Stan Lee revolutionised the comics industry in the 1960s when he created the mythic figures that are today inspiring new generations to flock to cinemas. Lee’s creations – Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, most of the Avengers (Hulk, Iron Man, Thor), Daredevil and Doctor Strange – helped rescue the costumed superhero from obscurity and usher in the Silver Age of American comic books.
Superhero comics had collapsed in popularity after the Second World War (their Golden Age) and the introduction of the Comics Code in 1954 had outlawed crime and horror comics with any real bite. Lee, then an editor with Atlas Comics, watched the industry folding up around him but kept Atlas going with a small staff and the sales of romantic adventuress Millie the Model and wild west gunslinger Kid Colt.
Adding to his woes, Lee’s related-by-marriage boss, Martin Goodman, decided to close down the company through which he distributed his comics and strike a deal with American News Company, who dominated newsstand distribution in the mid-1950s but who promptly went out of business. Atlas were forced to agree restrictive terms with Independent News Distributors, owned by their closest rival, National (later DC) Comics which limited Atlas to eight titles a month.
Lee grew tired of churning out dozens of semi-literate scripts each month. On the point of quitting, his wife, Joan, suggested, “before you do why don’t you do one book the way you would like to do it. The worst that happens is Martin will fire you, and so what? You want to quit anyway”.
This advice coincided with a major overhaul of characters at National where editor Julius Schwartz had been reinventing many of the company’s old costumed heroes before teaming them up in a new monthly, Justice League of America. Goodman – in the process of changing the name of Atlas Comics to Marvel Comics – heard that the title was selling well and suggested to Lee that he should invent a superhero group.
Lee realised this was his chance and created the Fantastic Four, a team with powers and problems in equal measure. Super-elastic scientist Reed Richards (Mr Fantastic) and his girlfriend Sue Storm (Invisible Girl) try to hold the team together while her brother Johnny (The Human Torch) and Ben Grimm (The Thing) bicker and fight. Lee’s instinct was to humanise the characters: Richards is wracked by guilt about turning his best pal Grimm into a monster who looks like an pile of orange boulders; Grimm is filled with anger and self-loathing; and Johnny, like any teenager, prefers to drive fast cars and use his superhero status to pull girls, resenting Sue and Reed’s attempts to reign him in.
Further innovations were to set the Fantastic Four series in New York rather than a fictional city and have the team visit real places. Briefly Lee kept the new team out of superhero costumes but was persuaded to have them don spandex by fans of the new series.
Lee’s next character, the Incredible Hulk, was inspired by a combination of Jekyll and Hyde and the notion of the misunderstood monster, exemplified by Boris Karloff’s depiction of Frankenstein’s monster. Caught up in a gamma radiation explosion, Dr Banner turns into a gigantic, green-skinned creature driven by hatred whenever he becomes angry. The angrier the Hulk gets, the stronger he becomes.
A radioactive spider was responsible for Lee’s most popular creation, although to many Spider-Man wasn’t about fighting malformed or transmuted enemies like the Green Goblin or the Lizard but about a shy, bullied young boy with a crush on a beautiful girl from his school but who lacked the confidence to ask her out.
Martin Goodman had so little faith in the character, he was not given his own book. Instead, Spider-Man debuted in the final (15th) issue of Amazing Fantasy, which sold particularly well. Goodman quickly gave the teenager his own title and The Amazing Spider-Man debuted a few months later. (A copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 sold for over $1m in 2011.)
Spider-Man was the first major character of this revitalisation of Marvel Comics that was not drawn by Jack Kirby. Kirby, one of the most influential and innovative artists to have worked in American comic books, had been involved in Atlas’s predecessor, Timely Comics, where he and Joe Simon had created Captain America in 1940. Simon and Kirby, the stars of the comic book industry of the time, departed shortly after, Simon claiming that they had not been paid their share of the profits from Captain America.
Kirby returned to Atlas in 1958 and was soon churning out 8-10 pencilled pages a day across all genres, although his weird fantasy and monster stories are his best known from this period.
