Deadpool vs Wolverine

First X-Men movie; first modern superhero movie; first summer of the second millennium. Our mutated heroes go into action in smart shiny leather uniforms. Logan the cool tough one with claws demurs; and Cyclops, the strait laced one says "Would you prefer yellow spandex?"

Wind forward a quarter of a century. 

My life flashes before me like Huge Ackman's showreel over the closing credits. Seven years old: Grandad brought me a Spider-Man comic and no-one in the world knew who Spider-Man was. Eleven years old: Nicholas Hammond is on the TV and Don McClean and Peter Glaze are making jokes about the Incredible Hulk. Twenty three years old: Watchmen and Dark Knight: zap kapow comics aren't just for kids any more. Early middle age: SIR Patrick Stewart and SIR Ian McKellen are openly treating mutants as a metaphor for Dr Martin Luther King. Samuel L Jackson pops up at the end of a Hulk movie and births the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Guardian's actual proper grown up movie critic compares Avengers: Endgame with Sophocles. And suddenly I'm sitting in a movie house full of old people watching a movie entirely made up of comic book in-jokes. Comic book in-jokes and jokes about wanking and blow jobs. Comic book in-jokes, jokes about wanking and blow jobs and incredibly over the top violence. And Wolverine actually is wearing yellow Spandex.

How could you do this? How could you take a story which is of such very deep importance to millions and millions of people and use it as a vehicle for fifth rate undergraduate humour?

No, I'm sorry. That was Malcolm Muggeridge talking about Life of Brian.

Think of it: through the golden years of Marvel Comics, the whole Stan and Steve and Jack era -- there was no such character as Wolverine. Wolverine is from a historical perspective a johnny-come (fnarr-fnarr) lately. But if there had been no Wolverine there would have been no Chris Claremont, and if there had been no Chris Claremont the Marvel universe would have trundled to an end before the 80s were out and the Marvel Cinematic Universe would never have existed.

"This movie acknowledges Len Wein, for the significant contribution he made to the X-Men ."

Well, quite.

I'm truthfully not sure that I can remember who Deadpool originally was. I think I saw the first movie, though not the second one. I think he started life as a perfectly serious second tier X-Men bad guy? (But then Wolverine started life as a perfectly serious second tier Hulk bad guy.) He pretty rapidly became a meta fourth-wall breaking har-har stop it you're killing me spoof character. The most recent graphic novel has him invading the cover of a Classics Illustrated edition of Tom Sawyer.

Yeah, meta-textuality and deconstruction. Grant Morrison did it very well in Animal Man. Chuck Jones did it in Daffy Duck. John Byrne's She Hulk knew she was in a comic, could comment on the cliches of the genre, an on one occasion, escaped from the baddies by tearing through the page and running across a spread of adverts. She does a similar trick in the TV show, getting out of the episode and running through the Disney+ menu screen. Deadpool's whole existence is a commentary on Deadpool. No scene passes without him pointing out that someone is doing exposition or that such-and-such an object is a McGuffin and that the people being killed are only extras. When he does, finally, fight Wolverine, he not only tells us that this is the scene we bought our tickets to see, but that "nerds will be getting out their special sock".

Did you get that, guys? You bought a ticket for the movie and the main character just called you a wanker. Except, obviously, he meant present company accepted: it's everyone else in the cinema apart from you who is going to enjoy the big fight scene in exactly the wrong way.

A lot of Radio 4 sketch comedy writers have a fallback gag in which characters in some TV show comment explicitly on the conventions of the genre that they are in. You know the kind of thing. "I'm going to drink half a bottle of whisky before the big match, because this is a sports movie and I'm the one with inner demons." It can be perfectly funny. I am fond of John Finnemore's cynical hard bitten won't play by the rules store detective trying to work out who stole the jaffa cakes from the biscuit aisle. The famous Mitchell and Webb "are we the baddies?" skit is a smarter take on the same joke. But it's a bit obvious. Even a bit cynical.

Deadpool vs Wolverine is just an incredibly cynical piece of film making. Which is not to say that it isn't funny: it is funny, very funny indeed in places. And I'm not saying that it isn't entertaining: it's lively and inventive and I was never bored, although, like many superhero movies, a certain desperation sets in when the last plot thread is tied off and you realise there is still forty minutes to go. The action sequences in serious action movies have become so unreal and  so over the top that parodying them or exaggerating them seems gratuitous; but the fight scenes in Deadpool vs Wolverine (and there is hardly anything but fight scenes) are kinetic and exhilarating and ludicrous and very, very, very, violent. Deadpool and Wolverine are both indestructible, and spend much of the movie sticking claws and katanas into each others face, arse, and groin with very little ill-effect. It's graphic enough to merit a 15 cert but honestly feels more like a Road Runner cartoon than a video nasty. I remember when you couldn't legally buy the Lone Wolf and Cub movie in this country because of all the tomato ketchup.

I kept thinking of Kick Ass, in which the violence made you wince and an eight year old girl said "cunt" and which still ended up feeling like a joyous love-letter to comic books.

The meta-in-jokes are very meta, very in-, very clever and very, very funny. We get a forced perspective Huge Ackman, because at one point Wolverine was said to be very short; we get a drunk Wolverine going by the name of Patch, because in the 1980s mini-series he used that identity; we get a Wolverine standing in front of a graffiti strewn post-apocalyptic wall because Days of Future Past. (We get jokes about Huge Ackman's singing career.)  After about ten minutes it all becomes a bit relentless and over-whelming and exhausting. Like being beaten not unpleasurably over the head with the Complete Handbook to the Marvel Universe.

In the 50s and 60s there was an academic thing called New Criticism which said that you had to look at the actual texts of poems and plays, and talk about the actual words on the page and damn what the author might have meant by them. Damn, indeed, the whole concept of the author and the whole concept of a world outside the book. I have often thought that modern science fiction franchises could provide a test case for this kind of thinking. Is Ahsoka intelligible if you have never seen a Star Wars cartoon? Is the Acolyte intelligible if you didn't know there was such a thing as Star Wars? It is probably feasible to watch a cowboys in space TV show and tacitly say things like "This is obviously a good guy, who has presumably had previous adventures which I don't know about; and the guy with the black cloak is obviously a bad guy who she's encountered in the past." You probably don't miss too much watching in that spirit. You might miss some nuances if you didn't know who Anakin was. But I must admit that I have sometimes been put off watching new episodes of Marvel TV shows (I am looking at you, Secret Invasion) because I have lost track of who everyone is and don't have time to put in the necessary homework. 

