Interview
WAMG Interview: Liel Leibovitz – Author of the Book STAN LEE, A LIFE IN COMICS and Upcoming Speaker at The St. Louis Jewish Book Festival
Author Liel Leibovitz will be speaking at the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival on Sunday, November 8 at 2pm. Visit stljewishbookfestival.org for the latest information. Ticket information for this online Liel Leibovitz event can be found HERE
Liel Leibovitz is an Israeli-American journalist, author, media critic and video game scholar. His book Stan Lee, A Life in Comics is part of the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a meditation on the deeply Jewish and surprisingly spiritual roots of Stan Lee and Marvel Comics. Few artists have had as much of an impact on American popular culture as Stan Lee. The characters he created—Spider-Man and Iron Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four—occupy Hollywood’s imagination and production schedules, generate billions at the box office, and come as close as anything we have to a shared American mythology. This illuminating biography, Stan Lee: A Life in Comics, focuses as much on Lee’s ideas as it does on his unlikely rise to stardom. It surveys his cultural and religious upbringing and draws surprising connections between celebrated comic book heroes and the ancient tales of the Bible, the Talmud, and Jewish mysticism. From close readings of Lee’s work to little-known anecdotes from Marvel’s history, the book paints a portrait of Lee that goes much deeper than one of his signature onscreen cameos.
Liel Leibovitz took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about his new book about one of his heroes..
Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 28th, 2020
Tom Stockman: Hi Liel, your book STAN LEE, A LIFE IN COMICS is part of a series of books called Jewish Life. There are 22 books in the series. Did the publisher approach you about writing a book about Stan Lee or was this your idea? How did that all come together?
Liel Leibovitz: They approached me. They did not originally tell me what it was to be about. They took me to a lunch in New York and asked me if I would be interested in writing a book for this series. I told them I would be delighted to and then they told me they wanted the book to be about Stan Lee. And there’s me, this big comic book nerd since age seven, and I looked at the editor and waited for her to say she was just kidding. It was such a tremendous opportunity and I really can’t think of any other person that I have spent so many years of my life thinking about.
TS: The focus of your book is how so many of Stan Lee’s creations take their cues and influence from Stan’s own Jewish background and from traditional Jewish legends. Please talk about that and give some examples.
LL: Yes, to me what is interesting about Stan’s work; Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Avengers, etc is that they have become so massively popular in America not just because the movies have made billions of dollars at the box office, but because they have in some ways become part of an American mythology. So what I argue in the book is that basically if you go back and read some of Stan’s comics, they are successful because they are kind of retelling ancient biblical stories. For example you have someone like Spider-Man, who is suddenly given great power and refuses to use it to help his Uncle Ben, who of course gets famously murdered in the first issue of the comic book. Then Spider-Man must learn that with great power comes great responsibility and that he is indeed his brother’s keeper. It’s the same exact realization that the biblical Cain had, this notion that we are all responsible for one another and have to use our powers to help each other. There are so many other examples like this and what I do in the book is to go through them and show how the Marvel Comics Universe is a modern-day version of these very ancient morality tales.
TS: Some of these characters that Stan created certainly seem to have more self-awareness about their own weaknesses and hang-ups and fears and phobias, certainly more than Superman or the comic superheroes that preceded Stan’s creations. Do you think this was related to Stan’s Jewish upbringing?
LL: Absolutely it was related to his upbringing. He grew up in the middle of the depression. He saw his father lose everything. And I argue in the book that it is part of his deeply Jewish way of looking at the world. Everything is subject to argument and interpretation. There is a famous story in the Talmud that I recount in the book about a bunch of a rabbis that have an argument and one of them says “If I am right, let God himself come down and say so”. God comes down and says that that rabbi is correct. The other rabbis look at God and tell him that that might be his opinion up in heaven, “But here on earth we get to call the shots”. So I think Stan Lee captured the same kind of themes and elements to show that even the mightiest, wiser, strongest, seemingly perfect heroes also have quibbles and issues and problems that are not always universally accepted.
TS: Did Stan Lee as an adult talk much about his Jewish faith?
LL: Not at all. In fact so much so that it became clear that it was kind of an evasive tactic People noticed that and pointed out to him that some of these characters resemble characters in the Bible or that a line he had written in a comic book was reminiscent of a famous biblical phrase, He would just smile coyly and say “Really? I never noticed that“, but clearly it was something on his mind. I will say that after Stan became very famous for all of his creations, and was honored by Marvel Comics with a big gala celebration in Carnegie Hall, what he chose to do for the occasion was to get on stage in front of thousands of people and read a poem that he had written for the occasion. The poem was called God Cried which shows that, even though he vehemently denied any sort of biblical or spiritual matters all these years, God was never very far from his mind.
