Front Burner - Stan Lee's legacy is as complicated as the Marvel Universe

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

The day after Stan Lee's death, we look at the comic book legend's impact on popular culture. And New York Magazine and Vulture staff writer Abraham Riesman explains why Stan Lee's legacy is just a complicated as the superhero stories he helped create.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. To be serious, when you were a kid, and I'm sure you were, you probably loved fairy tales.

Everybody loved fairy tales. But you'd get to be about seven, eight, nine, ten years old, whatever. You're too old for fairy tales. You get to be an adult, you're certainly too old, but you never lose that love for fantasy. Superhero comic strips are really fairy tales for older people. fairy tales for older people. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. That was Stan Lee. The comic book legend died on Monday at 95 years old.

Stan Lee, he ushered in a new era of superheroes, from Spider-Man to Black Panther to the X-Men. And he imagined an entire Marvel universe that went on to dominate the box office. For many, he was Marvel Comics. But like the rich, complex characters he created, the real story of Stan Lee's life was also complicated. Even if the average person who just likes seeing his movie cameos never learns that stuff, there are people who pay attention to the comics industry who will hold on to that to one degree or another. That's today on FrontBurner. My name is Abraham Reisman. I'm a staff writer at New York Magazine, and I profiled Stan Lee in 2016.

Hi, Abraham. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today. It's my pleasure. I mean, it's a sad occasion, but I'm glad to talk to you. I understand you're just in a car on your way back from another interview right now? I understand you're just in a car on your way back from another interview right now? Yes, I was doing another interview and I'm in a car in scenic, very crowded and congested Manhattan right now. I apologize. I'll try to tell everybody to keep it as quiet as they can. Yeah, if you could just let Manhattan know, that would be great. I will too. I know Stan Lee best for his cameos in a lot of Marvel movies.

He's in The Incredible Hulk. Security ought to be beefed up a lot more in a place like this. He's a mailman in the Fantastic Four or a wise Times Square patron in Spider-Man. I know he even made a cameo in Mallrats, but that's a sidebar. Oh, it was the vulture soliloquy, you know, from the Spider-Man anniversary issue, love be a vulture tonight. But he's taken on this iconic status over the years. What do you think it is about him that drew people to him?

He's a quintessentially American story. I mean, he's an incredible salesman. He came from nothing, you know, depression era kid who, you know, had a family connection at this publisher called then called Timely, what later became Marvel, and managed to become this giant in kind of a second act in his life. And I think people were always fascinated by this character that he created for himself, who was a showman and was a beloved uncle or grandfather in pop culture, I think people really responded to his personality and also wanted to be able to put a face

to all of these characters that they cared about so much. And he was more than happy to be that face for them. And let's talk about these characters for a second, these superheroes that he created or helped to create. And I do want to get to that in a minute. But first, can we talk about the superheroes themselves, many of which were created back in the 1960s? And what was so different about them? Well, they were, as Stan was fond of putting it, heroes with feet of clay. These were characters that had personal spats with one another, that had personal life commitments that kept them from being the superheroes they wanted to be. You know, you read them now and everybody reads as being a little bit paper thin.

But at the time, in the 1960s, it was a quantum leap forward for characterization of superheroes. They had been a pretty stoic and dull bunch prior to that. To me, that made them much more interesting. They just weren't all powerful or all good or even all bad, but there were shades of difference. He, along with his collaborators, was able to add a lot of humor and pathos and other elements to these superhero characters that made them this cultural sensation in the 1960s and onward. So would an example of that be like Peter Parker, for example? He's sort of a punk. You know, he doubts himself, which is something I've always kind of admired about that character. Yeah, yeah. Peter Parker's Spider-Man was a character who had a tremendous amount of self-doubt.

That was something that if you were a teenager reading those early Spider-Man comics, you just hadn't seen in comic books before. And it was something that you as a young person could relate to. as a young person could relate to. And it's been the backbone of this character that remains one of the best-known pieces of culture on the planet. I mean, you walk anywhere in the world, you can find somebody wearing a Spider-Man t-shirt. And thanks to Stan and his co-creator for Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, co-creator for Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, this figure was invented that has been a relatable staple and icon ever since.

