BIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF FANDOM:

A TRUE BELIEVER CONVERSATION WITH TEGAN O’NEIL

Comics criticism is, as of now, a wounded art form. Too few media outlets even bother to cover comic books in and of themselves, as opposed to merely looking at them as the source material for big-budget movies and shows. But among the remaining people who devote themselves to analysis of the comics medium, few are as sharp as Tegan O’Neil. She is the winner of an Eisner Award (comics’ top honor) for her writing at The AV Club and publishes fascinating essays on her blog, The Hurting, and on her Patreon of the same name. She’s a longtime watcher of all things Stan Lee, and was kind enough to interview me about the making and meaning of True Believer. The following chat appears in abridged form in the paperback edition of the book.

O’NEIL: I’ve been reading Stan, reading about Stan, hearing about Stan, infuriated by Stan, for decades. In a vacuum it’s a topic I’m well sick of, owing to the fact that it’s already been litigated to the grave and beyond in fan and critical circles for over five decades. You do an excellent job of distilling precisely how that started, the origin of the dispute at least inasmuch as we can know at this late remove. As with most tellings, you’ve got a few concrete events around which the facts are beyond dispute surrounded on all sides by inference, hearsay, and circumstance. 

These circumstances tend to lead pretty heavily towards one interpretation of the facts. In all fairness, if Stan was a consistently and measurably unreliable narrator to the circumstances of his own life, neither Kirby nor Ditko were able or willing to effectively communicate their sides of the story. You do a good job of drawing out those frustrations, too. They were both strong willed men of principle, albiet in very different ways. Neither of them enjoyed talking out of school and both did so publicly only much later, in disparate venues, after decades of sour memories had compounded. And so perhaps not with the pinpoint accuracy for which we might yearn in hindsight. 

Still! With these important caveats very firmly in place, it’s worth repeating again that these disputes were known and discussed in fandom for a very long time. Stan’s reputation took the hit eons ago, before either of us were born. This is an inherited argument three generations deep. Stan has his defenders, certainly, and they even make fair points here and there. But by and large the die was cast for him in comics circles a long time ago: people who knew him also knew and have consistently attested to the fact that he had never been any kind of reliable witness. In any event the facts of the matter without embellishment are that, of the three men who kickstarted Marvel in the early sixties, two of them walked away feeling profoundly screwed and died in relative obscurity while the guy who stuck around became a celebrated folk hero. Given those plain facts Kirby and Ditko have always been the sentimental faves in fandom, despite the grumblings of a small minority who consistently sided with management.

With all that in mind, when and how did you first become aware of the controversy? For my part, I don’t think there was one inciting incident, more just a gradual realization over the course of the years surrounding the formation of Image Comics in the early 90s, after I’d already been reading for a few years. That in turn was a climax of sorts to an industry discussion about creators’ rights that had begun in the early 80s as a reaction to, yes, the beginning of Kirby’s long dispute with Marvel, but also the crusade around Superman’s co-creators in the late 70s. It was in the air and consistently in the fan press for years. Interesting in hindsight that I first learned so much about Kirby, and by extension Lee, because another group of rather self-serving entrepreneurs wanted to drape themselves in the supposed imprimatur of the King. I’m interested how the process began for you.  

RIESMAN: To be honest, I’m not one hundred percent sure I remember when I learned that Stan Lee might not have been on the level. I sometimes have a vague memory of an embittered employee at my childhood local comic shop, One Stop Comics in Oak Park, Illinois, telling me that Stan was full of shit, but, unlike Stan, I’m prepared to admit that it may be an inaccurate remembrance. When I met him as an early adolescent, circa 1998, at the Wizard World comic-con in Rosemont, Illinois, I don’t recall thinking Stan was a bad guy.

I also don’t recall thinking he was a particularly good guy, at that point, either, insofar as I never worshipped Stan at any point in my life. I don’t say that to condescend to people who did worship him — people have found the Stan Lee myth to be extremely potent and attractive. I can see why people would get seduced. I was more or less neutral on him throughout my life. I loved the characters he was credited with creating, and I found him amusing when he popped up in fourth-wall-breaking comics or in those live-action intros for the early nineties cartoon The Marvel Action Hour, the latter of which was my first exposure to him. But he was never an inspirational or aspirational figure for me.

