True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

by Abraham Riesman (Crown, $28) “True Believer may not be the book that Stan Lee’s fans want,” said Rob Salkowitz in Forbes.com. “But it’s a book that anyone concerned with the business of popular culture over the last 80 years needs.” For decades before his death in 2018, Lee was celebrated as the genial impresario who had built Marvel Comics and overseen its magical 1961–72 run, when the upstart shop created the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, and too many other iconic superheroes to count. But doubts about Lee’s creative role were growing well before journalist Abraham Riesman wrote a startling “wartsand-all” profile of Lee for New York magazine, and Riesman has now expanded that 2016 story into a biography that serves, among other things, as “a takedown of the myth of the heroic creative genius.”

The Stan Lee we meet here comes across as “a serial abuser of the truth,” said Andy

Lewis in the Los Angeles Times. Yes, the gregarious New Yorker born Stan Lieber provided much of the zippy dialogue in Marvel’s 1960s comic books. But Riesman downplays Lee’s central role, emphasizing the complaints of Marvel artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, who claimed that they often dreamed up the characters and plotlines that Lee put his name on. Though he has turned careful research into a “compulsively readable” account of Lee’s eight-decade career, Riesman “overplays his hand, diminishing his biography’s strengths by shading every story to Lee’s disadvantage.” Many Marvel artists actually liked Lee’s working methods, and the business failures Lee suffered in later years shouldn’t be treated as evidence that he’d never done anything right.

“Generous observers might compare Lee to an orchestra conductor,” one who coaxed talent from others, said Stephanie Burt in The New Yorker. Just as Lee was never the same after leaving Marvel, falling prey more than once to unscrupulous business partners, Marvel was never the same after his 1972 departure. Until the end, Lee gladly played the role of father of the Marvel universe, a universe that means so much to millions. Whatever his true role in creating it, “it couldn’t have happened without him.”