True Believer
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
The definitive, revelatory biography of Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, a writer and entrepreneur who reshaped global pop culture—at a steep personal cost “A biography that reads like a thriller or a whodunit . . . scrupulously honest, deeply damning, and sometimes even heartbreaking.”—Neil Gaiman Stan Lee was one of the most famous and beloved entertainers to emerge from the twentieth century. He served as head editor of Marvel Comics for three decades and, in that time, became known as the creator of more pieces of internationally recognizable intellectual property than nearly anyone: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk . . . the list goes on. His carnival-barker marketing prowess helped save the comic-book industry and superhero fiction. His cameos in Marvel movies have charmed billions. When he died in 2018, grief poured in from around the world, further cementing his legacy. But what if Stan Lee wasn’t who he said he was? To craft the definitive biography of Lee, Abraham Riesman conducted more than 150 interviews and investigated thousands of pages of private documents, turning up never-before-published revelations about Lee’s life and work. True Believer tackles tough questions: Did Lee actually create the characters he gained fame for creating? Was he complicit in millions of dollars’ worth of fraud in his post-Marvel life? Which members of the cavalcade of grifters who surrounded him were most responsible for the misery of his final days? And, above all, what drove this man to achieve so much yet always boast of more?
Reviews with the most likes.
“There is no more unreliable narrator of a person's life than that person.”
I read this biography as a comic fan, and also as someone who was peripherally aware of all the controversy surrounding Lee's name much later in life. I knew some details in broad strokes, but nothing in the sort of detail presented in this book. While eye-opening (and sad, in the later chapters), it didn't surprise me much.
People are complicated, and I think Stan Lee embodied that. I think he was complicated, he was egotistical, he was ambitious to an unrealistic degree, and he always seemed to struggle to come to terms with who he was. Complicating matters of his life, he seemed to also unwittingly surround himself with people just like him, muddying the waters a bit in terms of what was truth and what was fiction in the early days of Marvel. Without going into detail here on my thoughts of the Kirby/Lee debacle, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle of what the two men each claimed.
Having said all that, a life led full of ambition, avarice, and wealth does not mean that you earn whatever comes next. Whatever wrongs Stan committed to get where he ended up do not justify his treatment at the hands of all the leeches that came out of the woodwork in his later years. He didn't deserve any of that treatment at the hands of people he initially trusted, people that were by blood or by friendship family to him.
This biography was extremely engaging, and clearly well researched by the author. The notes section in the end is extensive, and the author mentions at multiple points the sources of information used to write the different chapters. I enjoyed this book immensely, even if the subject is not the perfect person a lot of people expected him to be.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