Do you need to know who Gambit is to understand the scene with Gambit in it? Probably not: he's introduced as a French superhero with magic playing cards, and  that's really the only thing you need to know about him. For the purposes of the scene she appears in, Elektra is a tough martial arts lady with not enough clothes on; you don't specially need to know that she's Daredevil's lover and a key player in ninja politics and once recovered from her death. Although for those of us who were traumatised by Daredevil #181, the reduction of Elektra to a tough martial arts lady seems a bit of a shame. A bald telepathic lady bad guy turns out to be related to a bald telepathic male good guy. Probably the scene loses some of its sting if you're reaction is "Who is this Charles Xavier of which you speak?" But you can deduce from internal evidence that Wolverine had a very close relationship with the baddies brother and feels he let him down, which is strictly speaking all you need to know. (Did Prof X have an evil twin in any of the comics? I know he had an evil step-brother who smashes through walls a lot. It may not matter.) A huge punch line depends on the fact that we, and therefore Deadpool, assume that a certain famous actor is cameoing in a particular role which he is very strongly associated with; but turns out to be playing a different role he is associated with much less strongly. If you don't know, you don't know. But then if you don't know you probably don't know you don't know. He swears a lot and dies in a particularly horrible way.

I don't know how comfortable I am with the idea of a cool psychotic mercenary with a soft interior, and I absolutely grant that that's the whole point of the movie. It's not like "charming bastard" is a particularly new idea. James Bond was a charming bastard; so was Han Solo. So is Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy and so is the Chris Pine character in the much-better-than-it-ought-to-have-been Dungeons & Dragons movie. (Peter Quill's name literally and intentionally means "prick".) I preferred D&D: it is quite clear that Edgin is a good guy pretending to be a cynic; where there is a suspicion that we are supposed to think Star Lord is cool because he is an immoral psychopath. Deadpool is vulgar and psychotic and cynical but he likes kids and puppies and sacrifices himself to save the universe. (SPOILER: He gets better.) But he kills a lot of people a long the way. A lot. I bet there is a trivia page where someone has worked out the body-count.

The movie insulates itself against criticism. It's in terrible, offensively poor taste: but it's supposed to be. It's cynical and amoral and undercuts the whole genre it's celebrating -- but it's supposed to be. To complain about it is to reveal yourself as a humourless old such-and-such. The opening scene -- in which Deadpool overtly asks if the film is going to respect the memory of Logan and proceeds to desecrate his corpse, comprehensively, literally, and in slow motion, is a masterpiece of terrible taste.

Fuck the whole idea of the multiverse. No, that isn't nearly vulgar enough for a Deadpool review. "Give the multi-verse a blow-job up the arse while suffering from an incurable sexually transmitted disease." The many worlds hypothesis has some narrative uses: of course it does. It's fun to jump timelines to universes where Hitler won the war; where all the mutants have been exterminated; or where Superman landed in Weston Super-Mare as opposed to Smallville. And yes, the multiverse has been a convenient way to iron out inconsistencies, to say that those comic books over there are set in Universe A where these comic books over here are set in Universe B and that's why Hyperman's underpants are three different colours. Into the Spider-Verse is the most interesting thing that anyone has ever done with Spider-Man, or indeed, with superheroes more generally. I didn't even hate the Flash, though everyone else seems to have done. 

But oh, how wearisome the thought that all the different versions of Wolverine there have been over the years must of necessity be actually-existing-Wolverines-in-different worlds. How wearyingly obvious the idea of a Time Police patrolling the time lines for inconsistencies as a sort of metaphor for comic book continuity. I know the original thought was "It would be cool if all three cinematic Spiders Man were real, but in different dimensions" but the overall result is remind us that nothing we are currently watching matters, that every death is temporary and can be easily undone. 

And underneath it all, there is an actually quite good superhero yarn; which kind of manages to take itself seriously despite it all. Huge Ackman has the micky extensively taken out of him; but he never takes it out of himself. Wolverine diminishes and goes into a different continuity but remains Wolverine. Some of his Big Character Moments  -- about how this version of the character failed to prevent the deaths of the X-Men, and how he wants to live up to the faith that Prof X put in him -- are actually well done and quite effective. And the climax, in which, for good an adeqaute reasons, our heroes have to mutually sacrifice themselves, has a bonkers epic morality that reminds us why, in a peculiar way, superhero movies still matter. 

A serious epic wrapped in a violent, smutty action movie wrapped in an infinitely prolonged meta-joke? I don't know whether the Marvel Cinematic Universe can ever recover from this. It probably doesn't matter very much if it can't. I actually enjoyed Deadpool vs Wolverine  quite a lot. But oh dear oh dear. If the Dungeons & Dragons community is allowed an Old School Revival, can those of us who still enjoy the funny books hope for a Silver Age Revival? A line of superhero comics and superhero movies that actually, you know, told stories about superheroes? I propose calling ourselves the "Pre Watchmanite Brotherhood."

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Stan stans Stan

Stan Lee

Disney+

In the 60s, Marvel Comics was known as the House of Ideas.

It's a telling phrase. Not the house of writers or the house of artists or the house of editors. The House of Ideas.

That's what made the decade from 1961-1972 so seminal. Not the pictures; not the dialogue; not even the plots. The ideas. And the source of those ideas was the son of a pair of Jewish Romanian depression-era immigrants: Stanley Martin Leiber.

"I have always thought I was the creator of Spider-Man because I am the guy who said 'I have an idea for a strip called Spider-Man an so forth'...." explained Lee. "You dream it up and then you give it to anyone to draw it."

Walt Disney's Life of Stan is not as bad as I expected it to be. It ends with the voices of Kevin Feige (director of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and Roy Thomas (Stan Lee's anointed successor at Marvel.) Both of them distance themselves from the doctrine of Stan Sola.

"I often think of the 1960s and the famous Marvel bullpen" says Fiege "and think about the characters that came out of the imaginations of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and all of their co-creators, it's incredible. I often find myself thinking 'boy if we could just tap into just five per cent of that crucible of imagination' ".

"The seeds of all that stuff are all set back in what Stan did with Jack and Steve" says Thomas. "You know, you could always trace anything that they do now. It all kind of flows from that fountain that was unleashed when Stan and Jack and Ditko, you know, got together and suddenly became this wonderful triumvirate, creating a whole universe, and neither of them could have really you know done it without the other."

This represents one hell of a climbdown: Lee himself acknowledged Ditko as co-creator only with the utmost reluctance. ("I'm willing to say so".) I wonder if there is an element of arse-covering going on: a last-ditch attempt to shore up what remains of the myth? Stan Lee was not the sole auteur of Marvel Comics. No-one who has studied the evidence thinks that he was. Very many people would be prepared to argue that Ditko and Kirby could very well have created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four without input from Lee. There are even some who think that they did. But talking about a triumvirate allows us to keep hold of Uncle Stan. He may not have done everything, but he still did something.

