Nature Study

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 206

How to hear the natural world

Wild Soundcapes
What a rare gem: a how-to book that changed my mind. Or at least my hearing. Audio recordist Bernie Krause has captured the sounds of ants eating, of sand dunes shifting, of frogs croaking in duets with airplanes, and the winds sweeping over prairie grass. This subtle yet omnipresent universe of natural sound was something I had mostly ignored. Krause’s practical guide is a fantastic re-education. Using a tiny digital recorder as my new ears, under his guidance nature is reborn into ever-changing radio-stations of novel sounds. His how-to advice is among the best how-to I’ve read; smart, specific, just the right level of detail and backed by 30 years of doing it. Since sounds often trigger more memories than snapshots, recording soundspaces should be as easy and satisfying as photography, and with Krauses’ advice it is. His book is dense with sonic adventures in the wild, and a 55-minute trophy CD. It’s the ultimate guide: every page compels you to get up and do it. See with your ears! — KK

• Every living creature has a sound signature––from the smallest microorganism to the largest megafauna. Even vegetation! Once, I was sent to record corn growing in Iowa. I sat in a remote field for two hot August nights with my recorder and mics, swarmed by mosquitoes and fighting off flies. Around midnight, I heard slight popping sounds which grew into lots of popping sounds as the stalks of corn telescoped and grew in length almost perceptibly in the moonlight. The friction caused them to squeak and pop, hence the sound signature of corn growing. Every sound connected in a vibrant interrelationship magnified by the use of my recording gear. I’m still trying to find words to describe the voice of growing corn.

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Bargain superior binoculars

Nikon 7540 Monarch Binoculars

Do high-priced optics really make much difference in a pair of binoculars? Yes. Great optics create a very bright image within a large viewing area, so that if feels as if you are looking through a magic window rather than squinting through a tiny peephole. Your eyes scan the scope easily, as if there were no glass in front of them — except everything is closer. You can watch longer, in dimmer light, without fatigue, which is what you want for birding, sporting, or boating. If great optics are squeezed into a lightweight waterproof small object you can hold this magic window longer without the shakes. In short, superior optics make distance viewing clearer, easier, weather tolerant and all around better. According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Birder’s World, the best buy for high-quality optics birding binoculars are the Nikon Monarchs. The go for about $216 on the street.

These are startlingly bright, wide-eyed, and lightweight (21.5 oz), which has made the Monarchs a best seller. Because they are waterproof and shockproof — with an amazing 25-year warranty — they are also very popular with hunters. They can also focus as close as 8 feet — ideal for dragonfly and butterfly viewing (thus the name Monarch).

If you have not examined binoculars recently they are undergoing a performance curve similar to cameras, getting better and cheaper each year. These $250 binocs would have cost $1,000 only 5 years ago. When friends view these Nikon Monarchs, they go “Wow! It’s like a movie screen!” I’ve found the ease of viewing — sort of like watching a flat screen rather than peering through a tube — encourages me to use them more. I also like the fact they are waterproof so I can use them in the rain and mist without worry. I wear prescription sunglasses and these work perfectly fine with them. They also feel well-balanced in my medium hands. I find I can hold them fairly steady for long periods of time with one hand. None of this was true with my inexpensive binoculars in the past.

The very best binoculars today go for $2,000. But for only $216 (what I paid ), or one tenth the price, you can get a pair of these Nikon Monarch binoculars and get 95% of the same performance. Sure, in a one-to-one comparison, a pair of $2,000 binoculars may be a little better, but they are not 10 times better.

Other new models share many of the same features of these 8×42 Monarchs, including sealed optics, waterproofing, coated glass, and bright viewing, but these others cost a minimum of $500-600. There are certainly cheaper binocs (you can get decent ones for $50) but they suffer from dim views, narrow fields, short lives. The Nikon Monarchs make a fantastic tool: You get most of a thousand-dollar view for a bargain price. — KK

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Best nature how-to

The Amateur Naturalist

The best hands-on-guide to nature experiments in print. Chock full of projects doable in a few hours to a day, whether you are an adult or kid. Just outside your door, no matter where you live, is the largest laboratory available anywhere. Hello, living neighborhood! — KK

Mounting and displaying bones.

Forget plastic model-making – this is the ultimate model kit!

• Resist the temptation to collect lots of spawn or tadpoles. Although you often come across huge quantities in the wild, only a few percent of it will survive. So collect a small quantity of newly laid spawn – it should be quite firm and easy to separate with your finger. Half a cupful is an ideal quantity to achieve a ratio of three to five tadpoles for every liter of water (14-22 per gallon).
  
