While a person in his eighties can be forgiven for not managing to re-create the glories of his earlier career, the failures of Lee’s last two decades point to a through line in True Believer: The man hailed as brilliant had a lot of bad ideas, not simply in terms of marketing, but in content and execution. He was obsessed, for instance, with the idea of publishing collections of found images with comedic captions. (One example: a woman who stands beside Marilyn Monroe and exclaims, about her breasts, 'They’re real!'). The concept is basically a proto-meme—which has potential. But for Lee it never landed, probably because the pairings were not funny. ... In light of this, it’s only natural to ask: Could Lee really have invented all those Marvel characters on his own? Riesman doesn’t make a judgment either way, but I get the sense that he’s doubtful, as am I after reading his book. 'Stan was a man whose success came more from ambition than talent,' he writes. Lee’s ambition was to reach the top, which he did thanks in large part to his skill at self-promotion and his charm ... Lee may have done groundbreaking work, but his personal version of heroism was, at heart, old-fashioned: He envisioned himself as an icon who, by his own doing, redeemed some small part of the world. He believed not just in his own myth but in that of America: a place filled with well-intentioned, bootstrapping individuals who shape their own destinies. And the superhero genre, even Stan Lee’s version of it, propagates this national narrative, with its focus on strong men, its simplistic visions of good versus evil, and its glorification of justifiable violence.

True Believer is part for-the-record biography and part an effort to balance the scales between Lee’s public reputation and the more complicated truth underneath. The book delivers a wealth of details on Lee’s later life, unearths a few stories that blemish his reputation, and generally paints Lee as a restless and unsatisfied man whose own definition of success always lay just beyond his reach ... Riesman’s unsentimental reportage, and his discovery of some troubling details that complicate the picture of Lee as a generally liberal, tolerant man, may seem gratuitous given the humiliations Lee experienced in his final years and the genuine joy he and his work brought to millions of people. But Riesman’s careful debunking of the tall tales isn’t a takedown of Stan Lee as much as a takedown of the myth of the heroic creative genius ... True Believer may not be the book that Stan Lee’s fans want, but it’s a book that anyone concerned with the hard truths of human nature and the business of popular culture over the last 80 years needs.

To give a full account of Stan Lee, as Abraham Riesman sets out to do in a new biography, True Believer, is to contend not just with his presence in popular culture (the smiling oldster in sunglasses, with a cameo in each Marvel film) but with the fluid nature of artistic collaboration, and so with endless debates over which parts of the comics are his ... True Believer isn’t the first serious biography of Lee, though it is the first completed since his death, in 2018. It cannot settle every question about what, exactly, Lee did. What it does best is unfurl a Künstlerroman, a story about the growth of an art form and an artist who was also a director and a leading man, unable to admit that the show could go on without him.

[A] well-researched, engrossing and compulsively readable book. It’s also brutal ... There’s a corrective to be offered to the Lee Myth, but Riesman overplays his hand, diminishing his biography’s strengths by shading every story to Lee’s disadvantage ... The most illuminating sections focus on Lee’s personal life. Its raw material is straight out of Dickens by way of Kitty Kelley ... On the central question of Lee’s role in the creation of the Marvel Universe, Riesman doesn’t shed any new light. He views the paper trail as too thin and the participants’ memories as too inconsistent to draw definitive conclusions ... Riesman comes at the creation debate sideways — seeding doubt by emphasizing Lee’s unreliability as a narrator, his lack of other creative success and his wavering commitment to comics ... In focusing on the feuds with Jack Kirby and Ditko, True Believer downplays others who liked working with Lee ... The book shines when detailing Lee’s professional life after his 1980 move to Los Angeles, where he struggled to be taken seriously in Hollywood ... In recounting the scandalous last few years of Lee’s life, Riesman flashes the virtues and flaws of a skilled magazine writer capturing moments in their vivid immediacy. But he sometimes lacks the historical perspective of a biographer. Many of these later-life details feel disproportionate to the totality of Lee’s life and his place in the messy pantheon of Cold War American popular culture.

Riesman tells the story with lively and insightful writing. But he is hindered, as are all historians of comics, by that world’s ephemeral nature ... To his dying day, Lee claimed the stories and characters were his. Riesman is skeptical. (I, who live for this stuff, was enthralled by his deep-dive, inconclusive analysis of whether Lee or Kirby came up with the Fantastic Four, but won’t assume you’ll feel likewise.) ... This is an excellent dig below the geniality that shows casual fans who he really was.

A new warts-and-all biography of the comics icon challenges that saintly image. True Believer...makes the case that the 'Stan Lee' we know and love was as manufactured a character as Spider-Man. Through extensive research and interviews with friends, family, colleagues, industry professionals and various hangers-on, journalist Abraham Riesman peels away layers of Lee's own unreliable narration to offer a more complicated understanding of an insecure man ... Still, True Believer doesn’t read like a takedown. For all his flaws, Riesman’s Lee elicits sympathy ... One need not be a comics nerd to find Riesman's portrait of the deeply flawed and relatably human pop-culture icon an absorbing read, and some of its revelations are stunning.

A takedown of the comic-book legend, recapitulating well-worn charges about authorship while adding bits and pieces to them ... All idols have feet of clay, but, by this unpleasant account, Lee’s were more fragile than most.

Journalist Riesman unpacks the minutiae-gnarled debates swirling around comics writer and producer Stan Lee in his eventful, myth-dispelling debut, while also telling a story that will resonate even for those who don’t know Spider-man from the Red Skull ... This detailed, clear-eyed examination pulls back the curtain on one of America’s great storytellers and is sure to reignite debates over Lee’s legacy.