I didn’t come up reading old issues of The Comics Journal, I’m sad to say, so lots of the industry details were lost on me. That said, I got more details about Stan’s deceptions when I was reading the great comics message boards and blogs of the aughts: Barbelith and Comics Alliance, mainly, may they rest in peace. Then came Sean Howe’s book. I didn’t pick up Marvel Comics: The Untold Story until late 2013, when it had been out a year or so, since I had largely given up on superhero comics from 2006 to 2012 or so. I got back into them as a casual reader, then started pitching stories about them to New York Magazine a few months after I started working there in 2013. Around then, I read a column on Comics Alliance by the writer Chris Sims about Stan that quoted heavily from Sean’s book, and I realized I had to read the whole thing.

I snatched it up and devoured it. I’m being quite earnest when I say it changed my life. The information gave me a foothold for my reporting on the industry, but more importantly, it taught me that comics was an industry worth reporting on. There’s so much meat in there. I do have to take issue with the fact that Sean presented as fact a lot of things that have turned out to be dubious—perhaps most notably Stan’s account of his last encounter with Kirby—but no book is perfect and you can’t travel back in time. You do your best, and he really crushed it. That was the beginning of me having concrete info about Stan’s misdeeds and misdirections. So in 2015, when New York editor David Wallace-Wells plopped a copy of Stan’s graphic memoir on my desk and said I should “do something with it,” I was all too eager to investigate Stan’s life further in a big profile. I immediately started reading Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book by Jordan Raphael and the late Tom Spurgeon, which presented me with even more startling information. I didn’t realize until a week later that David had just meant doing a capsule review of the book. But to his credit, he encouraged me to continue with my harebrained scheme, which culminated in a February 2016 profile, which in turn planted the seed for the book. I tried to present all the relevant existing data points about Stan’s creative-credit problems, though I definitely can’t take full credit for unearthing all of it. Sean, Tom, Jordan, and many others did the initial digging.

So, I know it can seem hard at times to see a positive to a lot of this material, steeped as it is in controversy and heartache. But the actual process of sifting through the reams of paper necessary for the book seems like it must have been an interesting experience. Could you describe that process in a little more detail? I’m always curious about effective research methods (partly because I’m terrible at it!), and based on both our conversations and your social media feed, I’d guess that research is something you enjoy quite a bit.

I do and I don’t. My gripes are the inverse of those of the typical writer: I get enormously frustrated during the research stage and have trouble forcing myself to get working, then I have a total ball during the writing stage. I blame my ADHD, which makes staring at books or documents all day a big challenge. On top of that, there was so much material to get through that figuring out where to start on a given day was daunting. As such, I never really developed a system, to be honest. I sort of let my instincts tell me what to do each day during the research phase. It might be making cold calls to old friends of Stan, it might be reading a biography of one of his collaborators, it might be going through the endless scans of documentation from the University of Wyoming Stan Lee archive . . . it might just be reading some old comics! I’d spin the wheel and see where I landed.

That said, the research stage is where I had some of the most thrilling moments of the whole process. A few stick out in my mind. One was my first long interview with Larry Lieber. I’d called him, then had an initial lunch with him, and he’d told me his life story, but—to my great frustration—he wouldn’t let me record it or take notes. He wants to write it all down for his memoir. The eventual interview was monumental, and I’ll always be grateful to Larry for his time. Another was meeting with Keya Morgan after nearly a year of negotiation and getting to hear all the private tapes of Stan with his inner circle. I can’t say it was a happy experience, as the tapes are extremely difficult to listen to. But, as a journalist, you have to be slightly sociopathic, so all that mattered was that I was getting insights into Stan’s life and mind that no journalist had ever obtained before. I hope it was worth it for the reader. But perhaps my favorite part of the research was getting information about Stan’s Jewish background. I’m Jewish, myself, and do a lot of reporting on the Jewish world, so that was a particular delight to indulge in. I hope I didn’t bore anyone.

I can’t remember a time before I knew about Stan. I know there were a couple years there where I must have loved the guy — I saw him at a con in ‘91, after all, when he was at his warm avuncular prime. Signed a couple comics. But as soon as I learned more about Jack Kirby and what had happened to him, and by extension what Stan had done or said about it, it was hard for me to keep that illusion. Problem was I still loved Marvel, and to a greater or lesser degree I sort of still do, although that word encompasses a much more complex network of feelings now than when I was ten. It’s the longest relationship of my life, completely codependent, dysfunctional as all hell . . . similar to loving a bad baseball team, one imagines.

