Stan Lee

IF THIS BE MARVEL

 

BY TOM SOTER

When I was three or four I was a big fan of Superman. I drew pictures of him constantly, the earliest of which showed him “flying” with feet that looked like flippers. I went to a school run by Episcopalian nuns and one year, when we were designing Easter cards in art class, I blended my fondness for the man of steel with the spirit of the season and whipped out a card with Superman as Christ on the cross (my dad loved it and had it framed; it reportedly was under consideration as a magazine cover on religion in the ‘60s).

For all that, my allegiance to Superman and his publisher, DC comics, waned as I grew older. When I was 10 or 11, DC was out in my hip crowd of pre-teen comic book buyers and Marvel was in. The Marvel Comics Group, and its main auteurs, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, were revolutionizing the industry by poking affectionate fun at the genre’s silly villains and true-blue heroes of yore. "Because sales were down and out of sheer boredom," Lee, Marvel's former editor and chief writer, once explained, "I changed the whole line around. New ways of talking, hang-µps, introspection, and brooding. I brought out a new magazine called The Fantastic Four . . . The competitors were doing well with a superhero team; Well, I didn't want to do anything like what they were doing, so I talked to Jack Kirby about it. I said, 'Let's let them not always get along well; let's let them have argµments. Let's make them talk like real people and react like real people. Why should they all get superpowers that make them beautiful? Let's get a guy who becomes very ugly.' That was The Thing. I hate heroes anyway. Just 'cause a guy has superpowers, why couldn't he be a nebbish, have sinus trouble and athlete's foot?"

This humanity was the most important element of' Lee's stories, and the empathy it engendered was responsible for Marvel's success in attracting not only kids like me, but also the ’60s college crowd who were often as angry and confused as Lee's anti-heroes. The writing was witty and hip, with characters talking and acting like real people, not the cardboard cutouts that populated DC’s comics. The stories had titles that resonated, many with a faux literary bent: “O Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting?” “If This Be Treason,” “Where Strikes the Silver Surfer,” "A Clash of Titans," “The Man Who Failed,” and they were always hyped by Stan with cover lines like “Another book-length Marvel super-spectacular!” and “Possibly the most daringly dramatic development in the field of contemporary literature!”

Bullpen Bulletins, 1967.

It was the kind of over-the-top hucksterism that made Marvel fun to read. Lee also created a hip, "us-against them" (but all tongue-in-cheek) attitude that appealed to kids, teenagers, and the college crowd. It sagely positioned Marvel as the scrappy newcomer (even though the company had been around since 1939) that was fighting the corporate, stuffy world of such established comic book giants as DC (referred to by Lee as “Brand Ecchh”). The communal feeling was enhanced by a fan club, “The Merry Marvel Marching Society" and a chummy monthly news page called “Bullpen Bulletins,” all of which pushed the idea that Marvel was one big happy family. That feeling led a few of us journey down to Marvel’s legendary “bullpen,” where we imagined all the writers and artists were hard at work, goofing around and creating modern-day masterpieces. (Most of them actually worked at home.) It was 1967 or 1968, and I still remember the secretary (often referred to in the bulletins as “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg) telling us to wait in the outer office. We never got in to see the actual inner sanctum, but a long-haired man did come out to greet us, explaining that he was Gary Friedrich (“Groovy Gary,” as he was labeled in the credits to the comic he wrote, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandoes}. He chatted with us for a few minutes and then signed autographs for us on Marvel stationary.

Gary Friedrich's autograph: hang loose!

