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Stan Lee: The Rise and Fall of The American Comic Book
If you don't know who Stan Lee is, you will have little to no interest in this book. But who are we kidding? Any geek worth his or her metal knows Stan "The Man" Lee, the co-creator of Spider-man, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four and countless other beloved Marvel Comics characters. What most people don't really know is the real story behind the creation of these characters. Many have never heard of the artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, who contributed a great deal to the creation and development of these superheroes. In the past years a bit of a rift has formed in comics fandom, the hard-core siding with the late Kirby, claiming that Lee and Marvel did the artist wrong. The other side blithely backs the amiable Lee. Through interviews with artists, family members and Stan Lee himself, Spurgeon and Raphael try to shed some light on the subject.
Anyone who's read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will notice a great deal of similarities between Stan Lee's origins and the fictionalized settings Chabon created for his book. Both stories start in the time of the pulps, when publishers cranked out fantastic publications by the truck-load. The parallels are fascinating. If you're a comic book fan and you haven't read Chabon's book, you need to read it.
Anyway, the book I'm supposed to be reviewing tracks Stan Lee's star from his position as a lowly writer at Timely Comics, to the editor behind the most famous run of comic books in history; Marvel's Silver Age comics. This is when the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and The Hulk were born. The book doesn't stop there. It follows Lee through the decades detailing his involvement with the Marvel titles all the way. It examines his rocky relationship with Hollywood and decades of attempts to bring Marvel characters to life on television or in the movies. Even more fascinating are the segments of the book that deal with Stan Lee Media and the enormous financial flame-out that occurred when the business went sour.
The book paints Lee in a very humanistic light. It brings his flaws into sharp contrast and at the same time gives him credit for his amazing accomplishments, unceasing drive and wild imagination. Most interesting is the way the book tells the story of all comics in the context of Marvel and Lee's story. As much as underground geniuses such as R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman must hate the association, it's hard to argue that the fates of all comics are influenced by Marvel's gravitational pull.
There's been a mild knee-jerk reaction in the comics community that the book is blatant attack on Lee, being that both Spurgeon and Raphael both worked at The Comics Journal, a publication that has publicly supported Jack Kirby's claims against Lee. To be fair, the authors put an exceptional amount of work into trying to tell the truth, which is reflected in the sheer number of annotated resources they've provided in the book's source notes.
In all seriousness, try to forget for a moment that I'm friends with the authors. As a lifelong comics reader I found the information presented in this book fascinating. It made me want to run to my comics shop and buy reprints of the old issues. Don't take my word for it, though.
There are several excerpts of the book available online. You can read the prologue at the book's official website. Part of Chapter 17, "Stan in Hollywood" is excerpted at The Comic's Journal's website."
You can purchase Stan Lee: The Rise and Fall of The American Comic Book from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Manga tend to last a certain amount of time and then end. They don't frequently switch writers and/or artists. Popular stories are not necessarily stretched and reinvented in order to increase sales. (This point is arguable. There were 37 volums of Ranma 1/2 IIRC.) Artists are treated as talents rather than commodities.
Who reads and sells more comic books than any other nation in the world?
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I remember reading some potshots the two were taking at each other back in the mid-80s. It was stupid then and it's stupid now. It was a collaborative creation -Lee readily admits he just wrote outlines of the comics, let Kirby draw them and then added dialogue afterward. Lee will be dead soon and Kirby is already gone, so how about leaving it be?
Talk about your tempest in a teapot.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Between Diamond killing off independents by making them IMPOSSIBLE to get distributed and the basic stigma behind comics books, the only thing that wil truly re-invigorate comics is the internet and reinventing the distribution method.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Something I observe with comics is the constant looking back on the characters creation. To the general public (at least), the story of the characters creation is the most important, definitive dimension of the character.
Spider man was bitten by a radioactive spider. The Hulk was shot with Gamma rays. These are all examples of the basic knowledge most individuals have about comic book characters.
I know it is proper story-telling to introduce characters and dramatize again and again their beginnings or history, but with comics it seems to be a big thing to recreate the character (even if in the same vein) every so often (usually in another medium I guess).