But I grew up with that schism in my mind from a young age, learned both to be a rabid Kirby partisan and then in turn a slightly more circumspect Kirby partisan. One who recognized that most of the legends around the era were most likely apocryphal, even the ones most flattering to my side. I tend to give Stan more credit creatively than many, but that has less to do with anything in the public record and more educated opinion after having read hundreds and hundreds (thousands?) of comics by Lee, Kirby and Ditko together and apart. I’m also aware of my own hypocrisy in the matter by continuing to buy and read long after I should have known better. In other words I’m used to approaching the subject in a circumspect fashion. Nothing is gained by exaggerating one way or another, and I think you would agree in this instance that the facts on their face are most damning of all. 

All of which is to say, I’ve been navigating this touchy topic for much of my life and don’t know if I could even begin to adequately explain it to someone off the street cold. Hats off to you for dismantling that live grenade. Now, I would like you to correct me if I am mistaken but, as an interested bystander observing the process from the outside in, it really seemed to me as if you and your book were situated in this instance to be the poster children for “killing the messenger.” The message in this instance wasn’t a particularly new or novel one in the context of the comics industry, but you had the misfortune of being one of the first books over the ridge after Lee died. (I believe you said Danny Fingeroth’s book was out earlier, but that one didn’t attract quite the scrutiny.) Is my perception correct that you received a bit of backlash for being — if not the first person to tell this story, certainly the first person to get any real notoriety in so doing?

In other words, how’d the whole “telling people Santa Claus isn’t real” thing go? People love that one.

Yeah, there were some negative responses, mainly in my Amazon reviews. There are a ton of one-star reviews there, many by people who proudly state that they haven’t read the book. I don’t get too worked up about those, although the cutthroat world of algorithmic rankings makes it such that I wish they’d been nicer. There was one YouTuber who—again, without having read the book, in his case because it wasn’t out yet—said I was trying to “cancel” Stan. I get why you might think that, since the advance marketing copy was largely about debunking and disenchanting. But what’s been gratifying is hearing from Stan fans who were skeptical about or outright hostile toward the book in advance, but then read it and realized it wasn’t a hatchet job. Even if they don’t end up being superfans of me, I appreciate their willingness to alter their opinions, which is something all too rare in the contemporary moment.

The one piece of “how could you do this to Stan?” criticism that seems to have risen above the din was the essay in The Hollywood Reporter that Stan’s protege, Roy Thomas, wrote just after the book was out. I hope I’m not mischaracterizing Roy when I say he had no real factual disputes, just ones about tone and omissions. He felt I didn’t sufficiently highlight the positives of Stan’s time at Marvel, and that this wasn’t the Stan he knew. Fair enough, I suppose: I’m sure I wrote about a Stan—or series of Stans!—that was unfamiliar to him. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t exist. I went out of my way to point out Stan’s unambiguous talents and accomplishments, so I don’t think I made him out to be a monster. He wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t Satan, and I was trying to flesh him out more than tear him down.

When I was doing research, I had a conversation with the great Peter Guralnick, who, among many other accomplishments, wrote a definitive two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. As it turns out, the Jewish world is small: He went to summer camp with my dad. We connected and chatted, and he said my challenge was going to be to do something bigger than a mere exposé. I had to think bigger than just saying, “Here are things this guy lied about.” No one cares about that on its own. It’s the 2020s—shame over hypocrisy or dishonesty isn’t really a thing anymore. He said the real question is, “What was the story he was telling with his lies?” In other words, the lie, itself, is boring without the context of motivations and impact.

In an early press interview for the book, someone asked me what I thought the core theme of the book was. I used to think it was something about the American Dream, but by the time he asked me, I felt like maybe that wasn’t the case anymore. I surprised myself when I blurted out that the book is about the agony of ambiguity. You can try to glean life lessons from Stan’s arc, but I feel like they’re all relatively obvious: thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet, and so on. The harder thing to process is the twofold ambiguity of his life.

