About That Bad Stan Lee Doc on Disney+
It's time to stop printing the legend.
It’s probably surprising for people outside of the comic book world to learn that Stan Lee is actually a very controversial figure. In the mainstream world he’s kind of the kindly grandfather of comics, the acknowledged creator of all things Marvel, the guy whose cameos in Marvel Studios films would often be greeted with applause by audiences. He’s beloved by the larger world. But in the world of comics it’s not so cut and dry, and saying something like “Stan Lee created Spider-Man” can get you embroiled in a big argument.
The new documentary Stan Lee, now on Disney+, does nothing to defuse these tensions. It barely acknowledges them, in fact, and if anything it’s going to further the vision that Stan Lee was the guy behind all of your favorite Marvel characters and stories. I mean, Stan himself says as much in the doc. And as a result his genius collaborators are left largely in the dust, so much so that Jack Kirby’s son felt compelled to issue a statement about how the documentary underplays his father’s role in the birth of the Marvel Age of comics.
First things first: it’s not a very good documentary. Stan Lee has the feel of a hastily tossed together DVD special feature. There is one thing that makes it seem like perhaps some effort was put into it - the doc uses miniatures to reenact moments from Stan the Man’s life. Why miniatures? I’m not really sure; clearly the obvious choice here would have been comic book panels, but instead we get these little dollhouse figurines. They’re nicely made and staged, but I just can’t figure out why they’re in the movie.
But in terms of actual content, the doc is threadbare. Part of this can be laid at the feet of the decision to have the entire story told in Stan’s own words, using interviews and speeches and other recordings; this leaves the doc almost totally devoid of context. If Stan Lee didn’t explain on mic why Jack Kirby was arguably the most important illustrator in comic book history, the doc won’t have that information in it. And it doesn’t. There’s not a lot of context about the world of comic books at all, and what context that exists is perfectly perfunctory.
The doc’s scope is also weirdly truncated. It comes to the early 80s and then suddenly skips ahead 40ish years to the dawn of the MCU. It doesn’t give us the pulse-pounding behind the scenes tale of the creation of later Stan Lee legends like Stripperella, doesn’t talk about how Stan spent decades in Hollywood failing to get any Marvel stuff off the ground, and in the end Stan Lee doesn’t even die. If you watched this doc and did not know anything about Stan beforehand you would walk away thinking this old dude was still out there saying “Excelsior.” It’s strange, and it’s diminishing.
Because the whole doc is told in Stan’s own words, the film is heavily weighted towards Stan’s own recollections and opinions about his work and the world of Marvel. Stan never hesitated to self-mythologize, and as a result that legend is, in the vein of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, being printed. Stan Lee does try to include a little bit of doubt into the proceedings - there’s a segment where Stan talks about how Steve Ditko disagrees over who created Spider-Man and Stan’s rationale is absolutely dumb, and there’s a heated radio call-in exchange between Stan and Jack that I had read about but never actually heard - but it’s mostly a handwave. The emphasis is on how Stan did these things.
Why does this matter? Well, for one thing the people involved in the creation of these characters and concepts never got the money that was due them. Corporations have made billions of dollars off these Marvel characters over the years, but the Kirby family is not getting regular multi-million dollar checks. Marvel is especially bad about this; Ed Brubaker once told me that he saw more money from GCPD characters he created barely showing up in Nolan’s Batman films than he did from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which was based on his updating of the character of Bucky Barnes.
In the absence of financial remuneration it’s important to give cultural credit to these creators. For decades Stan Lee, the ultimate Marvel huckster, hogged all of that glory, and Stan Lee was an opportunity to set the record straight. And it could be done in a respectful way; clearly Stan Lee was not intended as some kind of hit piece on Stan the Man, but it could have repositioned the guy into his proper place… which still gives him a lot of credit!
The way that Stan and Jack and Steve made comics was this - Stan would give a basic plot outline, the artist would go off and draw a complete comic and then Stan would put words into everyone’s mouths. Eventually the basic plot outlines got even more basic, like “What if the Vulture is in the next issue?” and it’s believed that there are issues towards the end of Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man run that had zero Stan input until the pages were turned in. But this doesn’t mean Stan’s contribution was nothing.
Quite the contrary - read an old Marvel comic and Stan’s influence is palpable. The style in which he wrote dialogue and captions is one of the defining elements of Marvel stories back in the day. His verbal zip was the perfect counterpart to Jack Kirby’s visual vim. The words were a huge part of what captured the imaginations of older readers, helping make comics more than just for kids. And his personality and presence were vital in exploding Marvel into the mass consciousness, making it into the pop art that they would proudly proclaim it to be on covers. That’s a skill and a talent, and it’s a good one, and it’s a rare one. The response to Stan taking all the credit has sometimes been to overcorrect, to say that he had nothing to do with these comics in any meaningful way, but that’s just not true. Compare the classic Fantastic Four run to Kirby’s solo work at DC - while his Fourth World Saga is a masterpiece, it doesn’t have the pop punch that connected with audiences. You can see the difference - just as you can see the difference in the work Stan did after his collaboration with genius artists. I mean, who’s out here looking for a Ravage 2099 movie?
This documentary had the opportunity to reframe Stan Lee’s contribution to the culture in a way that would be more fair and more correct, and wouldn’t diminish the man himself. But the filmmakers chose to not go that way, to just take the easiest and cheapest path of pandering to pre-existing understandings of Stan’s role. That’s because this documentary isn’t a serious work, even by the unserious standards of corporate hagiographies. Somehow this fluff played the Tribeca Film Festival this year.
There’s still a space for a good doc or even narrative movie about Stan and Jack and Steve and all the rest of the Mighty Marvel Bullpen, and when that real story is told it will be much more interesting than this. That’s because the real story is about the magical way that people can come together and bring their own interests, influences and ideas and somehow merge them together to create something bigger and greater than what they could do on their own. We live in a culture that is obsessed with the auteur theory, but what makes the early Marvel comics great is that there is no auteur, but rather there are these mighty minds coming together to combine in ways they could never have imagined otherwise. This is the alchemy of comics, and it’s the alchemy of cinema, and it’s one of the most exciting forms of creativity. If only this doc understood that.