Name: True Believer: the Rise and Fall of Stan Lee
ISBN: 9780593135716

Abraham Riesman

Overture : what it takes -- Ambition and its discontents. Escape at any cost (To 1939) -- Means of ascent (1939-1945) -- Quiet desperation (1945-1961) -- Mister Marvel. What price victory? (1961-1966) -- Lonely at the top (1966-1972) -- Chafing in the C-suite (1972-1980) -- Lost in Hollywood (1980-1998) -- Get rich quick. The great experiment (1998-2001) -- Spotlight and shadow (2001-2017) -- Disintegration (2017-2018).

True Believer: the Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

Patrick Book

Illuminating, even when it isn’t able to produce absolute clarity about the whirlwind end of his life. There’s plenty of controversy here an awful lot of people won’t know anything about.

altlovesbooks

"There is no more unreliable narrator of a person's life than that person."

I read this biography as a comic fan, and also as someone who was peripherally aware of all the controversy surrounding Lee's name much later in life. I knew some details in broad strokes, but nothing in the sort of detail presented in this book. While eye-opening (and sad, in the later chapters), it didn't surprise me much. 

People are complicated, and I think Stan Lee embodied that. I think he was complicated, he was egotistical, he was ambitious to an unrealistic degree, and he always seemed to struggle to come to terms with who he was. Complicating matters of his life, he seemed to also unwittingly surround himself with people just like him, muddying the waters a bit in terms of what was truth and what was fiction in the early days of Marvel. Without going into detail here on my thoughts of the Kirby/Lee debacle, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle of what the two men each claimed.

Having said all that, a life led full of ambition, avarice, and wealth does not mean that you earn whatever comes next. Whatever wrongs Stan committed to get where he ended up do not justify his treatment at the hands of all the leeches that came out of the woodwork in his later years. He didn't deserve any of that treatment at the hands of people he initially trusted, people that were by blood or by friendship family to him. 

This biography was extremely engaging, and clearly well researched by the author. The notes section in the end is extensive, and the author mentions at multiple points the sources of information used to write the different chapters. I enjoyed this book immensely, even if the subject is not the perfect person a lot of people expected him to be.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Nuno Miguel Gonçalo Salgueiro

The definitive, revelatory biography of Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, a writer and entrepreneur who reshaped global pop culture—at a steep personal cost “A biography that reads like a thriller or a whodunit . . . scrupulously honest, deeply damning, and sometimes even heartbreaking.”—Neil Gaiman Stan Lee—born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922—was one of the most beloved and influential entertainers to emerge from the twentieth century. He served as head editor of Marvel for three decades and, in that time, launched more pieces of internationally recognizable intellectual property than anyone other than Walt Disney: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Thor . . . the list seems to never end. On top of that, his carnival-barker marketing prowess more or less single-handedly saved the comic-book industry and superhero fiction. Without him, the global entertainment industry would be wildly different—and a great deal poorer. But Lee’s unprecedented career was also filled with spectacular failures, controversy, and bitter disputes. Lee was dogged by accusations from key collaborators such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko over who really created Marvel’s signature characters—iconic figures for whom Lee had always been suspected of taking more than his proper share of credit. A major business venture, Stan Lee Media, resulted in stock manipulation, bankruptcy, and criminal charges. A second one, POW! Entertainment, has been repeatedly accused of malfeasance and deceit. And in his final years, after the death of his beloved wife, Joan, rumors swirled that Lee was a virtual prisoner in his own home, beset by abusive grifters and issuing cryptic video recordings as a battle to control his fortune and legacy ensued. Abraham Riesman is a veteran culture reporter who has conducted more than 150 interviews and investigated thousands of pages of private documents, turning up never-before-published revelations about Lee’s life and work. Lee’s most famous motto was “With great power comes great responsibility.” Stretching from the Romanian shtetls of Lee’s ancestors to his own final moments in Los Angeles, True Believer chronicles the world-changing triumphs and tragic missteps of an extraordinary life, and leaves it to readers to decide whether Lee lived up to the responsibilities of his own talent.

True Believer: the Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

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