And what do you think was different about the universe that all of these characters inhabited? So not just Spider-Man, but the past, but no one had really conceived of it the way he did, where he put all of these Marvel characters that he was co-creating into the same world and very much in the same universe as whatever was happening to the others and they would cross over and there would be storylines that uh you know you could only fully understand if you'd read other comics it was a great sales tactic but it also created this richly imagined fictional place where readers could go uh whenever they picked up a marvel comic and And it took a while, but Hollywood eventually figured out that this was a model you could replicate if you're talented enough at it. And that's one of the reasons why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is as popular as it is. Right. You have all of these spinoff movies. All these spinoffs. You have these sub brands that, you know, come together for the mega brand pictures. And that was something that Stan really pioneered.

And it's had a tremendous impact on popular culture and filmed entertainment. Can we talk a little bit about what a champion he was for comics? The kind of advocate he was. He was a huge advocate for the medium of comics. He used to say that anybody who had bad things to say about comics was ignoring the fact that it's just words and pictures. If you had Shakespeare and Michelangelo work together on a comic, then you wouldn't be

complaining about it, was the line that he used to say a lot. Who would dare to say that wasn't an art form? And what's interesting was he also had a healthy disdain for comics. He, you know, famously, his birth name was not Stan Lee, it was Stanley Lieber. And he always claimed that he used the pseudonym Stan Lee because he wanted to save his real name for the great American novel that he was planning to write. Or maybe host the great American game show or something. And I wanted to save my name for bigger things. And, you know, I didn't want Stanley Martin Lieber on comic strips. He never got around to the great American novel, and he eventually even changed his name to legally be Stanley.

But he had something of a mixed relationship with comics. I mean, I think there was part of him that right to the very end still felt like, you know, his career could have been better served if he had been in a more prestigious art form. We'd go to parties and somebody would walk over to me and say, what do you do? And I tried not to say, and I would say, oh, I'm a writer, and I'd walk away. But at the same time, he, more than just about anybody, is responsible for turning the industry around in the 60s and selling it as something that could be cool and socially relevant and emotionally valid. And comics owes him a great debt, and they've lost one of their biggest advocates today. It's so interesting to hear you talk about how this icon himself

might have thought that his job wasn't as cool as maybe other people thought it was. as maybe other people thought it was. This picture that you're painting of Stan Lee is a real innovator. I know that he was beloved by fans, that he's done a lot of work communicating with fans over the years. His reputation, though, is a little bit more complicated than that. It is complicated, yeah. I know that there's a dispute with his former colleagues that has sort of become folklore in a way.

And can you tell me a bit more about that? It gets messy. Basically, Stan undoubtedly co-created this array of characters that he's credited with being the progenitor of. He definitely was out there coming up with ideas and hammering out final scripts for these comics that introduced all the characters that we associate with him. But the artists he was working with were functionally acting as co-writers. It's a little complicated, but they used this method of comics creation where Stan and the artist would come up with a general plot together, and then the artist would go and draw the whole thing without a script. And I would put in the dialogue, and it was a real collaboration. And loved working that way mainly because i'm lazy and i didn't have to write a full script you know steve ditko was the one coming up with the look

for spider-man which is of course now globally iconic and jack kirby was coming up with the look for uh the avengers and the x-men and the controversy lies in the fact that Stan, according to his critics, was never fully appreciative in public of his co-creators, of these artists, these writer-artists who worked with him. You know, in the credits for the comics, he would bill himself first as the writer and then would bill the artist as the artist, even though these artists were coming up with the stories. I mean, they were co-writers. That was just not an accurate depiction of what was going on. Stan was just doing the final dialogue and narration. And there are a lot of people who will never forgive him for not being enough of a champion for the artists that he worked with, champion for the artists that he worked with, for kind of presenting himself as the big ideas guy, you know, as being the person who came up with all these characters, more or less from whole cloth in his own head. And around the end of his life, he started calling his co-creators co-creators as opposed to just calling himself the creator. But he always did it with a level of reluctance

that he would even be open about. I mean, he would just say, I, you know, I'll call Steve Ditko my co-creator, but I still think that the person who came up with the initial idea is the one who deserves the credit. And that was something that really alienated a lot of people who know a lot about the comics industry. And that will always be an asterisk next to his name for certain sectors of geekdom. Right. And I'm going to guess this also didn't go over well with the two illustrators, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Yeah, Jack Kirby, right. The two writer artists that he worked with most famously, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, both, you know, went to their graves really resenting stan um you know jack died in the 90s and although stan claims near the end of his life they reconciled um the evidence i've turned up

