Stan Lee, Still a True Believer, Spends a Day on AMC\'s \'Comic Book Men\'

September 10, 2012, 8:32 am

By DAVE ITZKOFF

RED BANK, N.J. â€" Friday seemed like a special morning in the life of Jack Davis, a towheaded boy who had been granted entry to Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, a comic-book store here. Though a familiar sign in the window said “I Assure You We're Open,” the shop was in fact closed for a taping of “Comic Book Men,” the AMC reality series about its proprietors.

But Jack was on the inside, being recorded by video cameras as he gingerly handed a home-made comic that he had written, illustrated and published himself, to Stan Lee, the venerated Marvel Comics writer and editor who helped create such long-lived heroes as Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four.

“You laid the whole thing out, it's y our idea?” Mr. Lee, 89, said in an avuncular, resonant voice as he thumbed through the leaflet's pages. “Son of a gun, you're a triple threat. This is pretty colorful. Interesting looking characters.”

He asked its young author how old he was, and when Jack answered 11, Mr. Lee tried to pay him a compliment.

“By the time you're 12 â€" ” Mr. Lee started to say.

“All right, thank you, we got that part,” a television producer said, interrupting the scene. “We might as well do a clean exit, too.”

“See,” Mr. Lee said, half-joking and half-serious, “he stops me in the middle of a sentence.”

Like most entries in the so-called reality TV genre, “Comic Book Men” (which returns for a second season on Oct. 14) has its artifices: while the interactions seen on camera are generally authentic, there is plenty of nudging, gentle and otherwise, that happens along the way.

And though Mr. Lee, a li felong showman, is no stranger to walk-on roles â€" see his appearances in summer blockbusters like “The Avengers,” “The Amazing Spider-Man,” and anything else based on Marvel characters â€" he seemed alternately perplexed and amused by this day's orchestrations.

On a shooting break Mr. Lee, wearing sunglasses and khaki-colored clothes, sat himself on a store counter and explained that he had been invited on to “Comic Book Men” by Kevin Smith, the writer-director of comedies like “Clerks” and “Mallrats” and the owner of the Secret Stash shop.

“I thought I was doing a little cameo here, for a few minutes,” Mr. Lee said. “It seems that the whole show is about me â€" which I don't mind.”

But Mr. Lee said he thought Mr. Smith might also be on hand for the taping. “The disappointment is, he isn't here,” he said. “He probably knew I was coming.”

Three months from his 90th birthday, Mr. Lee is the first to point out that h e does not see or hear as well as he used to, and to joke self-deprecatingly about his dependence on his event coordinator, Max Anderson, who assists him at public appearances. (At one point, Mr. Lee posed like a collapsed marionette in front of Mr. Anderson and said teasingly, “I sometimes feel like a puppet.”)

Still, he maintains a vigorous schedule between his involvement in POW! Entertainment, which produces superhero projects for film and television, and his continuing promotion of Marvel Comics. (From Red Bank, Mr. Lee was headed to a weekend at the Baltimore Comic-Con.)

Though some contemporary accounts of comic-book history throw shadows on Mr. Lee's legacy, or cast him as a villain who crowded out the contributions of illustrators like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, he said that artists were “every bit as important” as the writers in his field.

“It's like a song that has music and lyrics,” he said. “How do you know who's the most importan t one? And in comic books, you have an artist, you have a writer. Sometimes â€" rarely, but sometimes â€" one person does both. But one can't exist without the other.”

With some melancholy, Mr. Lee said it was hard for him to keep up with the comic-book industry of the present day. “Sometimes somebody'll show me a new comic book and all the people's names that are on the cover are strange to me,” he said. “I don't even know who they are, because I haven't been following them.”

And when he spoke about hit movies like “The Avengers” ($1.5 billion and counting in global ticket sales), he sounded like a proud grandparent â€" someone with a distant but not direct involvement in its creation or success.

“To tell the truth, when I see the movie, I think I'm seeing it just like any fan,” Mr. Lee said. “I'm just sitting in the theater, enjoying it, and I'm not thinking, ‘I did this.'”

All his life, Mr. Lee said, he was used to being the youngest person in his peer group: at school, in his Army platoon, as a writer. “All of a sudden, I'm a senior citizen,” he said. “I can't get used to it. Things change.”

As a young man, Mr. Lee said, “I used to do obituaries for The Associated Press. If you're a celebrity, your obituary is already written. See, that's how you know you're a celebrity â€" I hope somewhere, my obituary is already written. That would make me feel very important.”

(Asked if he genuinely wished to know whether The New York Times had an obituary on file for him, Mr. Lee adopted a tone of exaggerated horror. “No, no!” he shouted.)

While Mr. Lee was relaxing, Walt Flanagan, the soft-spoken manager of Secret Stash, was giving him some respectful distance.

“I met him on the set of ‘Mallrats,'” Mr. Flanagan said, “but to actually have him in the store, it's quite a coup. We'll always remember when Stan Lee came and spent the day.” Then he resumed organ izing his inventory of back issues and graphic novels.

Around 2 p.m. it was time for Mr. Lee to bid farewell. Mr. Flanagan and his co-workers waved goodbye as he made his way to the front door, followed by a cameraman, and prepared to exit.

But before he could make good on his escape, he was again halted by a producer: now the cameraman needed to go out to the street, to capture Mr. Lee as he walked through the doorway.

“There's always a last bit,” Mr. Lee said. “After the last bit, there's always another bit. There's no way out.”