The choice of metaphor is interesting. Thomas talks about seeds. The Blessed Trinity didn't create the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but everything that came afterwards was implicit in their primal creative act. He talks about fountains. Whatever we mean by Marvel Comics already existed; the Founding Fathers merely channeled and released it. Fiege talks about a crucible. I prefer that as a metaphor: Lee, Kirby and Ditko as three radically different metals that were superheated into a single alloy.

Fiege and Thomas are careful to talk about creators in the plural. But their summing up is bookended by the singular Stan Lee, enjoying the glamour of the Marvel movies and looking back on his long career. 

"In the days I was writing those books..." 

"That's a camera-wrap on the creator of Iron Man, Mr. Stan Lee" 

"The fact that I'm working with characters I've created..." 

"You can only do your best work if you are doing what you want to do, if you are doing it the way you think it should be done" 

"If you can look at it and say 'I did that and I think it's pretty damn good, that's a great feeling."

I, me, my...

The documentary is very well put together. Lee ceased to be an active comic book creator in 1972: for the last fifty years of his life, talking about himself was basically what he did for a living. There must be a thousand hours of recordings of his voice. Director David Gelb has, with some ingenuity, collated a tiny fraction of this material into a fairly cohesive first person narrative: Stan on Stan. Not such a monumental undertaking as Peter Jackson's Get Back, but a substantial editorial task. A computer may have been involved to make the sound consistent, but it's all based on actual recordings. We are not told the provenance of the voice-over, so a remark made in 1960 and a remark made in 2020 might well be placed side by side. We also get film clips of Lee on chat shows and conventions and personal appearances, where the context is much clearer.

Stan Lee was a professional raconteur. He created a persona on the pages of his comics and then adopted it in real life. Self-deprecating and egoistical in the same moment; never more arch than when he's being sincere, never more light-hearted than when giving a straight answer. We hear the voice of Joe Simon complaining that the Very Early Stan Lee used to incessantly play the piccolo in the office. We don't otherwise hear of an interest in music: he must have been inhabiting a persona even back then. I don't know if there is really a unique New York Jewish style of humour, but one can't help thinking of the later Groucho Marx when Stan speaks. Later on he dropped the flute and affected a cigar. If you fell in love with Marvel in the 60s, then Stan's voice is what you fell in love with. This is a strength and a weakness in any documentary. It is great fun to spend time in Stan's company: the ninety minutes shoots by. But we are drawn in. We want to believe the yarns he is spinning. It feels mean to interrupt and say "But wait a minute....?" and "Says who...?"

Jack Kirby and Joe Simon pointedly refer to him as Stanley. Stan Lee is a made-up character.

Lee's reminiscences are illustrated by static figurines in elaborate tableaux. (I don't know who made them, and if they are physical models or clever CGI, but they are terribly well done.) So as Lee talks about reading the pulps in his parent's tenement while his dad desperately looked for work; we see the scene enacted by the little plastic figures who normally populate model railway stations.

It's a clever stunt. Stan tells us. The pictures show us. But the artificiality of the pictures gently whisper "it ain't necessarily so".

We see a Steve Ditko figurine, hunched over a model writing desk, pencilling a comic book. To one side is a Stan Lee figurine, adopting a Spider-Man pose, demonstrating how he imagines a particular scene. The comic that toy-Ditko is working on is quite clearly Amazing Fantasy #15; the last page of the first section, when Peter invents his web-shooters. At his side are pencils, a protractor...and a typewritten script, several pages long. It's clearly based on the sample from Stan's 1948 Writers Digest Essay, There's Money in Comics, which envisaged a comic book script as a movie screenplay, with panel descriptions down one side and dialogue down the other. ("Panel 1: Louise in office, clearing her desk. Louise: (Thought.) He never notices me!") Elsewhere in the big open-plan Marvel office, there are four or five other artists, similarly hunched over drawing boards.

We would love it to be true. What Kevin Feige calls "the famous Marvel Bullpen" was such a big part of what made Marvel Comics so special -- a men's clubhouse that us little kids were allowed to peek into. But it never existed: during the Marvel decade the artists were freelancers working from home. Stan Lee didn't provide Ditko or Kirby with screenplays to work from: he provided them with short summaries or single line ideas. According to Flo Steinburg (Stan Lee's very own Betty Brant) Lee did sometimes stand on tables and mime scenes to artists. But there is something pernicious in the idea that Steve Ditko was drawing Spider-Man in poses that Stan Lee had first demonstrated to him. The one thing which characterised Steve Ditko's Spidey -- a flexible body perpetually twisted into unlikely shapes -- is implied to have originated in the Mind of Stan. Note that Lee has his third and forth fingers in the palms of his hands, in the classic "web-shooter" position: the idea that Lee suggested those kinds of details corresponds to nothing that we know about the pair's working practices. 

Ditko really did have the word THINK pinned to his drawing board, but that was in his home studio, not the Marvel office.

We hear a big chunk of the Merry Marvel Marching Society record, in which Stan Lee pokes heavy handed fun at the other creatives. This doesn't pretend to be anything other than a skit. At one point Steve Ditko, who characteristically refused to participate, is said to leap out of the window, to the sound of breaking glass. ("Maybe he is Spider-Man!") But the scene is lovingly recreated with the little Lego men. Perhaps that's a signal that the vignette of Lee and Ditko should be seen as part of the same, mythical, Bullpen play-world. 

But it's a vivid ideogram; visually conveying the idea that Ditko's job was to transmute Lee's thought into pictures. Which is. Just. Not. True.

"My mother said I would read the labels on ketchup bottles if there was nothing else around" says Stan. I am sure she did.

"I got a job as an office boy at the second largest trouser manufacturer in New York." I have no reason whatsoever to doubt this.

"When I graduated High School, I had an uncle, and he worked for a publisher, and he told me they were looking for an assistant, and I figured 'Gee, I'm going to apply', so I went up there, and I found out they also published comic books, they had an outfit called Timely comics, and they hired me to run errands, to proof read, fill the inkwell, whatever had to be done." By all accounts, this is perfectly correct. Stan's Uncle Robbie (Robert Solomon) worked for Martin Goodman, who published Timely Comics. 

What Lee fails to mention is that Goodman's sister (Sylvia Solomon) was Robert's wife. That makes Lee the boss's nephew-in-law. And rather confusingly, Goodman's own wife, Jean, was Stan Lee's cousin. Making him the boss's cousin-in-law as well. There is nothing sinister about this. It's how second generation immigrants found work during the depression. Once Lee is ensconced as a gopher, sharpening Jack Kirby's pencils and bringing him cups of coffee, he slips into the royal plural. "We had the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner and the Patriot and the Angel and the Destroyer, but the main character we had was Captain America."

But hey. It's a good story. Office boy to world-wide icon. Isn't that exactly what we mean by the Great American Dream?

