I made a post about Riesman's biography (https://community.cbr.com/showthread...-True-Believer) in the Spider-Man forums mainly about the stuff dealing with Ditko and (the little) stuff that pertains to Spider-Man in that story. I said there, that I thought it was the best book on Marvel Comics anyone has yet written and I'd like to reiterate that here. There's been some scuttlebutt about this especially given Roy Thomas' response so I wondered if I should read it but I read it and there's a wealth of new material that hasn't been reported or covered yet, and a collating of stuff that either I had read or known before or introducing some stuff I didn't know and contextualizing others.
PROS
It does what I've long insisted comics scholarship do, look at documentary evidence as much as possible, trawl through archives and reconstruct the narrative and find the version that makes the best sense. Riesman's book has finally brought a good level of professionalism to comics history which otherwise has been lacking. The comics business has too long been too incestuous, comics sites depend on the industry for interviews and access, and in turn the industry gives comics journos a platform for internships and working in the comics business directly.
CONS
Are there issues with it? Yeah there are, all books of scholarship are written with the aim that they will be overcome down the line. Riesman's book has weaknesses in his lack of critical interest in the comics and stories themselves, likewise his perpetuation of the black legend on Jim Shooter, and also for his tunnel-view on the issue of credit over everything else. I guess Riesman wrote this book with the idea of mainstreaming stuff known more among comics aficionados to a wider audience, hence he wrote a book that's fairly short for a biography (some 335 pages) and doesn't discuss comics continuity stuff and comics stories that most people wouldn't get.
In terms of what this biography argues or contributes:
-- The debates about Lee and Kirby and who came first is well-known in these boards. Roy Thomas argued in his review of the book that Riesman neglected stuff to exculpate Lee but he mis-states Riesman's views in the review. Thomas claims that Riesman's entire argument rests on a rumor by Kirby's associate but that's not the case. Riesman simply points out that the synopsis is just not a clincher and that there's no smoking gun, and that it's unlikely that the synopsis was written before the meeting between Kirby/Goodman/Lee that most sources agree is when the idea for a comic (that became Fantastic Four) came out. The interesting thing for me is that as Riesman documents thoroughly, Stan Lee himself never cites this synopsis as the basis for his claim that he came up with the Fantastic Four. He gave legal deposition (during which he tellingly admits that Kirby created some "secondary characters" without specifying who they are, all by himself, implying that the collaboration between them wasn't proportionate down the line).
-- The stuff that shocked me is the Wally Wood and Dick Ayers stuff. Wally Wood and Dick Ayers both report meetings where they went to Lee to "discuss" and Stan said nothing waiting for them to start first and that led to Wally Wood leaving in rage. Basically the empirical evidence and the most plausible explanation tips the scales to Kirby and Ditko and not to Lee.
-- Larry Lieber is the real heartbreaker of this book. I heard of him of course but I never cared enough to know more but wow. Stan Lee certainly wasn't "my brother's keeper" in any sense.
-- One weird thing that surprised me is that apparently Fantastic Four #66-67 was supposed to be a parody of Ayn Rand by Kirby, but Stan bowdlerized it because it offended his pro-business fiscal conservative views. Blake Bell's biography of Ditko revealed that Stan was the one who introduced Ditko to Rand, and now here we have it recorded that Stan censored Kirby's Rand-satire. So it seems that Lee and not Ditko was the real Randian ideologue of Marvel'60s.(Page 157).
-- Stan Lee defenders often bat away claims of Lee's credit-stealing by saying he was a co-creator and he felt he created the characters but in this book there are many examples of Lee claiming credit for stuff that didn't involve him. A particularly disappointing one was that in the 1940s, Lee tried to write a book about the origins of comics in a way to make money, and in that he claimed outright that he created Captain America, not Joe Simon and Jack Kirby but him, Stan Lee (Page 70). Stan Lee's constant involvement in union busting is documented right through, as is the level of nepotism involved in his career. And to be honest, I always tried to give Lee the benefit of the doubt but I really do think that he was the one who fingered Kirby and Simon and got them fired in the 1940s.
-- This isn't just a biography of Stan Lee but a biography of Marvel Comics as a company in part because Lee was at the center of stuff between management (Martin Goodman the man who founded Marvel) and the creative (Kirby mostly). One that comes across is that Martin Goodman just wasn't very good at his job. He was successful and capable but until 1961, barring Captain America, Timely produced no major durable comics and titles. They just weren't among the best on the lot: not as popular and iconic as DC, not as beloved as Fawcett's Comics Captain America, as weird as Quality Comics' Plastic Man, and not a candle to anything by Eisner, or at EC Comics. Kirby and Simon meanwhile after being fired from Timely went on to create Young Romance and then work at DC comics. It's a comics publication whose early years are stunningly mediocre compared to every other contemporary publisher.
-- At one point, Roy Thomas was privy to a conversation between Stan Lee and Carmine Infantino where both of them plot out "price collusion" or "price fixing" which is a financial crime. Lee and Infantino decided to control uppity artists asking for pay by trying to make a deal whereby both of them always inform the other about the rate they are paying each other. Roy Thomas is a mixed figure, on one hand he is a Stan Lee loyalist who always took his side against Kirby, on the other hand he did stand up to Lee and defended Gerry Conway when Lee was tossing him to the wolves.
-- The stuff about Lee's cameos are interesting. Lee was paid a pittance for these appearances and even if he got an executive producer credit never made real money off the movies. Sam Raimi is on record for opposing Lee doing cameos in the Spider-Man movies saying, "I know Stan, he can't act!".
Stan Lee's final years are definitely sad and incredibly so.
On the whole this is a pretty dispiriting look at the comics business, and as Kirby said, "Kid, comics will break your heart"