Podcasts about true believer the rise

In this episode, STEAM Box youth from Highlander Charter School sit down with The God Killer: Josie Riesman, acclaimed author of The Ringmaster and True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. Josie and Sarah dive deep into the legacy of Stan Lee, the mystery of who truly created Spider-Man, and their personal inspirations, including contemporary comics legend Jonathan Hickman. Josie talks about the tragedy of Vince McMahon and even shares some of her meaningful tattoos, like “Burn all that doesn't work.” This interview is packed with revelations for comics fans and anyone fascinated by the untold stories behind pop culture icons.#STEAMBoxPodcast #JosieRiesman #StanLee #TrueBeliever #WhoCreatedSpiderman #RIYouth #ComicBookHistory #JonathanHickman #PopCultureTalk #YouthVoices #HighlanderCharter #STEAMCreativity #BurnAllThatDoesntWork #ComicsLegend #SpiderManOrigins

This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes writer Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee” and her latest, “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.” Next, director Benjamin Millepied joins to talk about his feature film debut, an adaptation of “Carmen.” And for The Treat, songwriting power couple Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez talk about their inspirations on the page and in song.

This time around, Eden is joined by Abraham Josephine “Josie” Riesman, NYT-bestselling authoress of True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, and much else besides. The two dive into Philip K. Dick's legacy, investigating his positions on Judaism, his religious exegesis, what we can learn from his writings about the current (and sorry) state of American culture, our perceptions of our world around us, transness, and more! Seriously, more.

