There is a video where Stan Lee, eight years gone, looks into a camera and says, “You know what they never tell you about legends? They outlive the page.” Stan Lee did not say that. Stan Lee could not have said that. A machine built from old recordings of his voice said it for him, on behalf of a company that wants to rent him out by the hour.
That is the part nobody at ElevenLabs wants you to sit with for too long, so let’s sit with it.
What ElevenLabs actually built
On May 27, the AI audio company ElevenLabs, valued at around 11 billion dollars, announced a partnership with Stan Lee Universe, the joint venture between Genius Brands International and POW! Entertainment that controls Lee’s name, image, and likeness. The deal puts a cloned version of Lee’s voice on the ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace, where businesses can license celebrity voices for commercial work. It drops his likeness into the company’s image and video templates so users can generate his face into comic book panels and fake cameos. It launches a Stan Lee Book of the Month Club inside the Eleven Reader app, starting in June with Treasure Island, where the AI reads classic books aloud in his voice. There are even two Stan Lee themed music filters.
The voice was assembled from professional recordings of a man who died on November 12, 2018, at the age of 95. He had no say in any of this, because he was not here to have one.
ElevenLabs frames the whole thing as a tribute. Chaz Rainey, a board member for Stan Lee Universe, said fans always told them they hear Stan’s voice when they read his comics, and now they can make that real. It is a nice sentiment. It is also marketing copy for a product that turns a dead man into a subscription feature.
Authorized is not the same as wanted
Here is where the defenders reach for the magic word. This is licensed. This is consent-based. The rights holders signed off. All true. And all beside the point.
The companies that approved this are not Stan Lee’s family. They are corporations that own a legal interest in his ghost. And one of them, POW! Entertainment is the exact company Lee sued for a billion dollars in 2018, in the final months of his life, accusing its executives of conspiring to steal his identity, name, and likeness in a deal he said he never knowingly agreed to. He alleged they took advantage of him while he was grieving the death of his wife, Joan, and while macular degeneration had left him legally blind since 2015.
Read that again. The man went to court to stop these people from controlling his likeness, and now those same people are licensing his likeness to an AI company. The legal paperwork says yes. Everything else about the situation screams the opposite.
His only surviving immediate family, daughter J.C. Lee, has not endorsed this deal. Back in 2019, she argued the estate’s position was that neither POW! Nor did Camsing International have any rights to her father’s name, likeness, or legacy. Her own history with the estate is complicated, but the silence from the family side is loud. Nobody who actually loved Stan Lee is out front celebrating this. The people celebrating it are the ones who stand to make money.
The fans saw it immediately
You did not need a press release to know how this would land. Within hours, fans across X, Reddit, and Instagram were calling it ghoulish, vile, disgusting, and morally bankrupt. The Black Mirror comparisons wrote themselves. Filmmaker and AI critic Justine Bateman called it “Repulsive.” A common thread ran through the anger, and it was not abstract worry about AI ethics. It was personal. People remember how Stan Lee’s last years actually went, surrounded by people accused of bleeding him dry, and they recognized this for what it looked like: one more hand reaching into the casket.
The backlash was strong enough that ElevenLabs appears to have flinched. The press release announcing the deal was pulled from its website, and searches for Stan Lee on the Iconic Marketplace reportedly turned up nothing. If your big innovative tribute to a beloved creator has to be quietly scrubbed within days because the audience hated it, that tells you something about the tribute.
Where this goes next
Stan Lee is not the first. The Iconic Marketplace already trades in Judy Garland, John Wayne, Michael Caine, David Hasselhoff, and others. He will not be the last. The pitch is always preservation, always keeping the legend alive, always meeting fans where they are. The product is always the same. A person becomes an asset, an asset becomes a revenue stream, and the revenue stream never has to rest.
Stan Lee gave us heroes who were defined by what they chose to do with power. The lesson was never that you take whatever you can reach. He spent his life telling us the opposite. There is something bleak about watching his voice get pressed into service for the exact kind of grab his characters would have stood against, narrated in his own warmth, sold by the people he could not trust.
Let the man rest. He earned it. The rest of us can still hear his voice just fine, in the pages where he actually put it.
Sources: Variety, Deadline, Engadget, Kotaku, ComicBook, Cosmic Book News, GeekTyrant, Complex, The Next Web, ElevenLabs
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