TS: I assume that you have seen all of the Marvel Comics Universe films.
LL: All of them. Several times.
TS: How would you compare the Jewish influence in the films to the comics?
LL: That’s such an interesting question because one of the things that was always interesting to me about Stan Lee’s Comics universe is that he was always interested in creating a world and environment in which minorities could be represented. Persons who are persecuted for their beliefs or appearance could be represented and when Stan Lee was writing in the 1960s and early 70s, those people were Jews. Now, 30 or 40 years later, Jews have risen up in the socio-economic spheres in America while still being very much a minority. We’re a minority that is doing financially much better there are new groups of immigrants, a tidal wave of newcomers to America who are taking their turn working their way into American society and culture. Now you see a lot of that in the comic books and also in the movies. Spider-Man for example is now a mixed-race boy from Brooklyn. He’s no longer the proto-Jew from Queens. To me, that is so wonderful and that was exactly the intention of Stan Lee, to show people what it’s like to be the outsider, the person who is not exactly sure of their place in society
TS: Let’s talk about you. You grew up in Tel Aviv.
LL: Correct.
TS: You said you were a comic book nerd beginning at age seven. Were comic books popular there in Israel the way they were in the US? Did they have comic book shops there?
LL: That was the source of so much frustration growing up because we watched what little American TV that did come our way. When I grew up in Israel (and it’s a much different country now) we had only one channel on TV. It was ironically called ‘Channel 1’, so we got glimpses of American culture and we knew that comic books were really cool. The Incredible Hulk TV show for example played really well in Israel. But there were no stores to go to, no place to actually buy comic books. The first time I came to America I was seven. I was with my parents on vacation here in New York and they took me to an amazing store in downtown New York, it still exists, called Forbidden Planet. We went there and I was so afraid they would ask me to leave that I grabbed every comic book I could get my little hands around and somehow convinced my parents to buy me this stack of comic books because I told them that this is the way that I would teach myself English. That ended up sort of being true. The amazing point is that when I got home I realized that these were all of the comic books that I was going to have for at least a couple of years so I studied them the way some rabbis study the Talmud.
TS: So you’re saying it was just impossible to get your hands on comic books in Israel?
LL: Eventually you could when I was a teenager.
TS: Were they translated into Hebrew or Arabic or were they in English?
LL: Oh they were all in English they were imported from America. None were printed locally
TS: Disney bought Marvel in 2009 for several billion dollars yet Stan’s paycheck after that was relatively modest. Why do you think Stan was not a better businessman?
LL: From the beginning, Stan’s contract was this very tenuous issue. He started working at Marvel Comics because his relative owned the magazine publishing company that also owned what eventually became Marvel. He became editor in chief at a very young age because everyone was sure this was a really dumb business and they didn’t care much about it and were perfectly fine with a 20 something-year-old being boss. When the company took off, which was 20 years later, Stan was in his 40s. He was already tethered to this contract which really didn’t give him rights over many of his creations. He was decently compensated, but if you think about this immense influence that he had over culture and all the money that his creations had made, there is no doubt in my mind that he deserved far more than he got.
TS: When did you write the book? Before or after Stan’s death?
LL: I finished my draft three days after he died.
TS: When I think about Stan at the end of his life I picture him sitting there at Comic Cons with thousands of fans lined up to plunk down $100 or more to have Stan sign their comic book. Why do you think he did that well into his 90s? Did he need the money or did he love his fans, or a combination of both?
LL: Look, I think Spider-Man is good and Iron Man is OK and the Incredible Hulk is fine, but I think Stan’s own greatest creation was Stan Lee. Very early on in his career, he realized that part of the thing that made Marvel so magical was that readers felt like they could actually be friends with this genial, approachable creator. He performed on college campuses and absolutely loved the adoration he received and understood that it was a rare treat for an artistic creator, which is someone who usually sits in a room at home and dreams of ideas and never had any real feeling of how readers or viewers received the work. For Stan, it was a real treat to be able to go into a room full of people and receive all that love and all that support. I think he did it out of pure love and pure joy and pure satisfaction. I’ve seen him at Comic Cons several times and the sort of exuberance that he radiated could not be fake.
TS: It’s good to hear that. Best of luck with your book and all of your future projects.
LL: Thank you.
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