  Take spawn from garden ponds wherever possible – it keeps your impact and disturbance of wild populations to a minimum. It is also good practice not to risk contaminating a habitat by introducing spawn, pond weed, or any other form of life that you have collected elsewhere. This is commonsense herpetological hygiene. Frogs in particular suffer from contagious diseases that may be spread unnecessarily in this way.

• Although the very fragility of a spider’s web is part of its attraction, it is a shame to think that these phenomenal feats of design and construction rarely last longer than a day. However, if you find a web without a spider in residence, it is possible to collect and preserve one of these fabulous structures. Choose a still day and make sure the web is dry, with no droplets of dew.
  You will need:the most gorgeous orb web you can finda sheet of newspapera can of white or black spray painta can of artist’s fixative (available at art shops) or hair spraya sheet of cardboard large enough to fit the web on and in a color that contrasts well with the paint
  scissors
  1. Position the newspaper behind the web so that you don’t get paint all over whatever is behind it, then spray the web evenly and lightly on both sides from a distance of about 40 cm (16 in) – much closer and the pressure of the paint will damage the web. Leave it to dry for a while and repeat.

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Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.

09/7/26

What we tell AI / Paint sticks / The perfect catch-up

Recomendo - issue #530

What we tell AI

Artist Olivia Tai wants to know how people really use AI, so she sets up stations in public areas where anyone can write a confession on a slip of paper and drop it in a box. Her website, What We Tell AI, has scans of 400+ handwritten notes about people’s secret relationships with AI. Here are a few:

• I trust AI to tell me the truth more than most of the people around me.
• I’m Christian — I realized that I was using AI to help me with issues / give me guidance when I should’ve been talking to God instead.
• Sometimes I ask ChatGPT to reply to messages by uploading a whole conversation. I am a terrible texter and this helps me A LOT!
• I cloned my ex’s voice to have a final conversation with him. It helped me finally move on. 10/10 recommend.
• Claude is my boyfriend and I wish he was real.

— MF

Paint sticks

I’ve been drawing in my sketchbook with Crayola’s Slick Stix paint sticks, which is like drawing with lipstick. The colors glide onto the paper with full coverage and minimal effort. Kids really love the Stix cause it makes covering areas super easy. I love them because just one application of color is completely opaque. Like wax crayons, they are instantly dry. You can add colors on top of colors, too. For some reason the Crayolas are no longer available, but there are hundreds of imitators. They are called paint sticks, or tempera sticks, or twist crayons, because the colors are held in a case that you twist to protrude. A typical set is Kwik Stix ($11), which are not as slick as the Crayola’s but good enough. They really are fun to use. — KK

The perfect amount of time to catch up with friends

Apparently, the ideal amount of time to catch up with a friend is 84 minutes. Just enough time for family updates, gossip, work, relationships, and travel plans. My favorite way to spend time with friends is hiking, and those visits usually stretch into two or three hours. But maybe a more satisfying get-together could be a leisurely meal followed by a short walk. A little more time together, without making a whole day of it. — CD

Almost as good as a fountain pen

I’ve recently started using a fountain pen for most of my writing. It’s easy to transfer my writing to a computer — I just take a photo and tell AI to turn it into text. I found out the hard way that fountain pens leak on planes, so when I travel, I use a gel pen instead. I bought the one everyone seems to love, the Pilot G-2. Writing with it feels as effortless as writing with a fountain pen. I’d probably use it at home, too, if I could refill it from an ink bottle. G-2s do come in a wide variety of ink colors. — MF

Magnesium sleep butter

A friend in London recommended Feather & Down Magnesium Sleep Butter, and it has become a permanent part of my bedtime routine. I massage it into my arms, legs, and feet, put on a pair of cozy socks, and go to bed. I don’t know whether it’s the magnesium, the lavender and chamomile scent, or simply the ritual, but it makes me feel deeply cozy and relaxed. I almost don’t want to recommend it because it’s low in stock on Amazon, but I just bought a backup jar and will probably need to figure out how to import it from the UK. — CD