It was a kick meeting one of Marvel’s writers (Friedrich was then the No. 3 writer, following Lee and Roy Thomas). Indeed, we wouldn't have known who to approach if we had gone to DC (heaven forbid!). For Brand Ecchh didn’t credit its artists and writers; Marvel made them into celebrities, running not only credits but amusing ones at that (“Sagacious Script By Stan Lee” “Phantasmagoric Pencilling by Johnny Romita” “Iconographic Inking by Frankie Ray” “Lachrymose Lettering by Artie Simek”). We were all encouraged to refer to the Marvel team by their first names (not “Dear Editor,” when we wrote them a letter, but “Dear Stan and Jack,” or “Dear Stan and Steve,” etc.) Part of the Marvel mystique was Lee 's technique of creating personalities for all the artists and writers, each with his or her own alliterative nick names: Smiling Stan Lee (aka Stan the Man), Jolly Jack Kirby (aka “King” Kirby), Jazzy Johnny Romita, and Sturdy Steve Ditko (Lee loved alliteration and used it for many of his superheroes’ alter-egos: Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Reed Richards, Sue Storm) The letters section was often as much fun to read as the stories themselves, with (presumably) Stan’s answers, furthering the idea of “we are family.” One reader wrote that he didn’t have the money to join the Marvel fan club (because “money didn’t grow on trees”), but said he would do so soon, ending with three of the company’s popular catch phrases: “Face Front,” “Keep Marching,” and “Make Mine Marvel.” Stan’s response was typical: “For a guy who hasn’t joined the merry ones yet, you’ve sure got our slogans down pat, Stevey! But don’t tell Jolly Jack that money doesn’t grow on trees – he spends all his spare time planting trees and hoping!” Readers were also awarded “no prizes” for catching errors in the comics (one of the most famous being Lee’s accidentally renaming the Hulk’s alter-ego “Bob” Banner for two issues of a guest appearance in The Fantastic Four, when everyone, except, apparently, Stan, knew that it was “Bruce”). I even won a no-prize once for catching an error and was excited when it arrived: an envelope with a printed statement on its outside saying, “Congratulations, true believer! This envelope contains your no-prize!” And there was nothing inside. Marvel was fun and it was family, which is why my fondness for it lasts to this day (a fondness that doesn’t extend to current comic books, which seem to take themselves way too seriously). And it’s a fondness that led me to a brief “encounter” with Stan the Man himself. It happened like this: in 1988, I had just read a long article in the Village Voice telling the story of how the former “king” of Marvel, artist Jack Kirby, was engaged in a long and bitter lawsuit with his former employer to get back his original artwork, which had become increasingly more valuable over the years. Incensed, I wrote Stan a letter. “I’m angry,” I said. “I grew up with Marvel, loved Marvel, thought (and still think) it was something special. Marvel was more than comics. It was a way of thinking. It involved good-natured jibes at the competition, loyalty to the readers, and (so I thought at the tender age of 10) camaraderie among the staff. Alas, growing up is hard to do. What you’ve done to your ex-partner, Jack Kirby, is deplorable. If just one half of what the December 8, 1987 Village Voice article says is true… Stan, how could you?” About two weeks after I sent this heartfelt missive to Marvel, it came back to me in a new envelope with a comment scrawled across the bottom in Stan’s unmistakable handwriting: “No time for a letter now, Tom,” it said, as though Stan was off on a secret assignment, “but I swear by Thor’s hammer – not even one-hundredth of it is true! Excelsior! Stan!” Whether Stan was telling the truth or not, I’ll never know, but I had obviously touched a sore spot and was flattered by such personal attention.

The story would have ended there but instead gained a coda, some 20 years later. With the huge success of the Spider-Man movies, Stan the Man was again in the limelight. It was then that Tom (“Siny”) Sinclair, a childhood friend of mine (who had been part of the excursion to Marvel’s offices in the 1960s) was going to California to interview Lee for Entertainment Weekly. “When you see him, can you get me his autograph?” I asked, giving Siny a sheet of Hulk stationary that I had saved for years. I also gave him a copy of the Silver Surfer graphic novel (by Lee and Kirby) to sign, and, for good measure, a copy of my 1988 letter to him. Siny dutifully visited and interviewed the great man (and later wrote the best article on Lee I’ve ever seen), and then showed him my letter. Stan, who to this day admits he has a notoriously bad memory, naturally did not remember my missive, but said to Siny, “He sounds upset.” I had been angry, of course, but that had been 20 years before. Nonetheless, Stan, seeing a wrong that needed to be righted and a feeling that needed to be changed, dashed off a quick note on my sheet of Hulk stationary: “Honest, Tom – I really liked Jack Kirby. Don’t go away mad! Stan Lee.” And as further salve to the wound, in the book, he wrote in that typically familiar way of his, “To good ol’ Tom! Stan Lee.”

Superman, by TS, c. 1961 and 1964

I was amused and touched that Stan would even care. It was as though I were 10 again, and the scrappy Marvel was still there to inspire me as it stood for truth, righteousness, and the Marvel way (always keep that hip tongue in your cheek). For as Stan wrote in response to a fan in 1968: "It's a good feeling to know that somewhere, somehow, in some way, a small portion of the perpetual prose we keep dishing out may be having a salutary effect somewhere in Marveldom." Face front, Stan. You are the man. ‘Nuff said.

April 25, 2010