WITH GREAT POWER

If anyone deserves the superhero treatment, it’s Stan Lee.

Lee takes on more than one identity in this picture-book biography. As a teen, he’s Errand Boy, with the ability to deliver lunch to every employee at Timely Comics at astounding speed. Later in the book, Eriksen compares him to the Human Torch, as he creates one classic Marvel Comics character after another. She goes for the obvious pun: “Stan was on fire!” Sometimes she rushes through the timeline almost haphazardly. The artist Jack Kirby quits Timely Comics and then, a few pages later, is working with Lee again, with little explanation. One picture shows Lee on the red carpet, apparently at a movie premiere in the 2000s, but the next page jumps back decades, to columns he wrote asking: “What makes a hero?” The sections about Kirby may be controversial. Fans of the artist have argued for years that Lee gave him (and other artists, including Steve Ditko) too little credit for coming up with the ideas behind Marvel characters. But this book mainly credits Lee for those ideas. Kirby and Ditko were superheroes, too. Nearly all of the sources in the bibliography are interviews with Lee or books and articles he wrote. Still, the frenetic pace is often genuinely thrilling, and the illustrations are enormously appealing, stretching and squashing anatomy as though Gatlin had taken Silly Putty to the funny pages. The comic-book creators are, as they were in life, generally White and Jewish, but the pictures show comics fans of many races, cultures, and body types.

This high-speed origin story, appropriately enough, is larger than life and almost impossible to believe.