The argument could be made that this reflects the nature of Marvel after going public while sales had always been paramount to the company, outrageous profit started leading the way in that era. Howe seems to have little love for Marvel’s creative output post-Jim Shooter the book slides away from a creative biography of the company into much more of a stock-oriented biography. Howe’s book focuses a little bit more on the business side of the story, with his tale reaching its ultimate complexity in the 80s and 90s as Ron Perelman took over the company and steered it directly into bankruptcy by oversaturating the market with shitty books covered in shitty gimmicks. Howe’s version of Lee is a guy who checked out in the 70s.īut this is the Untold Story of Marvel Comics, not just Stan Lee, and the reality is that Lee is only a tiny part of the longer tale. Lee is portrayed as a guy who was in a real hurry to get out of comic books and into Hollywood, where he would spend decades with his dick in his hand, unable to get anything decent actually going.
He was an enabler of the magic, giving bigger creative minds support and an unprecedented openness in terms of stories and how they were told. After reading Howe’s book I have come to believe that it wasn’t Stan who made the Marvel magic but rather who ALLOWED it to happen. Stan Lee is presented as a guy caught between two masters, trying to make good comics and to protect the guys working under him while also keeping the bosses - in the beginning Martin Goodman, later a revolving door of corporate raiders - happy. Sean Howe’s book rehabilitates Stan - to an extent. Stan has slowly morphed into the wisecracking bad guy who danced at the ends of strings pulled by fat cats. That came along with a growing unhappiness in the industry with the way creators have been treated by the corporate entities that own their creations. Kirby, before he died, began claiming that not only did Stan not invent or write ANY of the classic Marvel stories, Jack was actually the guy who created Spider-Man. Over the years the creation myth of the Marvel Universe - Smilin’ Stan Lee and Jolly Jack Kirby together, bouncing ideas off of each other and laying the groundwork for all of our pop culture to come - has become sullied and darkened by gripes from within.
This was the driving question I had when I began reading Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
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