END TO AN AMAZING FANTASY OF ‘QUINTESSENTIAL HARD-LUCK KID’
STAN LEE 1922-2018
Stan Lee, who brought a modern sensibility to comic books and provided lucrative fodder for Hollywood as co-creator of such sympathetically imperfect superheroes as Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men, and Iron Man, has died. He was 95.
Lee died on Monday in Los Angeles, according to the Associated Press.
From his start as a writer for Timely Comics in 1941, Lee rose to editor and publisher of Marvel Comics. He made his mark starting in the early 1960s by conjuring superheroes with troubled lives and temperamental personalities, a leap from the comic-book characters of the past.
“For once I wanted to write stories that wouldn’t insult the intelligence of an older reader, stories with interesting characterisation, more realistic dialogue and plots that hadn’t been recycled a thousand times before,” Lee wrote in his 2002 memoir, Excelsior: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee. He was describing the 1961 creation, with artist Jack Kirby, of the Fantastic Four, the human quartet who gain special powers after being exposed to cosmic radiation.
So pleased was Lee with the quick success of the Fantastic Four that he added to the cover of follow-up issues the slogan, “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.”
He followed up by helping create the Incredible Hulk—he said he asked Kirby, “Can you draw a good-looking monster, or at least a sympathetic-looking monster?” —then the Mighty Thor, Iron Man and X-Menin the early 1960s.
‘World’s greatest’
In 1962, Lee found an opportunity — the final edition of a comic called Amazing Fantasy— to introduce a character with spider-like capabilities to stick to walls and ceilings. In true Lee fashion, this superhero, Spider-Man, was a normal angst-ridden teenager during off hours, an orphan named Peter Parker who lived with his aunt and uncle and struggled with such mundane foes as allergies and the first stirrings of romantic feelings.
“Except for his superpower, he’d be the quintessential hard-luck kid,” Lee later wrote. He found Kirby’s early sketches of Peter Parker to be too handsome and confident, so he turned to another artist, Steve Ditko, who came up with the character’s unique look. Introduced in 1962, Spider-Man became its own comic a year later and went on to be Marvel’s most successful character.
Lee and Ditko were said to have had a falling-out that led to Ditko’s departure from Marvel a few years later. In July 2018, after Ditko’s death at age 90, Lee saluted him on Twitter as “certainly one of the most important creators in the comic book business.”
Marvel method
With Kirby, who died in 1994, Lee developed the collaborative writer-artist relationship that became known as the Marvel Method. Lee’s other fictional characters — created with Kirby, Ditko, Bill Everett, Don Heck, and Larry Lieber, among others — included Daredevil, the Avengers, Doctor Strange, and Mighty Thor.