Stan Lee was a beloved American icon—but he also may have been more exploitative and more exploited than most people realize. In recent years, Josie Riesman's fantastic book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee and Tom Scioli's comic book-styled biography I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee have both explored the nuances and complexities around the man's self-styled myth-making.
Now, writer Daniel Best is taking a new angle over on Substack. Best has been slowly publishing the publicly-available financial documents that chronicle Stan Lee's career—from the 1968 corporate sale of Marvel Comics to the absolutely mind-boggling self-deals surrounding Lee's various media enterprises from the turn of the century. Those latter contracts in particular also tie into the legal and financial complications around Lee's employment agreement with Marvel after he left his formal position within the company and became an "artist emeritus" and general spokesperson/figurehead.
I mean, consider this mind-numbing excerpt:
The battles both by and for Stan Lee Media began when the company went under in January 2001. At least nineteen ex-employees filed suit with the State of California Labor Commissioner for unpaid vacation, time off, personal time, severance and wages. This was expected and, as mentioned in Part Two, on 16 February 2001 $910,328 was paid out to employees in wages owed. That seemed to settle those claims.
Stan Lee Media then went to the California Bankruptcy Court, which was expected. Most of the claims were settled on 14 February 2003. It was during the bankruptcy period that a few things happened that made people think.
1.Stan Lee and his lawyer, Arthur Lieberman, moved on with POW! Entertainment, using a lot of the same executives as Stan Lee Media had.
2. Stan Lee Media's assets included several properties that had been created and developed during the time the company was in existence.
3. Bankruptcy laws made it clear that those properties couldn't be sold off without permission.
4. Those assets were assigned to POW! Entertainment and QED (another company associated with Stan Lee) in a dubious deal.
5. Someone looked closely Stan Lee's employment contract with Stan Lee Media and believed that not only did Stan Lee Media own those properties, but they also owned everything Stan created and/or co-created at Marvel Comics.
Best's work is supported by primary documents, which are impressively difficult to parse, as legal and financial paperwork tends to be. Best does his best to breakdown the contents of each document he shares in layman's terms. It's confounding, fascinating, and absolutely messy.
The wildest takeaways, however (in my humble opinion) are twofold: first, how much wealth one can create that exists entirely on paper just by bullshitting some loosely-formed IP for the right buyers. And second, how everyone is screwing everyone in every one of these deals. Marvel tries to screw Stan's IP after Stan had already stolen credit from his collaborators. At the same time, Lee's business partners at POW! and QED and SLM seem to be trying to screw Stan—even as Stan is trying to screw both them and Marvel with a string of false promises.
I love juicy legal drama and comic books, and this has got it all.
Previously:
• 'I Am Stan' is a gripping graphic novel biography of the Marvel legend
• Stan Lee on the Insidiousness of Bigotry
• Comics legend Stan Lee dead at 95
• Little girl in a Stan Lee costume
• Artist Drew Friedman remembers Stan Lee: 'a complex man'
• Look at how Stan Lee transformed himself into a real-life superhero
