On the (surprisingly complicated) legacy of Stan Lee
Q: People ask, "Is Stan Lee still with Marvel Comics." Are you still with us?
STAN LEE: Sure! Especially on pay day!
— Marvel Age magazine interview, 1983
Almost all the main characters in Avengers — including Thor, the Hulk, superspy Nick Fury, and the movie's primary villain, the trickster-god Loki — were introduced between 1961 and 1964, in comics written and drawn by Lee and Kirby. During that same period — a generative streak basically unparalleled in American comics history before or since — they also introduced the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.
Officially, Lee wrote the books and Kirby drew them. Officially, Stan supplied the realism — his heroes had flaws, they argued among themselves, they were prone to colds and bouts of self-loathing, and sometimes they'd forget to pay the rent and face eviction from their futuristic high-rise HQs, which were in New York, not a made-up metropolis — while Kirby supplied the propulsion, filling the pages with visions of eternity and calamity, along with action sequences that basically invented the visual grammar of modern superhero comics. (...)
Over the years, Marvel changed hands, went bankrupt, reemerged, restructured. Stan stayed in the picture. Each time he renegotiated his deal with the company, he did so from a unique position — half elder god, half mascot. Administration after administration recognized that it was in their best interests PR-wise to keep him on the payroll. For years, he received 10 percent of all revenue generated by the exploitation of his characters on TV and in movies, along with a six-figure salary. This came out in 2002, when Lee sued Marvel, claiming they'd failed to pay him his percentage of the profits from the first Spider-Man movie, a development the Comics Journal compared to Colonel Sanders suing Kentucky Fried Chicken.
It's unclear if Stan still co-owns any of Marvel's characters, but the company continues to take care of him. When Disney (which, full disclosure, is also the parent company of ESPN, which owns the website you're now reading) bought Marvel for $4 billion in 2009, part of the deal involved a Disney subsidiary buying a small piece of POW! Entertainment, a content-farm company Stan co-founded; another Disney-affiliated company currently pays POW! $1.25 million a year to loan out Stan as a consultant "on the exploitation of the assets of Marvel Entertainment."
Jack Kirby, on the other hand, was a contractor. You could sink a continent in the amount of ink that's been spilled on the question of whether it was Stan's voice or Jack's visuals that ultimately made Marvel what it was, but it's hard to argue that any of this would have happened had Kirby been hit by a bus in 1960. Yet like most comics creators back then, he was paid by the page and retained no rights to any of the work he did for the company or the characters he helped create; by cashing his paychecks, he signed those rights over to the company. It took him decades just to persuade Marvel to give him back some of his original art, much of which was lost or given away or stolen in the meantime; there are horror stories about original Kirby pages being gifted to the water-delivery guy.
Kirby never sued Marvel, over the art or anything else. But as the years wore on he blasted the company in interviews. He blasted Lee, its avatar. Compared him to Sammy Glick. Referred to him as a mere "office worker" who'd grabbed credit from true idea men. "It wasn't possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things, for that matter," Kirby told the Comics Journal in an infamous 1990 interview. "Stan Lee wasn't a guy that read or that told stories. Stan Lee was a guy that knew where the papers were or who was coming to visit that day."
And all this happened back when the comics industry only manufactured and sold comic books. Back when even the medium's most vocal champions wouldn't have dreamed of Marvel (which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1996) being worth $4 billion to anybody.
by Alex Pappademis, Grantland | Read more:
Photo: Jerod Harris/WireImage