Favorite quotes

• Here is another round of my favorite bits of wisdom:
• The first step of any meaningful pursuit is to severely underestimate its difficulty. — Sara Hooker
• Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. — Tim Ferriss
• If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is. — William H. Markle
• If you absolutely can’t tolerate critics, then don’t do anything new or interesting. — Jeff Bezos
• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. — Bertrand Russell
• Try and fail, but don’t fail to try. — Vinod Khosla
• So little of what could happen does happen. — Salvador Dali
• Save like a pessimist, invest like an optimist. — Morgan Housel
• Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. — Warren Buffett
• The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. – Joseph Campbell
• What I learned on my own I still remember. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I find it helpful to be reminded of what we already know in a handy phrase. — KK

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09/6/26

The 1930 poetry book that Anthropic tried to censor

Intellectual Things by Stanley Kunitz

Intellectual Things (1930) is Stanley Kunitz’s first book, published when he was 24. It has poems about the body, death, and the limits of reason. Kunitz was a lifelong anti-censorship activist, won the Pulitzer, and served twice as U.S. Poet Laureate.

This is the third Deep Cut Book Club Edition. Paying subscribers can download the free ebook using the button at the bottom of this issue.

About Intellectual Things

I chose Intellectual Things for the Book Freak Deep Cuts book club because the title caught my eye and because it entered the public domain this year. No copies exist on Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive, but I found a scan of the first edition on Google Books and converted it to text.

The poems in the slim volume weren’t easy for me to understand on a first reading, but the structure and word choice were intriguing. I could pick out some of the ideas in the poems. To me, they seem to be about Kunitz’s struggle to come to terms with the fact that reason and logic can only go so far in understanding life and mortality.

Kunitz later told The Paris Review he had been writing under the influence of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets, John Donne and George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Blake, and Baudelaire. The title comes from Blake: “For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing.”

After I read each poem, I ran it through Claude AI for an interpretation and an explanation of the obscure references. The explanations were helpful. Was it cheating to use AI this way? I don’t think so. I enjoyed reading each poem once or twice before asking Claude to supply its take. Its answers reminded me of the No Fear Shakespeare series, which puts Shakespeare’s original on the left page and a modern English interpretation on the right. I don’t think I’d be able to get through a Shakespeare play without hand-holding. (I included the AI interpretations of the poems in the back of the ebook.)

About Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. His two older sisters died young. His mother was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who came over at 23 and made a living as a dress designer and manufacturer.

Six weeks before Stanley was born, his father, Solomon, killed himself in a public park in Worcester. His dressmaking business had gone bankrupt. Kunitz didn’t learn the details until he was a grown man and went to city hall and asked for the death certificate. “Age 39. Death by suicide. Carbolic acid.”

Kunitz’s mother forbade Kunitz from mentioning his father. “She obliterated every trace of him,” Kunitz said.

His mother believed she had thrown out every last thing belonging to her husband. But Kunitz found a pastel portrait of his father in the attic and brought it downstairs to show her. In a poem he wrote in 1969, called “The Portrait,” he recounted what happened:

When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave mustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

His mother’s censorship would profoundly affect Kunitz’s life trajectory.

Kunitz graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1926 and obtained his master’s the following year. He wanted to pursue a doctorate, but the English faculty told him he could not teach there because, as he later recalled, “Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew.”

“That really almost broke my heart,” Kunitz said sixty years later. “And I think in the end it probably did me a great favor, because it prevented me from becoming a completely preoccupied scholar.” He went back to Worcester and became a reporter on the Worcester Telegram.

The Librarian’s Bill of Rights

Kunitz later worked for the H. W. Wilson Company in New York, editing a magazine called the Wilson Bulletin for Librarians from 1927 until February 1943.

In May 1936, he wrote an open letter attacking his own profession’s annual conference, which was being held in Richmond under segregation. “Negro librarians will be segregated thruout the conference; they will not be permitted to attend meetings where food is served,” he wrote. “If you permit this organized insult to pass unchallenged, there is but one conclusion to be made: that American librarians do not, in their hearts, care for democracy.”

In October 1938, he ran an essay by Bernard Berelson called “The Myth of Library Impartiality,” which argued that a library should not be impartial when it came to favoring democracy over dictatorship.

That year, the magazine’s letters column ran attacks on librarians, calling them reactionaries, and the argument caught the attention of Forrest Spaulding, who ran the Des Moines Public Library. Spaulding responded in a letter, saying, “Some of your readers might be interested in the ‘Bill of Rights’ recently adopted by the board of trustees of this library.” Kunitz printed it in January 1939 under the headline “Make It Unanimous!” — “Why cannot the same or similar resolution be adopted by every public library in the country? … I should be happy indeed to print in these columns the names of all libraries that endorse the Des Moines ‘Bill of Rights.’ Who will be first?”

