Some years ago it became stylish to trash Stan Lee.
I’m not entirely sure why. It might be because they had it right in “The Dark Knight”: You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. That might have well been the situation in Stan Lee’s case.
The accusations were that Stan did nothing to promote the legendary artists who created the characters with him. The typical complaint was that Stan was rich while the others were struggling, and that was unfair, and Stan had no business being declared the co-creator of Fantastic Four or Spider-Man or the Mighty Thor or Doctor Strange or the Incredible Hulk. We were increasingly told the characters were the sole creations of the artists and horrible old Stan just stuck his name on them and tried to take all the credit. I’ll never forget when Jack Kirby stated in Comics Journal that he had gotten the idea for the Hulk by watching a news report about a frantic mother who, because she was so upset, had enough strength to lift a car that was pinning her struggling child to the ground. And Jack thought, “What if we did a hero who, when he got really angry, changed into a super strong monster!” Great idea…except in the Hulk’s origin the transition was brought about by the rise of the moon, like a werewolf. Anger had nothing to do with it and wasn’t established until years later. I’m not saying Kirby knowingly lied. I’m just saying memories can be problematic and claiming that all credit should be taken away after the fact based on differing memories is a slippery slope.
This of course also ignored the fact that while DC was still publishing comics with no creator names on the title page, Stan broke from that tradition and slapped the artists’ names right on the credits page. While DC artists labored in anonymity, Stan gave us King Kirby, Stainless Steve Ditko, Jazzy Johnny Romita, Genial Gene Colan. We would have known none of those names if it wasn’t for Stan. DC editors privately dubbed him “Stan Brag” because they thought taking credit wasn’t…I dunno…gentlemanly. At least, they thought that until they started doing it, too.
Yes, he was richer than the artists. But he was also an executive at Marvel, and spent pretty much every day of his waking life promoting the Marvel heroes, the Marvel philosophy, the Marvel artists, and the Marvel brand. He toured colleges all over the country, doing endless Q&As.
Are there still people who despise him? Oh yeah. But I think he thwarted the “Dark Knight” line because his popularity stared to swing back over the years. I believe part of it was his string of cameo appearances in the Marvel movies. Finding Stan transcended finding Hitchcock in his films. People even theorized that he was actually one guy observing the Marvel Universe, and even found affirmation of that when he was filling in the Watchers on all he’d seen in the previous films during a closing credits seen in “Guardians 2.”
Over the years Stan began to reaffirm himself as what he was: the oldest comic book fan alive. How can you keep hating somebody who was clearly just having so much fun? Whose continued presence in the films served to remind you that he was there when it started.
The Village Voice dismissed him as merely a “writer of word balloons.” Yeah, well, compare the word balloons of “Fantastic Four” with Jack Kirby and the word balloons of “New Gods” with Jack Kirby and you’ll realize what a master of dialogue he was. But it’s way more than that. The fact is that the comics industry as it currently exists would not be around if Stan had not only co-created the characters, but made Marvel Comics into what it was:
The House of Ideas.
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