Raphael, Jordan, and Tom Spurgeon. Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003.
This biography of writer, editor and promoter Stan Lee is also a history of comics, particularly Marvel comics. Lee’s long career with Marvel, especially as its public face, has made them inseparable.
If you’re interested in the history of American comics, Lee’s career is worth considering. He started in the industry shortly after it became a popular media as a gopher for Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Soon he was editor of a line of comics, which he actively worked on for parts of four decades before moving on to becoming the public face of comics and less successful efforts in other media.
Lee is best known for overseeing a revolution in comics in the 1960s. He introduced characters that were as notable for their flaws and human frailties as for their extraordinary abilities. He took elements from genres a varied as romance and giant monster stories to create relatable superheroes. This sparked a creative revival for the both Lee and the industry.
Lee is a great promoter and salesman, and one of his most daring creations has been his own public image. Raphael and Spurgeon are careful not to be caught up in the hype while still recognizing their subject’s contribution to popular culture and particularly to the characters he oversaw.
One of the interesting things that come out of the book, though the authors don’t focus on it directly, is Lee’s place as a writer. He entertained dreams of writing novels and screenplays, but didn’t. He only wrote one full screenplay and seemed to think it was an onerous chore. During his creative heyday in comics, the Marvel method involved Lee writing story concepts and synopses that were fleshed out by the artists with him adding the dialogue to the drawn pages. The system worked well for Marvel financially and seems to have been Lee’s forte.
The authors recognize this in summarizing Lee’s career. They say he may have been the greatest comic book editor ever. His famous creative contributions were collaborative efforts with artists and he got consistent quality from lesser contributors. He kept a marginal comics publisher going through tough time until he and others were ready start a creative renaissance in their medium.
Editor can be an inglorious position. The title suggests a secondary position to the writer and artist, but at his height he was very directly involve in the creation of Marvel comics. His ability to manage a burgeoning, collaborative, creative enterprise made the Marvel revolution possible.
Lee’s contribution as a writer, editor, creator and collaborator are obscured by his career as the public face of Marvel. He is a natural promoter and, some might fairly say, glory hound. His rise to celebrity almost necessitated the minimization of others contributions, which lead to strained relationships with his friends and the industry he represents. His public persona has cast a shadow on his career that both darkens his reputation and obscures the real value of his creative work.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in these fictional takes on comics history
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer
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Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Joe Simon. Sort by date Show all posts
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Stan Lee by Bob Batchelor
Stan Lee
is the face of comic
books to many and has become a sort of celebrity in
his more than 70-year long career as a storyteller.
He began to hone his image on the college lecture circuit in the 1960s while he
created a new type of superhero,
typified by the Fantastic
Four and Spider-Man,
in collaboration with artists including Jack Kirby
and Steve
Ditko. It was a role Lee was ready for; he had been trying out ways to
promote comic books and himself since the 1940s.
Bob
Batchelor presents Lee’s life in Stan
Lee: The Man behind Marvel. Though not a long biography,
it starts with Lee’s childhood in New York City
and runs through his 95th year, when he is still producing ideas for
comics and television.
Lee was present nearly at the beginning of comic books. He started as
an assistant to Joe
Simon and Jack Kirby, the creators of Captain
America. When they moved on after contentions with Timely Comics,
a forerunner to Marvel,
Lee stepped up to become editor while still a teenager.
Lee was ready to quit comics by the time the 1960s. He craved to work
in a respectable field and was tired of chasing trends. The right combination
of opportunity and encouragement from his wife pushed Lee to write the kind of
comics he would want to read, and it became a sensation.
Though Lee will always be associated with Marvel comics, by the 1980s his focus
was shifting to television and film.
It was a rough transition for Lee, but he had some success, especially in the
production of animated
adaptions of Marvel characters that were popular in the 1990s.
Lee has stumbled some in his post-Marvel career, notably the debacle of
new media company Stan Lee
Media. He seems to have recovered somewhat with POW!
Entertainment.
Lee has detractors, which Batchelor acknowledges. Batchelor doesn’t
refute those detractors, but his take on Lee is overall very positive. Lee
appears to be someone who tries not to be tied down by his past, neither
dwelling on his failures nor being content with many successes.
Lee was a central figure in creating some of the most popular
characters and stories in the world. Well into his 90s, he is still working and
coming up with ideas that find their way into print, television and the Internet.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Batchelor, Bob. Stan Lee: The Man
behind Marvel. New York: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2017.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Kirby by Mark Evanier
Jack Kirby,
born Jacob
Kurtzberg in 1917,
picked up the nickname King when he was young. That is not the only reason Mark Evanier
applies the title to him in Kirby: King
of Comics. Kirby was one of the most influential creators in comics
over the course of his long career, beginning in 1938 at the Eisner-Iger shop,
which began in the early days of the medium.
Kirby is a coffee table book, full of images
from Kirby’s work. Though Evanier’s biography
of Kirby is interesting, I suspect these images, some of them large, full-page
reproduction were always conceived as a major selling point of the book. Kirby
was a professional artist, mostly in comics, his entire career, which was long,
so it only makes sense that you need to see a selection of his drawings to
understand why he had such an impact on comics.
You can see
Kirby’s influence everywhere in comics, especially superhero
comics. He worked for both Marvel and
DC at
different times, and had a hand in creating or co-creating many popular characters and
settings.
More than
that, he had an influence on the style and visual language of comics that
writers and artist still used today. He was one of the first comic book artists
to break away from strip layouts (carried over from newspaper
comics) to designing for a full page. His characters busted through the panels.
His drawings were dynamic and suggested powerful motion; this is a striking
characteristic of his work that is discussed by nearly everyone who writes
about Kirby. I find his drawings can seem strangely flattened out and dimensional
at the same time.
Because
Kirby worked for so long, on so many comics, for so many publishers, and had
such an influence on the artists who grew up reading his work, you’ll still see
many Kirby touches in current comics. I see them in the depiction of technology,
the design of characters and costumes, the
framing of action
scenes, and even the continued use of Kirby dots (especially at
DC, no doubt because they just look so cool).
He was an
innovator who introduced new types of images into comics, such as collage, and new
genres, such as romance. He
even foresaw the future of the comic books, pushing his publishers for better
quality material and printing, new formats, longer stories, and new ways to
market and sell comics. Publishers balked at the cost of such innovations at
the time, but many of the changes Kirby predicted and sought for the industry
eventually came to pass.
Kirby is
known mainly as an artist, but he was also a writer. It may be fair to say that
Kirby couldn’t leave a script alone and regularly modified scripts he was
adapting to drawings. His solo writing was packed with big ideas and wild
concepts and sometimes had trouble finding large audience in his day, though
these comics have often done well when collected and reprinted. I do not think
it unfair to say that some of his best work was collaborations with other
writers. For much of the first half of his career, he partnered with writer Joe Simon,
with whom he created Captain
America and romance comics. In the 1960s, he
collaborated with Stan
Lee at to co-create much of what is now the Marvel Universe.
If you’re
interested in this book, you may also be interested in
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