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This excerpt is adapted with permission from True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman, published by Crown Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House, copyright 2021 by Abraham Riesman.

Stan Lee was good at projecting an air of hipness. Nowhere was that more apparent than in his dealings with a reporter named Nat Freedland (né Friedland; he changed it for his byline because he “thought Friedland was a stupid-looking name”), who was working on assignment for the New York Herald Tribune in the mid-1960s. Freedland had been working for a small paper called the Long Island Press and was trying to do some freelance magazine writing on the side. “I wanted to be the next Tom Wolfe; I wanted fame; I wanted to be a first-call for big stories,” Freedland recalls. “I was waiting for little niches that Tom Wolfe hadn’t covered yet.” He landed on a topic idea: “Spider-Man, Marvel, and Stan Lee were the really big thing in New York at the time,” he says, citing a contemporaneous Village Voice column as something that had sparked interest in the comics among “pop-culture snobs.”

He pitched a feature on Marvel to the editor of the Herald Tribune’s magazine section, James Bellows, and got it approved. “I called Marvel, I got Stan Lee on the phone, I said what assignment I had, and he was excited,” Freedland says. The journalist came to the Marvel offices for only one afternoon in late 1965. One component of the visit was an interview with Lee, who turned on the charm. “There are little touches I can see now, in retrospect—little touches of being an egomaniac and taking all the credit,” Freedland says. “But he told me about all the stuff, and I thought it was cute and tremendous. I saw artists coming around, but I didn’t talk to them much.”

The one quasi-interaction he did have with an artist came when Lee contrived to have a story conference between him and Jack Kirby to discuss an upcoming issue of The Fantastic Four, one of the many smash comic book series that were co-written by the two men and drawn by Kirby (others had included The X-Men, The Avengers, and The Incredible Hulk). “And Lee is talking to Kirby in very general terms and Kirby’s going, ‘Uh-huh’—he’s not very verbal,” Freedland recalls. Lee started doing his trademark storytelling acrobatics, leaping around and throwing mock punches. “Great, great,” was all Kirby said when Lee was done. Kirby maintained that the whole thing was a staged stunt—and, for Lee, a successful one. “Jack said that there was not a plotting session for a real issue,” recalls Kirby’s assistant and biographer, Mark Evanier. “They had already plotted that issue beforehand, and they were basically recreating it for the reporter. And one of the reasons Jack didn’t say more in the meeting was he wasn’t thinking about a story. He wasn’t gonna take anything home and draw that story. The story was done for him.” Indeed, according to Kirby, he was by that point primarily just dictating to Lee what he was going to do in a given story, and those meager plot conversations weren’t even happening in person; they were all over the phone. Freedland knew none of this and didn’t bother to find it out. “I was so enchanted by the whole thing,” he says. The staged scene wound up as the central sequence in the Herald Tribune story.

REECE: But Jack, what about these legendary story conferences of you and Stan, or Stan and whomever, acting the stories out, in the office, jumping up on the desks and so forth, making things considerably more lively than when it was just an office consisting of Stan and Fabulous Flo Steinberg, having people stick their faces in the door, from Magazine Management, going, “Hurry up, little elves, Santa will be coming soon!”

KIRBY: Uh, I’d have to disagree with that. It wasn’t like that at all. It may have been like that after I shut the door and went home.