When Lee introduced his new breed of superheroes, it was to Kirby that he turned. Disputes would later arise over who should be credited with creating the stories for these, although the initial development of a storyline would be down to Lee, who would write out a storyline in longhand and then discuss it with an artist until the plot gelled. With artists he knew well and trusted there was no need for a detailed panel breakdown – Kirby could work from the briefest outline of a plot (sometimes described over the phone) which Lee would then embellish with dialogue and captions once the pages came in. Since he was writing so many stories each month, this became Lee’s usual working style, sometimes called the ‘Marvel method’.
Lee made no secret of the way stories were produced and was quoted in a 1966 New York Herald Tribune interview as saying: “I don’t plot Spider-Man any more. Steve Ditko, the artist, has been doing the stories . . . We were arguing so much over plot lines I told him to start making up his own stories. He won’t let anybody else ink his drawings either. He just drops off the finished pages with notes at the margins and I fill in the dialogue. I never know what he’ll come up with next.” Lee’s argumentative relationship with Ditko, which included the co-creation of eastern mystic Doctor Strange, ended when Ditko left Marvel in 1966.
Iron Man was created by Lee as someone who should be hated by the readers – an inventor of military hardware who was benefiting financially from the Vietnam War – but whom he would turn into a hero. Lee also took the unfashionable subject of World War II and created Nick Fury, who led a multi-ethnic platoon known as the Howling Commandos. His most popular creations in 1963, however, were The X-Men, a group of mutants brought together by Professor Xavier for mutual protection and The Avengers, the latter originally made up of Iron Man, Hulk, Ant-Man, Thor and Wasp. Lee’s blind superhero Daredevil appeared in 1964, drawn by Bill Everett.
Lee and Kirby continued to create new characters, including The Silver Surfer, a galaxy-spanning traveller who was also Lee’s philosophical voice, and Black Panther, the first African-American superhero in mainstream comics. Both appeared in the pages of Fantastic Four in 1966, as did Galactus, a planet-eating cosmic entity intent on destroying Earth. Lee’s heroes were only as good as his villains and, with Kirby, he also gave the Marvel Universe Magneto and Doctor Doom.
Lee seemed to feed off the power and elegance of Jack ‘King’ Kirby and the eccentricity of Steve Ditko. One must not forget that the characters he was creating were unleashed after 21 years in the business. He was already approaching 40 – Kirby, 5 years older, was 44 – and this was Lee’s first opportunity to write something with greater depth than the stories he had been churning out for whatever comic needed to be filled that particular day.
Lee was finally allowed to give his characters flaws and, where superheroes had previously immediately embraced their powers, Lee’s heroes were often reluctant. Lee gave his characters voices, from pithy catchphrases – “Flame on!”, “Hulk smash!”, “It’s clobberin’ time!” – to pages littered with thought balloons out of which would grow some truth that the hero needed to learn, not the least of which was Peter Parker’s “With great power there must also come – great responsibility”. In his regular “Stan’s Soapbox” features that appeared in Marvel titles from 1967 he tackled Viet Nam and bigotry and shamelessly overhyped Marvel’s comics at the expense of their rivals (Brand Echh!). His high-spirited editorials where adolescent fans – “true believers!” and “keepers of the flame!” – were told to “Face front!”, offered No Prizes and rewarded for buying more comics by becoming a recognised “R.F.O.” (“Real Frantic One”), were hyperbolic, fun and funny and typically signed off with an exuberant “Excelsior!”
In a 1965 Esquire poll, Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk were ranked alongside Bob Dylan and Che Guevara as the favourite revolutionary icons among college students. As early as 1968, Lee said “Our goal is that someday an intelligent adult would not be embarrassed to walk down the street with a comic magazine. I don’t know whether we can ever bring this off, but it’s something to shoot for.” Lee has been widely recognised for his works, including being indicted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995, receiving an honourary degree from Bowling State University and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011. Long Beach, Los Angeles, celebrated Stan Lee Day on 2 October 2009.
