Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir by Stan Lee

I love a good memoir or autobiography and this was a really fun read. Stan Lee tells his life story in comic book form and it’s downright delightful. I was surprised by the comic-format (although I probably shouldn’t have been), so it was a great surprise.

My biggest issue with biographies is that they wander too far outside of a person’s life and dwell on other historical issues adjacent to the author’s life. That’s not at all the case with this book, which if anything, is too quick of a read. That said, he still hits a lot of the big points (like how he came to work at Marvel, how he created Spiderman, Iron Man, and the Incredible Hulk, and how his company branched out into movies and other forms of media besides comic books).

It’s cool, too, how he can capture so much of a memory or moment with pictures (which I guess is the point of comic books, but still). So it reads really quickly, but I feel like I came away with as much information about his life (and an even more lifelike of a “feel” of those big moments and conflicts) as I would have gotten in a normal print book.

Overall, it’s a fun book. If you like Stan Lee and Marvel and want to hear the story of how they got to their present state, it’s a neat read. Still, unlike some other memoirs that I’d recommend to just about anyone (like Ben Franklin’s, or Phil Knight’s) this is probably a little more niche.