Tom Spurgeon: Documenting Stan Lee

By Tim O'Shea

Stan Lee. There’s a name in comic books that no matter your opinion of him or his work, almost without fail, people will read the words that follow his name, be it out of genuine or morbid curiosity. There’s a new book, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, to be released in mid-September 2003. As detailed here, Stan proves to be a complicated subject to cover:
“In the annals of comic-book history, there are as many views of Stan Lee as there are comic-book fans. Some see Lee as an important dialogue writer, perhaps the most crucial figure in the development of mainstream comics. Others see a skilled editor and production man. But he’s also renowned as a credit hog and a relentless self-promoter, a man responsible for dragging comic books over the mass-media cliff and obscuring the true artistic legacies of many of the men with whom he worked.

So what should we believe about Stan Lee?

Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, a new book by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, aims to set the record straight.”

SBC was fortunate enough to recently discuss the book with one of the authors, Tom Spurgeon. Spurgeon is a name that many readers will recognize as well, given that from 1995 to 1999 he was on the editorial staff of The Comics Journal, a publication for which he is still a contributor.

Rather than pelting readers with pictures of Stan, SBC is providing a sample of the documents that Raphael and Spurgeon acquired during a research trip to “the Stan Lee Archives, housed in a facility at the University of Wyoming.” In fact, be sure to visit the book’s website as it will be updated weekly with additional Lee documents.

Tim O’Shea: Has this book been something you wanted to do since the period when you helped edit TCJ's infamous "Stan Lee issue" in October 1995?

Tom Spurgeon: I never thought about doing books until about 2001, so I guess I'd have to say no. But doing that issue certainly started me thinking about Stan Lee in a more serious way than I had previously. Although there were a few essays in that issue that took Lee to task for various things the writers thought were important to talk about, there were also several writers and fellow professionals that wrote positive things, and in a considerable, thoughtful fashion, which is something you usually don't see with things written about Lee.

In particular, the writer Earl Wells gave that issue an early draft of his really fine essay about who authored the early Marvel superhero comics. Wells looked at what Lee did by examining later Jack Kirby comics where Lee wasn't involved and comparing them to the Lee/Kirby material to find differences in theme and approach. That you could have a really compelling discussion about Lee's work is something that stuck with me, that's for sure.

TO: Did you come out appreciating the achievements of Lee more or less (or about the same) after doing this book?

TS: I would say more. The thing I think I appreciated most after looking at the first few years of Marvel's '60s superheroes period was how effective an editor Stan had become at that point in his career. People are sometimes suspicious of what editors do in comics these days, and rightfully so, but their importance in most of mainstream comics history was absolutely key. And Lee was great in that period. He picked up on what Kirby and Ditko were doing and was able to communicate that approach to the other Marvel artists without completely stifling most of them. He was also able to tell which writers "got" Marvel, like Roy Thomas, and he was able to work a kind of romance comics feel into the books without upsetting the basic storytelling formula. Stan's skill as an editor is why I think the Marvel success story became about the entire superhero line rather than a few books within that line. Stan's understanding of what was hitting with fans is why it's also possible to argue that, say, John Romita's Spider-Man was more emblematic of Marvel than even Steve Ditko's, which is a really rare thing for a commercial creation.

Another thing that struck me was how hard Lee worked at a certain point in his career to further himself. He was in his late thirties when Marvel started their superheroes and around fifty when he started to turn his attention to Hollywood in a more serious way. People have really divided opinions on Lee's transformation into a minor cultural celebrity, but watching it step by step you realize how deliberately he pursued becoming Stan Lee and how unlikely his success really was.

TO: Was Lee's pseudo-autobiography of last year any help in compiling your book, or was your book pretty much in the home stretch by the time that book came out?

TS: We were about halfway done figuring out our approach when that book came out. I'd say it wasn't a primary text, but it was surprisingly useful with one minor aspect, and that was tracking Lee's opinion of certain events in his life - not just how he felt about things at the time, but how he's come to feel about them as time has progressed, which is sometimes different.

TO: How exactly did Stan Lee's Archives end up in Laramie, Wyoming? How many hours did you and Jordan spend poring over the various papers. Amidst all of that history, what would you consider to be the greatest "discovery"?

TS: We were told while we were visiting that Lee donated his papers after being approached by a previous administrator of the heritage center there who was really aggressive in going after celebrity subjects. I don't really know if that's true, but that seems to be what the librarians there think.

Jordan and I spent a full week in Laramie, working from the minute the historical center opened to the second it closed and paying for a lot of copying work to be done by the librarians after we left. We had to work really, really quickly - there's so much material - and in some cases we didn't know exactly what we had until we looked more closely at it when we got home.

I think there were three basic treasure troves in the papers. The first is that Lee or his wife Joan or someone close to the family kept all the major correspondence between Lee and various college student organizations in the 1960s. Lee's speaking on college campuses is a big part of his personal story and the Marvel Comics legend, and through those letters it's possible to track how Marvel's comics became popular with college-age kids and how effectively Lee promoted himself as their primary caretaker.

The second great find in the papers is that Lee kept a lot of his Hollywood-related writing work from the 1970s, from idea sheets to formal proposals all the way up to full scripts. I'd never heard of, let alone seen, ninety percent of that material, and it made for a fun section in the book.

The third thing that really interested me was a vast collection of radio and television interviews on tape. Not only do you get to see Lee hone his effectiveness as Marvel's spokesman, but you experience the changing attitudes of the interviewers and audience for who Lee is and comics in general. Some of the people, especially in the 1960s, were so mean!

TO: When was Lee interviewed for the book, and as it went along did the rapport and level of cooperation improve, or was it in fact the exact opposite?

