has done, every lie that he's been caught in, from the possibility of getting Simon and Kirby fired from Captain America in the 1940s to hogging all the credit for the creation of the modern Marvel universe in 1961 to being a millionaire who couldn't be bothered to help out his brother Larry Lieber at all during his lifetime.

Maybe some people are panning this book because it destroys the myth of Stan Lee being a jolly grandpa that loves comics. There are a lot of similarities between Stan Lee and Vince McMahon. Both of them achieved their greatest successes when attached to the best talents of their generation and coasted on their reputations and promotional skills the rest of the time. Both of them claim to be self made but each of them were given a leg up by their relatives. Both of them don't actually seem to like the business they're in and would rather be making movies.

In the Wizard of Oz, the Wizard is also called Professor Marvel. I find this amusing because that's who Stan Lee wound up reminding me of the most. Behind the Stan Lee public curtain, there's a hack writer named Stanley Lieber who toiled in obscurity for twenty years before he had the opportunity of a lifetime dropped into his lap. When that opportunity came, he squeezed the shit out of it for the next 50+ years.

The last section of the book was a sad grotesque shit show of manipulation, fraud, and elder abuse. Was it karma for the way he treated Kirby, Ditko, and the others? If it was, karma is a real mother fucker.

If you already dislike Stan Lee, this book adds plenty of fuel to the fire. It probably would feel like a personal attack if you think he's some kind of creative genius. I think he was a great self promoter but I don't know if he had much creative talent. I have to think if he did, he wouldn't have spent 2o years toiling for Martin Goodman writing mediocre material. If you have Jack Kirby writing and drawing six books a month and all you have to do is script them, it has to be hard to fuck up something like that. It's telling that he was never again able to catch lightning in a bottle after he no longer had Kirby and Ditko at his disposal. The fact that he avoided giving them even a little credit at times speaks volumes about his character.

I'm giving this four stars. It was a powerful, eye opening read but I can't exactly say I enjoyed reading it.


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