Stan Lee

by Bob Batchelor

  The persona Lee fashioned, with part sarcasm and large dollops of self-deprecation, created a voice that permeated Marvel. The popularity of Spider-Man, Hulk, Iron Man, and the others went beyond mere fandom to a kind of cult status that established Marvel as a major cultural influence. Yet, even though it became the hip comic book company, Marvel still trailed DC Comics in total sales. In 1968, for example, DC Comics published forty-seven titles with sales of approximately seventy-five million, while Marvel had twenty-two titles and fifty million (although in an August 1968 interview, Lee claimed sixty million). Even though Marvel published fewer than half the titles DC did, its sales were at least two-thirds as much, making the company in some ways more successful.

  In countless speaking engagements and interviews, Lee continued to hone his public persona. Simultaneously, though, he never missed a chance to recognize Marvel fans and his creative team (then numbering around thirty-five staff and free-lancers). “Marvel readers must be among the most fanatical in the land,” he claimed. “They ask questions, find mistakes, [and] make suggestions.”3 The thousands of letters Lee received and the interaction with fans at comic industry gatherings gave him direct insight into his target demographic, from the obsessed diehards who chided Lee for every Spider-Man frame that left out some minor detail to the casual observers attempting to understand how comic books got so popular.4

  Lee never shied from telling the world how innovative or creative Marvel’s new work (and by extension, his writing) stood in comparison to past characters and comic book publishers, particularly DC, which he constantly chided as a monument to an outdated era.

  Lee sincerely believed in the educational and cultural value of comic books, so his basic earnestness led to an authenticity that people accepted, particularly when delivered in the corny, self-deprecating style that he perfected as the speaking engagements piled up. Lee understood that fans wanted Marvel books to engage with real-life socioeconomic and political topics. Staying flexible and listening to fans, Lee responded, explaining, “they want a whole ethos, a philosophy, within the framework of the comic character. They seem desperate for someone to believe in. . . . I don’t want to let them down.”5 In the late 1960s much of the editorializing expressed via Spider-Man, Thor, and others addressing pertinent issues helped legitimize comic books for a wider audience.

  Although Lee could be criticized for not taking a more progressive tone, given that he had the youth market at his feet, he often dropped his self-deprecating mask and spoke to readers about serious topics. In late 1968, for example, he used a “Stan’s Soapbox” column to speak out against bigotry and racism, which he labeled the “deadliest social ills plaguing the world today.” Lee said it was “totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race—to despise an entire nation—to vilify an entire religion.” Instead, he urged Marvelites to be tolerant.6

  Similar thinking about societal concerns prevalent in the chaotic era led Marvel to create several African American characters, including Robbie Robertson, a city editor at the Daily Bugle in Spider-Man books and, more centrally, the Black Panther, the superhero guise of T’Challa, the prince of a mythical African country. Around the same time, Marvel introduced the Falcon, another black superhero, but this time an American. After debating what to do with the Black Panther, Lee confessed to hoping that the fan mail would provide him with insight about how to carry on. In 1970, Lee claimed that he wanted to offer black heroes earlier, but “the powers-that-be” were “very cautious” and would not let him.7 Whether this finger wagging was aimed directly at Goodman or the Cadence bosses, Lee did not feel that he had to hold back.

  In March 1970, Lee again turned to the Soapbox to lay out Marvel’s policy on “moralizing.” Some readers simply wanted escapist reading, but Lee countered: “I can’t see it that way.” He compared a story without a message to a person without a soul. Giving the reader insight into his world, Lee explained that his visits to college campuses led to “as much discussion of war and peace, civil rights, and the so-called youth rebellion as . . . of our Marvel mags.” All these ideas, Lee said, shape our lives. No one should run from them or think that reading comic books might insulate someone from important societal topics.8

  Despite all the attention he received and the outpouring of fan affection bordering on cult-like devotion, Lee couldn’t shake feelings of inadequacy. He continued to receive off-putting reactions from other adults who worked in more mainstream jobs. As a result, Lee searched for legitimacy. No accolades seemed enough to erase those initial negative perceptions of being “just a comic book writer.”

  Often, when Lee faced challenges, he turned to Spider-Man. From a literary standpoint, Spider-Man tapped into the era’s existentialism—an average person who fell victim to an accident that changed his life in every way imaginable. The radioactive spider that injected its venom directly into Peter Parker’s bloodstream enabled the boy to transform into a superhero, but the venom did not cast aside Peter’s insecurities, anxieties, or basic humanity. As a matter of fact, a moment of indecision and hubris led to the death of his beloved Uncle Ben and left the boy reeling and reflective. The dichotomy between hubris and humility made the character compelling to legions of Marvel fans.

  As a symbol of the 1960s and its collective unrest, which resulted in a kind of split personality between protest and conservatism, Spider-Man was another iteration of the figures populating books, film, and celebrity tabloids during the era. Peter Parker occupies the same city that drove young Holden Caulfield to the brink in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Similarly to Caulfield, Parker questions his place in the world. While Lee knew the character resonated with younger audiences, he also believed that more mature readers and adults would connect with the character as well, which he had seen in his lectures on college campuses. He just needed to get the superhero in front of this expanded audience. The growing college-aged population gobbled up Catcher, just as it devoured Marvel comics.