TS: Lee was interviewed at various times during the writing of the book up until about five months before deadline, and Jordan had interviewed him previously for a well-received profile in the LA Times Sunday Magazine. Other than access to Lee, which was incredibly appreciated and greatly added to our understanding of him, we really wanted to make sure the book was journalistically sound and grounded in our independent research, so there wasn't really an ongoing cooperative relationship outside of that.

TO: OK, the question a lot of folks probably are wondering, were you able to interview Steve Ditko? If not, how close did you come? Of the contemporaries of Lee that are still alive, who were the hardest interviews to get and who were the most forthcoming? Were there some contemporaries that died soon after (or right before) you interviewed them, and you feel the book would have benefited if you had gotten more (or any) of their perspective?

TS: We pursued Steve Ditko and contacted him but like so many other journalists failed to convince him to break his silence and speak to us for the book. Jordan wrote an article about Ditko that appeared in newspapers worldwide when the first Spider-Man movie came out, so we were pretty versed in Ditko lore. I also think that Ditko's own writing on the early Marvel era is underestimated - once you get past some of the rhetorical flourishes, what he has to say about the act of creation is really smart and to the point.

The hardest interviews for us to track down were people in other divisions of Martin Goodman's publishing empire that knew Lee as a fellow professional, just because that's an area of cultural history that was really unfamiliar to us. As for most forthcoming, I'd say Gerry Conway was a great interview and an interview I did with John Romita Sr. for The Comics Journal during the book's later stages was really helpful.

That contemporaries question is a really smart one, because one thing I found myself wishing is that someone had written this kind of book 15-20 years ago, including sharply conducted interviews with all of those involved. In addition to all of these actual witnesses to history, like Jack Kirby, there were some really erudite artists who could have given us even more color and analysis than is in the public record - was anyone as consistently insightful and funny about working in comics as the late Gil Kane?

The only person who passed away right in the middle of our process - which was yet another sad loss; so many of these creative greats have already passed on - was Dave Berg, who did a lot of work for the Goodman comic book line in the 1950s

TO: Lee's memory for details (according to some) is not the most exact at times, given what is "history" to some present day folks, was merely another day at work for him and his contemporaries. How daunting a task was it to sort out the way Lee (or others for that matter) remembered it and a close to official version?

TS: Pretty daunting. And there's a lot more white noise with the history of Marvel than there is with your garden-variety corporate history because many of the details are flat-out disputed by the principals! But you're right in that a major thing obscuring what actually happened is that no one really knew at the time how important these events would become. One thing we knew we had to do in addition to just being good journalists and checking facts and dates and tracking different testimonies from different people at different times is try and find brand new ways to look at the events.

TO: Was there any particular chapter that was harder to write than the others?

TS: The story of Stan Lee's Internet company, Stan Lee Media, was a lot more complicated than what has been written to date, and some of those events have yet to be resolved legally. So that one was particularly tricky. From a critical standpoint, I think understanding Marvel's "relevancy" period vis-à-vis the early Marvel superhero era was a complicated subject.

TO: In your bio you say this is your first book, with more to come. Did any of your ideas for future books evolve out of the creation of this one?

TS: The stuff coming next is really different, but I had a few comics-related ideas while working on this project. I'd love to write a book of short, critical biographies about great cartoonists of the 20th Century that reflects the wide range of interesting material done - everyone from Jack Kirby to Bill Mauldin to Oliver Harrington. And I'd love to do an oral history of what has become known as alternative comics, because cartoonists are such great storytellers.

TO: How exactly did you and Jordan go about writing this book (how were responsibilities divvied up, in other words)?

TS: Jordan and I broke the chapters down and wrote initial chapter drafts according to our strengths. Well, our supposed strengths, anyway. Jordan has done a lot of media company reporting, so he did the initial writing on various Hollywood endeavors, while with my background writing about comics I got the analytical chapters. That kind of thing. We went back and forth a lot, though. Jordan was my intern and then briefly my co-worker at The Comics Journal in the mid-1990s, and has since become a good friend, so it was a pretty organic writing partnership. But since he's not here I'll say that if you're reading the book and there's a paragraph you don't like as much as the others, that's almost certainly one of Jordan's.

TO: How daunting a task is it to write this book knowing Kirby loyalists will be viewing it with their own bias/concerns (just as Ditko loyalists and Lee loyalists will)? Or is it something you don't even worry about, as you are immune to the hyper-criticism from your exposure to the typically highly critical nature of the TCJ readership who seemingly dissect every issue almost as much as the TCJ staff deconstructs/analyzes the industry?

TS: We're looking forward to disappointing all camps.

Seriously, though, I think there's a point where you just have to write the book that's being revealed to you through your research and not worry so much about trying to guarantee a particular reaction. I imagine working at the Journal will help me negotiate any criticism in an emotional sense, although I guess with the book I can't claim Gary Groth made me do it!

You know, one thing that will probably also help is I did a newspaper strip for about three years, and newspaper strip fans can make critics of the Journal look as positive as Paula Abdul.

TO: When the whole Stan Lee.net fiasco fell apart, some mainstream articles that covered the collapse provided a less than flattering/condescending portrayal of Lee. How hard was it to write of this recent business failure without some level of condescension or pity toward his business troubles?

TS: Our section on Stan Lee Media is driven by what we hope is pretty solid journalistic fact gathering rather than trying to make some immediate, summary point. For the most part, we trust the reader to draw any conclusions.

Plus since we're dealing with Lee's entire life instead of a news event, it's a lot easier to see Stan Lee Media in relation to past Lee business disappointments, including those in comics.

TO: Is there anything you'd like to discuss that I did not ask?

TS: Shouldn't I be asking you that? No, this was great. I really appreciate the coverage, and I hope that people try the book.