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Stan Lee Review
Image Credit: Disney+
Loading...As I sit here in the basement of my house where I do most of my writing, movie watching, gaming, and… everything I guess…
(Don’t judge; it’s cooler down here, and my wife and I have very differing ideas on how warm a house needs to be)
…I realize I am surrounded by comics and comic memorabilia. Art prints on the wall behind me. Framed comics on the opposite wall. Boxes of comics. A bookshelf of manga. Stacks of what I haven’t read yet. Comic character pop vinyls. A gaming table covered in comic covers I got out of 50 cent bins. It’s a comics world, and I am just living in it.
And it dawns on me that Stan Lee probably had more impact on me than anybody else in the world that I never met. And more impact on me than 99% of the people I HAVE met.
I got into comics you, when I was about eight years old, and have been in and out of them intermittently ever since. Even when I’m not actively reading them, I still love the culture around them. Talking about them. Revisiting the ones from years past. Collecting statues and shirts of my favorite characters.
And so many of my favorite characters and books were directly created or strongly influenced by Stan Lee.
As far as pop culture effects on me, probably only Vince McMahon is even close, and… whoof. Stan wasn’t always a saint, but as a human being, he’s pretty damned far removed from Vince. Really kind of disheartening to compare the two.
I still remember being a kid, a burgeoning Marvel zombie who read Spider-Man and X-Men and Avengers and Thor and Hulk, and seeing Stan’s name plastered everywhere in every book. It was all “Stan Lee Presents…” and every book had a “Stan’s Soapbox” page, and reprints would allow me to read the older issues that he actually wrote. It’s why I’m here; it’s why I’m reading this. These books, these characters, were bombastic and awe-inspiring, and he brought them to us. I wanted to be a writer, just like Stan Lee!
As I grew, I branched out more. I started reading indie books and manga. I even started reading DC Comics! And I slowly started learning about the influence of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko that those earlier “Stan Lee Presents…” captions kind of undersold. I still loved Stan for what he opened my eyes to, but I started seeing him with more nuance than as this infallible golden god from my childhood.
And so I was a little concerned going in to the new DisneyPlus documentary, simply titled Stan Lee, that we would get this glossed-over telling of Stan’s life that maintains the image of him as a perfectly clean hero of imagination.
Let’s start with one aspect that did take me by surprise. By cutting together interviews, radio shows, TV appearances, audiobooks, and the like… the entire documentary is narrated by Stan himself, despite his passing years ago. For the first ten minutes or so, I kept expecting a current-day narrator to take over, but nope… it’s almost entirely Stan from the word “go”. It’s his life in his words, from his childhood in New York up through his years as Cameo Man in various Marvel movie productions.
The documentary comes in at a little under 90 minutes, and it isn’t comprehensive. After doing a really good job covering Stan’s early life through his creation of many of Marvel’s biggest hitters, we are left with a big time skip from the mid-70’s until the 2000’s. There’s no mention of some of his more forgettable ventures, be it Ravage 2099, Stripperella, or even his turn with DC’s Just Imagine line where he came in and wrote what it would have been like if he had created some of their biggest stars.
To me, that felt like a miss. As a Stan fan, I’ve read and heard the story of the creation of Spider-Man a thousand times. I’ve seen his telling of using the X-Men as a parable for bigotry before. But why come back for Ravage 2099? What was his welcome to DC like? These are the tales I’ve seen much less attention given to. Personally, I wanted to know more about them!
And what about Stripperella, DisneyPlus?! The people want to know about Stripperella!
In lieu of those, we do get a look at his courtship of and marriage to Joanie, which was very sweet. The interviews they showed from the two of them really displayed a couple in love. I knew Stan had a daughter (Stan jokes that the couple was so egotistical, of course they also named their daughter Joan), but I was unaware they lost another child hours after her birth. That has to be devastating, but it’s just a bit of a sidenote here, as I’m sure her loss was very hard for Stan and Joanie to ever talk about. How could it not be? And again, I saw Stan as less of an untouchable being and more as a human who experienced tragedy just as much as anyone else.
To somewhat of my surprise, the movie does get in-depth into the conflicts Stan had with Steve and Jack; including airing a talk that Stan and Jack had on a radio show that gets genuinely uncomfortable. After starting quite pleasant and cordial, you hear the wounds open up as the two slip slowly into light accusations and disagreements over what “creating” means. The host of the show tries to keep them on track, but both men seem more interesting in relitigating the past.
An audio clip of Stan’s narration gives Ditko a heaping helping of respect and admiration… while also showing that Stan never really believed Steve’s point of view on the latter’s contributions to Spider-Man. To hear Stan say it, crediting Steve as co-creator of Spidey was a benevolent act on his part to placate a cranky artist. You would hope that at some point after whenever he recorded that, he began to see Steve’s point, but… if so, we don’t get that here.
So this doc was not nearly as white-washed as it could have been, which is nice to know. It even has a cut clip of Stan talking about how he regrets that he never applied to own the rights to his creations, which… given both Marvel’s and Disney’s track record in that regard, it’s humorous they even left that quote in the final edit.