  In July 1968, in hopes of thwarting some of the criticisms he faced about being in an inferior industry, Lee launched The Spectacular Spider-Man, which was not only magazine-sized, but its interior art was in black and white, a trend mirrored in underground comics. The fifty-plus-page magazine debuted for thirty-five cents, nearly triple the newsstand price of regular comic books at twelve cents.

  The first issue featured a rewritten and redrawn origin story and a Lee original, “Lo, This Monster.” The covers were distinctive as well. Harry Rosenbaum, an artist who did cover art for men’s adventure magazines, painted an image of the hero in acrylic, which gave it a deeply textured and mature look. The second issue presented a striking cover by artist John Romita that showed the Green Goblin zapping Spidey with a colorful yellow burst. The energy of the Romita cover exploded from the page and quickly became a fan favorite.

  Lee revealed his hopes for the magazine in a general Soapbox update, calling the magazine “a real, glitzy, status-drenched, slick-paper publication” that readers could find “amongst the so-called ‘better’ magazines at your newsstand.” In his “Stan’s Soapbox” call-out, Lee declared the magazine, “possibly Marvel’s finest achievement to date” and a “Marvel milestone” that would go down in comic book history. The editor-in-chief saw the magazine as an opportunity to create a bridge to adult readers, featuring more mature themes and topics. He also felt it would provide him some gravitas among adults and win them over to his viewpoint regarding comics.

  What Lee didn’t anticipate was that the new adult-oriented comic seemed to occupy a no-man’s land between kids and older readers. No amount of bluster or hype on Lee’s part could save the title from bombing. For average fans, The Spectacular Spider-Man cost too much. The foray into black and white did not help either. The second issue went back to interior color, but it was already too late. That second issue with the beautiful cover would be the last, though Marvel rehashed the Lee story later in 1973 in The Amazing Spider-Man #116–118, with revisions
by writer Gerry Conway. Another story from the second issue, featuring the Green Goblin, would later be repurposed (as Marvel so frequently did) in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #9 (1973).

  Although the failure of the adult version delivered a blow to Lee’s notions of crossing into a more traditional form of mainstream success, the magazine didn’t diminish Spider-Man’s overall popularity among comic book fans. Nonetheless, Lee still reeled with career frustration. Since the late 1940s, he had attempted to gain a sense of legitimacy by self-publishing material for older readers or moonlighting for Goodman’s adult-oriented magazines. On the outside, Lee seemed upbeat and passionate about comic books and his superhero creations. Throughout his long career in comics, though, he had internalized the negativity, hiding deep fears about working in an industry that others deemed unacceptable.

  In early 1970, Lee faced another challenge. Kirby’s contract had expired around the time Goodman sold the company to Perfect Film. The corporate leaders who ran the business had little interest in re-signing Kirby for the big money the artist expected, and Goodman didn’t back him, either. Kirby correctly gauged that it was his turn to get paid for all that he had done to build Marvel into the industry leader, but according to Mark Evanier, no one would talk to him or his lawyer about a new contract.9 Eventually, he turned to Lee for help, incorrectly assuming that the editor had the power to help. Though Kirby thought Lee sandbagged him, there is no evidence that he could have swayed Goodman or the corporate management team to give Kirby what he wanted.

  The contract impasse drove another wedge between Lee and Kirby—in hindsight, one that seemed based on misjudgment rather than malice. The irony of the relationship between Kirby and Lee is that the two are tied together forever in comic book lore, yet their complexities turned the relationship at times indifferent, or begrudgingly cordial, sour, and even hostile.

  Kirby seemed to care less about the fame that came with creating successful superheroes and comic books. He loved his craft. His desire centered on earning a living and getting treated with equity—receiving a fair share of the money that corporations were making off his art, ideas, and reputation. With Kirby, the feeling emerges that no matter how financially sound he might have been, the haunting recollections of his youth in the Lower East Side slums would never be far from his mind. “All of Kirby’s work in the ’60s was for Marvel, and he was always terrified that he would stop getting assignments,” Joe Simon explained. “It was a big deal for him.”10

  Both Kirby and Simon, like Lee, had lived through the hardscrabble times of the Great Depression, which fundamentally colored the way they viewed work and money. According to Simon, Kirby put a lot of pressure on himself to provide for his family, at least in part because his own parents had been so poor. “He had to bring the money home for Roz, put food on the table for the kids.”11 This kind of intimate relationship with poverty never leaves a person. Kirby’s demons regarding money hovered ominously over his worldview. His $35,000 freelance salary in 1970 (about $220,000 in current buying power) allowed him to make a decent living, but one could certainly argue that he should have been making multiples more than that, perhaps in the millions of dollars.

  Despite their shared history of growing up poor, for Lee, recognition was a far greater desire than the financial compensation that Kirby sought. He also drew from important lessons bestowed on him as a child—a mother who demanded perfection and success and the toll that financial hardship had taken on his family. Adulation was the check Lee needed to cash.