There’s the factual ambiguity of who created the Marvel pantheon, which is a dilemma that will probably never be resolved. And then there’s the moral ambiguity of asking whether he was a “good” man or not, which is a similarly unanswerable question, albeit for different reasons. The human mind wants to reject ambiguity; we want to say some things are incontrovertible facts and that the people we like or hate are objectively good or bad. But the reality of existence is uncertainty: constant, chaotic, and infuriating. You can either lie to yourself for certainty—and, to be sure, we all have to do that for certain aspects of life—or you can be honest and confront the answerlessness of the world. It sucks, but without that confrontation, you’ll accept the wildest lies from people who can provide the illusion of certainty.

Man, Roy Thomas — gotta love the guy. He really has done an immense service to comics, not always acknowledged as such, with his fan scholarship for the multiple volumes of Alter Ego. Few people have done more to preserve and compile the primary documentation and testimonials of the earliest generations of comics creators, a project that will only become more important with time. Especially as an increasing number of academics turn their attention to the field. With that said, I was tickled to see he came out blasting against you. Were I him I’d probably feel similarly honorbound, but what do I know? Were I ever on the receiving end of a burn as bad as “Houseroy,” I’d never leave the house again.  

Something that really needs to be said more is that writing critically about media does not mean you dislike media. On the one hand this seems to me like a patently absurd thing to say. Why the hell else would anyone ever engage with any art if not from a place of love? And yet. We live in a world where many readers seem to assume animus on the part of people who engage with culture on anything other than a purely complementary level. Over the last few years I’ve taken to writing in more plain language about what I actually do like and appreciate. Partly I’ve done this to remind myself after years of being a churlish grump, because that’s just not a healthy way to engage with media as you age. So to some degree it’s a positive challenge, in terms of actively reminding myself why I care in the first place, when I am critical of many elements. But it’s also partly self-defense. The nature of fandom has changed, and its in my interest as someone who doesn’t enjoy being yelled for a living to try to accommodate that change in my writing. There’s no margin in needless antagonism. I think we both agree it’s not a completely salutary change in culture, focused strongly as it is around parasocial relationships with financially interested individuals and corporations. But it’s also a change that has occurred largely without our input. C’est la vie!

After seeing the reaction to your book I wanted to defend you against accusations of bad faith. I freely acknowledge I feel slightly implicated because I’ve been writing critically about comics for twenty years, not just about Stan and Marvel, but almost every other part of the comics industry as well. Why would I be here — why would you be here — in the first place, if not love? Writing a book about Stan Lee was not a decision you made with the purpose of making your life easier. You care deeply or you'd never have done it, I don't have to ask to know. Something I think we both share is a genuine desire to hold the things we love to account. It’s important to have standards, important to live by those standards and hold ourselves accountable, important to strive to hold important institutions and individuals responsible to those standards. My mom taught me having a long memory is a civic duty. That means remembering the bad and the good both.

Stan was a complicated man. There’s a lot of pathos in his life, and I found him very relatable in your telling — especially in the years leading up to the 1960s. There’s an alternate Earth where he takes a Roman vacation in the late 1950s and stumbles upon the actual market for his goofy photo caption magazines in the Italian fumetti. The essential paradox of his life is that his greatest gift was in facilitating collaboration and yet he was constitutionally incapable of treating collaborators as equals. He deserves a lot of credit for those comics and it’s his own fault people begrudge him the praise. So, with all that said, I'd like to ask you to take off your journalist hat for a minute and reflect on the project as a fan. How has the experience changed the way you look at Marvel? Has your relationship with comics changed? Have you been back to revisit any of the sixties material since you finished the book?

Oh, man. It’s become really, really hard for me to consume superhero media these days. My spouse and I just watched the new DC Comics movie adaptation, The Suicide Squad—not to be confused with Suicide Squad, the 2016 film for which The Suicide Squad is a sequel. Comics, everybody! Oh, wait, I mean movies. Wait, is there a difference anymore? Anyway, I really enjoyed it, but afterward, as I was discussing it with my spouse, I found myself getting increasingly defensive whenever she said I seemed to have liked it. Like, I’d say, “Y’know, the more I think about it, the less I like it,” which wasn’t even true. I couldn’t quite understand why I was having this reaction, and then I realized that it’s because the movie’s writer/director, James Gunn, had dissed my book on Twitter when it came out. It’s truly strange to know that someone of that stature specifically took time out of his day to prevent people from buying my work.