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Abraham Josephine Riesman who wrote the explosive new book out this week Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. I have been looking to this one for a while, I was a massive fan of her 2021 book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.The subject matter of this one will be of interest not just to wrestling fans but among anyone who has felt the reverberations across pop culture, sports and politics of one extremely complicated family and their very influential “sports entertainment” business.The book is out this week and can be found wherever books are sold. Riesman can be found at her website and on Twitter. This interview has been condensed and edited.Josie, thank you so much for coming on.Hey, I'm so glad to be back. Fire away.You are out with the new book Ringmaster this week. I have been looking forward to this all year, honestly, since I heard you announced it. Folks might know you from your Stan Lee biography. Both of these stories are about complicated men who worked in the entertainment industry and how it kind of destroyed them, I guess. What drew you to Vince McMahon?I was a teenage wrestling fan from the ages of about 13 to 16. I was very obsessively involved in Vince McMahon's product, the World Wrestling Federation, as it was known then. And three years isn't all that long a period of time in adult human years, but in teenager years, those are a century each. It was a time when I was very impressionable, and wrestling made a big impression on me. And after I gave up on it around 2001, I stopped watching for like 20 years. And then when I was done with my biography of Stan Lee, True Believer, I had to come up with something else to write. And I was having a conversation with my wonderful spouse, who ended up being my frontline editor on this, but was not at the time, S.I. Rosenbaum, and we were just chatting about what could the next book be.And one of us said, what about a biography of Vince McMahon? Now, she'd reported on wrestling in the past as a local news reporter. Not on the WWF, but on the wrestling world, so she was familiar with him. And I obviously was familiar with him, had a lot of distinctive memories of him, had some knowledge of his real life. But it was, as is true of most people's knowledge of Vince McMahon's real life, ill-informed, because he's very good at deliberately altering your perception of him. So it just seemed like a natural idea. He is this amazing individual whose story had not really been told in the particular way that I wanted to tell it.It's a fascinating business story, it's a fascinating cultural story, and we'll kind of touch on each of those elements in a bit. I guess to give folks a little perspective who might not be totally familiar with wrestling, what role does Vince McMahon play in the evolution of it, and what it's become today versus what it was maybe 50 years ago?Sure, yeah. Vince is the singular man of professional wrestling right now. There's no one more powerful or influential than him, both in the present and also in the recent past. Of the living people in wrestling, no one has had more of an influence than Vince McMahon. He took over the company from his father, who was a wrestling promoter, like his father before him, in 1982 and 1983. He, over the course of that year, purchased the company from his father and some minority shareholders.And after that, Vince sort of went on a war of conquest. Up until then, wrestling had been this largely regional phenomenon. You had regional territories where local bosses, who operated not unlike mob bosses, would dictate what pro wrestling was in that geographic territory. And it was an oligarchy. It wasn't a democracy, but it was an oligarchy. It was not unlike the English nobility circa Magna Carta, where it's like it could have been the beginnings of democracy, but democracy it wasn't. But the fact was that power was more diffuse than it is now. Because Vince went on this little mission to take over wrestling in America and Canada, and he did entirely.It's not exactly a monopoly because there are small other promotions, there have been. Now there's a pretty big rival promotion AEW, but for about 20 years there, from 2001 until 2020 or so, Vince was essentially unopposed in the world of professional wrestling. And the whole art form has been changed by that fact, by the fact that this one person has so much outsized influence on how it has evolved in the past for decades.And it really was a conquest. Again, he cajoled and destroyed and won over and allied with—And bought, don't forget bought. The big thing was he would flood the zone with money and tell the top talent at any given territory, come over to my shop and you'll get paid more. And it's a very punishing industry financially, so unsurprisingly, a lot of people said yes. And similarly, he would just buy TV slots in rival territories and start broadcasting his show in syndication. One of the WWF's employees spoke to a reporter in the early ‘80s or mid-‘80s and said that Vince was executing manifest destiny. Used that actual phrase. It was an apt comparison, let's say that.Yeah, and I think that I would love to hear your view on how he changed wrestling to reflect him, because we're going to get in a second to how wrestling kind of changed a lot of the world around it; but whether it was the body building league that he backed for a bit, or whether it was the distinct styles in wrestling, I suppose I'd love your view on, what does the Vince McMahon wrestling world look like that's different than perhaps what came before?The Vince McMahon world of wrestling for one thing, this is perhaps the most important thing, it no longer claims to be a real sport. This was perhaps, I mean, there's a lot that Vince reshaped, but a lot of it's sort of technical. It'll be like, oh, well he started doing this kind of camera thing. It's a vast accumulation of little things that result in an altered tapestry. But the big historic, world historic break, was Vince in the mid-‘80s started pushing to get his business deregulated so he didn't have to have state athletic committees overlooking health and safety and levying taxes. And his big strategy for that was not in public, but behind the scenes in legislation sessions and in lawsuits. He and Linda, his wife, and their underlings would say, ‘Don't worry, this is all fake. You don't need to regulate this like a sport, because it ain't a sport. It's just like the Harlem Globe Trotters or the circus.' That was the comparison they always made.And it's unclear whether Vince ever intended to make that all that public. Perhaps it was inevitable that it would've been, but he was kind of caught off guard in 1989 when, after four or five years of this deregulation effort and after some lawsuits that he or Linda had testified in in which they'd said all that, it finally got reported.The New York Times ran a big story called, "Now It Can Be Told, All These Wrestlers Are All Just Having Fun." And it was about how the WWF's deregulation campaign, especially in New Jersey, had resulted in them going on the record and saying in legislation and in legal proceedings that wrestling was fake. And Vince was kind of caught off guard, because he was not intending that to be a big public New York Times story, but he'd already laid the groundwork, whether or not it was his intention. That effort also combined with something that was very public, which is that he started referring to his product in the mid-‘80s as sports entertainment, not wrestling. It was sports entertainment. And that change, that shift toward acknowledging wrestling's fakeness in a grand way, was just a sea change. It resulted in a lot of enormous upheaval.Yeah. I suppose I'm interested in, then, how that deregulation and that upheaval affected not just folks who worked for him, but the product as well as the human beings who worked for him. So much of your book is about the relationships between Vince and various different wrestlers. If he's the only game in town and if the state's not paying attention, that lead to some significant negative impacts for a lot of people, and a couple significant positive impacts for another group. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?Yeah. In the absence of anybody telling Vince what to do in a meaningful way, he was able to execute a lot of very abusive business tactics towards his workers. Wrestlers are not employees, they are independent contractors, they don't have health insurance provided by WWE, as it's known now, and they are in this very low-paying profession compared to other athletic events of similar spectacle and notability.Like, you have these people who are every bit the athletes that a basketball player or a football player might be, but they get paid vastly less, and have so few job protections and no voice, because again, there's no collective bargaining. And so that has manifested itself in a lot of death and destruction. Not to put it too bluntly, but I could go on all day about all the people who've been affected in that way.Just a few off the top of my head, Owen Hart, a wrestler himself, but also the younger brother of the very famous wrestler, Bret Hart, Owen Hart died in the ring. He was doing a zip line stunt — well, technically it was called a descender stunt, but that's getting technical. He was doing this stunt where he was flying in from the rafters at a pay-per-view event, and Vince had changed up who was managing that stunt, and the person who did it was allegedly somewhat incompetent, and the botched stunt led to him falling 70 feet and hitting the ropes and then falling into the ring, and he died mere minutes later, and the show went on. That was the thing about Vince, was it any other athletic event, if one of the players died, I can't imagine that the game would've continued. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's some sports example that I'm not aware of, but it would be completely obscene and impossible to imagine a sporting event continuing after one of the players died.But that's exactly what happened with Owen Hart. Vince told them to keep the show going, and the arena crowd — it was 1999, so we don't have as much internet penetration in a remote location — but you had all these people in the arena who therefore didn't know whether Owen was dead or not, thought maybe it was all part of the act, because they weren't told. And they cheered their heads off for the rest of the show thinking maybe that was all part of the show. That's just one example. There are countless people who've died young because of injuries or head trauma or steroid use, drug use, any number of things that just go completely unchecked or largely unchecked in wrestling, because it's just not a regulated or unionized industry.The steroid component was a huge part of it as well, too.Yeah, back in the ‘90s, it's actually kind of interesting. The steroid scandal that the WWF found itself in was arguably held up as a bigger deal than the concurrent scandals about rape. Vince was accused in that same period in the early ‘90s, and then especially in 1992 of raping a female employee in 1986. He was accused of actively knowing and looking the other way about child rape in the WWF among the so-called ring boys, these sort of underage boys who were hired to do odd jobs. And the steroid thing, and there were a bunch of other sexual misconduct allegations, but those were two of the big ones.The steroid thing was always held up as a bigger deal than any of the other stuff. It was the steroid allegations, and those were specifically about distributing and pushing steroids on the wrestlers, which was a bit of an abstraction because Vince didn't have to actively come tell any wrestlers to do steroids, they knew that that's what the boss expected of them.So trying to pin it on a specific like, oh, Vince said to this one wrestler, ‘You need to do steroids today, and here they are,' that was going to be very hard to do. So it's very odd to look back on the steroid trial — well, the steroid scandal is what led to the federal trial that Vince faced in 1994 — and yet you look back on it