If you're a fan of Marvel or Stan Lee, I highly recommend this book.

And then of course, Batchelor also discusses Stan Lee's settlement with Marvel.īut good times and bad times aside, it's clear that Stan Lee is a creative individual who not only has a highly active imagination and creative eye but an excellent business sense as well. The ill-fated Stan Lee Media venture was mentioned, and so was the Pamela Anderson-voiced Stripperella cartoon from the early 2000s, which I only vaguely remember as being one of those saucy late-night shows that I wasn't allowed to watch along with Greg the Bunny and The Man Show. STAN LEE does touch on some of Lee's failings or mediocre efforts. This isn't all rose-tinted lenses, though. He wooed over America when we were being saturated with superheroes, and helped keep Marvel from going under in the Silver Age of comic books, when they were being stifled by the Comic Code. That was the vibe that I got from STAN LEE. A living personification of the grandfather character in Princess Bride who woos his grandson over with a tale of heroics and romance and good triumphing over evil. He's got that 'cool grandpa' vibe, where he's kind of nerdy, but not really out of touch. Why would you? But then, Stan Lee is a cool guy.

You don't want to air all the dirt on your childhood heroes. STAN LEE is obviously biased in that it is very much pro-Stan Lee. I guess there are some controversies over how much of the effort was his versus, say, Jack Kirby's, and I found a pretty great Vulture article called Why Is Stan Lee's Legacy in Question?that does a pretty good job discussing the subject, whereas this book, STAN LEE, kind of glosses over it. I had no idea that he was involved with so many of the Marvel superheroes - X-Men, The Fantastic Four, Thor, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Hulk. But the best part is his contributions to the Golden Age of Comics, before the Comic Code snafu. It shows his contributions to the war effort with colorful cartoony instructional pamphlets for the soldiers. STAN LEE shows how Stan Lee became involved with Marvel, how the Depression made him desperate and hungry (a familiar tale with many comic book authors and illustrators). It would be really cool, I thought, to see the Marvel side of things. I've read several comic book histories, about Wonder Woman and Superman, and they were all good. Apart from that slight disappointment due to some questionable labeling choices (*cough*), STAN LEE is a pretty fantastic book.

But STAN LEE is not a graphic novel - it is merely a biography about a man who wrote them. When I first saw this book on Netgalley, I was super excited because I thought it was going to be a graphic-novel style biography of Stan Lee's life, because some fool had slapped it with the 'graphic novels' label.

Bob batchelor stan lee