Stan Lee was definitely given the role of "Playwright" by the US Army during World War II: we are shown his discharge papers with the job title on them. He was writing instruction manuals and training-film scripts while Jack Kirby was actually getting shot at by Nazis. (Another "playwright" was one Theodor Geisel, who would later do quite well for himself writing children's books.) But is it really true that adding light-hearted cartoon characters into accountancy training books shortened the training period for army finance officers from six-months to six weeks? This is, of course, spun as a eureka moment; indeed, as an origin story:

"It was then I realised that comic books can have a tremendous impact; you can convey a story or information faster, more clearly and more enjoyably than any other way short of motion pictures."

With great power comes great responsibility. Thus were born the Fantastic Four and the world will never be the same again. 

Abraham Riesman mentions in her biography that Lee's most widely distributed army work was actually a poster with the punchy slogan "V.D? Not me!" No-one doubts Stan Lee had a way with words.

In Origins of Marvel Comics, written in 1974, Lee tells the story of how his wife, sometime in 1960, pointed out that he'd been writing comics for twenty years and still treated it as a temporary occupation. (Significantly, he was still pitching screenplays and novel ideas; equally significantly, none of them got picked up.) Why, asked Jean, didn't he fully commit to the industry he was actually in? The result was the Fantastic Four. 

It is sweet that Stan wants to say that he owes it all to his wife; but it strikes me as the sort of conversation two people might actually have. Half a century later, in a BBC interview, the story had evolved. Now, Lee had actively decided to quit comics and his lovely wife suggested that if he was going to do that anyway, he should "do one book the way he wanted" before he finished. The result was Spider-Man. 

Corollary: Stan Lee always had Spider-Man "in" him; but he had spent many years doing comics in the way he thought his publisher wanted. (*)

In the present documentary, we get the story from Jean Lee's own mouth. (I hadn't realised that she had such a wonderful cut-glass English accent!) And the choice of words is very telling:

"Why don't you create characters who you like?"

In the beginning was the idea. The Fantastic Four differed from the characters who came before because Stan Lee liked them. Because they were his personal vision.

On this timeline, Stan goes to Jack and says "Jack, wouldn't it be nice if you had good guys who occasionally make mistakes, who occasionally trip at the last minute and let the bad guys get away?" This is presented as the key moment: when the seed was planted, the fountain unleashed and the crucible heated. It is illustrated with a panel from the 1947 Secrets of the Comics strip about how Martin Goodman created Captain America in a single eureka moment.

"That was really the start of everything" says Stan.

So: that was the Big Idea. Not the idea that there should be a team consisting of a stuffy scientist, a beautiful lady, a cool, hot-headed younger kid and strong, bad-tempered older kid, and that together they should fight monsters. Not even the idea -- that Lee is inordinately proud of -- that the Scientist and the Lady were already engaged when the story started. The light bulb moment was when Stan Lee went to the guy he used to run errands for and told him that the Fantastic Four would be realistic and fallible

In fairness, we do get to hear Lee talking extensively about the Marvel Method; and acknowledging Ditko's primary input into the majority of Spider-Man's adventures. This is spun in Lee's favour: because he didn't know what was going to be in the comic until Ditko handed him the art, Spider-Man took twice as long "to write" than any of the other books. Lee says that Marvel Method was introduced as an emergency measure -- introduced because Marvel were putting out more books than he could personally keep track of. The chronology of the documentary implies that this happened after the post-Fantastic Four superhero explosion: but Lee has said elsewhere that he was already feeding Kirby and Ditko single-line story ideas (for monster comics and twist-ending horror titles) from the middle-fifties at least. The provenance of Stan's outline for Fantastic Four #1 is contested: but it's definitely a synopsis, not a script.

We hear Lee's side of the Jonathan Ross interview; which acknowledges that Ditko believed himself to be the co-creator of Spider-Man. We hear the infamous moment when Stan and Jack nearly come to verbal blows about "who did what" on live radio. Lee accuses Kirby of never reading the finished comics, which Kirby does not deny. Kirby honestly believed he was the sole creator of the Fantastic Four because he genuinely didn't know what Lee was bringing to the table.

The trailer for the 1978 Christopher Reeve movie strongly implied that Superman's appearances in comic books, on radio, and on TV had been a preliminary, gestational period from which Superman-The Movie had finally emerged. Similarly, the 2018 Double Fantasy exhibition presented John Lennon as a peace campaigner, guru and avant garde artist who had served an apprenticeship in a British pop group. And clearly, it suits Walt Disney to present Stan Lee's story as a single creative decade, followed by forty years of obscurity, and universal adulation as an octogenarian. The documentary skips the years between 1972, when Lee ceased to be a regular writer, and 2008, when he started to cement his mainstream fame with a series of Hitchcockian cameos in the Marvel Universe Movies. We hear nothing of the decades of pitching ideas for characters and movies -- none of which get made -- and certainly nothing of the failed Stan Lee Media or POW Entertainment. 

Marvel Comics was the egg from which the Marvel Cinematic Universe hatched.

"In the days I was writing those books I was hoping they'd sell, so that I wouldn't lose my job, that I could keep paying the rent. All of a sudden, these characters have become world famous; they're the subject of blockbuster movies, and I'm lucky enough to get little cameos in them..."

"It's certainly nice to see the world catch up with what Stan Lee did" adds Roy "Even if it took movies and TV shows to do it. The world has to kind of admit now, maybe there is something to some of this stuff."

The final moments of the film juxtapose images from the movies with images of the same characters from 60s Marvel. But this only underlines how little the comic book characters have in common with the figures in the movies. The evil mutant with the silly red tiara unrecognisable as the tragically crazed witch from Wandavision. The lumbering cold-warrior in gun-metal armour has hardly anything to do with Robert Downey Jnr's sleek cyberpunk hero. The Hulk who Stan Lee dreamed up wasn't powered by anger and wasn't green. One of these things is not like the other one, but we are asked to suppose they have a unique essence which makes them kind of the same. Stan Lee's theory of Ideas which fall fully formed like mana from heaven is a necessary component of that essentialism. 

Jack Kirby created Captain America as a wartime hero; Stan Lee brought him forward to the 60s and killed off his annoying kid side kick; Ed Brubaker brought Bucky back from the dead as a psychotic brainwashed assassin. Gene Colon created the Falcon, and Steve Englehart made him Cap's partner and Rich Remender made him Cap's replacement. The very fine 1941 Captain America comic and the very fine 2021 Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV show are only instantiations of the same idea in the way that Trigger's broom (which has had fourteen new heads and seventeen new handles) is still the same broom he bought twenty years ago.

