Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir by Stan Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I don’t mind saying it brought a tear to my eye. The story of the lonely kid who grew up to be Stan Lee. Pretty awesome.
The best bit about this book, I feel like they really captured Lee’s voice. Reading it FEELS like Stan Lee talking. Full of great anecdotes. The end get a little list-y, lots of stuff happening without much context, but such is life.
There is a weird thing that’s addressed here. The relationship between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
For those who don’t know, Jack Kirby was the artist behind a lot of Marvel’s greatest creations. Fantastic Four, Thor. And for those who aren’t familiar with why lots of people think Kirby deserves more credit, it’s because of the Marvel Style, coined and created by Stan Lee.
Marvel Style goes like this: If I’m writing and you’re the artist, I give you the general idea of the plot, the characters, and the story. You then illustrate the entire thing, with action and word balloons, and then I come back and fill in the dialog. So the thing is, when we call Jack Kirby the artist, Marvel Style meant he shaped the story a lot more than someone who was drawing to a very specific script with greater detail in the outlines and actions.
And lots of people look at Stan Lee as someone who took more credit than he deserved. Who is really responsible for these stories? How much does the look trump the idea? How much does the shape of the story consist of the story’s creation?
It’s an interesting question. For example, we accept that James Patterson plots stuff and has other writers do the actual writing. So who wrote those books? We credit writers on improv TV shows, and yet the actors have a lot to do with the creation of those characters.
I don’t think it’s very useful to say who did exactly what and what percentage of a character is his costume versus the story outline plus dialog. Because there’s no definition for this stuff, and we could go back and forth all day.
Instead, I’ll invoke a more modern pair, Jobs and Wozniak. J and W are almost the archetype for something we see in a lot of modern, self-starting companies and industries. You’ve got your quieter programmers, and you’ve got a boisterous salesman. The salesman slowly becomes the face of the company. And then there’s a backlash about how much creation the salesman did versus the Woz.
But part of me feels like the backlash is our own fault. We create the Jobs. We are the ones who read the interviews. We are the ones who want a company to have a face, and excuse me for saying it, I don’t think we’re ready for a company to have a face that’s a nerd. Or unattractive. Or might have a flat personality. And we also have a lot of people who get into something like drawing or writing comics because they like drawing or writing comics, and they aren’t particularly interested in running a company.
Jack Kirby wasn’t Stan Lee’s employee. Stan did try to offer Kirby a job a couple of times, and Kirby turned it down in favor of remaining freelance.
My base opinion on this, I don’t feel like there would be a Marvel comics without Stan Lee AND Jack Kirby. And probably Steve Ditko too.
But my larger opinion has to do with a story:
I went to my first comic convention in 2002. It was a weird experience, I’ll tell you that. And one of the people they brought out was (if I’m remembering correctly) Martin Nodell, artist who did the original concept art for Green Lantern. The dude would have been in his late 80’s, and he didn’t seem all that spry.
He was selling sketches for something like $40. And they made an announcement during the day to try and drum up business.
I regret that I didn’t buy one. I was 18 and I didn’t have a whole lot of money, but still. You know that a guy in his late 80’s isn’t selling sketches at a con because he’s set, financially.
And this is the larger opinion: Comic companies royally fucked the original creators, without exception. I think Stan Lee has done quite well for himself, but he has less than $100 million in the bank. I’m not totally ready to weep for a millionaire, but here’s the context: Robert Downey Jr. made $80 million for playing Iron Man in one movie. So there you go. There are people today involved with these characters and stories that have made a shitload of money and have absolutely nothing to do with their creation or, really, their current stories.
And that’s what bothers me a lot more. That doesn’t feel right. I feel, just a little, like fans are whipped up into this idea of who should be getting a bigger piece of the celebrity pie, meanwhile neither Stan nor Jack have gotten what they deserve. It doesn’t have to be about these two men sharing this tiny slice of the pie. It should be about “Holy shit, this is THE biggest pie in the world, and we can do justice to its creators by giving them a nice share without really changing our bottom line.”
I will also say this.
Kirby’s family did bring forth a lawsuit to try and halt Marvel projects, the big Marvel movies, asserting that Kirby was the copyright holder. The case was set to go to the Supreme Court when Marvel settled out of court, just last year, in fact.
I feel the tragedy here is that Marvel handed over a bag of money, and the Kirby’s walked away from what could have been a precedent-setting case. If it was found that Kirby really DID own the copyright, then he’d be cut in on the characters he created. Which would mean that Steve Ditko would have a pretty good shot at some of the Spider-Man money. Which would mean that the Martin Nodell’s of the world might actually be able to retire after creating an iconic comic character. They wouldn’t have to work in their 80’s.
To be fair, I don’t know all the details of the case. Maybe there was no shot. Or maybe the legal fees were too tremendous. I don’t know.
All I really know is that I wish I lived in a world where these creators got paid for the work they did.