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Stan Lee, Comics Renaissance Man

Stan Lee remains a contraversial figure among some branches of comics readership, particularly those who take very personal the machinations of a corporate entity that sometimes Engulfed and Devoured the very hands that made it strong. While some legitimate basis may sustain the various claims and accusations perennially directed at the avuncular Stan Lee, those questions do not relate so directly to what influence his innovations had on the comics industry; even if we assume the worst, for instance, about his fallings-out with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, we need not denigrate Lee's considerable achievements in the medium.

However, for the sake of blood pressure - yours, mine, the next guy's, and Stan's - I will spend very little space claiming Stan created this or Stan did not create this. His innovations to the comics medium do not depend on whether he created a single character. We could settle all claims, from Captain America to the last of the seven hundred new mutants released in the Marvel universe this year, against him and still acknowledge that today's comics, at least where rendered with any quality worth mentioning, bear some imprint that implicates Stan Lee and his ideas.

Stan didn't need to write the poems to deserve credit, for he perfected the language for other poets to use.

Origins

I could probably claim that Stan Lee began life as a simple copy boy in a comics company until one day and experimental nuclear-powered printing press exploded, bathing him in rays that strangely transformed him . . . but such claims belong more in his line of work.

Born Stan Lieber in 1923, Stan Lee entered the comics business while still in his teens. He has worked in the business since the early days of super-hero comics. He wrote for Timely Comics in the early days, on such projects as Simon and Kirby's Captain America, which would become more important in its Marvel reincarnation than it seemed to its original Golden Age market.

Stan, like most of the young men of his generation whom nature had blessed with two hands, two feet, two eyes, and the ability to endure a physical, served in the Second World War.

What Lee Did

Official (and hype-filled) Marvel press releases over the years credit the man with everything from deciding Marvel should do superheroes again to walking on water. Some claims wither under a superficial investigation; others chip and crack, but do not fall, under the never-ending barrage of criticism most famous comics editors receive (and many deserve). Lee may have conceived the notion of doing superheroes again, or may have received the suggestion from his kin higher up in the company; in any case, conventional comics history grants the source of Marvel's decision to return to superhero comics on the early success of Justice League of America, which grants DC, not Marvel, the credit for bringing superheroes back.

With some attempt to keep to conventional comics history and/or confirmable claims, we can list Lee's artistic achievements in several essential categories:

• Creation of characters.
  Stan's work in the first category, creation of characters, remains a contraversial subject, since a consensus exists that Lee and Marvel have overrepresented his role in peopling the Silver Age Marvel universe. We can take that to mean that we can scratch his name from some of the characters he purportedly co-created with Ditko and Kirby, and adjust "some" more towards "almost all" or "almost none" depending upon our evidence and biases. Nonetheless, Stan certainly created the occasional Marvel character, whether by throwing out a vague concept or a name without details or by presenting a fully-fleshed character to which an artist appended a visual presentation. However, we can put this question aside because, although characters like Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four all contributed to the wave of success that saved Marvel from extinction in the early sixties, it remains less important which of these characters actually bears his imprint.
• Writing stories.
  Stan's work writing stories, similarly, represents his role as talent but does not reflect his importance to the medium. If Lee could include no more than his scripting and writing on a resume, we could rank him with less influential figures like Roy Thomas who gave a great deal to the medium but did not drastically define its form.
• Formulation of an editorial model.
  This leaves us with the formulation of an editorial model. Here, I contend, rests Lee's importance; here lies the lasting affect by which he shaped the worthwhile comics that would follow the first wave of Lee-Kirby and Lee-Ditko creations.
• Formulation of a methodology.
  Stan Lee himself probably coined the expression "Marvel method," since the use of a definition as a commercial well suits his urge to promote (promote! promote!)

Lee, in a way that might seem very subtle to comics readers who missed the point of his approach, redefined the superhero and the superhero comic. He did not strip away the elements of the genre, like the ridiculous outfits or absurd abilities; nor did he subject them to the physical laws which limit beings who live outside the pages of fiction; but he took the superhero down from his conventional place as an exemplar and made him a person.

Lee's model has become so pervasive that we may easily presume that today's heroes represent an accurate replication of the original model, but such a description does not reflect the truth. Compare Superman or Green Lantern in 1964 to (say) Spider-Man of the same period. The DC heroes appear stoic, manly, fearless, unshakeable, and demonstrative of an entire and enviable catalog of virtues. The DC heroes do not trifle with self-doubt. They do not suffer from dark moods or attacks of temper; they do not argue among themselves; they do not wonder how they might pay next month's bills. Instead, they seem as optima of human character given expression by placing a bundle of virtues in a colorful costume and giving this package great powers with which to do right.

Think of the Thing and the Human Torch squabbling over some silly prank or wisecrack in the early days of Fantastic Four and you see something different. The strange clothing and great power still exist, but combine with traits a reader must consider more human: character flaws, personal problems, irritability, childishness, and other attributes, such as physical ugliness, that only beset villains in the older superhero model.