Born Stanley Martin Lieber in Manhattan on 28 December 1922, Lee was the son of Romanian immigrants, Jacob Aaron Lieber and his wife Celia (née Solomon). He grew up in Washington Heights and The Bronx where Jacob, for the most part unemployed during the Depression, worked occasionally as a dress cutter. Brother Larry (Lawrence David Lieber) was born when Stan was nine.
Lee attended DeWitt High School where he wrote for the school magazine, The Magpie, but had an otherwise uneventful schooling. He had several jobs during his teenage years, including delivering lunches to offices at the Rockefeller Center, selling subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune, working as a theatre usher and as an office boy for trouser manufacturer H. Lissner & Son.
After graduating at 16, Lee joined the Federal Theatre Project, funded by the Works Progress Administration, but left soon after when he learned through his uncle, Robbie Solomon, that Timely Comics, a subsidiary of Magazine Management owned by Martin Goodman (related through his marriage to Stan’s cousin, Jean), was looking for an assistant in the editorial office run by Joe Simon.
Lee’s first job was to fill inkwells, collect lunch, erased pencil lines and proofread finished pages. His first story was a text filler, “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge” in Captain America 3 (May 1941). A few months later, he found himself in charge of the office when Simon and his artistic partner, Jack Kirby, struck a deal with rivals National.
Lee’s first superhero creation was a journalist called Keen Marlow. Caught behind enemy lines, he was experimented upon with a serum that turned him into The Destroyer. Other early Lee creations included Jack Frost and the scythe-swinging, hooded hero Father Time.
Lee was the cheerleader of Marvel Comics for over sixty years, as editor-in-chief from 1941 and as publisher from 1972 until 1996. He enlisted in the US Army in 1942 and trained with the Signal Corps but spent most of his three years working with a unit writing training films, manuals and posters.
Lee met English model Joan Clayton Boocock though a cousin and they married in Reno in 1947. A daughter, Joan Celia ("JC") Lee, was born in 1950; a second daughter, Jay, died after just three days.
Lee moved from Manhattan to California in 1980 where he set up an animation studio, narrating the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends TV shows, and became involved with Marvel’s Hollywood ambitions. Lee also made numerous appearances on TV and in movies, beginning with an appearance as a jury foreman in The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (1989), his extensive credits include playing himself in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory. Virtually every Marvel movie contains a cameo from Lee.
Marvel went into Chapter 11 liquidation in 1996 and emerged a new company in 1997. Lee, who had been paid $1m a year by Marvel Entertainment Group, which fell to half that from the newly founded Marvel Enterprises.
A year later, launched Stan Lee Media with Peter F. Paul. This was one of the biggest internet start-ups of the time, employing 165 people to create and market a variety of branded franchises. Web animation series The 7th Portal debuted in 2000, but within months had run out of capital. Paul fled to Brazil from where he was eventually extradited, beginning a 10-year sentence in 2009. Litigation surrounding Paul and Stan Lee Media dogged Lee for years.
Lee set up POW! Entertainment in 2001 and has since involved himself in a wide variety of media and entertainment projects ranging from the adult animated TV show Stripperella (voiced by Pamela Anderson) to reality TV series Who Wants To Be A Superhero?. He sued the company for damages in 2018, but dropped the suit after two months.
In 2002, Lee took Marvel to court over unpaid profits from the run of highly successful movies – Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 grossing over £1bn worldwide – and was rewarded with a multi-million dollar decision in his favour in 2005. In recent years he was the subject of worrying reports of elder abuse which resulted in a police probe and a restraining order issued against his business manager, Keya Morgan. The restraining order was renewed in August 2018 and required that Morgan also stay away from Lee's daughter, JC, and 86-year-old brother Larry.
Lee has been the subject of numerous books on the history of the comic book and co-wrote (with George Mair) his autobiography, Excelsior! The Amazing Life Of Stan Lee, in 2002. Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible, a graphic memoir by Lee, Peter David and Colleen Doran, was published in 2015.
Joan died in July 2017, and Lee is survived by his daughter JC and brother Larry.
(* Picture: Stan Lee receives his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 4 January 2011. Photo: Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock.com.)
