BOOKS: True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee: Abraham Riesman

Published 10:00 am Saturday, March 20, 2021

Ask most people who created Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Dr. Strange, the X-Men, Iron Man and dozens of other Marvel superheroes, villains and supporting characters, and if they have any answer at all, it will likely be Stan Lee.

Even people who give a more nuanced answer often respond that Stan Lee created the characters along with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. They may say Lee wrote the stories and Kirby and Ditko drew them.

But in his new biography “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee,” Abraham Riesman poses that Lee may have been credited as the writer but Kirby and Ditko likely did the majority of the story plotting with Lee writing dialogue and serving as editor. It’s possible that Kirby created most of the Marvel characters, too.

Further, Riesman poses that Lee’s greatest character creation was Stan Lee.

He was born in 1922 as Stanley Martin Lieber. As a teen, a relative hired him to work in a clerk-type role in a publishing company that developed comic books. Kirby was already there, an adult a few years older, drawing and plotting comics such as Captain America, a character Kirby created with Joe Simon.

Young Stanley Lieber began writing some filler copy and created the pen name Stan Lee, thinking that he would save his real name for works with more depth; he eventually legally changed his name to Stan Lee.

By the late 1950s, early ’60s, Lee was a writer and editor at the company that eventually became Marvel when comics featured monsters, romance, Westerns, war stories, etc. Superheroes had become mostly passe, though DC Comics still published Superman and Batman adventures.

As the legend goes, in the early 1960s, deciding that he’d really put some creativity into comics, Lee had the idea for the Fantastic Four, which he then discussed with Kirby who drew the characters.

Through the years, Riesman reveals, Lee told inconsistent stories of how he developed the FF, Spider-Man and other characters. Riesman also includes excerpts from interviews with Kirby who claims the FF and other Marvel characters were his ideas; however, Kirby’s claims were also riddled with inconsistencies. 

“True Believer” also throws doubt on who came up with the story ideas for these monthly titles as they were created and introduced throughout the 1960s. Kirby and Ditko claimed they developed the storylines while Lee filled in the dialogue bubbles. But Lee gave himself full writing credits and writer’s pay for each issue.

Riesman argues Lee didn’t so much create the mythos of Marvel but rather the mythos that he created Marvel.

Lee was far more outspoken and outlived Kirby by more than 20 years. He told the story behind Marvel his way. He became a more public face as he made cameos in the many Marvel Cinematic Universe movies.

“True Believer” shines a harsh spotlight on Stan Lee’s life as a creator, provocateur and a man in decline/victim as he entered the final years of his long life. Many long-time Stan Lee fans – “true believers” – of the man and Marvel will likely not care for the story Riesman tells.

The book will throw other true believers into doubt.

And still others may feel it confirms what they have long believed. Stan Lee did not create the Marvel characters alone. That Kirby and Ditko also created the characters. But so did Stan Lee. That they were co-creators in the making of the Marvel Universe.