Every Entertainment Industry, Gets the Brand Ambassador it Deserves.
And so it was, that Stan Lee aka Stanley Lieber, former Editor Publisher of Marvel Comics, finally died last month at the age of ninety four. I will give him credit, he took a fourth rate outfit from impotence to market dominance, and it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy the entire time.
As a writer, he wrote the worst women in comics, craven passive unheroic creatures, worth remembering that Marvel didn't have a single super hero comic that centered on a female character up and running until the 1970's. In the 1960's Marvel was a chest burs tingly patriotic publisher in the vein of Mickey Spillane until Stan discovered his comics had some cachet on College Campuses and then overnight it enabled so called youth culture to a hilarious degree. He did train a generation of writers and creative, all of them to write just like him.
The man had two great talents, he could write (bombastic pseudo mythic dialogue admittedly, but with a heart certainly) and he could hype, lord how he could hype. Hype so strong he himself began to believe it by the nineteen seventies, proclaiming himself soul creator of a good dozen of Marvel's bestselling superhero books, he called Marvel's audience "true believers" but clearly he true believer in his own almighty myth. The man spent most of the nineteen eighties walking back boasts he'd made in the public prints in the nineteen seventies...only Donald Trump can beat a record like that.
After Chris Reeve's "proof of concept" with "Superman the Movie" in 1978, Lee managed to convince Marvel Comics to release him from his publishing duties and allow him to take up residence as the company's multimedia ambassador to Hollywood. Thereafter he signed bad development deal after bad development deal, A cheap "Fantastic Four" Movie that has become the exclusive property of video bootleggers a "Captain America" movie wherein the patriotic ubermensch fights...Mussolini (my legally blind ninety five year old mother could take down Il Duce who are we kidding...) and a handful of TV pilots best forgotten. The man had a genius talent for a bad deal, in fact Marvel's cinematic revolution was likely delayed a good decade because key characters like The Hulk, The Fantastic Four or the X-Men were scattered around tinseltown optioned out to different rival studios...somehow that universe has prevailed at the box office despite Stan Lee's legendary business ineptitude.
Someday someone is gonna write a great history of this period in Stan Lee's life, from a "what-not-to-do" perspective...it'll be instructive.
He Hyped, and he Believed, that is Stan Lee's legacy. If I criticize and list his faults its more or less in the shadow of that legacy, a fantasy empire in Hollywood with global reach, one that will likely soon rival Walt Disney's planetary predominance. When you've conjured at that level, you can afford a little candor..."Excelsior Stan, Excelsior"
Saturday, December 01, 2018
Stan Lee: In Memoriam...
Every Entertainment Industry, Gets the Brand Ambassador it Deserves.
And so it was, that Stan Lee aka Stanley Lieber, former Editor Publisher of Marvel Comics, finally died last month at the age of ninety four. I will give him credit, he took a fourth rate outfit from impotence to market dominance, and it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy the entire time.
As a writer, he wrote the worst women in comics, craven passive unheroic creatures, worth remembering that Marvel didn't have a single super hero comic that centered on a female character up and running until the 1970's. In the 1960's Marvel was a chest burs tingly patriotic publisher in the vein of Mickey Spillane until Stan discovered his comics had some cachet on College Campuses and then overnight it enabled so called youth culture to a hilarious degree. He did train a generation of writers and creative, all of them to write just like him.
The man had two great talents, he could write (bombastic pseudo mythic dialogue admittedly, but with a heart certainly) and he could hype, lord how he could hype. Hype so strong he himself began to believe it by the nineteen seventies, proclaiming himself soul creator of a good dozen of Marvel's bestselling superhero books, he called Marvel's audience "true believers" but clearly he true believer in his own almighty myth. The man spent most of the nineteen eighties walking back boasts he'd made in the public prints in the nineteen seventies...only Donald Trump can beat a record like that.
After Chris Reeve's "proof of concept" with "Superman the Movie" in 1978, Lee managed to convince Marvel Comics to release him from his publishing duties and allow him to take up residence as the company's multimedia ambassador to Hollywood. Thereafter he signed bad development deal after bad development deal, A cheap "Fantastic Four" Movie that has become the exclusive property of video bootleggers a "Captain America" movie wherein the patriotic ubermensch fights...Mussolini (my legally blind ninety five year old mother could take down Il Duce who are we kidding...) and a handful of TV pilots best forgotten. The man had a genius talent for a bad deal, in fact Marvel's cinematic revolution was likely delayed a good decade because key characters like The Hulk, The Fantastic Four or the X-Men were scattered around tinseltown optioned out to different rival studios...somehow that universe has prevailed at the box office despite Stan Lee's legendary business ineptitude.
Someday someone is gonna write a great history of this period in Stan Lee's life, from a "what-not-to-do" perspective...it'll be instructive.
He Hyped, and he Believed, that is Stan Lee's legacy. If I criticize and list his faults its more or less in the shadow of that legacy, a fantasy empire in Hollywood with global reach, one that will likely soon rival Walt Disney's planetary predominance. When you've conjured at that level, you can afford a little candor..."Excelsior Stan, Excelsior"
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