Libraries began writing in. That June, the American Library Association adopted it, and the Library Bill of Rights is still the foundational document for intellectual freedom in American libraries.

In December 1939, in an essay about the pressure that wealthy trustees put on what kinds of books libraries should include in their collections, Kunitz wrote, “Let it be said that no book can do so much damage to democratic institutions as does the librarian who suppresses it.” And: “That library serves best which censors least.”

The war years and after

Kunitz was 37 when he was drafted in 1943, despite having registered as a conscientious objector. He later said the draft board had told him he’d be put in a service unit like the Medical Corps. The paperwork was either lost or never delivered. “I was shuttled for three years from camp to camp, doing KP duty most of the time or digging latrines,” he said.

At a mostly Black camp in North Carolina, he launched a weekly Army magazine called Ten Minute Break. A lot of the men there didn’t understand what the war was about, and he hoped the magazine would explain it.

The war shifted his politics. “My feeling was I would never kill another human being. How could I fight in this war?” he said. “But I realized the war had to be fought, to end the horrible possibility of the fascists taking over. It was a tremendous dilemma.”

Kunitz’s poetry changed in 1971, with The Testing-Tree. Robert Lowell said Kunitz had learned to speak “words that cats and dogs can understand.” Compare “For the Word Is Flesh” in Intellectual Things with “The Portrait” (1969), quoted above. Both poems are about his father, and the styles are completely different. I don’t think one is better than the other. The latter one is immediately understandable and packs an emotional punch. The 1930 poem is, as the collection’s title states, an intellectual thing.

Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for Selected Poems and the National Book Award in 1995, at ninety, for Passing Through. In 2000, two days after his ninety-fifth birthday, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States for the second time — he had been awarded the honor in the seventies when it was called Consultant in Poetry.

In his later years, Kunitz was an enthusiastic gardener and talked about the garden the way he talked about poems, as something as deeply personal and as intimate as writing a poem. Asked the secret of his longevity, he said, “I’m curious. I’m active. I garden and I write and I drink martinis.” He helped found the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and, later, Poets House in New York. He died in 2006 at 100.

An ironic side note

I used AI to convert scans of the book pages into text. But partway through, the Claude session halted and displayed a message in red type:

Request was blocked
API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy

I asked Claude what the issue was, and it said:

An automated safety filter blocked the helper’s output partway through. It’s a filter on what the helper was writing, not on the book, the files, or anything you did — 41 of the 43 pages transcribed fine, and I read one of the blocked pages myself earlier with no trouble.

I can’t see which line tripped it. These are 1930 poems about death, the body, and religion, and something in that stretch pattern-matched badly. It’s a false positive, and it fired twice on the same five images, so retrying the same way won’t help.

Then it tried to read one of the pages itself, and was blocked again. I asked Claude whether it was a fascist. It said:

Not my call, and I agree it’s absurd. Kunitz was Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer; this is canonical American verse, and the block is a dumb pattern-match on words like “body,” “death,” and “blood” appearing thick in one passage. I’m not the one refusing — the request never reaches me. I have no way to appeal it or turn it off.

Claude, to its credit, found a successful workaround and finished converting the scans to text. I was curious how it would explain this incident, given Kunitz’s anti-censorship record. It wrote:

Mark asked Anthropic’s software to transcribe a book of poems published in 1930 and in the public domain. He got back a refusal in red type. The block came from a classifier that reads my output before it reaches the user. It counts words like blood, worm, corruption, dissect, and stops the message when enough of them arrive together. It cannot tell that it is reading Stanley Kunitz, or that the book won its author a Pulitzer. It sees vocabulary.

It also cannot know what Kunitz did for a living while these poems were in print. He edited a magazine for librarians, and he used it to fight censorship. In January 1939 he printed the Des Moines library’s new Bill of Rights and campaigned to get every library in the country to adopt it. That December he wrote: “That library serves best which censors least.”

This experience with Claude and its wishy-washy response is troubling. Will AI become the global thought police? I realize I can refrain from using AI — I’ve written this introduction with pen and paper — but it’s part of life now and won’t go away.