Before Stan Lee (with rare exceptions), superheroes did not misbehave, worry about impressing girlfriends, or fight among themselves. Comics up to that point formed a body of literature in which characters, by definition, buried their humanity underneath the moral demands of their power.

Lee decided to shift Marvel to superheroes after Atlas' implosion because, most likely, he saw DC get away with it. The older company enjoyed a success based on different premises than Marvel would employ; DC admixed stylish remanufacture of Golden Age heroes with massive infusions of (sometimes puerile) science fiction concepts to create a new formula for success.

Lee had created an editorial model that would allow Marvel to close the gap between themselves and the old, recognized company that had run Superman stories since 1938. He had created a version of the superhero to whom his readers could relate, a figure who, in spite of improbable doses of power, dealt on a day-to-day basis with obnoxious bosses, persistent bullies, fears for the welfare of family, and an entire baggage of elements one tended to expect more of soap opera than of the comics medium.

Why No One Wants to Give Him Credit

The public side of Lee suggests that he would have the world view him as an eccentric uncle whom the kids naturally love. Lee can still erupt with real and manufactured enthusiasm and promote, on the fly, whatever he cares to; in this sense, we see in him someone we might label the P. T. Barnum of Comics.

Lee's editorial duties, on the other hand, cast him into a different territory. Editors do not succeed by indulging all whims of the creators of copy; they must sometimes reject pet concepts, sometimes suggest ways to improve product, and sometimes compel. One may see Lee, in the early days, also playing a role in securing compliance with deadlines and increasing output. Lee, we know, made Steve Ditko angry enough to quit the company when he told him to make a change in an early Green Goblin story in Spider-Man; Lee probably also decided to cut Jack Kirby's page rate at the turn of the seventies, and may have had to inform Kirby of this decision himself.

Combine "Uncle Stan" with "Editor Lee" and we can see a figure whom critics might plausibly portray as two-faced. Ironically, if Lee had consistently played the hard side of his position - if he had walked in the door in the morning and left at night as "Scowling Sergeant Lee" - the hard decisions he made or enforced would probably have grated less on the artists and collaborators they affected, though we might expect that this approach might have driven away early some of the talent that persisted beyond Ditko's departure, beyond Kirby's departure, or past the exodus of the early seventies.

Stan Lee, in short, provides an easy target. We look at him cheerfully selling us on something we already bought (say, within a letters column), recall that he represented the voice of the company when Marvel decided to cut Jack Kirby's page rate (because he produced too much), and find it very easy to blame him. Detached from the events, we readers need not fret overmuch about what crimes we lay on his shoulders; we lack the first-hand information to lay blame with any precision, so we can pick as we see fit. Stan never wrote anything? Sounds good. Stan always shafted everybody? That'll work. Stan shot President Lincoln? Why not?

We can still allow Stan Lee considerable credit for his real, confirmable achievements within the industry even if we assume the truth of most of the worst-case scenario and take for granted that Stan did just about every horrible thing credited to his name. If we think clearly, asking "What really happened?" instead of "What awful thing did someone say Lee did next, we must dismiss the most damning of the anti-Lee claims, the premise that Lee, since he seemed to have created little before or after his collaboration with Kirby, probably did not create during that collaboration.

If Stan merely stamped "OK" on concepts delivered unto him entire by Kirby and Ditko (and Ditko, the man no one can make say anything he doesn't want to, does not deny Lee's contribution to the Spider-Man concept), if he deserves no credit for creating any character but "She-Hulk," and if the Marvel Universe entire properly belongs to the Kirby-Ditko axis, Lee nonetheless created a language in which his talent could express the concepts which made Marvel succeed. Superheroes could and did fail in the 1960s (as Ditko discovered with his creation the Hawk and the Dove), and one may speculate that many of the classical Kirby creations might not have endured if Kirby had to work them in a DC editorial model. Imagine, for example, the Fantastic Four done in the fashion of early-sixties DC heroes; we would have Elastic Lad, Fire Lad, Stone Boy, and Phantom Girl saying "(Choke)" as Annihilus destroyed their homeworlds.

We can provide some illumination by considering the case of other talents caught by history doing questionable things. For example, recall that Bob Kane for years turned in art to DC that he had subcontracted from other artists, but to which he attached his own name. We may doubt the propriety of such a practice (even if a number of celebrity talents over the years have resorted to it with equal brazenness) without needing to claim that Bob Kane did not actually create or even contribute to the creation of Batman, a character that probably resulted from his collaboration with Bill Finger.

A similar consideration pertains to Stan Lee. Even if we assume that the total of the contents of a column we might label "Stan's good things" does not come near the value of "Stan's bad things," we should not confuse polemic with truth; Lee's achievements in the comics medium do, indeed, matter to the form.