Stan Lee
Disney+ | ★★★✩✩

There has been some squabbling following the release of Disney+ documentary about American comic book writer Stan Lee.

And they are not new arguments, these attempts to determine who deserves credit for the Marvel behemoths Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor, X-Men and Daredevil.

And make no mistake, it is an important question: these characters have been constant companions through the lives of many, me included.

Meanwhile, the real question in this documentary not, bizarrely, mentioned anywhere in it, is what’s up with Lee’s hair?

When we first meet him, via some black-and-white promotion, he has a harsh New York intonation and a full head of hair. At our next encounter, decades into a career that he began as a teenager by doing odd jobs at publishing house, he is a suavely suited, clean-shaven and balding middle-aged man.

Later in the programme, he appears looking 20 years younger: a hipster with a beard and a mysteriously full barnet. Then, we see him sporting the large glasses and moustache that were to be his trademark for the last five years of his life until he died at the age of 95.

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Stan Lee (Photos: Getty Images)

How odd that the programme made no comment on these superficial changes. I think it is fair to say that the failure to address them is a failure to explore to what extent Stan Lee, creator of myths, was the creator of his own myth.

He was born Stanley Martin Lieber to Romanian Jewish immigrants and, as is explained by Stan Lee (Stanley, geddit) in archive interviews, he came up with his pen name as a sort of protection.

He considered comic books to be superficial. It would have been interesting to delve deeper into this, but the documentary doesn’t.

It would also have been interesting to learn more about Lee’s Jewishness, but his ethnicity is only mentioned in connection with his dressmaker father.

This feels a sin of omission for there is a strong argument that the outliers, the shunned characters of Outsiders, X-Men experience a persecution that mirrors that of the Jews. In the same way that Superman’s Jewish creators used their experiences of being outsiders.

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Stan Lee (Photo: Getty Images)

Making Lee the sole narrating voice in this documentary leads to holes aplenty. For starters, nothing is said about the decades he spent trying to cross over into film, or his final fate of being exploited when he was in ill health.

I guess we can only expect so much from what is essentially an extremely well-made corporate video, which does pay tribute to the significance of the Jewish American comic book writer’s life.

Let’s hope it’ll inspire further investigation from those intrigued to learn more.