With Great Power... The Stan Lee Story is a documentary every True Believer should see, as it gives a peek behind the curtain at the early days of Marvel Comics and the creation of many of the iconic superheroes of today.
Unsurprisingly, the documentary initially covers a lot of the same ground as Stan's autobiography, Excelsior! The Amazing Life Of Stan Lee, and in much the same way this isn't a warts-and-all, dirt-digging exposé, but a celebration of the man's life and creations.
After looking briefly at Stan's childhood, the story really gets into gear when he goes to work as an office boy at Timely Comics, working under Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, where he got his first break writing text pieces to accompany the Captain America comic strips.
After the war, the actual formation of Marvel Comics is rather glossed over as we're suddenly thrown into the infamous Bullpen and everything is already up and running.
But from then on With Great Power... does an excellent job of setting the development of comics, and Stan's role in reshaping the medium, against the backdrops of the politics and movements of the decades.
Disputes with artists and co-creators are touched upon, but never dwelt on, and Stan is always quick to give credit where it's due and stress that while he often had the initial ideas for characters it was the artists who helped shape the end result.
From the birth of the Fantastic Four, in the wake of the misguided backlash against comics sparked by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's Seduction Of The Innocent condemnation of lurid comic books, it becomes a tale of hit after hit.
Eventually, as the documentary draws towards the modern era, it looks at the faltering - and ill-judged - first attempts to bring the Marvel comic book characters to live-action (both on TV and film) before the secret recipe was finally cracked and the current golden age of superhero movies came about.
The final chapters of the film bring things right-up-to-date, with the collapse of Stan's internet enterprise and then the rise of his current company, POW!
Throughout the story, we are let into Stan's home life with his wife, Joan, and while their initial romance is kind of fudged around (she was married when they first met), their enduring love story prevails. Joan comes across as as large a character as Stan, but both are lost for words when recounting the early death of their second daughter.
Even non-comic book readers will find this documentary fascinating, as Rachel did, because it paints a graphic portrait of the changing socio-economic times of the latter half of the 20th Century in America - and how Marvel comics reflected, and reacted to, these changes.
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