and the steroid allegations are easily the least interesting, or at least scandalous or least harmful in many ways; even though steroids are very harmful, they're nothing compared to rape.And it was, I wonder why the media attention went so much to the steroids. I think a lot of it just had to do with the war on drugs. There was just a general moral panic about about chemical substances, especially their use among young people. And I'm not saying young people should be doing anabolic steroids to bulk up, that's not what I'm saying at all. But I think it maybe got held up as a bigger deal than some of the allegations that may now seem more serious. Because it was part of this larger American phenomenon.It was also likely more obvious on its face, as well as more easy to report on?Yeah, you're absolutely right, but that doesn't necessarily preclude media from making hay out of something just because it's harder to prove, especially when it's something salacious and tabloidy like sexual misconduct. But I'm sure that was part of it, yes. With the steroid thing, you just have to turn on your TV and you see all the evidence you need by looking at the Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan, as opposed to some of the other stuff.I want to talk about some of the really cool reporting and new information that you broke in this, and just kind of things that I got out of your book that I have never seen or really kind of felt before.And I got to say, one theme that I think you keep coming back to is just that how Vince is able to do this is that he appears to be preternaturally charismatic. And you have a couple scenes in the book, I recall one where I think he's talking to Bret Hart, where he's just able to win somebody who is technically in conflict with him, fundamentally over to his position. There was also the excerpt this week that ran about a negotiation between him and one of those ring boys.Could you talk a little bit about, I guess, his character and his skills, and what his talents are?Vince is an enormously charismatic individual, which is interesting because he wasn't as a child, this was not necessarily a phenomenon for his entire life. I spoke to many people who knew him when he was young before he got involved in the wrestling industry, and they all said he was kind of unremarkable. They liked him, but he was not president of the class, and oftentimes he wasn't even doing any extracurriculars.So at some point, either it flowers or he learns it, and by the time he meets Bret Hart, Vince McMahon walks into a room and everybody looks at him. I've never been in a room other than an arena with Vince McMahon. I've never interviewed him. But everyone I know who has said they've been in the same room as him, they all say it's like gravity, you just can't escape the pole of wanting to be around this sort of uncanny dude.It's not just that he's charismatic, he's also just physically odd to look at, and that's appropriate because Vince and his father both really understood that the human mind is easily hackable in one very particular way, which is that humans don't know what to do with uncanny-looking other humans. If you see somebody who's really big, just enormous, you're going to pay attention to them.And if you can win them over after they started paying attention to that person, then you've got it made. And Vince is an enormous guy, not as much, he's older, but in his prime, and his prime lasted well into his 60s, he was just a bulked out dude. It's something that everyone remarked on, even before he started wrestling or doing anything as a real character, when he was just an announcer. I was talking to people who watched him in the ‘70s when he was an announcer starting out, and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, we would watch and we'd be like, “Why is the announcer so jacked? Is he going to wrestle at some point? What? Why is that happening?”'Whether that's intentional or not, it's effective. People are weirded out by Vince McMahon, and that leads them to pay more attention to Vince McMahon, and that's something he used to his advantage a lot.That's fascinating. I think that wrestling has lended itself rather well to memes; a lot of Vince's actual strategy with recruiting and retaining wrestlers was to find folks who had a very distinctive look. If you look at who has gone mainstream in Hollywood from wrestling, they're gents with a very specific aesthetic. Do you want to speak to some of that?Yeah, I mean the people who have broken out of wrestling and become people that your mom might recognize are John Cena, Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, these extremely charismatic, extremely large, chiseled, slightly odd-looking men, and very few of wrestlers have actually achieved that level of mainstream prominence.But the ones who have have been very successful. I mean, John Cena is probably the most popular wrestler who's still sort of on the roster. He occasionally wrestles for them still, but all these past stars who are still in Vince's fold, they all know where their bread is buttered, and they don't piss off Vince, they have had a lot of influence.Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson's star is falling at this moment thanks to Black Adam, but that doesn't mean he's not one of the more recognizable humans on the planet. He could still run for president, he keeps teasing that he might.Jesse Ventura, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, was not created by Vince initially, but he became a megastar thanks to Vince, and Jesse was the governor of Minnesota, and now is an influential conspiracy theorist. It's like these people come at the world from odd angles, and end up taking it in even odder angles.Yes. Can you think of any recent examples, perhaps from recent American politics, that could potentially back that point up as well?Yeah, right. Well, I don't know why I didn't talk about that, but yeah, there's a particular member of the WWE Hall of Fame who happens to have been the 45th president of the United States: Donald Trump. Vince and Trump are very close, they've known each other since the ‘80s.Trump was the host of two WrestleManias in the ‘80s, and then would appear at wrestling events and class the joint up. And then eventually, most notably, he had this whole storyline where he was a character as himself, and he was in a rivalry with Vince McMahon, and they had the Battle of the Billionaires at WrestleMania in 2007. And it was a real interesting spectacle, in retrospect. I mean at the time people ate it up just because it was a reality star and another reality star essentially being goofy on television, but it ended up having a lot of significance.I really think that experience of doing that storyline was transformative for Donald Trump, because Trump wasn't a guy who worked rallies as of 2007, really, that was not his milieu. And he's not somebody who likes watching politician speeches, it's not like he's learning how to work a rally from watching George H.W. Bush deliver the State of the Union or something; he learned from wrestling.I say he has known Vince since the ‘80s. He's been watching McMahon Family Wrestling since he was a child. We have people on the record talking about him watching. We have people on the record talking about watching Vince Sr.'s wrestling show, that's Vince's dad, in the ‘50s, in the ‘60s, and he was really influenced by that.Donald Trump loves wrestling, he has watched it for a very long time, and I think the experience of doing that storyline and watching all that wrestling, but especially doing the storyline, really taught him how to work a crowd into a fervor by tossing them little bits of unspeakable truth, and big chunks of completely outrageous lies, and delivering them all with the exact same level of commitment. And the crowd ate it up, and I think that was a taste of something that he then craved more of.Fascinating. So again, the book is called Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and The Unmaking of America.Josie, I want to kind of back out a little bit and talk about not only this book, but your previous book, because again, I mentioned in the beginning how there's a lot of connective tissue there, and how these are folks who have a chip on their shoulder, they're not in the mainstream, and they really lust for the mainstream, and then that fundamentally changes the way that they view the world, the people around them, and the folks who work for them.Just kind of take a step back, what kind of connective tissue do you see between Vince McMahon and Stan Lee, two men who are fundamentally instrumental for the current state of pop culture?For a huge cog of what happens in culture now and politics, as well.They were both men who created a character based on themselves but not themselves, and then lost themselves in that character. That's the most obvious comparison.Stan Lee, Stan Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber and became this character named Stan Lee. And eventually that was all that was left, was the Stan Lee character, at least in most of his interactions with people outside of his inner circle. And it was a prison for him in many ways. It was, by the end, very different from how he acted with his intimates. And with Vince as well, Vince, when he became a character in the wrestling as a supreme super villain, he became Mr. McMahon, that was the official branded name for his character. And Mr. McMahon was seemingly at least an extrapolation of Vince, and I think in a lot of ways it was an extrapolation of Vince, but Vince has always maintained, ‘Oh, Mr. McMahon isn't me. Mr. McMahon is based on all the people I hated when I was growing up.'And we didn't really have time to get into it in this interview, but my whole big fat theory about that is, he's talking about his father, Vince Sr., who he never says anything mean about, but I can't imagine he doesn't have deeply conflicted feelings, even if he's not really in touch with them, about this man who abandoned him for the first 12 years of his life, and then was cold to him for the entire rest of the time they knew each other.We can go there. I mean again, he did kind of run off and join the circus, so to speak, when his father reentered his life.Yes. When he met his father at 12, he threw himself into wrestling. He became a huge wrestling mark. He was not into wrestling as a child up until then, but when he found out that his father had this whole other life doing that, he wanted it, and he threw himself into it. He became his own wrestling promoter in high school.Vince had never talked about this, but I uncovered it. In high school when he was at military school in Virginia for two years, he would stage wrestling shows in the school gymnasium. This was his beginning, and he's never talked about that because it interferes with the story he's tried to foster of himself as a juvenile delinquent, rather than somebody who was doing fights only for show.I guess to kind of add on to that, you had a hell of a time reporting this out. It was a lot of records; covering a guy as slippery as somebody who has a wrestling character can be difficult in its own right. What went into some of the reporting?A lot. I mean, it was a lot of going through documents and a lot of cold calling, not a lot of travel, because this was a pandemic book for the most part. I did go to North Carolina. That was my one priority: All the other travel was optional, but I had to go to North Carolina as soon as there was a vaccine. And lo and behold, once there, I went down there and I found a lot of stuff.It was very interesting. You found this total counternarrative to what Vince had told everybody about his youth. And yeah, it was a wide array of things, lots of interviews, I talked to more than 150 people, building off of other secondary sources. You know, how does anybody write a book?Well, so the book is called Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Josie, do you want to tell folks where they can find it?Look for me at abrahamriesman.com, or you can look just at the book, at ringmasterthebook.com. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