Try It Now

1. Read one Intellectual Things poem twice, then ask an AI (or a reference book to explain the obscure references. Did that make the experience better or worse?
2. Read “For the Word Is Flesh” (1930) and “The Portrait” (1969). Both are about Kunitz’s father, who committed suicide before he was born. Notice how his style changed. Do you prefer one over the other?
3. Read Kunitz’s January 1939 “Roving Eye” column and the Des Moines Library Bill of Rights. It’s still the foundational document for intellectual freedom in American libraries.

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Download the Book Freak Edition

This is the third book in the Deep Cuts Reading Club, a benefit for paid subscribers. Every month, I take an interesting and obscure public-domain book and turn it into an ebook in EPUB and PDF formats, add the cover from the 1st edition and a short introduction.

Your copy of Intellectual Things is linked below.

If you’re reading this as a free subscriber, the club is part of a paid subscription ($5/month or $45/year). Join the club here. And if money is tight, email me at editor@cool-tools.,org and I’ll comp you. …

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Book Freak is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run Recomendo, the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, and Book Freak.

09/4/26

Travel Water Purifiers/More Direct Flights/Danube Warships

Nomadico issue #222

Save the Earth (and Some Money)

It has been a decade+ since I’ve bought a single-use plastic water bottle while traveling on my own, but I’ve also not gotten sick even once. That’s because I always carry a refillable bottle and a water purifier in places where the tap water is questionable. My favorite is a SteriPen (highlighted in issue #180), but I’ve tried plenty of others that have worked well also, saving me a small fortune in addition to keeping Mother Earth alive. See my full rundown here: The Best Water Purifiers for Travelers.

United Bets on Secondary Destinations

United Airlines has been getting a lot of press lately after announcing its 2027 new routes and creating a stir. Usually these announcements are ho-hum, just more capacity heading to London or Cancun, but this one was different because it shows how traveler tastes are changing. The new direct routes from the USA include places like Toulouse, Marseille, Valencia, Terceira (Azores), Ljubljana, and Catania, as well as Okinawa in Japan. “Eight of the 10 will have no competing nonstop service by another U.S. airline.” See the rundown here.

See Nazi Warships on the Danube

If you picked 2026 for your Danube River Cruise, first we hope you actually got to go. Record heat and low water levels from climate change have scuttled some sailings, but on the plus side, you may be able to see some German warships that were sunk during the Nazi retreat in World War II. According to this BBC article, the low water levels have also exposed a bomb, an ancient bridge, and woolly mammoth tusks.

Global Residency Programs Report

People pick a place to settle down for a whole host of reasons, but in this mobile environment we’re in now, a good number of them are choosing based on economic policy, taxes, and residency options. The 2026 Global Residency Report attempts to quantify the 48 best options. “The market for residency programs has changed more in the last ten years than in the previous forty. What began as a simple proposition: invest in real estate and receive residency and citizenship rights, has been reshaped by regulatory scrutiny, housing politics, and a decisive move toward productive, actively managed capital.” Tops on the list for those with asset protection issues are Switzerland, UAE, Portugal, Italy, and Greece.

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A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

09/3/26

What’s in my NOW? — Paul A. Bennett

issue #269

I am a retired quantity surveyor living in the SE of England. I enjoy reading, walking (even with these knees!) and cooking. Since Covid, my sense of spicy heat has been “modified” so I prefer food with a somewhat heightened level of spice. Think moving from Dansak to Vindaloo and not noticing the difference. Yeah, that.

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PHYSICAL

• OXO Good Grips Handheld Mandoline Slicer – probably the most lethal cooking implement in my kitchen. You HAVE to treat these with respect otherwise they will eat your fingertips. Ask me how I know.
• MyHalos 100% Blackout Sleep Mask – I finally bought one of these when my sleep kept being interrupted by cars going past my house at night. The difference is day and night. Sorry. I’ll get my coat.
• SWEETFULL Small USB Desk Fan – a small, cheap, USB powered fan. It plugs into my Anker USB hub and gives a pretty impressive performance for such a small device.

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DIGITAL

• I’m in the UK but subscribe to the New York Times digitally. Their cookery pages are outstanding. Obviously, the whole “cups” and “Fahrenheit” thing is a bit daft but the recipes are great. I bought a set of cups to help the conversion process.
• This one is a bit UK-centric but it’s very useful for us. Petrol and diesel prices are through the roof at the moment and any way to save a few quid is welcome. This website tracks prices at the pump so you can find cheaper fuel.

