Getting to know Stan Lee

In the southeast corner of Wyoming sits the state’s only university, home of the University of Wyoming Cowboys and alma mater of current NFL players such as Josh Allen and Logan Wilson.

Just a stone’s throw away from War Memorial Stadium—which arguably becomes the most densely populated location during home football games—is a surprising looking structure with equally surprising contents. The American Heritage Center (AHC) is located within the Centennial Complex which catches the eye with its unique architecture—it’s cone shaped and covered in black panels—and was designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Antoine Predock. Among the surprising contents found within its collection, which is estimated to be approximately 90,000 cubic feet, are donations from comedian Jack Benny and science-fiction author Forrest J. Ackerman.

The AHC also contains material from one of the most influential figures in popular culture: the face of Marvel Comics himself, Stan Lee. The collection, which consists of about 200 boxes, spans from the 1940s until the 2010s and is currently the project of three undergraduate students at the University of Wyoming.

“We’ve been tasked with the creation of an exhibit on Stan Lee and his life, utilizing the entire Stan Lee collection they have here,” said Hazel Homer-Wambeam, one of the three students.

The other students joining Homer-Wambeam in this task are Rhiannon McLean and Liam Leslie. Each brings their own personal and educational backgrounds to the project. Homer-Wambeam is majoring in musical theater performance with minors in honors college and American political science, was Miss Wyoming in 2022 and took second in the national History Day competition with a project on Stan Lee. McLean is majoring in political science with a minor in history and grew up collecting comic books. Leslie is majoring in secondary english education and admittedly came into the project with only a tangential understanding of both Stan Lee or Marvel Comics.

Why Wyoming?

Many people—fans and non-fans alike—may wonder why Stan Lee, who was born and raised in New York, donated his life’s work to the only university in Wyoming nearly 2,000 miles away. This is one of the questions which the students hope will be answered by the exhibit.

“The short version of that story is, one of our former directors—Gene Gressley—was a very charismatic historian who would hitchhike across the U.S. to find donors,” said McLean. “At one of these points, he had gone to Manhattan and met Stan Lee. They had developed a very fun, friendly working relationship.”

When that relationship first began to form, Lee wasn’t so intrinsically tied to Marvel Comics as he is now but after the creation of Spider-Man which is one of the most recognizable characters.

“Stan Lee was nowhere near the icon he is now, so Gene was clearly thinking way ahead. A lot of that communication is lost with both Stan Lee’s passing and, currently, we’re unsure of where Gene Gressley ended up,” said McLean. “He (Stan Lee) saw the Jack Benny collection that we have and he said ‘Well, if it’s good enough for Jack Benny it’s good enough for me.’”

Included within the Stan Lee Collection is a letter between Gressley and Stan Lee from 1978 in which the future face of Marvel Comics agreed to begin donating to the AHC. By 1980, documents were being shipped from New York to Wyoming.

“The relationship Gene Gressley developed with Stan Lee was a slow burn thing and seems to be an authentic friendship that developed naturally, but the collection was very fast,” said McLean. “Stan stopped donating in the early 2010s but still consistently praised the Heritage Center for everything. My favorite piece from the collection that we have is a letter that Stan wrote that he considers himself an alumnus of the University of Wyoming.”

The relationship begun by Gressley continued strong for around three decades, long after the former director’s involvement with the American Heritage Center. According to Leslie, it is easy to track through the collection the close, personal relationship that Stan Lee had with the AHC and whoever he was in contact with at the time.

“We’ve got over 30 years of donations that occurred and plenty of time for a real relationship to develop,” said Leslie.

No Bias but Stan’s Bias

Any exhibit on Stan Lee—which would also include Marvel Comics—is likely to have some elements of politics included. Stan Lee, who was born Stanley Martin Lieber, was the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants and would co-create iconic comic book characters such as the X-Men and Black Panther alongside Jack Kirby, who was the son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants. Many of the characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had some sort of political undertone to them.

“We will have a section at the final exhibit about this topic precisely. When we first came in, that was something we all wanted to touch on,” said McLean. “We all had a different relationship to Stan Lee as a cultural icon, as comic book fans and culturally what he means to people as someone of Jewish identity and someone who had been a champion of human rights throughout his life.”