Episode #437! Another new episode! This week DL talks about the collected twelve issue maxi-series Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen: Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? In the Matt Fraction written Steve Lieber drawn comics we find out the answer. Next up, Scott tells us about True Believer The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. This biography by Abraham Riesman has received numerous positive reviews from newspapers, websites and industry insiders. We finish up this episode with talk of the new Doctor Strange movie. Check it out!

Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/2njb *** Let me ask you a question: if you checked showtimes for movies in your area at any given moment over the past decade, which type of movie would you almost certainly see on the list? That's right, a superhero movie. But not just any superhero movie. A Marvel superhero movie. Marvel has produced and released around 30 films since 2007, grossing almost 30 billion dollars! But this empire of film didn't start as an empire. It all started with a man named Stan. Stan Lee. Or did it? Today we're joined by Abraham Riesman. Abraham is the author of True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. The book was published by Penguin Random House's Crown imprint and is nominated for both the Hugo and Eisner awards. As Neil Gaiman describes it, “True Believer is a biography that reads like a thriller or a whodunit. It's an exploration of an often farcical tragedy: the life, afterlife, and death of a salesman and an editor who dreamed of being something more. It unwraps Stanley Lieber the man and Stan Lee the invention and the brand name, and manages to be scrupulously honest, deeply damning, and sometimes even heartbreaking.” Abraham Riesman is a Providence-based journalist, writing primarily for New York magazine about arts and culture. Abraham's work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, and Vice, among other publications. We are super thrilled to be joined by Abraham today to talk about Stan Lee and all things Marvel. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

It had to happen! Superheroes have shaped our shared culture – both popular and political – but where did the idea of the “good superman” come from? How did idealism, power fantasy and radicalism merge so that an outsider generation of young (often Jewish) Americans could transform America?  Join Dorian and Ian on a senses-shattering odyssey that takes in socialist Superman, juvenile delinquents, the polyamorist roots of Wonder Woman, the Nazis (again), the great lost horror comics of the 50s, Stan Lee, how Churchill and FDR inspired Spider-Man… and which one of the X-Men was based on Menachem Begin.  –––––––– Superheroes: A Reading List From Ian: American Comics by Jeremy Dauber. Really comprehensive and full of love for the genre. But maybe a bit too comprehensive. Dauber covers absolute everything, so it can feel a bit too thinly spread. The Ten Cent Plague: The great comic book scare and how it changed America, by David Hajdu. Absolutely masterful retelling of the 50s moral outrage against comics. Impeccably researched, brilliantly written, and full of striking insights. Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison. If you were to read these three together, even as a non-comics fan, you would get a really good crash course in the different approaches taken to the genre since the 80s. From Dorian: Supergods by Grant Morrison. One of the all-time great comic-book writers has also the written the most entertaining and provocative history of the superhero. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe. Essential reading for anyone interested in the people who built the Marvel universe. Howe has all the stories. I've given this book as a gift more than once. All Of The Marvels by Douglas Wolk. The Marvel Universe as explained by somebody who has read all 27,000 comic books. While Howe covers the creators, Wolk digs into the evolution of the characters and ideas. True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman. Juicy and unflinching biography of Mr Marvel. The Comic Book Heroes by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones. Dated but interesting 1985 encyclopaedia of superheroes. The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. New Yorker writer's eye-opening history of the love triangle that gave us Wonder Woman. –––––––– “Even by thinking about superheroes, you're thinking about politics. What is politics about but power and how you use it?” — Dorian –––––––– Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our favorite fanboy holiday is just around the corner, so it's time for Ka-Pow the Pop Cultured Podcast's annual Free Comic Book Day preview, showcasing all the goodies that will be available at shops across the country on May 7th.  Then stick around for opinions and reviews on a new superhero-themed RPG, a biting Stan Lee bio, Moon Knight, Thor, Disney boycotts and a whole lot more! Length - 01:14:45 Language - PG-13.  (Contains mild adult language.) - 0:01:18 - COMIC BOOK NEWS A sneak peek at this year's offerings for Free Comic Book Day, the "Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game" introduces a new way to play as your favorite hero, recent biography "True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee" digs for the facts behind the tall tales and the first teaser for "Thor: Love and Thunder" gets us excited. - 0:38:15 - TV RECAPS & REVIEWS "Moon Knight" lags through its halfway point, the amazing "Better Call Saul" returns for its sixth and final season, "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty" succeeds by sacrificing reality for entertainment value, long-awaited new episodes of "Atlanta" deal with topical issues in an exaggerated style, Florida politics create swirl of controversy around Disney parks and a "This is Us" wedding gets the show back on the right emotional track.

