BEFORE: This is the reason I was so liberal with adding "extra" films to my Doc Block, other than trying to land films on celebrity birthdays, I was thinking about San Diego Comic-Con. Sure, it officially starts this Thursday (Preview Night Wednesday), but for maybe 15 years in a row, I used to travel out there on Tuesday night so I could arrive on Wednesday morning, check in to my hotel and then have enough time to pack up a few boxes of merchandise and get down to the Convention Center in time to start selling. My first year there, I missed Preview Night and my boss was PISSED, I think I went to the San Diego Zoo or something, and boy, I got chewed out and learned the hard way to not do that again. So, there's still part of me that wants to be packing a bag tonight so I can catch my overnight flight. Which always left on Tuesday, because who needs sleep when there's merch to be sold on Wednesday?
I saw Stan Lee live in person at a number of S.D.C.C.'s and N.Y.C.C.'s over the years, I think at one point it was odd if I DIDN'T see Stan Lee at a convention. But I'd met him a few times before that, because I used to own stock in Marvel Comics, and if I wasn't working on the day of the annual shareholder's meeting in NYC I would learn the location and check it out. Each year they printed their annual stock report in the form of a comic book, and they would bring out Stan to autograph the stock report for anybody who wanted that, so I probably have 3 or 4 Marvel Stock Report Annuals signed by him. He was always very friendly and gracious about spending his time doing that and talking with the fans.
My history with the stock did not work out well, because the company bought one company after another (Toy Biz, Topps, Panini stickers) with the goal of saving money - why license their characters to a toy company when they can own a toy company and make all the profits themselves? That was a terrible idea, because Marvel spent so much money buying other companies that they went bankrupt, and the stock became worthless. I sold all the shares I'd bought for $1,000 for a few dollars and then invested in some Disney stock instead - a few years down the road, of course Disney bought Marvel and I was back owning shares of that same company again.
Charlie Chaplin carries over again from "The Real Charlie Chaplin".
THE PLOT: Stan Lee was Marvel Comics' primary creative director for two decades, expanding it from a small publishing house division to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics and film industries.
AFTER: I haven't made much reference here to the latest twists and turns in the Presidential Race, because there just hasn't been a good opportunity to reference them. Sure, I finally watched "You've Been Trumped" Parts 1 and 2, because for some reason not everyone got the memo about what a Class A A-hole he really is. Unfit to serve, convicted felon, I think I've made my position on this pretty clear. Getting shot at by an unhinged Gen Z-er who can't quite seem to pick a party has not changed my opinion one bit, but some people who believe in mystical things like angels have taken this as a sign from above that this has somehow made him more worthy, which is a load of horse hooey.
But let's talk about Biden's decision to not run for re-election for just a minute, because I see a parallel in the career of Stan Lee, who started at Timely Comics as a copy boy, then jumped in as a writer when needed, and kept volunteering for more and more comics to write that eventually he was running the place. Similar career path (in a way) to Biden, who served as a Senator for a long time and then of course was picked by Obama as his vice-president, it's another case where if you just keep working long enough you might end up running the whole place, if you can stay alive and build up enough experience. The biggest mistake Biden probably made was stepping aside for Hillary Clinton and then having four years of down time during which he stupidly grew four years older, and that resulted in him essentially aging out of the program. Stan was similarly forced to retire when he hit - what was it, 90 years old?
Stan Lee became editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics in the late 1960's, and then there was nowhere else to go but publisher, which meant a new editor-in-chief needed to be named. But it's not like Stan was working on the production line when the comics were being printed, it just meant he was the man in charge of everything. Then for some reason in 1981 he moved to California to oversee the production of Marvel's properties in movie and TV series forms, however all of the Marvel shows produced during this time period were quite terrible, at least compared to the high-budget movies made in the last 15 years. And at some point in the 1990's Stan retired, though he retained the title of Chairman Emeritus and still drew an annual salary of about $1 million, just for going from one comic convention to another. Sweet gig.
What this documentary doesn't mention is that Stan started another company called Stan Lee Media, to develop some new superheroes for comics and movies that were NOT owned by Marvel. But this was in 1998, and by 2000 the other creators were in trouble for illegal stock manipulation and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Stan tried again a couple years later with a new company, POW! Entertainment, but really, the next ten years were a complete blur of lawsuits, with Stan Lee suing Marvel after the X-Men movies took off, then Stan Lee Media sued POW! Entertainment, and then I think at one point Stan Lee accidentally sued himself, which was very embarrassing.
But by 2006 it seemed that everyone figured out that Stan Lee would never be as successful as he was when he worked at Marvel, and Marvel was also missing some of the magic that Stan brought to the table as the public face of the company. So he was eventually welcomed back, wrote a few minor comics for the company, but more importantly, he began making cameos in the new Marvel movies, and people kept going to see each one just to get a glimpse of Stan as part of each story, whether he played a museum security guard or a mailman or just a guy driving down a highway, people looked forward to seeing when and how Stan would pop up in each new film.
