Imagine getting worked up about the difference in quality between Pizza Hut and Domino’s. Or being agitated to the point of heart palpitations when someone says Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is leagues better than the offerings from Starbucks. Or blowing a gasket when some Star Wars nerd suggests that, actually, a squadron of TIE Fighters would easily take down a Galaxy-class starship like the NCC-1701-D. (That’s the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, duh.)
This is how a certain subset of comic-book fan goes through life: as a DC zombie or a mighty member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, condemned to spend all eternity at war with his enemy on the other side of the comic-book-store aisle. And for that, we can thank one Stanley Lieber.
It was Lieber—aka Stan Lee—whose tireless efforts and endlessly cheery demeanor transformed comic books from an impersonal enterprise aimed at children’s pocket money into something a bit friendlier, a bit more impassioned. As biographer Bob Batchelor documents in Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel, Lee began working for Marvel’s predecessors—Timely, Atlas, etc.—as a teenager, briefly ducking out of the comics bullpen to serve in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II. Lee’s first credit came in 1941 in an early issue of Captain America, and the aspiring novelist suffered any number of indignities at the hands of his boss, Martin Goodman, before coming up with the comic book that would forever change the cultural landscape: Fantastic Four.
Lee was among the first to recognize and harness the power of fandom to help build and expand a book’s reach. Given the impossibility of tracking sales in anything resembling real time—distributors shipped copies to newsstands and then tracked returns; if, six months later, you saw that more than 50 percent of your run ended up in the hands of paying customers, it was considered a win—Lee relied instead on fan letters to gauge which characters were hits and which misses. Perhaps intuitively grasping that a letter writer hopes to have his affections returned, Lee began answering the missives in the comics, building out a whole new regular feature for readers to enjoy. Lee’s “jokey, easygoing interaction with fans,” Batchelor writes, helped establish him as “the central public persona of not only Marvel, but the comic book industry.”
The characters and stories Lee created at Marvel while working alongside artists Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others were unlike anything the comic-book industry had seen to that point: Rather than cardboard-cutout good guys in the Superman mold, the Marvel stable featured people with problems, heroes like the Fantastic Four, who squabbled with one another; like Spider-Man, who struggled to hold down part-time jobs and get dates with his high school classmates; like the outcasts, misfits, and miscreants who were brought together to form the X-Men. It was a formula that resonated at the time and, judging by box-office receipts, still strikes a chord today: What would the box office look like without the exploits of Spider-Man, Iron Man and his pals in the Avengers, the X-Men, and other Stan Lee creations?
Lee has been accused over the years of hogging the spotlight and claiming glory that ought to belong to Kirby, Ditko, and other Marvel employees and freelancers. Kirby had a rather famous falling out with Lee over money and credit—Kirby would go so far as to pen a comic for DC in which a character resembling Lee operates a plantation—and Batchelor seems pained by the conflict, believing it could have been worked out if they just confided in each other more: “Neither realized the immense frustration each secretly held. They both detested many facets of the comic book industry and its seemingly continuous boom-and-bust financial cycles.” Color me skeptical; Kirby may be the favorite of creators and connoisseurs, but Lee’s telegenic, manic presence rendered him better suited to be the face of comic books.
The truth about the so-called “Marvel Method” of writing, in which artists worked from rough scripts by Lee who then filled in the dialogue once the pages were ready, is hard to know (especially since Kirby is dead and Ditko hasn’t given an interview in almost 50 years). Following a series of contentious lawsuits, Kirby received co-creator standing while Lee, now 94, remains in a very real way—despite not having made a creative call in decades—the face of Marvel: He pops up in cameos in almost every Marvel movie, delighting people who haven’t read a comic book in decades by giving them a chance to feel as though they’re in on some sort of sly joke. Kirby may have been King, but Stan is very much The Man in the mind of casual fans.
Batchelor’s book reads a bit like an extended research paper, with much of the information cobbled together from primary sources like autobiographies and documentary films, and his writing is occasionally grating in its repetitiveness (e.g., “but the demand for comic books by servicemen kept demand skyrocketing”). Still, The Man Behind Marvel is a handy document that not only tracks the career of the best-known man in comic books, but also traces the rise of Marvel from copycat also-ran to industry king.