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, a heavily researched and all-encompassing biography written by Abraham Riesman, is an elucidating examination of one of the most significant figures in modern pop culture. Originally released a little over a year ago, the recent release of the paperback edition precipitated our discussion of the book. It's a book we think that anyone who's remotely interested in learning about Stan Lee should read. For those who don't know too much about Stan Lee, there may be things in here you'll wish you would have remained ignorant of. Join us as we discuss this prose biography! (Please note that if we said anything inaccurate or misleading during the course of our conversation in this episode, that is the fault of our own subpar recollection of what we read combined with poor note taking, not the fault of the material in Riesman's book.)

On the last Bonus Comments Section edition of Downlow.d until May, Joe Scott interviews writer Abraham Riesman (https://abrahamriesman.com/) to talk about his book "True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee." Together, they discuss the movie Stan Lee produced with Harry Knowles, professional wrestling, the Geek Industrial Complex, and the importance of being king of the Scholastic Book Fair. Plus Joe and Kristina Bell also present another mailbag featuring questions, comments, and feedback from both listeners as well as the media. P.S. Downlow.d: The Rise And Fall of Harry Knowles and Ain't It Cool News will return with a BRAND NEW narrative episode on April 28th. Click here to purchase a copy of Abraham Riesman's book "True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee." --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/downlowdpod/support

The Foundation, ny Bond-film, nye danske Marvel-tegneserier, Y the Last Man, biografien True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee ... og mere!

My friend Abraham Riesman, author of True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, comes on the show to talk X-Men, origins of Magneto's Jewishness, collective storytelling, apocalypse and queer allegories. Visit our website to ask us questions at xaihowareyou.com and call or Text the Talmud Hotline at 401-484-1619 and leave us a voicemail! Support us on patreon at patreon.com/xaihowareyou. Follow us on twitter @xaihowareyou and @miss_figured. Music by Ben Schreiber.

August 8th, 2021, The Fantastic Four celebrated their 60th Anniversary, and we're pulling out the red carpet and setting a birthday cake ablaze in their honor. And we're not partying alone; we've invited some of our bestest comic book creator friends over to the Love Nest to help champion Marvel's First Family.  On this week's show, we have Fantastic Four: Grand Design cartoonist Tom Scioli (back on the show), Marvel's Executive Editor and Senior Vice President, Tom Brevoort, Stan and Jack comic creator Pete Doree, superstar writer/artist Daniel Warren Johnson, and Extreme Carnage scribe Clay McLeod Chapman. We love the Fantastic Four, but it was a journey to reach that love. And it was a privilege to discuss Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's milestone comic book with these creators, and they helped us better appreciate the FF's role within the industry and the culture. Send our guests some love by tracking down their work via their social media accounts You can find Tom Brevoort on Twitter HERE, on Instagram HERE, and over on his website HERE. Follow Clay McLeod Chapman on Twitter HERE, on Instagram HERE, and visit his website HERE. Follow Pete Doree on Twitter HERE, on Instagram HERE, and visit his website HERE. Daniel Warren Johnson is located on Twitter HERE, on Instagram HERE, and on his website HERE. And make sure to follow Tom Scioli on Twitter HERE, on Instagram HERE, and on Patreon HERE. Our CBCC Sue & Reed episodes: 1 - The Fantastic Four #1 - 6  2 - The Fantastic Four Wedding  3 - Fantastic Four: Civil War  4 - Fantastic Four: Marvel NOW!  Our two previous Fantastic Four related interviews: 1 - Tom Scioli on Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics  2 - Abraham Riesman on True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee  Finally, follow the podcast on Facebook, on Instagram, and Twitter @CBCCPodcast, and you can follow hosts Brad Gullickson @MouthDork & Lisa Gullickson @sidewalksiren. Send us your Words of Affirmation by leaving us a 5-Star Review on Apple Podcasts. SUPPORT THE PODCAST BY JOINING OUR PATREON COMMUNITY. Podcast logo by Aaron Prescott @acoolhandfluke, podcast banner art by @Karen_XmenFan.

Thanks to our awesome Patrons, we're proud to present another Booksplode! This month, Josh Flanagan and Conor Kilpatrick take a look at... True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman! What's a Booksplode? It's a bi-monthly special edition show in which we take a look at a single graphic novel or collected edition, something we really just don't have time to do on the regular show. In this case it's our first prose book! Running Time: 00:46:00 Music: "I Believe" Chris Isaak Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode I review The Big Fella, a graphic novel of Alien 3, and Army of the Dead. Next week: True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee The Godfather

How much Stan can you stand? That’s the question Emmet and Tim are asking as we review an undetermined number of Stan Lee biographies! In episode 692, we covered Spurgeon and Raphael’s 2004 entry; this time, it’s the most recent tome, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman. While some … Continue reading #694 “True Believer”

Who created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four? That seems like a simple question, but the super messy answers—and the difficulty in determining them—may astonish you! Abraham Riesman, author of True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, joins Jesse Taylor and Marc Faletti for the first-ever interview on the Marvelous TV Club. Buckle up for a trip through Marvel's past, and prepare to challenge the way we give credit for the creation of our favorite Marvel characters.

Episode Notes Abraham Riesman, the author of "True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee," joins Douglas Wolk to discuss 1964's Fantastic Four Annual #2, the first appearance of Latveria, and the origin of Doctor Doom. Topics include what we know and don't know about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's working relationship at this point, Lee's unusual interpretation of "diplomatic immunity," the open question of when Doom's mother came into the narrative, and Kirby's uncharacteristically reserved evaluation of what he contributed to Doom's creation.

Jerome and Brian discuss Netflix's The Old Guard, one of their biggest titles released to date. They also provide some general thoughts on the recent Stan Lee biography that just came out. Excelsior!

Kris and Dave sit down with journalist Abraham Riesman and talk about his new book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. Plus, Kris and Dave discuss video game news and recommend some new nerdy content. Nerd News Microsoft completes purchase of Bethesda New TMNT video game announced Byword Big Talk True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee Nerd Commendations Kirby's Adventure via Nintendo Switch Online IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Everybody knows Stan Lee, but nobody knows Stan Lee— except people like critically-acclaimed writer Abraham Riesman, who has written a new book about the late Marvel Comics founder. Riesman joins the Bagels to discuss  "True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee," which shatters fans' assumptions about the life of the man who started out as Stanley Lieber.    Riesman also provides background on comic book fandom and culture, questions Jewish characters in Marvel universe and asks if we go too far in looking for Jewish themes and identity in comic book superheroes and their stories. Later, Esther talks trauma as a crucible for storytelling and Erin reveals a surprising turn in her "WandaVision" fandom.    Relavent Links: Find his book here. Follow Riesman on Twitter @abrahamjoseph Check out his latest WandaVision Recaps here!   Follow Erin, Esther and The Bagel Report on Twitter! 

Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee so inspired a generation of readers and writers, a multiplicity of biographies was inevitable after his death in 2018.On the occasion of the publication of Oak Park, Ill., native Abraham Riesman’s entry, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, the Chicago Public Square Podcast invited Riesman and A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee author Danny Fingeroth to join a conversation about Lee’s life and legacy.Listen here, on your favorite podcast player, via Spotify and Pandora, on Amazon’s Alexa-powered devices* or on iTunes (“Hey, Siri! Play Chicago Public Square Podcasts”). Prefer video? See the whole unedited session as recorded via Zoom here. Footnotes:■ Contrary to a statement during the Zoom session (but edited out of the podcast), Meyerson interviewed Stan Lee just twice. You can hear those encounters here and here. But he also witnessed Lee’s first Chicago comics convention appearance, which you can read about here; and his final public Chicago appearance, which you can hear here.■ Enjoying these podcasts? Keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.*Even if you don’t have an Alexa speaker, you can turn iOS and Android phones into Alexa devices for free.

We talk the legacy of Stan Lee, we muse on the future of Wandavision and Evolution gives us an explosive finale! Join us as we discuss...The incredible page turning book and historical implications of, "True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee," by Abraham Reisman!Hoping heavily for the Quicksilver's 'realness' in Wandavision to be, well, real!Tracking the evolution of Wolverine's healing factor across comics, cartoons and movies!Magneto fixes the show!Another day, another blown up mansion!A really great ending to season two, pumping us up for more! The X-Men TAS Podcast is now on Twitch… click here to go to our page and follow and subscribe so you can join in on all the mysterious fun to be had! Also, make sure to subscribe to our podcast via Buzzsprout, iTunes or Stitcher and tell all your friends about it! Last but not least, follow Willie Simpson on Twitter and please join our Facebook Group!