Plus, I know how comparatively little the people who created the Suicide Squad in comics are being remunerated for their efforts, especially compared to Gunn. And honestly, it’s even worse with Marvel movies. At least DC used to have these little equity agreements that allowed creators of characters to get compensated as a matter of course when their creations were used, but Marvel has historically just dicked over anyone and everyone they can, and the Disney era has only made that worse. Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting came up with the idea and design for the Winter Soldier, the subtitular co-star of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The movie comes out, they toss the two of them a few thousand bucks — which, they remind you, they’re not legally obligated to give — and invite them to the premiere. That’s it. Not even the premiere party — just the premiere, then it’s, “Begone, so the grown-ups can talk.” It’s sadistic — but what do you expect? It’s Marvel and Disney. Entertainment through exploitation has been the name of the game for both of them for nearly a century.

The comics are even harder for me to read, because at least there are a few people involved in the creative process of a movie who get big paydays and union jobs. There are no good comics jobs at Marvel and DC. Hell, if you’re a writer or artist, there are no jobs at Marvel or DC, period, because you’re an independent contractor. America is already an awful enough place to be a freelancer of any kind, what with our lack of universal health care and general disregard for the human spirit, but comics is one of those industries that’s especially bad, insofar as they try to make it seem like they’re doing you a favor by letting you come up with intellectual property for them. The big bosses rely on the fact that there are lots of people in their applicant pool who have been obsessed with Marvel for so long that they’re willing to let their love of these characters and this universe override their instinct for self-preservation. No one sticks around at Marvel if they can afford not to. Seriously, look at the roster! Are there any Marvel “lifers”? No. Even Brian Michael Bendis left! It’s a horrible place to work. Staffers, too! I know so many folks who have worked as editors at Marvel. All of them were miserable.

You can’t lay all of that at Stan’s feet, but he was instrumental in establishing this awful, rapacious state of affairs. He was genial and friendly with lots of his creators, and he would do individual good deeds for them, but there is zero evidence that he tried to fix anything at a systemic level. He was largely fine with none of the other creators having stable jobs, health benefits, or ownership. The only time he got on a soapbox about creator rights was when he was getting jilted over the movie and TV profits and sued Marvel in 2002, and that ended up with him getting screwed out of billions. Chickens, meet roost. So, along those lines: No, I haven’t been revisiting the sixties comics since I finished the book. It’s too painful to think of all the injustice that surrounds them and the industry they created.

You make a point that I think bears emphasizing, partially because I got yelled at once for making it in another context. If you add up all the money that has been made and the power that has been gained with the Marvel characters, Stan really didn’t end up with anything near a just compensation either. He got table scraps, even as he lived a comfortable life with those scraps. At least in comparison to any other creators from his generation. Certainly so much more comfortable than any of the creators he worked with along the way. But just how much money have all those characters made, again? What kind of astronomical number are we talking about? It’s difficult for me to get past the simple fact that if he’d done literally just a handful of things differently at a few key points in his life he would have ended up far richer and even more beloved, and the tone of this very book might even be significantly different. He gave his life and his good name to build a company and a brand and characters that he didn’t own, and his “gold watch” was that he got to stick around as a mascot.

Marvel is still the company Martin Goodman created, whoever else’s hand has ever been on the tiller. The business model is dreadfully simple: chase that dollar, and when you find that dollar you flood the zone. Business 101, I know. But Marvel was always more aggressive than the competition in the shamelessness of their chasing trends and their willingness to crowd the stands with subpar product. They were overwhelmingly racist in the early 40s, a tad racy in the late 40s, and exceedingly gory in the early 50s. The distribution cap under which the Marvel line suffered in the late 50s and most of the 60s was a particularly apt punishment for a company whose business model was predicated on publishing enough books to push rivals off the shelf. Less a corporation than a Viral Marketing Scam of Thesus, Marvel retains the same corporate philosophy today as it did in 1940. That’s how Marvel Studios operates, too. Stan never did own the company, it was Martin’s all along. And it’s still Martin’s to this day.

But I have never stopped reading Marvel, save for brief sabbaticals. Perhaps hypocrisy, I readily acknowledge. I excuse myself sometimes for professional reasons. A big part of the answer is that even when the company is at its worst — most of the time — they still always manage to find good people to make their comic books. Like you say, there’s always someone next in line for the sausage factory. That’s why the labor problem in comics is as acute as it is. But we can scream until we’re blue in the face, good people will still find their way to the company. They will still make their names drawing the X-Men on paper before leaving the industry on their way to draw the same characters for a video game company that pays five times as much money, and it will be our medium’s acute and immeasurable loss every single time. 