Reed Tucker’s Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC tracks both sides of the most interesting era of the struggle for the soul of comic-bookdom. Featuring new interviews with a bevy of industry heavyweights, Tucker’s book is lively and engaging. He does a good job of capturing some of the confusion DC Comics—home of, among other superheroes, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—suffered in the mid-1960s as it saw its market share slipping away to the upstarts over at Marvel. “So DC did what any big company does when facing declining sales and potential ruin: it called a meeting.” DC staffers pored over Marvel books, analyzing the covers, the colors, the logos, the word balloons, the art. Jim Shooter, who worked at DC as a teenager in the 1960s and would later go on to be Marvel’s editor-in-chief, recalled one theory his mystified DC colleagues aired: “They thought maybe the readers liked bad art because [Marvel’s was] crude, like a kid would draw. . . .‘Maybe we should tell the [DC] artists to draw worse.’”
DC didn’t get it because compared to Marvel DC has long been a more corporate entity, an organization that made as much revenue from licensing its iconic characters as from its creative storytelling. Plus, there was a generation gap. “DC’s brass grew up during the Great Depression, which had imprinted on them a respect for work and the firm that employed you,” Tucker writes. “In short, they were company men.” Ironically, that description will sound familiar to anyone who has read Batchelor’s book on Lee, who was himself deeply affected by the Great Depression and absorbed the ethic that a good job was worth tolerating all manner of crap, so long as you’re putting food on the table. That Lee transcended this limitation even as his enemies at DC struggled with it helps demonstrate just how special he was.
Tucker’s book will probably be more interesting to devoted comic-book fans than laymen: If you’re not only familiar with names like Chris Claremont and Dennis O’Neil and Todd McFarlane and John Byrne but also interested in the machinations that sent those artists, writers, and editors back and forth across the (relatively porous) wall separating the two companies, you’ll find much to love here. And it is a reminder that sometimes-heated competition ultimately served both companies well: “We were concerned about DC’s sale numbers, to be honest,” says Peter David, a writer who worked at Marvel in the 1980s. “Whether there’s rivalry or not, let’s face it, the comic book industry can’t really survive if DC goes away. We always felt our mutual survival depended on each other.”
That rivalry continues today, but not on magazine racks. The comic book itself has devolved into a niche product aimed at a shrinking market; whereas bestsellers in previous decades would sell millions of copies, the highest-grossing titles today are lucky to crack into six figures. There are event-driven booms followed by individual title busts. The lifecycle of Marvel’s rebooted Black Panther series is instructive: Debuting atop the charts in April 2016 by moving more than a quarter-million units on the news that bestselling activist-author Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing the new book, the title’s sales dropped to just over 25,000 copies by this summer, and a Coates-written spinoff has been canceled.
No, the new battleground is your friendly neighborhood multiplex, where stories and characters derived from comic books have become a powerful driver of our popular culture. Of the 25 highest-grossing movies in the U.S. box office since 2000, 9 were based on comic books. Many of the Marvel movies have shared characters and plot points, since they are set in the unified Marvel Cinematic Universe. The success of the MCU—its movies have so far earned a total of $5 billion at the domestic box office—has led other studios to consider how they might turn their intellectual property into engaging “universes.” And this trend in the manufacture of our pop culture, too, can be traced back to Stan Lee, since it was his idea more than anyone else’s to show the characters from Marvel’s various comic books interacting with one another in a single shared universe, a half-century ago.
Now that Marvel’s chief comic-book competitor is building out its own DC Extended Universe—with the latest installment, Justice League, opening in November—the clash between partisans of the MCU and the fewer, but more vociferous fans of the DCEU will only grow more heated. While the average filmgoer just wants to see something fun—maybe with a few one-liners and a handful of CGI explosions—the MCU/DC fanboy death struggle plays out on social media in full view of the world. Woe betide the critic who suggests that Marvel’s technical proficiency masks a smallness of spirit and a lack of individual style or that DC’s intellectual ambitions sometimes come at the cost of entertaining storytelling; your Twitter notifications will quickly be a dumpster fire. And, while it’s occasionally annoying to be on the receiving end of these tantrums, there’s something refreshing about the passion of those involved. Yes, it can be subliterate and somewhat idiotic. But it’s cheering that art intended for the masses can inspire such angst.
Even if, in the case of Marvel Studios, the angst comes on behalf of cookie-cutter motion pictures built to succeed overseas at the expense of more provocative and interesting storytelling. That’s right: DC rules, Marvel drools. Please be sure to email me your complaints; I love your passion.
Sonny Bunch is executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