This doc kind of glosses over the early years, like it shows Stan (or an action-figure version of him) getting the job at Timely Comics, but there's no mention of the publisher, Martin Goodman, being Lee's cousin's husband. So it's not like he was "destined" to work at a comic-book company, some nepotism was involved, but sure, also hard work and a volunteering spirit to take on more work, whether it was writing comics or sweeping up. When World War 2 came, Stan volunteered for service but never went overseas, he served in the signal corps in the U.S., repairing communications equipment, but later transferred to the Training Film Division, which also made training manuals, which started to look like comic books with Lee's influence, and that wasn't a bad thing, it made them easier to understand. Also serving in that division were director Frank Capra, cartoonist Charles Addams, and future children's book writer Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss).
But the main thing that comic book fans want to know about is probably Stan's "marriage" - not the one to his wife Joan, but the creative partnership with Jack Kirby where Stan did the writing and Jack did the illustration and some of the greatest comic-book characters were created, like the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man and the X-Men. Stan also partnered with Steve Ditko to create Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, and later BOTH Kirby and Ditko would leave the company because they felt that Stan was taking too much credit for the creation of these characters. Stan's argument is that he thought up the characters, named them, figured out what made them tick, and then decided who they would fight, but Kirby and Ditko were responsible for the LOOK of those characters - I can see both sides here, maybe you just call that a 50-50 collaboration, give the artist the benefit of the doubt, but Lee clearly didn't DO that, because both Kirby and Ditko still had unresolved issues.
This documentary plays a recording of Jack Kirby calling in to a radio show where Stan Lee is being interviewed, and yeah, the conversation may have started with "How are you, Stan?" and "How's your health, Jack?" but it wasn't before long before the knives came out and the two men just could not see eye to eye and were arguing over who "created" the X-Men. This is Lennon-McCartney or Mick Jagger-Brian Jones all over again, there just can't be two Alphas in the company, it won't work for any period over five years. Besides, even though Stan got most of the credit, turn-about was fair play when it turned out that Marvel owned the characters, because Stan was an employee of Marvel when he created Spider-Man, so guess who owns Spider-Man? Hint: not Stan Lee. And all attempts by Stan to create new characters that were as popular and also owned by Stan Lee failed miserably. What does that tell you? Lightning in a bottle, it's not going to happen twice.
Stan Lee may have been part Biden, but he was also part Trump - in that he was his own best salesman. He was always happy to tell everyone about how great it was to be him, how he did every job in the company by himself and oh yeah, also the artists drew a little bit, but he wrote EVERY WORD and decided which villain each hero should fight and he thought up the idea of a teenager from Queens getting bitten by a spider and gaining the ability to climb walls, fight villains and screw up his own life at the same time. I mean, I get it, everybody loves super-heroes now and Stan wrote some of the most classic stories in the entire genre, but he didn't exactly invent the medium, a lot of other people wrote comic books before he did, and a lot of other people wrote BETTER ones after he did. Just saying, let's keep this in perspective.
But a shout-out to Stan Lee for creating some of the first black superheroes (Black Panther, Falcon) and for writing stories that touched on civl rights, anti-bigotry and the dangers of drug abuse. And of course, 55 years spent working for the same company is notable in ANY industry. That goes for Stan Lee AND Joe Biden. Another take on Stan Lee, however, is that by creating likable characters and presenting them in a never-ending narrative form, he got millions of young kids addicted to comic books, which turned in to an older generation that never fully grew up and still reads them (myself included), and did you know that the average comic book now costs FIVE dollars? (OK, some are still $4). But jeez, I can remember when Marvel Comics increased their standard price from 35 cents to 50 cents, and the company APOLOGIZED to the fans for having to do that. There's inflation, and then there's just being greedy.
With archive footage of Stan Lee (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Joan Lee, Kevin Feige, Jack Kirby, Julius Schwartz, Joe Simon, Flo Steinberg, Roy Thomas,
Spiro Agnew (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Martin Freeman (ditto), Kenneth Branagh (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), George W. Bush (last seen in "Yogi Berra: It Ain't Over"), Larry King (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Bill Clinton (last seen in "The Strange Name Movie"), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "We Blew It"), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Taika Waititi (ditto), Robert Downey Jr. (last seen in "Sr."), Chris Evans (last seen in "Street Kings"), Jon Favreau (last seen in "Term Life"), George Harrison (last seen in "Wham!"), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Extraction II"), Tom Holland (last seen in "Uncharted"), Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "Eight Legged Freaks"), Martin Luther King (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Brie Larson (last seen in "The Marvels"), Marilyn Monroe (last seen in "Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Keith Haring: Street Art Boy"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in "Kill Your Darlings"), Jesse Owens (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Wind River"), Franklin Roosevelt (also carrying over from "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Orson Welles (ditto), Tom Snyder (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Ringo Starr (ditto), Vanilla Ice (last seen in "The Wrong Missy"), Billy Wilder,
RATING: 6 out of 10 musings from "Stan's Soapbox"
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