A hopeful thought to balance the pessimism before we move on: as I’ve mentioned, I spent some time away from comics a little while ago. Not reading anything I wasn’t reviewing. Do you know what brought me back? Other fans. I know it’s been a rough couple years for fandom, but I try to screen out the yelling and focus on where people are enthusiastic. What are people buzzing about, writing about of their own volition? Go after that. It’s the primary reason I’m writing about the X-Men right now. Seeing other peoples’ enthusiasm in regards something that had become, for me, layered with years and years of cynicism and disappointment — well, honestly, it made me jealous. Made me want to get back to that place, and to see if I could still get back to that place without forgetting all the sad shit that made me cynical to begin with.

That community space is where the action in the culture is now, where fandom takes these stories and makes them into something new and most decidedly unowned. Seeing the Black Panther film become a genuine cultural milestone, seeing the degree to which that movie was embraced and beloved and celebrated by a community who was starving for a story just like that . . . it was the first time in my career as a critic I ever felt my standard qualms regarding the provenance and ownership of these characters seemed small. Petty, even. And I realize my saying that is making a huge concession to Disney that they don’t deserve, but that’s the plain cold fact: they do not deserve to own the Black Panther, or Wakanda, or Spider-Man, or the Fantastic Four. They do not deserve to own these things which so many people love and whose creators they have so egregiously harmed at every point. Stan and Jack should have owned the Black Panther and his world, together as he was created, but they did not. In the absence of that ideal we will have to settle for litigating the ghosts — and when and where applicable, to celebrate fandom as a generative force.

Given that these characters aren’t going anywhere, the discourse around these questions isn’t going anywhere either. While my instinct is towards pessimism I also realized on reflection that Walt Disney’s reputation actually has fallen significantly in the years since his death. His name is still on the company and no one gainsays his significant artistic and technical achievements, but its more or less common knowledge that he was a son of a bitch on a scale Stan Lee could barely comprehend. Ub Iwerks should be a household name just as much as Jack Kirby should be, and he’s even more obscure. People remember that Walt broke the unions and they certainly remember he had some salty opinions about race, but none of that means he didn’t also make “Steamboat Willie.” So I think there is some room in our culture, despite public perception, for reality and nuance to take over from myth and sales pitch. Many of our culture wars are fought for the specific purpose of flattening such nuance after it reveals itself. But it takes a while for the issues to cool. Not that there aren’t still people who will fight to the death for Walt’s honor, but the defense rings hollow in an era when his character is the regular butt of sitcom jokes. 

Now, as I said, Stan was nowhere near the son of a bitch Walt was, but they shared a similar attitude towards self promotion. It makes perfect sense that their companies ended up marrying one another. Do you think we’ll ever get to someplace like that with Stan, where we can actually talk about the man without having to fight a reflexive desire on the part of many to defend something they don’t understand?

To the extent that anything is foreseeable these days, I don’t think the Stan Myth is going anywhere, because the Mythic Stan isn’t going anywhere. People love the fictional story of Stan as much as they love the man himself. When the book was first being advertised, more than a year before it came out, I had random Stan fans getting furious with me online because the subtitle was “The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.” The comments were always along the lines of, “Fall? He never fell! He died while Marvel was at the top of its game and he was more famous than he’d ever been!” What’s interesting about such statements is that Stan had a publicly awful final few years. The tales of grift and elder abuse were all over the place, from legitimate sources to tabloids and beyond. He pretty conclusively fell! Even without reading my book, you could know that! But they chose not to. These are people who profess to be Stan diehards, but they were willfully blind to the arc of his story. I think it’s because the Stan myth—the tale of a cheerful and loving man who struggled, then succeeded through hard work and being true to himself, and eventually rode off into the sunset as a champion—has been a huge inspiration and comfort to them. The fact that it’s barely rooted in reality and that easily available information contradicts it is unimportant. We construct our lives and minds around stories, and when someone tries to take our stories away, we get defensive. Disney, Marvel, POW!, the Peter Paul group—they’re all going to keep posthumously milking the Stan myth for as long as they can. Once those companies are gone, maybe the myth will die out and be replaced by the facts, but I don’t think I’ll live to see that day.