This didn't do it for me. Granted - I like Marvel, but I am by no means a mega fan. I couldn't tell you how accurate this is or isn't. But the disclaimer in the beginning threw me off a little bit and it make me question if it was accurate or just he said she said through a lot of the book. The authors credits make me more confident that it's probably accurate, but yeah, that's a weird one.

The art style fits for a Stan Lee book, but it's not to my taste. It's lacking a lot of detail. Speaking of detail, this has the weirdest amalgamation of detail. Some things are exceptionally detailed, others if feels like they got mentioned and left. I was very confused for a lot of it, cause I had no idea of a timeline. There's not a single date or anything anywhere to keep it moving. And as someone who doesn't know Stan Lee's life, that isn't helpful.

I dunno, it's fine I guess, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it.

So this one didn't really work for me as a graphic novel nor as a biography. The narrative lacks structure, as Stan Lee's life is shown in a stream of moments and anecdotes with little to link them or transition between them and very little to indicate how much time is passing. A lot of pages suffer from being overcrowded with text. I also found it difficult to keep track of who is who, as there's a lot of names being dropped constantly and a lot of the characters aren't very visually distinct.

Overall, I would find this book hard to recommend. Maybe if you're very familiar with the life of Stan Lee already, and can fill in the gaps where necessary to keep track of what's going on...

I as a stan do stan this graphic novel biography.

I love the art sequence style and how the dialogues have been written. However, it seems to have lost its patience towards the end and so the last few pages seems a bit congested.

Apart from this minor issue, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this graphic novel. I came to know so much more about the creator and his younger days. Means so much to sometime like me who’s been quite looking forward to know a little more about this legend.

Black Panther is still my favourite though I do not miss out on most of his amazing creations. Yes, I will keep stanning Stan Lee.

Thank you, Ten Speed Press, for the advance reading copy.

I love the concept of this book, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
The art was not to my taste, with the "characters" (actual people) mostly blurring together. Even Stan Lee himself was hard to pick out at times. I did look up the author/artist's other works from his website, so it seems his style is just not for me, so your mileage may vary in that regard.
As for the narrative, it was very disjointed and mostly involved a lot of name dropping. Both of creators and characters without any exceptional art to back them up. Part of the problem was that since this is an unauthorized (is that the correct term?) biography they probably couldn't show any images of a lot of the Marvel characters without copyright/licensing issues, but that really took a lot out of the story.
The other part is likely the difficulty of cramming so many years of life into so few pages.

What better format to tell Stan Lee's life and career than a graphic novel?

Tom Scioli's I Am Stan offers a quick paced, one page per event series of flashes through Stan Lee's personal and professional life, inseparable from the history of comics and superheroes in the United States. Through interviews and some political events (including the comics code), the story mentions the criticism comics received as they became more popular, how long it took for the medium to be taken seriously, and how difficult it is to keep working on an artform that's considered "inferior".

I particularly appreciate how the author didn't shy away from showing Stan Lee's less shiny sides. The man may be a comics legend, he made wrong choices and wasn't always the best person, and I Am Stan portrays him as a complete human.

Thanks Ten Speed Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Well, it was great to see this billed as "the first graphic novel biography" of Stan Lee, especially as the man's own "Amazing Fantastic Incredible" (that he at best co-wrote) has been out for years now. Would this be as self-congratulatory? Would this try and pretend the later years gave us anything of note whatsoever beyond a few cinema cameos? The mind boggled as to if this Stan Lee could properly admit the personnel clashes back in Marvel's golden, million-selling years.

Unfortunately, for all the flaws in the sanctioned version, this is inferior. Suffice to say, this looks a lot different – the dynamic Marvel-styled angles and so on have been swapped out for the tinted paper background, the routine panelling and the more staid style of yore. It's a complete yack-fest at times, with something we're given too little context to just being a page of guff about what the youth want, politics- and justice-wise. Stan himself almost becomes one of those stupid manga mini-characters, barely squeezed into frame to begin a speech elsewhere.

Which brings us on to the other issues, for this is written very weakly. If we get one scene set as Interior – Nameless Office – cigar smoke, we get a hundred, all introduced by Lee telling us who he's talking to, carrying no flow from what has just gone before. No, I didn't like the bitty return to the lecture lectern of "AFI" mentioned above, but this plod of similar people with their welter of non sequiturs is narrative purgatory. Heck, the creator here has Lee talking more than once about having a consistent flow to his stories, and this hasn't tried to take that advice. (It also has someone tell Lee "you don't have to have constant talk. You need to leave room for things to breathe", so it patently ignores that philosophy too.)

So, what does it give us? It gives us pretty much what was in the earlier book, as regards incidental detail – the brick wall seen from the childhood home window, the bike, the bumping into the woman of his dreams, the beat where she proves she can write a sloppy romance novel. It takes longer over this, less time over that, but takes us on the same path, and never once steps away from it. But off the beaten track is where we needed to go. Yonder, in that bush, is the truth of this falling out. That bog is something Lee would rather not talk about, and it's not alone. Those brambles are hiding the core of the narrative and it's too much of a fight to get through.

Inasmuch as this is unauthorised, do we gain anything? Well, there's much more to show his hair loss and choosing bad syrups as a result. It has Lee a touch more naive, such as a time he gets paid for a PA event and didn't realise there was cash to be had. Oh, and the way this scene crashes into that scene crashes into that scene (sans the cigar smoke now, we've modernised) allows for a brilliant montage almost of his naffness – Backstreet Boys the superheroes, the failure of his company and its web presence not working, getting Pamela Anderson in as a soft-porn supe. His glee at getting the MCU cameos is a similar tumble, if not down the dumper then to its edge.

Oh, and we get a lot more about character creation, and a talk show where he says he neither wrote nor even read the aforementioned biography (which is utterly absent from the lists of sources and bibliography here). But for all that, this book could so easily have taken down the myth, removed the statues and Lee icons, and proven the history one way or another. So it's disappointing that, in a most un-Lee styled fashion, it more or less repeats the legend, and lets it continue unchallenged. The book hasn't the guts to step back from Lee, point the finger at who was more creative – all the while proving Lee just added verbiage to the narrative stories of his artists – and be the book to settle the argument. For the fact it doesn't do what it should, and does what it does in an unenjoyable fashion, I cannot recommend this. One and a half stars.

I love Stan Lee and the work he’s done so I was excited about this biography but it didn’t work for me.
The art was not really my style, a bit different from the cover I’d say. The digital format was a bit blurry but mostly what bothered me is that there was way too much text by pages, making it hard to read. Those crowded pages should have been done on 2 pages.
And it needed some dates because it was very confusing. I never knew what year it was and at times, who was who or what was happening. Some pages seem to jump to one moment a bit out of nowhere without context. All very confusing in my opinion