There's a political dimension to all this. The belief that there is a one true Spider-Man, who appeared in a snap-your fingers lightbulb moment feeds into the mentality which sets fire to action figures if a once-light-skinned character is played by a dark-sinned actor.

There is a really very touching epilogue in which Stan, now in a wheel chair, gets an ecstatic standing ovation from a college graduation cohort. His closing address turns the story-of-the-idea into a morality play, like one of those picture books about how Mother Theresa was a little girl who followed her dreams but doesn't mention that she was a Roman Catholic. 

"If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don't let some idiot talk you out of it. That doesn't mean that every wild notion you come up with is gonna be genius, but if there is something that you feel is good, something you want to do, something that means something to you, try to do it. Because you can only do your best work, if your doing what you want to do, and if you're doing it the way you think it should be done."

And that's the message. Where the whole trajectory of Stan's career is collaboration, pragmatism, following trends, selling a product, the final message is individualism. Spider-Man was great because Lee had a singular vision and he stuck to it. Bull. Shit

And the pity of it is this: if anyone reads to the end of this essay, they will call me a Ditko hater and a Stan Lee shill. Because I do believe that Stan Lee was a creative genius. I do believe that Kirby and Ditko did better work with Lee than they ever did solo or with different collaborators. I do believe that Marvel Comics from 1962ish to 1972ish reads as a single text, adverts and letters pages and all, and the soul of that text comes from Stan Lee. Stan Lee's voice formed the soundtrack to my childhood, if not my whole life. Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four are great because of Stan Lee's ironic meta-textual self-insertion. The endless peddling of the myth of the auteur who never actually auteured anything is insulting to Ditko and Kirby. And it does no favours to the very talented man whose name is on the tin.

Stan Lee was a copywriter. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were draftsmen. What they produced was not ideas, but texts.     

(*) It also follows that he was not "doing" the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, or Thor in "the way he wanted" and that he became disillusioned with comics when he had already "created" Doctor Doom and reintroduced the Submariner.

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Doomsday Clock #11

This issue is exposition, mostly.

Doomsday Clock #9 & #10

 You've been a Batman fan since you were a little kid; and a jobbing comic-book hack since you left college; and it has finally happened: you are going to write your very own Batman Story. (Page 1, panel 1: "The Bat Cave..." You've waited your whole life for this moment.) The most -- the very very most -- you can hope for is that it will be a story that is fondly remembered by future generations of Bat-Nerds. "Of all the stories in which the Penguin has kidnapped Barbara Gordon" you imagine them saying "That was definitely in the top fifty."

But that's not enough, is it? You don't want to be remembered as one of the good Bat-writers. The Bat-myth is much more important than any actual story: you need to leave your thumbprint on the Myth itself. You have to find some way of binding your successor: your Penguin story has to influence all other Penguin stories for as long as Batman endures. "That was the story which first revealed that the Penguin was Thomas Wayne's estranged brother and therefore Batman's wicked uncle" they will say "And now all us Future Batman Writers have to stick with that." (NOTE: That is a made up example. At least, I sincerely hope it is.)

But even this may not be enough for you. With the growth of the Insatiable Continuity Beast the truly hubristic Bat-scribe has an even more grandiose way of exerting control over the Tradition. If you are clever enough, and if you can get yourself commissioned to write this decade's Universe Defining Mega Continuity Crossover, you get to define what stories can and what stories cannot be told for decades, or at any rate weeks, to come. Penguins will live. Penguins will die. And the Bat Universe will never be the same again. You will be remembered as the writer who wiped out Earth-2 and thereby stopped the Future Writers from telling tales about a grey-haired Dick Grayson and the late Bruce Wayne's daughter. It was you who dissolved the multiverse so that no story involving the Flashes of Several Worlds could ever be written again.

Actually, the only thing which determines the influence one writer has on the writers who come after him is a certain sort of Darwinian fan consensus, survival of the least uninteresting. Frank Miller successfully turned Daredevil into a Ninja because the idea of Ninja Daredevil is manifestly more interesting than Very Slightly Grimmer Version of Spider-Man Daredevil. If the idea hadn't worked it would have been discretely forgotten. We can Crisis as much as we want to; but Superman's human parents will always be alive; because a Superman who can go and visit a sweet little grey haired old homestead in Kansas is much more interesting than one who swore to use his powers only for good on his father's deathbed. That is John Byrne's legacy. Everyone has forgotten his Krypton because it was krap.

Doomsday Clock #9 and #10 amount to two solid issues of exposition, building up to a sort of literary meta-theory about how DC Comics now work. Less of a joyless slog than the previous ten issues, I must admit: some of the ideas are borderline interesting, and Geoff Johns is unquestionably more comfortable writing about the DC characters than about Alan Moore's. But 40 pages of exposition is 40 pages of exposition, even if the ideas being exposited are not entirely uninteresting.

I thought that Grant Morrison was supposed to have sorted out DC cosmology a decade ago? (Hypertime, was it?) Are we already due for a meta-reboot?

We start with three wordless pages -- nine long thin panels -- showing different groups of heroes on different kinds of spaceships. One ship has Hawkman and Big Barda and Mr Miracle; another has some Green Lanterns and Wonder Girl; one has the JLA; another has Shazam and all the little Shazams and one even has Swamp Thing and John Constantine. (Does the idea of John Constantine on a spaceship to Mars go against the whole idea of John Constantine? Can any such character as Spider-Man continue to exist in a Universe where a character called Spider-Man can fight Thanos in Outer Space?) I thought this was quite fun; recalling the endless shifting battle fronts in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, but it is also a pretty cheap way of getting my attention. Hey kid, here are some superheroes. And here are some more superheroes. And here are even more superheroes! Superheroes! Superheroes! Superheroes!

Last issue, Firestorm apparently lost control of his powers and nuked Moscow -- and incidentally put Superman in a coma -- which the Russians are treating as an act of War. But in fact the explosion wasn't caused by Firestorm: it was apparently caused by Doctor Manhattan. On Mars. Except it may not have been. So all the heroes who are still standing fly off to Mars to confront Doctor Manhattan. Batman isn't convinced this is a great idea.

Bits and pieces of what follows are not unfun. Green Lantern envelopes Mars in a big green sphere and Firestorm turns the atmosphere into something the humans can breathe. Guy Gardner punches Doctor Manhattan. One of the younger Shazams finds his nudity "gross". Doctor Manhattan provides a scientific explanation for "magic". Captain Atom kills Doctor Manhattan, but he gets better. Once everyone has had a go, Doctor Manhattan knocks them all out with pretty much a wave of his hand.

