Excelsior!: The Amazing Life Of Stan Lee, by Stan Lee and George Mair

The amazing life of Mr Marvel - by his biggest fan

As a working-class New York teenager in the 1930s, Stanley Martin Lieber was convinced that one day he would write the Great American Novel. Instead, he found himself writing and editing comic books. To preserve the literary purity of his name, he attached the pseudonym "Stan Lee" to his comics. Stanley Lieber never got around to writing his novel, but as the figurehead of the Marvel Comics Group, Stan Lee became the best-known figure of the postwar comic-book scene.

Until the big-screen success of Spider-Man and The X-Men, Marvel seemed the poor relation of the Warner Bros-affiliated DC, which had movie hits with Superman and Batman. In the Forties and Fifties, Marvel's low-budget forerunners, the Timely and Atlas groups, had been on the defensive. Popular as Captain America, the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner were, they represented little threat to DC's Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Lee, the self-described "ultimate hack", spent his time cranking out Westerns, crime stories, war comics, monster books, "girl comics" and whatever else was selling.

In the Sixties, however, the boot was on the other foot. Lee, tired of gearing his work to small children, decided to have some fun by launching a set of unorthodox super-heroes to challenge DC's anodyne approach. It worked.

Renamed Marvel, the company saw sales double within a year and were up almost sevenfold by the end of the decade. Lee geared his work towards adolescents and introduced elements of soap-opera, wise-cracking humour, moral dilemma and politics to achieve what passed for "realism" in the censored comics world. He collaborated with master-artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to create Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men and a horde of others.

These characters were unlike any heroes who preceded them: in DC's straitlaced world, the Hulk would scarcely have qualified as a hero at all. Their impact was revolutionary, and Marvel had DC on the run until the former market-leader could learn to play by the upstart's rules. By the end of the Sixties, Marvel's innovations had degenerated, as innovations will, into a new set of clichés, but by then Lee had handed over day-to-day responsibilities to others.

Lee had become "Mr Marvel". Colleagues moved on, irked by low wages and Lee's penchant for hogging the credit. This is the way corporate popular culture works, when it works: a combination of inspiration, accident and ego.

In Excelsior!, the 79-year-old Lee – expected to realise some $3m this year from auctioning his memorabilia and artwork – provides anecdotes, self-justification and folksy quips, complete with his trademark alliteration and faux self-deprecation. Meanwhile, George Mair supplies research and more-or-less coherent narrative.

"If I may be totally candid," Lee writes, "I'm my own biggest fan". We would never have guessed. 'Nuff said.