But to subscribe to this line of sanctimonious, simplistic judgement is to fall into the same kind of well-intentioned but ultimately self-defeating, revisionist PC nonsense that the Founding Fathers were just oppressive, old white men, whose roll in American history should be seen as merely a footnote of sorts.
It is also to willfully ignore the fact that everyone involved in the Silver Age of comic books - not just Stan Lee - had faults and failings, and behaved like what they all really were: hungry men and women, trying to eke out a living in an industry that had never been taken seriously, who were as surprised as anyone when the characters populating the comic books coming out of 655 Madison Avenue started shifting serious units, something Marvel publisher Martin Goodman could only have dreamed about just four years earlier, when his comic book empire teetered on the edge of collapse.
Steve Ditko, of course, tops the list of strange personalities that forged Marvel's turnaround in the early 1960s. An Ayn Rand fanatic whose obsession with and devotion to Objectivism dominated his later work, the aloof, taciturn artist who drew the first 38 issues of Amazing Spider-Man, and gave Dr. Strange his ethereal vibe of psychedelic unreality, abruptly left Marvel in 1966, and lived the rest of his life (he just died in June of this year) refusing to grant a formal interview.
Jack Kirby, who had logged nearly 50 years in the industry by the time he started his well-publicized fight with Lee over ownership of his original art and credit as a co-creator of the titles he worked on with Lee, already knew how cutthroat the comic book business was. He certainly deserved his art and co-creator credit on all those books, but the notion that he was an innocent, wronged by the merciless Stan Lee, is shortsighted and one-dimensional. (In fact, Kirby had been involved in the losing end of a lawsuit with DC comics' editor Jack Schiff just prior to his arrival at Marvel in 1958.)
The denouement of this suddenly fashionable pursuit of trash talking Lee came in the form of The Comics Journal #181 (October 1995), with their cover story "Step Right Up! The Three Ring Career of: Stan Lee." Never an obsequious industry mouthpiece, the Journal's Gregory Cwiklik wrote a critical - but fair - piece about Lee, followed by a juvenile hatchet job by Paul Wardle. Other sections dealt with Lee and Kirby - natch' - and in another section, artists, writers and editors weighed in about their relationships or dealings with Lee.
So, in case you were wondering, or still hadn't gotten the news yet, The Comics Journal wanted to make it plain and simple for you: Lee may have made himself out to be an important, avuncular character in the comic book industry, but there are many reasons why you should consider not liking him.
Stan Lee was a flawed human being, same as the rest of us. He almost certainly let much of Marvel's 60s and 70s success go to his head. He never gave the artists at Marvel in the 60s half the credit they were due, and he should have humbly given Kirby what he wanted in the 80s without any fuss. A lot of the barbed criticism he endured over the last 40 years is deserved.
But it is garish understatement to say that Stan Lee's negative attributes were far, far outweighed by his positives. Stanley Martin Lieber was an American treasure. Although known primarily for his work in the 1960s co-creating the famous Marvel superheroes that presently populate the wildly successful Marvel Cinematic Universe, Lee's fingerprints are all over the whole of comic book history.
Barely a year after Action #1 launched comic books' Golden Age, Lee was hired on - through a family connection - to Martin Goodman's fledgling Timely Comics in 1939, happy to be off the mean streets of Depression-era New York City. And accusations of nepotism would certainly be fair if the sixteen-year-old Lee had done nothing but twiddle his thumbs and collect a paycheck from Goodman. But instead, he did everything: He did odd jobs around the office. Then he wrote text filler stories in Captain America Comics (the kind that allowed comic book publishers to save money and send their subscriptions second class mail, the same rate assigned to magazines). Then he co-created some lesser known superheroes like Jack Frost. Then he fell into the role of editor at Timely after the departure of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.
Anyone else would've been happy having all of this as a résumé. But that was just Stan Lee's warm-up act. At 35 years of age, he was very nearly the last man standing at what was then known as Atlas Comics, after the Atlas Implosion - otherwise known as Martin Goodman's disastrous distribution deal with American News Company - left Goodman and Lee as virtually its only employees.
Something happening down the street at rival National Periodical Publications (DC, whom now, in fact, distributed Goodman's comic book line, their draconian contract allowing Atlas only eight titles per month, a sliver of National's output) gave Lee, four years after the Implosion, the opportunity to turn his creativity loose: Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino revamped The Flash in Showcase #4.
Superhero comics fell on hard times after World War II, but the new Flash and National's very popular Justice League of America made them popular all over again. Martin Goodman, whose business acumen for decades had consisted of simply hopping on bandwagons, told Lee, "maybe we ought to do some superheroes." The result, with the help of Kirby and Ditko, was what Lee enjoyed calling The Marvel Age of Comics. Spider-Man, The Avengers, Iron Man, The Hulk - every famous Marvel character sprang from this fertile period when the imaginative Lee and his endlessly talented artistic staff let their imaginations run wild.
Lee started his career at the dawn of the comic book industry, rode it through its golden age when the most popular titles sold millions of copies, persevered through the dark days of Wertheim, Kefauver, and self-censorship, helped revitalized it in the 1960s, and was there when Marvel declared bankruptcy and the industry petered out at the end of the century, turning their superhero comic books into an expense, as Rob Salkowitz wrote, "required to keep the intellectual property assets current and the trademarks up to date."
Stan lived through it all, playing an integral part in creating and developing the characters that now bring in billions of dollars for Marvel Studios. He was proud to see the characters he scripted decades earlier become the dominant force in the movie industry, and he should have been. His co-creations reach into every corner of the globe, entertaining and inspiring millions of boys and girls, men and women, decade after decade.
It was amusing reading the above-mentioned issue of The Comics Journal again all these years later, remembering the folly of Alvin Boretz and even Lou Ferrigno, the years when Donner's Superman reigned supreme and Marvel could do no right on TV or in the movies. For his article in the Journal, Cwiklik wrote "Over the years, a well deserved source of embarrassment for the Marvel organization has been its continuing failure to successfully put onto film any of their popular characters in a form that does justice to them. There has been a succession of unerringly juvenile and/or inane cartoon and TV adaptations and at least one film so bad it's hard to find even on video."
Twenty years later and the tables are turned. It is DC that struggles in the motion picture world, and Marvel whose movies - featuring Stan Lee's co-creations - have attracted an enormous, rabid fan base, and regularly rake in truly obscene sums of money.
Were you one of those ignorant malcontents twenty five years ago saying Stan was a creep? You're not terribly bright. RIP, Stan. Thank you for turning superheroes on their collective head and giving us - with Kirby, Ditko, Wallace Wood, et al - our favorite, most enduring characters. The acrimony from all those years ago has dissipated, and you're widely remembered as someone who showed all of us who grew up reading Marvel Comics how tremendous life can get.
As it should be.