The next issue primarily consists of Doctor Manhattan talking to himself. Since he ran away from Earth-WM and arrived on Earth-DC he has been observing all the ret-cons and reboots from the inside. He arrives on Earth-DC in 1938 and hears news reports of Superman's first appearance. (A man in a wrestling costume so strong that he can lift a car!) But when he follows the news story up, Superman is not there: because his arrival on earth has been pushed forward to 1956 and then to 1986. Each time the date of Superman's nativity changes, Earth-DC changes around him. It's quite fun to see the different iterations of Superman laid out side by side -- Pa and Ma Kent finding a pointy space rocket in one of their fields; and Jonathan and Martha stumbling on a John Byrne incubation sphere; Superman's dad telling him to go to Metropolis and become a Superhero from his death bed; Superman's ageing Mum knitting his first Superman costume for him. Doctor Manhattan witnesses the first meeting of the Justice Society (which is of course a lot like the first meeting of the Minute-men, only less rapey). In one version they are waiting for Superman to turn up; in another version Superman is not invited because he doesn't exist.

Doctor Manhattan himself starts to deliberately affect changes in continuity. He prevents Alan Scott becoming Green Lantern; which appears to prevent the formation of the Justice Society; and due to some jiggery pokery with a flight ring that went completely over my head, he prevents the Legion of Superheroes from coming into being as well. He also seems to cause Superman's earth parents to die in a car crash just before he leaves high school, as foreshadowed in Clark's dream in issue #1. The result is that the Superman of Doomsday Clock is more detached from the rest of humanity than the standard DC version. More like Doctor Manhattan.

So, are you ready now: here comes Geoff Johns' Great Big Idea which will change the DC universe forever, or at least until next summer.

This could count as a Spoiler.

We all know about the Multiverse. Alongside our world, there is a world where Hitler won the war, a world where Rome never fell, and also billions of worlds exactly like each other except that one particular tree in the Bazillion rain forest has one slightly different shaped leaf. Up to now, the various version of DC mythology have been regarded as different branches of the multiverse. In one branch Superman is a muscular reformist who sends gangsters to the electric chair; in another he is a camp nice guy who does super-chores and frolics with his super-pets.

But no, says Doctor Manhattan: this world, the world of Doomsday Clock is the world on which all the other worlds are based. It is not part of the Multiverse. It is -- get this -- the Metaverse. It is the world all other worlds derive from. And Superman is crucial and central to the Metaverse.

What are the chances? DC's most famous super-hero is the central pivot point of the entire multiverse.

It's a not un-clever idea, I suppose, but its too...knowing. Too meta. Yes, obviously all worlds in the DC canon are copies and variations of one original DC universe; and yes, obviously that DC universe wouldn't exist if little Joey and Jerry hadn't thunk up Superman in 1938. But trying to make that a cosmological principal that is true from a story-internal perspective....? Its too much like someone in Thunderbirds saying "How come our facial expressions never change?" or DCI Barnaby becoming obsessed with the idea that Midsommer has been built over a Hellmouth because of its statistically improbable murder-rate. And if you aren't a hard core comic book fan, it's pretty impenetrable. It's one thing to tell a new reader "On Earth-X, Lex Luther is the goodie and Superman is the baddie." It's quite another to expect them to swallow "The multiverse reacts to this universe. There have been endless parallel worlds. None, fifty two. Dark multiverses all created by changes to this universe."

You had stories about the Flash, who was the fastest man alive. And then you had stories about the Flashes of Two Worlds, because, well, two versions of the same hero is obviously more fun than just one. And then you had more worlds and more Flashes and an annual cross-universe crisis. And then you had Crisis on Infinite Earths. We went from "parallel worlds are a plot device because a story with two iterations of the same hero in it is kind of cool" to "stories which are mostly about the idea of parallel worlds" to "stories which exist mainly to sort out the confusing tangle that all these parallel worlds have become." From stories, to stories about stories, to stories about stories about stories about stories...

So Manhattan is by himself on Mars, waiting to confront Superman. I suppose the only remaining question is "Will Doctor Manhattan's meddling leave us with a DC universe which is cynical and dark, like Watchmen" or "Will Doctor Manhattan realize his mistake and return us to a more hopeful, four-coloured comic-booky DC Universe."

There are still two issues to go.

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

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Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

God Woke!

The bastard. He doesn't exist.
Samuel Beckett

In 1937, a student at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx was helping to edit the school newspaper. One lunchtime he found that someone had left a ladder in the tower which served as the paper’s offices so he climbed to the top and wrote a graffito on the ceiling. 

"STAN LEE IS GOD"

It was the first time he had ever used that pen-name.

*

After creating The Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man, Stan Lee believed he had exhausted the possibilities of narrative fiction. “What was there left to invent?” Creativity is a matter of hyperbole: each character has to be bigger and better than the one before. But “Who could be stronger than the Hulk? Who could be brainier than Mr Fantastic?” If he was really going to out-super his existing superheroes, Stan Lee's next comic would have to feature God. And he didn’t think the Comics Code would let him get away with that. But then he had one of those epiphanies that used to occur regularly between 1961 and 1972. He certainly couldn’t do a comic about God. But he certainly could do a comic about a god.

And that is the true story of how Stan Lee created Thor, off the top of his head, without any input from anyone else.

But Stan never quite gave up on the idea of The Amazing Super-God. 

“You know, I’ve spent all my life writing about superheroes” he recalled in 2000 “And one day, about thirty years ago, I decided to write about the greatest hero of all.” 

“I have written about so many superheroes” he explained in 2016 “and each one gets stronger and more powerful. We ended up with Galactus and people like that and I said who can I get which will top all of them? Well who’s left? God! So I’m gonna make a hero out of God! And I hope he’s grateful!” 

He wasn't joking. In 2016, Lee's performance poem God Woke! was published in comic-book format, with Kirby-a-like illustrations by Fabian Nicieza. It is as close to a Marvel Comic starring Super-God as we are ever likely to get. 

On any view, God Woke is a pretty feeble piece of work. It is an extended piece of free-verse about the Deity constructed around a sequence of two word statements in which God does something ironically anthropomorphic: God woke; God laughed; God frowned; God sighed; God pondered; God cried. A lot of the meter is lifted from the Raven, a poem which Lee reportedly adored: 

While He pondered, watched and waited

Endlessly they supplicated…. 

The endless internal rhymes seem to have come directly from Poe’s The Bells 

Chanting, ranting, moaning, groaning, 

Sighing, crying, cheating, lying…. 

As poetry, it rarely reaches the level of Dr Seuss. But if it is truly Stan Lee's most personal work, it is worth a look. How did the creator of Marvel Comics imagine the creator of the Universe? 

