Bob Batchelor’s STAN LEE: THE MAN BEHIND MARVEL and Telling Old Stories in a New Way

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Did you ever hear that story about the young boy who doesn’t have any parents?  He lives in a place that he hates and dreams of doing something more with his life.  One day, an older figure intrudes into his life and reveals a secret: the boy has powers that he didn’t know about.  The mentor takes the boy to a place where he can learn more about his power.  He makes friends who eventually help him out on his ultimate quest: to restore the balance between good and evil.

Can you identify the story?

If you said Harry Potter, I would tell you that you are wrong in an effort to confuse you and to make you think.

If you said Ender’s Game, I would do the same.

Star Wars, Lord of the RingsThe Odyssey…even The Hangover.  To some extent, these are the same story.

No, friend, there are very few original stories.  The great challenge for the writer, then, is to devise a new way to tell old stories.  There’s nothing wrong with this kind of “borrowing.”  Nothing at all!  In fact, every single writer does it, but few have done it as well as Stan Lee, the living legend who created (or co-created) characters that have made approximately eleventy trillion dollars at the box office.

In Stan Lee, Bob Batchelor tells the story of the remarkable man who started out wanting to write the great American novel and ended up creating a universe instead.  (Purchase links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the publisher.)  Mr. Batchelor takes a standard approach to the structure of the book; he begins with a prologue scene that represents the turning point of Mr. Lee’s life and then rewinds to the 1920s, when little Stanley Lieber (later Stan…Lee) entered the world.  From there, the author engages in a linear description of Mr. Lee’s life, from his New York City upbringing to his Los Angeles second act.

Mr. Batchelor had a couple pretty big problems.  First of all, the details of Lee’s life are fairly well-known.  He’s been a celebrity for fifty years and has given about a million interviews.  Second, Stan Lee’s life is fascinating and historic in relation to comic books and superheroes and modern mythology…but unless there’s something I don’t know, Mr. Lee was a pretty boring guy.  In a good way.  He was married for several decades, he and his wife had two children (one of whom lived to adulthood) and he wrote comic books and outlined comic books for others.  I’m willing to bet that Mr. Lee is like the rest of us and has made some big mistakes, but it’s not like he was an evil scientist ninja or drove monster trucks from state to state in between liquor store robberies.

How did Mr. Batchelor tell a story that all comic book aficionados know in a new way and how did he make a comfortably mundane life interesting?  The author took a step back from the protagonist of the biography and described the world and conditions that shaped Mr. Lee, allowing the reader to explore their own understanding of the character.  The son of Romanian immigrants, Mr. Lee was part of a wave of Eastern European Jews who came to the United States in the first couple decades of the twentieth century.  These people were amazing; they were crucial to the development of musical theater, standup comedy, and comic books.  What about his origin story helped Mr. Lee become what he did?  How did his experience as a child of financially insecure parents shape him in later life, and how did it shape the X-Men and Spider-Man and the Hulk and the Fantastic Four?  Mr. Batchelor compensates for the relative mundanity of Mr. Lee’s life by hinting toward a greater, grander story about the combined nature of culture and creativity.

There are a lot of flashy and interesting moments in the Marvel universe and in Mr. Lee’s life, but Mr. Batchelor devotes a lot of page space to the everyday necessities of life that constituted the bulk of Mr. Lee’s days.  We can all relate to the events around Marvel’s beginnings:

  • The tightwad boss who somehow manages to have enough money for himself
  • The young, ambitious kid who may or may not have screwed the established co-workers
  • The desperate desire to keep up with marketplace trends
  • Unnecessary governmental and societal intervention
  • The conflict between ambition and the desire to put food on the table

Mr. Batchelor offers us a book worth reading because he does more than distill Mr. Lee’s many interviews.  Stan Lee teaches us that powerful writing comes out of adversity.  Without the restrictions and worries that surely influenced Mr. Lee’s work, our shared cultural heritage would be different.

Perhaps most importantly, the author doesn’t skimp on the parts of Stan Lee’s life that you really want to know about.  We get detailed tellings of the creation of the Fantastic Four, of Mr. Lee’s working relationship with Jack Kirby, and his somewhat unfocused later years.  (Where do you go when you become a living legend by your fifties and live into your nineties?)  Whether or not you’re a comic book person, Mr. Batchelor’s book is a worthwhile chronicle of a writer’s life and offers other writers the opportunity to see what it’s like to have your creative dreams come true in ways you didn’t expect.

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