Danny Fingeroth – författare

This program is read by the author.The definitive biography of the beloved—often controversial—co-creator of many legendary superheroes, A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee presents the origin of “Stan the Man,” who spun a storytelling web of comic book heroic adventures into a pop culture phenomenon: the Marvel Universe.Stan Lee was the most famous American comic book creator who ever lived.Thanks, especially, to his many cameos in Marvel movies and TV shows, Lee was—and even after his 2018 death, still is—the voice and face of comics and popular culture in general, and Marvel Comics in particular. How he got to that place is a story that has never been fully told—until now.With creative partners including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko—with whom he had tempestuous relationships that rivaled any superhero battle—Lee created world-famous characters including Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X–Men, the Avengers, and the Hulk!But Lee’s career was haunted by conflict and controversy. Was he the most innovative creator to ever do comics? Was he a lucky no-talent whose only skill was taking credit for others’ work? Or was he something else altogether? Danny Fingeroth’s A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee attempts to answer some of those questions. It is the first comprehensive biography of this powerhouse of ideas who, with his invention of Marvel Comics, changed the world’s ideas of what a hero is and how a story should be told.With exclusive interviews with Lee himself, as well as with colleagues, relatives, friends—and detractors—Fingeroth makes a doubly remarkable case for Lee’s achievements, while not ignoring the controversies that dogged him his entire life—and even past his death. With unique access to Lee’s personal archives at the University of Wyoming, Fingeroth explores never-before-examined aspects of Lee’s life and career, and digs under the surface of what people thought they knew about him.Fingeroth, himself a longtime writer and editor at Marvel Comics, and now a lauded pop culture critic and historian, knew and worked with Stan Lee for over four decades. With his unique insights as a comics world insider, Fingeroth is able to put Lee’s life and work in a unique context that makes events and actions come to life as no other writer could.Despite F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous warning that “There are no second acts in American lives,” Stan Lee created a second act for himself that changed everything for him, his family, his industry, and ultimately for all of popular culture. How he did it—and what it cost him—is a larger-than-life tale of a man who helped create the modern superhero mythology that has become a part of all our lives. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin''s Press

Why are so many of the superhero myths tied up with loss, often violent, of parents or parental figures? What is the significance of the dual identity? What makes some superhuman figures “good” and others “evil”? Why are so many of the prime superheroes white and male? How has the superhero evolved over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? And how might the myths be changing?

Why is it that the key superhero archetypes—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the X-Men—touch primal needs and experiences in everyone? Why has the superhero moved beyond the pages of comics into other media?

All these topics, and more, are covered in this lively and original exploration of the reasons why the superhero—in comic books, films, and TV—is such a potent myth for our times and culture.

In this insightful and provocative book, comics-industry veteran Danny Fingeroth explores the backgrounds of the most well-known superheroes and their creators—largely young American Jewish men from Eastern European backgrounds. These innovators include Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Jewish Identity has historically been about the push and pull toward and away from that very identity. As immigrants with a history of persecution, Jews came to America with their heads down but their eyes open, finding themselves presented with unprecedented freedom and opportunity.

Still, there were limits, spoken and unspoken, which often pushed Jews into fields with a hint of “second-class-ness” to them. Among these was the comic-book industry, until then minus the breakout hit that would put the medium on the map. That phenomenon would be the superhero—specifically Superman—and the flood of others that followed, including Batman and Spider-Man.

In Disguised as Clark Kent, Fingeroth explores how the creators’ Jewish backgrounds helped make superheroes the most familiar popular-culture icons of all, far beyond the comic books that spawned them—on TV, in movies, in electronic media—and in our very ideas about what it means to be a hero.

Drawn in part from original interviews with legendary creators as they reflect on their Jewish backgrounds—religious, ethnic, and cultural—Disguised as Clark Kent brings valuable insights into the fantasies that fuel our imaginations, and raises significant questions about the relationship of individual and group identity to the content of our collective dreams.