It seems that the more powerful a character is, the less personality he has. Galactus, the closest thing the Marvel Universe has to a deity, speaks entirely in declarative sentences about how powerful he is. (Eternity rarely gets beyond "I am Eternity" and Kirby's Celestials don't communicate at all.)  Since God is ultimately powerful, Lee imagines him as being almost entirely personality-free. Nicieza draws him as a giant, featureless male figure with stars and planets drawn over his body. Lee writes him as an innocent moron, like the Hulk or Frankenstein, stumbling around the universe failing to understand the strange humans who populate it. Since humans spend most of their lives being baffled by God, the idea that God is baffled by man is a fair-to-middling literary conceit.

God, it seems, created the Earth and the human race as components of an unexplored "master plan" and then dropped off to sleep and forgot all about it. After he wakes up, the Deity checks in on the planet to see how it is doing. He is not particularly impressed.

God’s complaints — and let’s face it, we are all a bit cranky first thing in the morning — take up the rest of the poem. God complains that the human race are making too much noise; and in particular, he is irked by the sounds of their prayers. He has three main objections to humans praying. Stop me if you’ve heard them before. 

First, he complains that humans pray to God as an alternative to doing something about their situation. He seems to see prayer as an aid to procrastination: 

man the enigma, bewailing his fate, 

but plagued by inaction til ever too late 

Second, he complains that prayer is generally insincere 

mouthing his rote 

just from his throat 

words without feeling 

sound without meaning. 

And finally, he finds the whole idea of prayers personally insulting. There is a Groucho Marx logic to this: God despises prayers because they come from the kind of beings who think that he is the kind of being who would listen to prayers. He doesn't listen to prayers because they come from the kind of creature who is foolish enough to pray. I don't care to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.

And anyway, why would God limit his attention to humans when there is so much other cool stuff in the universe? This idea makes any Marvel Comics reader think of the Silver Surfer, doomed to spend eternity on this paltry planet (oh woe is me)!  It is expressed in what may be the worst line in the poem, and therefore in the history of American literature: 

who but a fool 

with a cosmos to stray in

would conceive himself an ant-hill 

and like a prisoner, stay in? 

The Silver Surfer's boss Galactus also regarded the human race as ants and earth as an ant-hill. It’s a very telling metaphor. God is greater than humans in the way that a human is greater than an ant: by virtue of being very much larger. Lee’s God, like Richard Dawkins’ God, is nothing more than a super-sized chap.

The idea that prayer harms God is not uninteresting. (Wasn’t wish-granting physically painful to the Psammead?) You could imagine it framed in Christian terms, with each prayer adding to Jesus’ suffering. I’d have been inclined to treat it comically, with God wading through prayers as a human wades through emails. "I’ll get around to blessing Tiddles the cat right after I’ve given Mrs Jones her double six at Las Vegas." But it comes out here as an anti-religious screed. I don’t think that the illustrations do the text many favours. The prayers which are so annoying to God are represented by a montage of pious people at holy sites — the Kaaba, the Wailing Wall, Stonehenge. Humans are not seeking contact with a higher power or trying to become their best selves; even the most committed pilgrims are essentially selfish. 

God then goes off an a new track. Humans have no right to ask him anything at all: his duty was fully discharged by bringing them to life in the first place. Creation had nothing to do with a divine master-plan after all: humans were only ever God’s plaything. 

at first I found the plan was sound 

and somewhat entertaining 

but once begun, 

the deed now done, 

my interest started waning. 

This is quite shocking; but Stan Lee doesn’t seem particularly shocked by it. The creator of the universe is an abusive or neglectful parent, and there is no cosmic Child Support Agency to force him to face up to his responsibilities. 

Having complained that the Earth is full of noisy creatures who want to talk to him, God withdraws into space for a few pages, and immediately starts complaining that he is all alone in the universe. The Silver Surfer and Spider-Man spent most of their time moaning about how badly the universe was treating them and how it wasn’t their fault. Superheroes with super-problems, as the fellow said. Having been told that God is the greatest hero of all, I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that he is the biggest whiner in the universe. I suppose “circular incoherence” is Lee’s best stab at “divine ineffability” but this mortal found it very difficult to work out what point the Lord was trying to make here. 

like unto children, lost in the night 

they created a God to guide them. 

like unto children huddled in fright 

they must have their god beside them 

yet what sort of children from cradle to grave 

would grant him obeisance yet make him their slave 

they have conjured a heaven and there he must stay 

ever responsive be it night be it day 

he must love and forgive them and comply when they pray 

ever attentive never to stray 

and like unto children in their childish zeal 

they worship their dream and think fantasy real 

There is something to be said for the idea that humans cling to gods like children clings to a teddy bear — particularly if human beings are only God's toys. Lee seems to be saying that Allah and Jesus and Buddha are no more than stuffed animals designed to get human beings through the night, but the big blue glowy chap is the real McCoy. Humans claim to worship these made up gods, but they are only interested in what they can get in return. Big glowy Stan Lee God is every bit as jealous as Yahweh; fictional gods make him very angry indeed. 

The“they have conjured a heaven and there must he stay” part is particularly perplexing. Is the complaint that people think that God is confined to the spiritual realm and not relevant to day to day life? (The illustration shows people leaving Sunday Morning service and returning to their cars.) But wait a minute — weren't we just told that God found "spiritual" prayers every bit as annoying and noisy as materialistic ones? Is there some Gaiman-esque idea that the Demiurge is literally being transformed into a wish-granting machine because that’s all humans believe him to be? Or are prayers somehow physically trapping God in heaven in the way that the barrier of Galactus trapped the Silver Surfer? 

At any rate, God comes back to earth. He has a jolly good look round the place and starts bewailing Man’s Inhumanity To Man. 

how to make them understand? 

how to make them see? 

how to make them recognize? 

their own insanity 

tiddly tiddly, 

tiddly tiddly, 

tum tum tiddly tee 

It is a little unfair of God to complain about the whole idea of religion on one page and to wonder about how to share his divine wisdom with mankind on the next. 

He has a number of highly original divine insights. It seems that people want to be rich and famous even though wealth and fame don't make you live any longer. Politicians and generals start wars, but it’s the young who die in them. Wars are only ever about meaningless things like flags and skin colour and never about defeating Hitler. Both sides think that God is on their side and both armies pray to God for victory. God comes across here as a Sixth Form Atheist, claiming sagely that all wars are caused by religion and if we didn’t have any religions there wouldn’t be any wars. (Woah woah, woah woah, you may say I’m a dreamer...) But "justice", it seems, is also a false value which humans use as a pretext for conflict: 

only man 

earnestly praying 

to god as he's slaying 

and piously saying 

as the corpses increase 

he does what he must 

for his motives are just 

the mayhem, the carnage 

the slaughter won't cease 

God's in his corner 

killing for peace 

I quite like the increase/cease/peace rhyme, incidentally. Lee was a big fan of Broadway musicals and this could have fitted nicely into a song. 