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Abraham Riesman, the author of the electric new book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, out last week. It's another podcast Sunday edition. Let me know what you think of these.I have been waiting for this book for ages, I'm a huge fan of Abe's and the topic could not be more prescient. We talk about the actual role Lee played in making the characters, how Stan Lee was ahead of his time when it came to making a living as a proto-influencer, and the undercovered, complex and unsavory period from the 1970s through his death. It's a complicated portrait of a complicated guy, and is deeply reported at every stage.True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee can be found wherever books are sold, and Riesman can be found on his website and on Twitter. This interview has been condensed and edited.The book is out, you've been working on this for quite a while at this point. It was delayed back in September. It's all about one of these people who have become a very central figure in modern American pop culture, Stan Lee. What got you interested in him as an individual?Oh, geez, what got me interested in him? I guess you have to go a long ways back for the beginnings of it in that I grew up reading comics and being interested in Marvel. I think I first became aware of Stan Lee when I was very young, watching the now mostly forgotten Marvel Action Hour cartoon show. He used to introduce the animated segments there. And basically he remained this figure in the background of my life, in the way that he's been in the background of the lives of countless people who have engaged with Marvel superhero products. And long story short in 2015, I started writing a profile of Stan for my then place of employment, New York Magazine, and it came out in 2016. Then in 2018, when Stan passed away, an editor at Penguin Random House who had read the 2016 profile approached me about writing a full biography, and that's where it began.He's interesting because he had a fairly seminal role at a company that has become incredibly central to American pop culture, but he himself has appeared in a lot of these entities. How did you get at the question of who is Stan Lee in terms of both the public and private and the individual person?Well, it's a big question, isn't it? I tried to base it on as much evidentiary stuff as I could, as opposed to surmise and opinion. So, I did more than 150 interviews. I went through thousands and thousands of pages of his personal and professional documents, which were mostly ones that I got from the University of Wyoming, their American Heritage Center, which is where Stan's papers and other archival materials are stored — long story about why it's in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming. But, yeah, in addition to reading through documents, I also watched a bunch of home movies. There was this Holy Grail moment of the last day I was at the archives — I only had five days there — I found this box among the almost 200 boxes of materials there that was just a bunch of unlabeled home movies.I started popping them in the little VCR they had at the reading room, and was just blown away by the fact that right under my nose there had been all this stuff that the Lee family either advertently or inadvertently had left behind for posterity. So, you take that, you take the documentation, you take the interviews, you take the comics, you just throw everything in a blender and try to sort it out in your brain and then put it on paper. There's no magic recipe to it. You just have to engage with the source material and then see if you can craft something from it.It's fascinating because this is an individual around whom a couple of major corporations have attempted to construct a mythology.A lot of your reporting, whether it was in that feature from a few years back or in the book itself, it's not poking holes, but really saying a lot of what we held up to be the myth of Stan Lee, is it necessarily as black and white as it might appear. Do you want to go into some of what you found?There's a lot that Stan was less than truthful about, a lot of things he just outright lied about and then other things where there were sins of omission or misdirection. And the big thing that matters when it comes to talking about Stan's dissembling — there's a lot of things that matter with that — but the big one, as you mentioned, is the corporate claim on Stan and the characters that Stan was credited with creating. What my research turned up was there's literally no evidence Stan created any of those characters.There's not?No, there's none. There's nothing. There's no presentation boards. There's no diary entries. There's no contemporaneous accounts from friends saying Stan was working on this and told me about it and then he created it. Nothing. It was a fly by night industry, so there wasn't a whole lot of documentation of anything to be fair, but there's significant evidence — it doesn't prove it, I don't have a smoking gun — but there's significant evidence or at least testimony that goes against Stan's word and says that one of his main collaborators, Jack Kirby, was the guy who came up with almost all of those characters.Jack was also an artist. So he, according to him and his defenders, created the characters from whole cloth, whereas Stan at best can only claim to have come up with the idea. He was not an artist, so he didn't come with the visual look of these characters. It's a sticky thing because, again, you're not going to find a smoking gun. There really was just terrible documentation and a large lack of professionalism at comics companies circa the 1960s.These were not the glossy corporate entities that they are now. Marvel was not a Disney subsidiary as it is now back in 1961. So, we don't really know who created those characters, but what I wanted to do in the book was just say the fact, which is we don't know that it was Stan. We've just taken it for granted that Stan was presented to us factually as the progenitor of these characters, usually at best you'll get people saying, “Jack was the co-creator, Jack did it with Stan.” Now that may be the case, but we don't know that. We can't say that with any certainty. It may well be that Jack was the only one who was actually coming up with these characters and that he was doing them from whole cloth. That's not even getting into the stuff that Stan more transparently lied about when it comes to crediting his collaborators for the actual comics they made. It's a long, complicated thing, but basically the process by which the classic Marvel stories were created was not "Stan sits down and writes a script, and then hands the script to the artists to draw." Stan was not writing scripts. He was having brief conversations with the artists who would then go home and write the story. So, really they were writer-artists.They would go home and just draw out the entirety of the narrative that they were working on in the comic, add in little notes sometimes in the margins about what dialogue should go in there, and then they would hand this completed story, or more or less completed story, to Stan who would then add in dialogue and narration. Now, the dialogue and narration were very important, I don't want to discount that, and he also wrote the letters columns in the back, which were enormously influential and helped create the Marvel phenomenon. But he wasn't crediting his artists as co-writers, which they were. You can even argue that they were the primary writers since they were the ones who were actually coming up with the structure of the narratives. Anyway, I could go on and on like this, but that's just one area in which I wanted to cast some light on the disputes and force people to live with the ambiguity, which no one likes, of not knowing who actually is responsible for these things that are so enormously popular and prominent.We always talk about people who were ahead of their time, and oftentimes that's indicated as a very unambiguously positive statement, but the idea of a person who is a brand creator, that seems fairly prescient for a couple of reasons. It's not the first time that, again, not necessarily negatively, not necessarily positively, somebody has been able to float to vast cultural influence through basically brand definition and steering.You're exactly right. Stan was, in a time when we didn't talk about branding the way we talk about it now or being an influencer or any number of pop-y terms that we use to describe the present day media landscape, he really was an influencer and a brand himself. His personal brand and the brand of Marvel were intimately intertwined, and he was so good at promotion. There are very few people in the history of American life who have sold better and at a higher profile than Stan Lee, and that's huge. Jack may have been the person coming up with the characters, but Jack was a terrible salesman in terms of public relations and advertising and slogans and all of that. That was not something he was good at or enjoyed, whereas Stan, that was what he lived for.He loved being a raconteur. He loved creating a fan base. He loved all of that. And without him, I don't think we would have the Marvel phenomenon, even if the creative material had been in there, it wouldn't have become this — again, to use a modern term to describe something not so modern — it wouldn't have gone viral in the way that it did. He was ahead of his time. I find myself, as I promote this book, often looking in the mirror and thinking, well, I've become my subject. There's so much in just the modern publishing landscape that requires you to be a Stan Lee if you want to succeed. It's all about individual hustle and getting your name out there. I wasn't alive in the ‘60s, but I don't presume these things were talked about in quite the same way that they are now, and they were skills that Stan had that, if anything, in the ‘60s were maligned.That was back when the biggest object of joking that you could put into a satirical pop culture thing was about ad men. That was one of the reasons that Mad Men was the show that it was, because it was set during a time when being in advertising was in a lot of ways like having a tech gig now in that there was good money to be made, it was very much a hotly discussed industry, it was all based on bluster, et cetera, et cetera. And at the time you could really make fun of somebody for being a big promoter and advertiser, but Stan was really good at it! Now it's something we look at with a great deal of admiration, or at least grudging admiration when people can pull that off. And Stan really did.Partially because they're both owned by Disney now, but you have a guy like Jim Henson who was very much in the trenches of making the art that he was promoting pretty consistently, and then Stan really was a little bit more hands-off than I think people tend to think when it comes to developing characters.For the most part. Again, we don't know because we can't go back in time and figure out exactly who said what inside a closed room. We'll never know for certain, but even when it comes to creating individual comics as opposed to just creating the characters, yeah, he was relatively hands-off when it came to an individual comic, because he wasn't writing a full script. He was not being the auteur of these comics. He was saying, “okay, here's some ideas,” and then people would go and run with them. And a lot of the time it wasn't even, "here's some ideas, go run with," it was the writer-artists would come to him and say, “we're going to do this.” Stan would maybe have some tweaks, but would largely just say, “okay.” Then the writer-artists would go home and do that. So, it's not exactly like you say. It's not like Jim Henson going and tinkering away with his characters, it's much more of an ambiguous and distant creative role that he had.Over the course of Marvel's history, obviously, the company had I think some of the most tumultuous possible business situations through the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s. What of Stan Lee's later life and pops culture ascendance do you track in the book?All of it. There's nothing that was off-limits for this book. It's the full arc of his life to the best of my ability. I tried to keep it short, it's not a Robert Caro, but I talk a lot about what happened later because I think that that's the most interesting stuff to be honest. I think we're pretty well-covered — not as well as we should be — but prior to the release of my book, we were pretty well covered in terms of stories about Stan's life and work in the ‘60s. People have written about that stuff pretty extensively. Now, I have things to add to the ‘60s narrative that hadn't been there before, but comparatively, not that much, because it's been so heavily excavated. But when it comes to things that happened to Stan from 1971 and onward, basically no one had written in-depth about any of that.There've been some attempts at it. The comics journalist Tom Spurgeon and his collaborator Jordan Raphael, who's now a lawyer, wrote a book together, the first biography of Stan in the early aughts. It had a lot of really good stuff, but it too was heavy on the ‘60s and some of the ‘70s and then drops off. And I just felt, well, there's got to be something in there and turns out, I think that's where the whole story was. That's where you see the vast majority of what Stan's life was like, both in terms of just the numbers of years— he was alive for much longer than that one decade of the 1960s — but also because that's where you start to really see what fame and success and money did to Stan.What was it?Well, a lot of things, but one was he wanted more. He was never satisfied. He didn't like comics, particularly. He didn't like superheroes, particularly. He said that on the record — that's not me inferring — it's just people don't pay attention when he said that because he would also talk out of the other side of his mouth and say he loved the medium, and he loved the genre. But evidence points toward that not really being the case. Every time he tried to break out of comics, which was basically every day of his life since he got back from World War II and went back to his comics job he had left to go be in the service, every time he was trying to escape comics, it was never to make more comics. It was never, "I want to go do superhero stories in another medium either." It was, “I want to go make movies and I want to be taken seriously as a novelist or as any number of other things that are not comic book writer.”Later in life, once he had the taste of fame that he got from his work in the ‘60s, he just spent the rest of his life from 1971 until 2018 just trying to be something else. That led to a lot of disastrous incidents. I trace the history of his two post-Marvel companies. His first one was a Dot Com Bubble-era company called Stan Lee Media. The other one is one that still exists now as a subsidiary of this big Chinese conglomerate, but it's called POW! Entertainment, and both of them were accused of enormous criminal, or at least unlawful, malfeasance, of bilking investors and juicing a stock and all kinds of stuff. No one had talked about that, no one had looked at that. And yet that's where Stan's true colors — in a lot of ways, I don't want to say always — but where a lot of his professional true colors came through. He wanted to have money, he wanted to be famous. He wanted to break out of just being thought of as the Marvel guy. And it never happened.Around the end of his life, or by the end of his life I should say, he was world famous for being the Marvel guy, but he was not world famous for anything else. No one talks about the great triumph that was Stan Lee's Stripperella, or Stan Lee's The Mighty 7, or Stan Lee's Superhero Christmas. All of these silly tossed off things that didn't really go anywhere. No one talks about them. They just talk about the work he did in the ‘60s, and that's something that Stan found very frustrating. He wanted to be known for more.It's an incredibly powerful story and it's so deeply reported. It's gotten a lot of love from folks within the comics industry, many of whom have seen this, but have not had a chance to really see the real situation laid out. I suppose coming to the end, what do you think your main takeaways about this are? What do you think the main difficulties are? And where do you think this goes next?Well, I don't know. I'd love to see what people have to say about it. I've been very gratified to get some nice responses so far, but I want this to be something that opens up discussion, not just about — this is all highfalutin, I don't know if any of this will happen — but I would love for this to be the beginning of a discussion about the ‘great man' theory of business. I hate it. I hate this fixation we have on having singular geniuses who are responsible for the products that we like. We want there to be an intimate one-to-one relationship between us and the creator. If you want to get really heavy about it, you can talk about it in religious terms.Maybe we want to feel like we have a relationship with one who creates, with one who has this godlike ability to make something out of nothing. That leads us down dangerous paths because we start avoiding the truth. We're not looking for the actual ways in which something does get created. The other problem is we then throw under the bus all of the many people who are not the one great man, who are in some part, or sometimes in most part, responsible for creating the thing. So, I would hope that if there's a lesson to this book, it's question what you're told about people, and especially what people tell you about themselves. People have regurgitated Stan's version of events for more than a half a century now. We just have widely taken this one man's word as gospel.I would love for this to be something that prompts journalists and historians to think more carefully about who they believe, because oftentimes we just go with whoever the most charismatic and nicest seeming person is and say, well, their version of events is probably true, and then we print it uncritically. I get it. I'm a journalist. A lot of times you don't have enough information to be able to make a claim that you know something is one way or another, but that shouldn't be an excuse to do a shoddy job of describing what you know, or acting like you know something that you don't know for certain.So, I guess that's the last thing. I would like for this book to be something that encourages us to live with the awful agony of ambiguity. We're not necessarily going to know what happened in the past in order to influence things that we like in the present. You sometimes have to sit with the fact that these things are unknowable, and that's hard for people. It's hard for me, it's hard writing a piece to admit that you don't know, but it's also sometimes the only intellectually and morally honest way to approach a subject.So, there you have it, the definitive answer on Stan Lee. It is unknowable. And we must be content with ambiguity within the art that we like. Abraham, thank you so much for coming on. The book is True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, where can folks find it?Easiest way is to go to your one-stop shop for all Abraham Riesman needs, which is Abrahamriesman.com. I'm on Twitter, @abrahamjoseph.All right. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. And we'll want to hear why all of Stan Lee's stuff is in Wyoming at a later time.Some other time. If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

