I never lost my love for Superman, but I was thrilled by this new world that felt deliciously subversive and somehow accessible. I won’t say our son Ben was named after the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm, but I won’t say he wasn’t.
Fantastic Four. X-Men. Spider-Man. Thor. Black Panther. Iron Man. The Hulk. They are all part of the world created by Stan Lee, who was a teenager when he became an office boy and then a writer and editor for what would become Marvel Comics. In this documentary by David Gelb, Lee tells his own story and, through it, the story of how comics reflected and shaped their times from the 1940s to the present day, when movie special effects finally caught up with comic books’ ability to depict any fantasy setting. But Lee might say, the way he shaped the era. Lee was never shy about taking credit; in a way, his superpower was his ego.
The real-life audio and visual images are well-chosen, though the stories are unlikely to surprise anyone who has ever collected comics or attended a Con. And for a movie about a medium that is all about conveying action with eye-popping images of super-punches and flying through skyscrapers on spider webs, the archival footage oddly alternates with static, doll-house-like re-creations of people and settings, more suitable for “Severance” opening credits than a story about superheroes.
As noted, Lee was not shy about telling his story (emphasis on his). In his final years, he served as an ambassador for Marvel, speaking at colleges and cons, going on any talk show that would have him, and providing cameos in blockbuster films. Lee was, above all, a storyteller. He always did a great job of making what he did at Marvel seem impressive, important, and fun.
Perhaps it was because he was a teenager when he started writing comics that he remained so connected to what young people needed in stories. “Our superheroes are the kind of people that you or I would be if we had a superpower,” he said. It was his idea to create a teenage superhero who would have teenage problems. Turned down by a boss who insisted that no one wanted to read about an adolescent superhero, Lee and artist Steve Ditko snuck it into what was supposed to be the final issue of a series called Amazing Fantasy. (“No one cares what’s in the final issue of a series that is being canceled.”) Lee says he got the idea for Spidey’s powers from watching a fly. Wouldn’t it be great to have superhero powers inspired by an insect’s strength and its ability to crawl on walls and produce a web? Later, he imagined a team of teenage superheroes in the X-Men.