It’s the “war” thing, not the “prayer” thing which pushes God over the edge. If humans persist in having fights about made up stuff like religion and justice, he's definitely finished with them, and off he goes, this time for good. 

The final stanzas are vintage Stan Lee bullshit and I mean that in a deeply affectionate way: 

he looked his last at man so small 

so lately risen, so soon to fall 

he looked his last and had to know 

whose fault this anguish, this mortal woe. 

had man failed make or maker man 

who was the planner and whose the plan? 

he looked his last, then turned aside 

he had found the answer 

that's why God cried 

*

When the philosopher says “God is dead” he doesn't really mean that someone or something called God has really died. He means “People used to believe in God, but they don’t any longer.” When a scientist says “God does not play at dice” he doesn't mean that there is a an actual being called God who prefers games of skill: he means “I don’t think that at the most fundamental level the universe is random.” When a pundit says “Where was God on September the 11th?” he doesn't mean that there is an actual Deity who is capable of being in one place but not another. He probably means “When everything is going fine, it is possible to believe that the universe is benevolent; but events like this force us to think that it is indifferent or hostile.” And it seems that if a Bishop says “God died for the human race” he really means “Self-sacrifice is the most fundamental value I can conceive of: it is in a very real sense the ground of my being.”

All of these usages can be defended: but it is terribly easy to fall into nonsense without intending to. Someone says "Where was God during the last high school massacre?" and you reply "Don't you remember? You threw God out of school". The word "God" is being used to mean "religion" or "state religion": "we threw God out of school" means "religious studies ceased to be mandatory." But the same word is also being used to mean "the idea that the universe is just and arbitrary suffering doesn't occur." "If the universe is just, why do the innocent suffer?" is a good question. "The innocent suffer because there is no longer a daily religious assembly in this district" is a terrible answer.

I don’t think that Stan Lee ever seriously supposed he could turn the God of religion into a superhero character. A comic book about "the god of the Marvel Universe" — the most powerful cosmic entity in that entity filled cosmos — is perfectly imaginable. It may even be that that is how God Woke was originally conceived: a Silver Surfer story from the point of view of Galactus. But once Stan has named his protagonist “God”, he can hardly avoid talking about religion — or philosophy, or reality at the most fundamental level, or the ground of our, in a very real sense, being. He presumably doesn't believe that the actual Deity, if he exists, is actually capable of crying, or sleeping, or forgetting. “Galactus turned aside” or “Odin wept” are descriptions of things which happen to characters on the inside of a story. But "God cried" is a theological statement. We are entitled to ask "What do you mean by that?"

*

Lee presents the story as God complaining about mankind; but it is really a man, Stan Lee, complaining about God. The God of God Woke is not the greatest hero of them all. He is a bad God, a failed God. Instead of sticking around to nurture the human race he got bored and left them on their own. Result: wars, false religions and wasted prayer. God recognizes that this is all his fault. God weeps because he is finally aware that in this universe with ultimate power must also come ultimate responsibility.

Only atheists ever talk about a malevolent Deity. No-one who seriously believes in a God believes in a bad one. Indeed "Bad-God" may be a contradiction in terms, like "square circle". The ultimate Thing is the ultimate Good Thing almost by definition.

When someone says "God is bad" or "God has failed" they generally mean "the idea of God has failed" or "God is bad idea." When Stan Lee tells us that God created the world and went to sleep, he must mean "When we look at history, we cannot reasonably suppose that there is a God who is actively in charge of it", or more simply "History shows that God does not exist." When Stan Lee shows humans calling to God and God saying “Stop being so noisy” he is saying "No-one listens to or answers human prayers" or more simply “Religion is a pointless waste of time because God doesn’t exist.” 

Atheism could be a positive or liberating belief: but Lee's parable about a God who is useless, or asleep, or neglectful, or malevolent points to an atheism of the most pessimistic kind. The message on Stan Lee's bus is not "God is asleep! Stop worrying and enjoy your life!" It is more like "Only a God can save us; but unfortunately, God is asleep. We are therefore, fucked." 

But perhaps the poem is more hopeful than that. After all, God recognizes his shortcomings on the final page. Again, is is impossible to literally suppose that God is capable of recognizing his own faults and getting better at Godding. "God admits his flaws" can only mean "Human beings should recognize the flaws inherent in their own idea of God. So the message could be: "The Gods of religion cannot save us; but the alternative is not atheism, but a better idea of God. If we would shut up for a minute and listen to the real God, over and above our religious ideas about him, all manner of things may still be well."

*

If you are a gardener, you probably imagine God planting seeds and pulling up weeds and watering the universe. If you are a writer, you probably think that the universe is a great book which God is writing. Bob Monkhouse thought that God was a comedian and the Universe was a funnier joke than he could ever write. Freemasons call him the Great Architect of the Universe. It would not surprise me if sports fans think of the Deity as the referee in a very long and very beautiful game. 

God Woke was first presented as a performance piece, recited by Stan Lee’s wife and daughter, at the infamous Stan Lee at Carnegie Hall event in January 1972. It went down poorly. According to some accounts, the audience were throwing things at the stage before the evening was over. 

It follows that while God Woke was written a decade after the creation of Thor, Lee’s account of the creation of Thor was written a year or so after God Woke. The idea of God was obviously something Stan Lee was thinking about a good deal in the early 1970s.  Origins of Marvel Comics (1974) opens with a tasteless pastiche of the book of Genesis. 

“And the spirit of Marvel said ‘Let there be the Fantastic Four’. And there was the Fantastic Four. And Marvel saw the Fantastic Four. And it was good.” 

It is not surprising that Lee is attracted to a Deistic idea of God. The Demiurge isn’t personally responsible for each little flower that opens and each little bird that sings, in the same way that a comic book writer doesn't personally work out the storyline for the comics he works on. Once he has done the difficult bit of saying “Let there be the Fantastic Four!” he can leave the mechanism to run under its own steam. But that means that your creations won't always go in the way you intended them to. You might check in after a long nap and find that someone has killed off Gwen Stacey! And just because God set the whole thing in motion that doesn’t mean he has read every damn line of every damn fan letter and listen to every damn cry of every damn fan at every damn convention. The "Stan the Man" to whom the faithful send letters is partly a fictional figure anyway: he can't possibly be the real Stanley Martin Leiber.

*

he looked his last
he turned aside

That first performance of God Woke! took place in January 1972. The following August, he relinquished control of the Amazing Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. He would be admired and revered — worshiped, even — as Creator of the Marvel Universe right up until his death in 2018. But he would never be a comic book writer again.

*

“I thought up the Fantastic Four, which did well” Stan Lee told Jonathan Ross in 2007. “So we did another book, called the Hulk, and then we did Spider-Man and the X-Men and on and on and on. And then, of course, on the seventh day, I rested.“

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