in my research is that that uh reconciliation may never have occurred and seems somewhat unlikely. And Ditko, who died just a couple of months ago, really disliked Stan and was open about that in these newsletters that he would self-publish. And it's, you know, not a great sign when your two greatest collaborators end up really loathing you and speaking ill of you. So I do want to get a little bit into the later years of Stan Lee's life. He left Marvel in the 90s, and he's reported to still get a $1 million annual paycheck from the company. What has he been doing since he left Marvel? So after he stopped having an active role at Marvel, Stan made a number of very poor business decisions, is the short version.

He started up a company. The company went down in flames and actually trapped Stan in a lot of legal troubles. It gets very complicated, but that was the first sort of disaster. And then he had another company called POW Entertainment, which stood for Purveyors of Wonder Entertainment. And POW was a place where people could come and basically pay for the right to have the stan lee name attached to a story so you would have these sort of scattershot tales um from across the the you know spectrum of of genre and you know with dubious levels of uh creative quality being put into them but they were being sold as like,

you know, Stan Lee created this character or like Stan Lee co-wrote this or whatever. And pow entertainment never really took off. And by the, it's final years, it was hemorrhaging money. And then on top of that, you had all of these legal and financial troubles that Stan ran into with his

family and people closest to him, you know, people who'd worked with him very closely. And that stuff gets very tricky because a lot of it is competing narratives that are mutually incompatible. And you don't know who's lying, who's making something up. And a lot of the details get pretty lurid. But suffice it to say that there were a lot of people in stan's life especially after the death of his wife joan last year who were trying to take advantage of him and trying to extract money from him uh get you know legal rights that he could offer um and it it was a really ugly situation that was uh very tragic and much discussed within the comics and entertainment

world. And it's just sad that that was the note that he went out on. That was the last set of things that were being discussed about him. And it is what it is. He told many an interviewer, including me, that one of his great regrets was that he wasn't a better businessman. And that really showed in his final years. And in April, I understand he was accused of sexual misconduct by a Chicago area masseuse. Do you know what ended up happening with that case? I don't know what the exact legal status of it is. And it'll be interesting to see what happens now that he's no longer with us.

But it's so hard for me to comment on because it was part of this larger tapestry of accusations that were going on between people who worked for Stan and were close to him. And there are allegations that the allegations are made up. And it's just another difficult passage from the last few chapters of Stan's life. I just want to pick up on one thing that you mentioned about his regrets over not being a better business person. This was a really fascinating thing for me to hear because over the last few years especially, you look at these movies dominating the box office black panther made a billion dollars last year i just assumed that stan lee was like a billionaire he had a lot of money but not as much money as you'd think because he sank a lot of money into these bad business ventures he was not as wealthy as he could have been if he had either had a better deal cutting him into a percentage of all the movie profits, which for various reasons he did not have. And he probably could have been better off if he had made wiser investments or just retired and stopped investing money in these new projects.

tired and stopped investing money in these new projects. And he really did regret that and yet seemed somewhat unable to stop the train when it had gone off the rails in those final few years. He didn't die penniless the way that a lot of comics creators from his generation did, but he went through a lot of time thinking about stanley's work and his complicated legacy is there an anecdote that really sticks with you about him so interesting i think the anecdote that sticks out in my mind actually is something from my childhood. I went to a comic book convention, my first comic book convention when I was in sixth grade, and Stan was doing a signing engagement there. So I had him sign a copy, beat took a picture of me and him, and he looked directly at the person who took the picture and said, you've immortalized me. And for some reason, that just stuck with me throughout my life and throughout the time I spent thinking about Stan and writing about Stan. He was somebody who really did become immortal a long while ago. immortal a long while ago. So no matter what happened in the final few years of his life,

he's going to be, his memory is going to be preserved and honored by countless people for as long as people are caring about these characters, which I think is going to be for a very long time. I must have absolute silence. Excelsior! Over. Stanley died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after suffering a medical emergency on Monday. His cause of death was not yet known when we recorded this podcast. Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after suffering a medical emergency on Monday. His cause of death was not yet known when we recorded this podcast. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.

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