According to McLean, politics was even ingrained into characters such as Spider-Man and his alter-ego Peter Parker. Though in different variations, Peter Parker is either a high school student or a college student, he is often balancing his role as a superhero with the struggle of being unable to afford college or take care of his widowed aunt, May Parker.

“You think about what it was like being a Romanian-Jewish person in New York, suffering from poverty, not feeling like you could be anything in life. He couldn’t go to college because he couldn’t afford it, it was not an opportunity,” said McLean. “That debate of affording college is a huge thing. That’s political.”

Homer-Wambeam pointed out, however, that as researchers for the project the three of them were doing their best to let the collection speak for itself.

“There’s in no way a political stance we’re trying to promote by presenting this material. We’re just putting on display for viewers to make their own conclusions about who Stan Lee was and what he supported and what he stood for whether or not they agree,” said Homer-Wambeam. “There’s no political agenda behind what we’re putting out there.”

McLean compared the upcoming Stan Lee Exhibit to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. All three undergraduate students were able to visit the center and learn about Guthrie, who was a political figure in his own right. Though he wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” images of him in the 1940s show anit-fascist messages written on his guitar.

“Woody Guthrie was a very overtly political figure in his own life. People were really angry with some of the curators there,” said McLean. “In order to present an accurate picture of who Stan Lee was as a person, his values—his political worldviews that he held—are necessary to telling that story.”

Getting To Know Stan Lee

All three students have already spent several months with a collection of 200 boxes which include notes and correspondence spanning over 40 years and there are still a few months before the exhibit is open to the public. Due to this, the three students often feel like they’ve come to know Stan Lee on a personal level.

According to Leslie, there are often many documents they find he described as “Stan Lee typified” while McLean said the experience is emotional because she grew up with comic books and is now one of three people who are able to work on this exhibit. For Homer-Wambeam, who is 22 years old, it’s almost coming full-circle to when she was in junior high.

“When I was in 8th grade, I did a History Day project on Stan Lee. That was a year-long project. It was for the National History Day competition. I lived here in Laramie, so I used the American Heritage Center as a resource. I was here as an 8th grader researching the collection, not to the extent we are now, but I really did look through boxes and boxes of it,” said Homer-Wambeam. “I finally had this idea to use the American Heritage Center as a resource to contact Stan Lee.”

It took a few months of communication between the AHC and Stan Lee’s secretary, but eventually Homer-Wambeam—as an 8th grader in Laramie, Wyoming—had the opportunity to speak with Stan Lee on the phone for 10 minutes in her living room. Earlier this year, Paul Fletcher, the current director of the AHC reached out to Homer-Wambeam regarding the exhibit.

“He reached out to me and said ‘You were the last person to have really researched this collection, I have some questions for you.’ He brought up this idea of doing some type of exhibit and what that would look like and ultimately asked me if I would like to be on the team,” said Homer-Wambeam. “For me, it’s been a full circle moment to come back to this collection and be able to look at the things Stan Lee has given the American Heritage Center after having actually spoken with him.”

The Accessibility

of the AHC

As amazing as it has been for these three undergraduate students to work on the Stan Lee Exhibit—each said it is not lost on them how important he is to the world as a cultural icon—what is equally amazing is the AHC itself. While it is located on the University of Wyoming campus, the building and its collection are accessible to the public, as evidenced by Homer-Wambeam’s experience as a junior high student.

“One of the cool things about the American Heritage Center is how accessible it is. Part of this is speculation as to why it would be an attractive place to donate your estate. It’s not limited like other archives are,” said Leslie. “In other archives, you have to apply and you have to give an abstract and you have to say exactly what you’re going to be studying when you show up, so you’re going to be a full-fledged academic. Here at the American Heritage Center, it’s open to everyone.”

It is this accessibility that the three students are hoping to be able to highlight with the Stan Lee Exhibit. To not only instill pride in Wyoming residents that a worldwide cultural icon donated to a repository in their home state, but that such an institution is also available for people regardless of who they are or where they’re from.

“When Wyomingites come to visit the Stan Lee exhibit, we want them to be proud of their state,” said Leslie. “We shouldn’t overlook Wyoming, we should be proud of Wyoming because there’s a reason that Stan Lee chose Wyoming.”

The Stan Lee Exhibit at the American Heritage Center is scheduled to be unveiled in May 2024 and will be available for viewing until November 2024. For more information, visit www.uwyo.edu/ahc.