On the Stan Lee Biography and Writing-as-a-Fan
How do we write criticism when we're fans of our subjects?
I’m trying to get back into the mindset that this space—my own newsletter—doesn’t have to feature polished, perfect essays with deep insights. I called this “Kate Likes Stuff” for a reason. Sometimes I just really, really like stuff, and I want to say a few words about it.
So, yeah. I’ll get back to the Forever People thinking/writing shortly (I’ll link that post below). Trust me, I still have a lot to say about it, even all these months later, especially after spending two weeks on Jack Kirby and Adrienne Rich in the classroom for my Poetry and Comics class (hi friends!). I think it’s been hard to get back to writing about it because I’m a little intimidated by the scope of my own thinking. But I miss writing for this space, so I’m just gonna jump in on something slightly unrelated (but still tangential to the material circumstances of Forever People’s original publication).
Obviously I’ve been spending a lot of time writing about comic books the last few years, whether through poems or prose. I don’t plan on stopping any time soon, so I’ve been more and more eager to find serious and vetted writing about the medium, the history, the business, the characters—really, anything to do with the American comic book industry. So a couple weeks ago I took a trip to Barnes and Noble (oh, Long Island, when will you support an independent bookstore near me) with the plan to buy anything there that would fit the bill, however loosely. I ended up with an exciting-to-me stack with at least one title that was completely unfamiliar to me.
But, if I’m being honest, I went to the bookstore with one book in mind that I was suddenly itching to read: True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by journalist and culture writer Abraham Josephine Riesman. I knew of the book because of Stephanie Burt’s review in the New Yorker, which I read upon publication and then assigned as an optional reading in the aforementioned Poetry and Comics course. If I found the review so fascinating, it stands to reason that I should probably read the book.
So I did. And, boy-howdy, what a ride.
I don’t want to get too into the weeds—like I said, I’m trying not to compose a full-ass essay every time I sit down to write for this newsletter—but Riesman has compiled a compelling portrait of a really challenging figure, if only because of Lee’s own practically-mythological status among a certain caliber of nerds. Lee, at the kinder end of the spectrum, was not a perfect man, though he was a genius marketer and even editor. At the meaner (and maybe more accurate) end of the spectrum, he was a self-serving and chronically unsatisfied narcissist.
What makes True Believer, in my opinion, such a successful biography is that it manages to balance both ends of that spectrum. Stan Lee was not perfect, and he unforgivably screwed people over in his professional life, and at times he led a truly troubled personal life. But couldn’t that be true of us all, really?
Okay, before I get into more broad generalizations, let me say this: though I read this book frantically from beginning to end—it reads like gossip with an intellectual veneer, my favorite kind of profile writing, I mean this glowingly—it’s probably not surprising that I was most interested in the chapters covering the 1960s and Marvel’s true beginning. One of the key narrative threads throughout the biography—from his teenage years almost until his death—is Lee’s relationship with Jack Kirby. I’ve written about (and will definitely, definitely write more about) Kirby’s DC years in the early 1970s, but he will always be most famous as the (co-)creator of most of Marvel’s most celebrated characters. Starting with the Fantastic Four and moving through such household names as the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, Thor, and more, Kirby and Lee have been credited with countless corners of the Marvel Universe.
But what this biography does so well, even while centering Stan Lee, is lay out the decades-long battle between Kirby and Lee about creative credit for the bulk of Marvel’s IP.
Again, I won’t go into it (though I happily would, but you should just read this book), but what I so admire about Riesman’s work here is how she manages to honor these creators and their work while still laying out the sticky, sticky credit problems that still undergird the entire superhero comic book complex.
That’s the work of any good critic and journalist, of course: to “stay objective,” however phenomenologically impossible that may be, and provide actual criticism. And I don’t just mean “negative feedback,” though perhaps that, too, has its place in cultural criticism. That’s not what I’m interested in here: I’m interested in how one writes about “fannish” subjects while still centering questions over firm answers, centering ambiguity and nuance over hyperbolic praise and adulation, and centering craft over reader satisfaction.
As I continue writing about comic books and the comic book industry, those are the writerly problems I’m most interested in tackling, especially as I also continue to read superhero fiction as, seriously, a fan. After reading True Believer, that’s the personal question I’m left with: how does one write critically about stories, characters, worlds, and histories that one loves?
I guess that question is also true of poetry, and it’s a question that circles now and then on Poetry Twitter. What is the role of engaged criticism in an insular creative world? I think I already have my own personal answers for literary criticism—and they don’t involve hyperbolic praise—but the problem still feels fresh, for me, in my own comic book writing, especially given the corporate nature of the subject. It’s a question I need to keep asking if I want to keep growing—and I hope I’m not the only one asking it.
This is nearly 1000 words. I have no self control. I have a zillion more thoughts on this, but I’ll put a cap on it for now. Check out True Believer; even if you’re not a comic book fan, it’s a super compelling portrait of a massive cultural figure. Maybe also check out more of my comic book writing? I have an essay in The Gutter Review about teaching ODY-C that hopefully tackles, beneath the narrative, some of my questions here.
I’ve breached 1000 words. Goddamn. ‘Nuff said, or whatever.