While this brings new readers and maybe reminds current readers of why they enjoy the comic, I wonder if it discourages the developement of the character (i.e. a change that redefines the character and is generally unreversable or undefiable, even in the comic book world).
I'm not saying characters don't change, but it seems when it comes down to it, the characters are always in the shadow of their original creation. I don't if this mirrors real life or not (though one could suppose so in most cases).
Let's not overgeneralize the geeks & comic books thing, okay? I read a few when I was a kid, but have no interest at all now.
Scott McCloud's books, Understanding Comics, tries to answer your question. One big historical situation was back in the 40's and 50's when there was a genre of comics dealing with crime ... they would depict sex, drugs, grisly murders. There was a huge backlash and the "comics code" was created which basically censored the crap out of comic books in America. So, along the way, comics couldn't talk about "adult" subject matter, and due to all the media coverage, a lot of people were told that comic books were evil, brain washing, exploitative, etc.
Frankly you could see some parallels there and with what some people say about videogames today. Just imagine what would happen if the government decided to crack down on video games ... and all we were left with were Mario and Dance Dance Revolution etc....
Anyhow during the 60's a whole underground movement started which did a lot to revitalize the "adult" nature of comics ... starting with Crumb ... Spiegleman is a direct offshoot of what Crumb started with his autobiographical comics style.
But I would dare say the underground comics movement at least in it's inception, over compensated for all the censorship. They went far left, delving into drugs, nudity, sexual hangups, racism. So you get comics that are all about superheroes on one hand and alienated losers on the other, and not a whole lot inbetween.
The inbetween is what I think needs to be filled out.
In Japan they've got everything covered. There are comics for kids, adults, women, jocks, pervs, working class people. It is socially acceptable to read a comic. Nobody thinks you're a deviant, a perv or a stunted adolescent as they seem to in the States. And a lot of this stereotype has to do with the history, and the inability of the comics makers to breach the social walls with some truly mainstream material.
I'm thinking, American comics needs a "Harry Potter" or "Sims" equivalent.
While it is always dangerous to assume that a Slashdot reviewer actually knows what they're talking about, the review does present me with several reasons I might not want to read the book:
1. Calling Marvel's Silver Age comics "the most famous run of comic books in history" is a highly subjective and arguably mistaken statement. More famous than the early years of DC, with Batman and Superman? I don't think so.
2. While I have no objection to a book about Stan Lee per se, calling it The Rise and Fall of The American Comic Book suggests a rather serious overreach. The fact is that the decline in the quality of Stan Lee's Marvel stable happened at the same time of perhaps the most impressive ferment in comics and graphic novels in history, i.e. the mid-to-late 1980s, a renaissance lead by a handful of exceptionally influential DC titles (especially Alan Moore's Watchman, Frank Miller's Dark Knight, and Neil Gaiman's Sandman), together with a number of important independent comics (Dave Sims' Cerebus, etc.).
3. The review does not mention it, but the true "Fall of the American Comic Book" occured in the mid-1990s due to largely economic circumstances, i.e. the collapse of the speculator market and a disasterous consolidation of comic distribution companies set in motion by Marvel's decision to make Heroes World their sole distributor. (I published an article by Paul T. Riddell on this very subject in the Fall/Winter 2000 isssue of Nova Express, but there are also several online summaries of those events you can Google.) The fact that the book focuses on Stan Lee, and that the review makes no mention of this (an event quite apart from the Dotcom-like collapse of Stan Lee Media) makes me fear that this book either gives a very distorted view of this economic cataclysm, or no view at all.
That is not to say that it might not be interesting to Stan Lee fans. But Stan Lee != American Comic Books, no matter emblamatic his work may have been in the 1960s.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Such as Bone, Cerebus, Ghost in the Shell, and so forth, you'll see that Marvel is the AOL of comics.
Do you mean the old X-Force with Cable, Shatterstar, etc? Fuck that noise. The new X-Force, now X-Statix, beats the old X-Force like a red headed stepchild.
Everything "used to be better" or "is better over there". The reason is that the crappy stuff made in the past or overseas never makes it to us; we only see the cream of the crop that has stood the test of time or been judged worthy for export.
I'm sure there is plenty of crappy manga, but only the good stuff gets exported because there is limited shelf space and marketing dollars for this genre here in the States.