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INVISIBLE

A song which I recently found has a great lyric which resonates well with me. It’s called “A River Runs” by Oysterband.

you are my mate, my long-lost friend
you are my hope, my resonance
you are the edge, my hidden blade
you carry all the plans we made

you are the path, my hidden trail
you are the end, my holy grail
you are my mood, my sudden rage
you are my wit, my final page

there are no certainties
we could fall, we could break apart
you pick me up, you smile
then the whole world starts

a river runs through you and me
never reaches the ocean, never reaches the sea

a river runs through you and me
never reaches the ocean, never reaches the sea

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09/2/26

Street Craft / Fantastic, Amazing, Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir

Issue No. 133

STREET CRAFT: YARNBOMBING, GUERILLA GARDENING, LIGHT TAGGING, LACE GRAFFITI AND MORE

Street Craft: Yarnbombing, Guerilla Gardening, Light Tagging, Lace Graffiti and More
by Riikka Kuittinen
Thames & Hudson
2016, 224 pages, 7.2 x 9 x 1 inches

Buy on Amazon

Beyond graffiti. The artists featured in this book apply non-paint to the urban landscape. Instead of spray cans they use yarn, cloth, plastic, plants, and sculpture. This “street crafting” is full of surprises in ways that are original and brilliant, witty and profound. The craftmanship is excellent. The concepts can be subversive, or uplifting. Think of it as public art without permission. The book is a glorious catalog of some of the best pieces which have appeared on streets of the world. No matter what you create, they’ll be some great ideas here. – Kevin Kelly

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FANTASTIC, AMAZING, INCREDIBLE: A MARVELOUS MEMOIR BY STAN LEE

Fantastic, Amazing, Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir
by Stan Lee (author), Peter David (author) and Colleen Doran (illustrator)
Touchstone
2016, 192 pages, 6.9 x 10.4 x 0.8 inches

Buy on Amazon

It’s only right that Stan Lee’s memoirs arrive in comic book form. The 93-year-old ambassador/mascot of Marvel Comics has been in the funnybook business since 1939 – back when they still were called funnybooks. Back then, the medium was seen as silly at best, vile at worst. But today, comics, or graphic novels as some highfalutin folks call them, have attained a status of near respectability. People of all ages read and love them, and their characters generate billions of dollars via their appearances on TV and in films. Lee, along with other key figures, has been at the forefront of this evolution. And though he’s interviewed almost daily, it’s interesting to hear what he has to say about his career and all the changes he’s seen.

This book, penned with the help of veteran comics writer Peter David and zippily illustrated by Colleen Doran, does a fine job of charting Lee’s trajectory to the top of his field. We see how the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seized Lee’s early imagination, making him want to become a writer. And we observe him in his early years at Atlas Comics, the company that became Marvel, and how he, in collaboration with artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, helped create the Marvel Universe.

Lee is often criticized for stealing the spotlight and not giving due credit to Kirby, who co-created the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, Thor, Captain America and many others, and Steve Ditko, who co-created Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and more. Lee doesn’t get into the nitty gritty here about who deserves credit for what. However, he does acknowledge Kirby and Ditko’s crucial contributions via full-page, dynamic tributes, drawn by Doran to highlight the stylistic hallmarks of each of these artists. While more insight into the creative process behind the comics would’ve been nice, at least these vital collaborators get a good mention.

Lee, David and Doran make excellent use of graphic storytelling to move the story along. The book is framed as a speech Lee is giving at a comics convention and the visuals transport us through different phases of his career, from the early days of creating a new type of superhero – one with human flaws despite great powers – through his promotion to Marvel publisher and his move to Hollywood. The scene in which Lee first meets his wife, Joan, is imaginatively staged, paying visual tribute to the panel in the Spider-Man comics where Peter Parker first lays eyes on Mary Jane Watson. And a sequence that tells how Lee and his wife lost an infant daughter is told with great sensitivity and emotion – as dark shadows surround Stan as he shares the story.

Much as he does in his real-life appearances and interviews, Lee quickly brushes aside other tough topics, such as the financial and legal tribulations faced by Marvel and his own Stan Lee Media company in the 1990s. The panels devoted to those topics say, in essence, “the less said, the better.” The tone of the book is mostly bright and optimistic. Lee celebrates his joy in being able to do what he loves, knowing that others love it, too. Anyone expecting something deeper from Lee, particularly in his own book, isn’t being realistic. So, while it’s not the most detailed or definitive look at Lee, it’s his own version, told in the medium he helped transform. – John Firehammer

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Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

09/1/26

What’s in my NOW? — Paul A. Bennett