In this week's episode, we chat with our very first guest, Abraham Riesman, journalist and author of the new book from Penguin Random House, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. www.abrahamriesman.com New episodes every Thursday! Follow us on social media! Instagram: @comicsnchronic Twitter: @comicsnchronic YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UC45vP6pBHZk9rZi_2X3VkzQ Twitch: twitch.tv/comicsnchronic E-mail: comicsnchronicpodcast@gmail.com Cody Twitter: @Cody_Cannon Instagram: @walaka_cannon TikTok: @codywalakacannon Jake Instagram: @jakefhaha Anthony Twitter: @mrtonynacho Instagram: @tonynacho // @nachocomedyofficial YouTube: youtube.com/nachocomedy

This episode features the journalist Abraham Riesman, author of the new Stan Lee biography True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. We spend a lot of the full episode talking about the book and his history with Marvel Comics, but in this (rather generous) preview segment we talk about Stephen Malkmus, Beck, Kiki & Herb, and how coming out as bisexual in his early 30s shifted his relationship with some music. For the full episode, hit up the Fluxblog Patreon. 

Abraham Riesman is a journalist and essayist, writing primarily for New York Magazine about arts and culture. He has written a book chronicling the world-changing triumphs and tragic missteps of the extraordinary life of Stan Lee, titled: True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. He called into the show to discuss the book and detailed the extensive research involved, and talked about what readers can expect from the upcoming biography.Watch the FULL interview on our YouTube channel  The Short Box is made possible by sponsor & listener support on Patreon. Support the show & join our Patreon community! Podcast logo & other artwork by Ashley Lani Hoye, Edmund "Edbot5k" DansartAnd you can follow hosts: Badr & CesarSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/theshortbox)Proudly sponsored by Gotham City Limit!