Stan Lee died an icon in 2018, beloved by fans around the world for his work on Marvel Comics superheroes and a cameo fixture in Marvel’s cinematic universe. You might therefore expect this Disney+ documentary to be a print-the-legend affair. It’s even largely narrated by Lee himself – a great self-promoter – but turns out more balanced than we might have expected.
Directed by David Gelb (the excellent Jiro Dreams Of Sushi) and emerging six months after the centenary of Lee’s birth, this hits all the familiar beats story-wise. From a relatively impoverished childhood, Lee rose to fame and fortune after, as a teenage office boy, he was pressed into work as a writer and then as an editor for the comics company that became Marvel. There are the War years, the frustrating decades churning out anything that seemed popular, and the come-to-Jesus moment as Lee decided to try something genuinely different or quit for good, and most of the great Marvel heroes followed.
A surprisingly moving celebration of Lee and the cheerleading he did for comics
There is quite a lot of dispute about the degree of Lee’s authorship during that crucial Silver Age, given the famed “Marvel method” where Lee gave an artist the broad strokes of a story, left them to plot and draw it, and then added or polished dialogue. Lee’s cardinal sin, for both fans and historians, lay in the fact that he frequently did not adequately credit collaborators like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Bill Everett.
Initially, Gelb goes out of his way to choose Lee quotes that include or credit his artists and co-workers, something that feels more like a kindness to Lee than sufficient recompense for them. He also includes a few Lee broadsides at artists, calling them temperamental, before Gelb, and to some extent even Lee, acknowledge Ditko and Kirby’s points of view. The line, however, “You dream it up and then you give it to anybody to draw it” seems… ungenerous at best.
Then, the legend is not unearned, either. Lee had at least a role in creating those legendary characters, and more generally built the environment that allowed them to flourish. With his stewardship of Marvel and general championing of comics, he was a hugely successful ambassador for the artform. He was also ahead of his time in envisioning their success on the screen – though his own endeavours there weren’t successful, a period of frustrating decades that this film skips entirely, before rejoining Lee as the MCU takes off (there’s charming footage of his cameo shoots).
While it’s largely narrated by Lee himself, occasionally others do get a word in, like his beloved wife Joan, Jack Kirby and former “gal Friday” Flo Steinberg. Counterintuitively, his world is recreated through 3D miniature tableaux, rather than the obvious comic panel route – not always a beautiful approach but admittedly less trite. Perhaps it’s even a clever way of referencing Orson Welles’ adage that the movies are the biggest electric train set any boy ever had: the Marvel bullpen — and later all of Tinseltown — became Lee’s playpen, as the world conformed to his vision. Perhaps it was too much to hope that these filmmakers would remain entirely resistant to his charm.