  Though forever linked as a creative tandem, Lee and Kirby’s complex relationship suffered from different desires, one for fame, the other for financial security. Thus, Kirby’s frustration with Goodman’s penny-pinching and reneged-on promises, as well as lingering exasperation with Lee, led him to turn down a new contract with Marvel in 1970. Instead he boarded DC, where Carmine Infantino ran the editorial ship. Kirby was given free rein to develop a new superhero universe, called “The Fourth World.” At DC, he created three new titles that enabled the artist/writer to tackle the biblical, existential, and science fiction machine-driven questions that were at the center of his mythical worldview.

  Comic books were big business and had been a hit in other mediums, demonstrating how central superhero narratives were in contemporary American culture. Envious of the way Superman and Batman had moved from radio to film and television, Marvel made similar plans. Historically, the emphasis had been on creating demand for comic books by crossing platforms. During this era, publishing executives realized how television and film would drive licensing.

  For Lee and the corporate honchos in New York, the ultimate dream for Marvel’s superheroes centered on a series of movies and television shows. Moving into these mediums had two primary objectives. First, increasing the overall size of the audience would establish the characters for successive generations of fans. Next, the increased exposure would lead to greater demand, thereby generating a catalog of profitable licensing deals. Despite some early successes the company had getting the figures into animated series, most attempts at adapting them for live-action floundered, often stuck somewhere in the jumble of the Hollywood process that took an idea to script, then development and casting.

  The early Marvel Super Heroes animated program produced by Grantray-Lawrence proved that even a crudely done series featuring the company’s main superheroes would find an audience. The next logical step, based on the ever-growing popularity of Spider-Man, was that the web slinger would get a show. Grantray-Lawrence led production efforts in late 1967 and worked on the series into 1968. The struggling studio went into bankruptcy, however, enabling famed animator Ralph Bakshi to take over the reins. The series aired on ABC and proved a hit, running until 1970.

  Animation juggernaut Hanna-Barbera Productions produced another series for ABC—the first series for The Fantastic Four—that ran from 1967 to 1970. The new program ran alongside Spider-Man, giving audiences an extended dose of superhero stories. Lee and Kirby’s original comic books were truncated to fit into the thirty-minute time slot and watered down so that children could easily follow the stories. Considered one of the first Saturday morning educational cartoons, each episode had a segment dedicated to Mister Fantastic explaining a scientific term or concept to viewers.

  Producers downplayed Kirby’s ominous depiction of Doctor Doom and made Galactus less imposing, but these stylistic changes were offset to a degree by the enthusiasm of the voice actors, including film and television star Gerald Mohr voicing Reed Richards. This formula—making some characters more generic and operating within the technology boundaries (in this case, clunky animation)—seemed to hinder how production companies brought Marvel characters to the screen. Publicly, Lee supported the show, but had little to do with it otherwise. The lack of control irritated him. He believed that if Marvel created its own programming, like Disney, that its superheroes would rival Walt’s famous mouse and princesses. The urge to start a production company began to gnaw at Lee.

  In 1971, a New York Times reporter estimated that about 300 million comic books were printed each year.12 Considering even a conservative pass-through rate equating to four others reading each comic sold, that means around 1.2 billion comic books were read at a time when the total world population stood near 3.7 billion. Despite lingering questions about its negative effects on young readers, the medium had grown into a central component of mainstream culture. And Lee was its pivotal figure. In the eyes of many, the name “Stan Lee” was synonymous with comic books, a kind of Johnny Appleseed who toured the nation to spread the joy and significance of comic books.

  In May of that year, Lee showed how comic books could be used for good with The Amazing Spider-Man #96. In that issue, Spidey saves a young black kid who mistakenly jumps off a rooftop, because, as the superhero explains, “The poor guy’s stoned right out of his mind.” After the rescue, other characters exchange words about drug use and Spider-Man thinks: “My life as Spider-Man is probably a
s dangerous as any—but I’d rather face a hundred super-villains than toss it away by getting hooked on hard drugs.” Peter Parker’s African American friend Randy later gets into a heated exchange with Norman Osborn, explaining that blacks hate drugs the most, because young people “got no hope,” which makes them “easier pickin’s for the pushers.”

  Casual readers may have regarded the antidrug message as yet another aspect of their favorite comic book’s approach to realism. Marvel fans probably didn’t know that Lee had received a letter asking for his help from an official at the National Institute of Mental Health, a division of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The executive implored Lee to use Spidey’s popularity to fight drug abuse by directly confronting the issue in comic book form. Government officials believed that the character’s esteem among high school and college students would enable the agency to get factual information to this key demographic.

  Although Lee realized that mentioning drug use would be a violation of the Comics Code, he decided to fulfill the request. Understanding the broader implications, he explained, “We can’t keep our heads in the sand. . . . If this story would help one kid anywhere in the world not to try drugs or to lay off drugs one day earlier, then it’s worth it rather than waiting for the code authority to give permission.”13