TRUE BELIEVER

A takedown of the comic-book legend, recapitulating well-worn charges about authorship while adding bits and pieces to them.

Stan Lee (1922-2018) was something of a con man, writes Riesman, who began this book as a profile for New York magazine that, unsurprisingly, incurred the subject’s wrath. He was also easily conned, particularly in his later years, when he was beset by misery—including an allegedly abusive daughter who seemed intent on spending all of Lee’s money and hangers-on who bilked him out of millions. Former associates don’t come off much better. Of one, writes the author, “He has little to show for his years of labor other than an endless stream of stories, lots of them about how he was wronged by others (a common refrain, for whatever reason, among men Stan grew close to), but many about seemingly every interaction he and Stan ever had.” Most fraught—and a tale well known to students of comic-book history—is the question of authorship of such famed superheroes as Spider-Man, with credit going either to Joe Simon or Jack Kirby (and perhaps both) and not to Lee, who claimed it for his own. Long after Kirby’s death, Disney, which owned Lee’s Marvel brand, settled with the family for millions in a legal battle that almost went to the Supreme Court; other of Lee’s enterprises ended up under investigation. Riesman adds that Lee’s own creations were less than heroic, as when he pitched actress Whoopi Goldberg a yarn in which she would play “the offspring of an alien father and a human mother who possesses the ability to be sexually irresistible to men.” Goldberg didn’t take the gig, and she seems an odd choice if we are to accept Riesman’s charge that Lee habitually made “racist, homophobic, and misogynist remarks.”

All idols have feet of clay, but, by this unpleasant account, Lee’s were more fragile than most.