Superhero creator became superfamous
Comic book writer
WHEN he got his start in the 1940s, Stan Lee was embarrassed by his profession.
‘‘I would meet someone at a party, and they would ask what I did and I would say, ‘I’m a writer,’ then start to walk away,’’ the man who helped create SpiderMan and other famed superheroes recalled years later.
Pressed for more details, he would say he wrote for magazines. And if the questions kept coming?
‘‘Finally I would say, ‘comic books — and they would walk away from me,’’ Lee said.
Half a century later, the writer who in the 1960s spearheaded Marvel Comics’ transformation into a powerhouse brand was considered a superhero in his own right. He was mobbed by fans at conventions and became the toast of Hollywood, with blockbuster films based on his characters racking up billions at the box office.
Lee died on Tuesday at CedarsSinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles.
In recent years, Lee was credited as associate producer on many of the blockbuster movies — including multiple sequels — starring Marvel characters Iron Man, XMen and Captain America, in addition to SpiderMan.
Marvel Comics and the Walt Disney Company honoured
Lee in a statement.
‘‘Stan Lee was as extraordinary as the characters he created,’’ said Bob Iger, chairman of the Walt Disney Company.
‘‘A superhero in his own right to Marvel fans around the world, Stan had the power to inspire, to entertain and to connect. The scale of his imagination was only exceeded by the size of his heart.’’
‘‘Noone has had more of an impact on my career and everything we do at Marvel Studios than Stan Lee,’’ tweeted Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios.
Lee’s legacy was celebrated far and wide on social media and the man once embarrassed by his work was showered with adulation and praised as a cultural transformer.
As the guiding force behind the spectacular rise of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, Lee and his artistic collaborators devised characters that broke the mould of conventional comicbook superheroes: No longer were they onedimensional costumed crusaders who were all good, struggling against villains who were all bad.
Marvel’s superheroes, which Lee developed with Marvel artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, battled not only complex villains but also their own personal demons in stories that have been praised for their ‘‘wit and subtleties’’, ingredients that greatly expanded the appeal and readership of comic books.
Lee and Kirby launched the new era of humanised comicbook superheroes in 1961 with the debut of the Fantastic Four: Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl, the Human Torch and the Thing.
The crimefighting quartet — scientist Reed Richards; his fiancee, Sue Storm; her teenage brother, Johnny; and test pilot Ben Grimm — obtained their superpowers after their experimental rocket ship passed through cosmic rays that altered their atomic structures.
And although they gained superpowers, they also retained their alltoohuman personalities.
Although Richards amazingly could now stretch and bend his body into any shape as Mr. Fantastic, for example, he could be as boorishly longwinded and pompous as ever. And Grimm could caustically reprimand him by saying, ‘‘You don’t have to make a speech, big shot!’’
Marvel’s new series was an immediate hit.
With its success, the Marvel universe expanded to include the Hulk, the XMen, Thor, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, Iron Man, the Avengers and many other characters.
But the character that
Marvel had the most success with was SpiderMan, which Lee and artist Ditko introduced in August 1962.
SpiderMan’s alter ego, Peter Parker, was a bookish and alienated teenager who gained his superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.
Although the webslinging crimefighter clashed with various villains, he was still the same geeky Parker: a bookworm who is bullied by football players, ignored by girls and lives with his motherly aunt, who reminds him wear his gumboots in the rain.
‘‘You ask the audience to suspend disbelief and accept that some idiot can climb on walls,’’ Lee said in a 1992 Washington Post interview, ‘‘but once that’s accepted, you ask: What would life be like in the real world if there were such a character? Would he still have to worry about dandruff, about acne, about getting girlfriends, about keeping a job?’’
Tall, lean and fit, with a trim moustache and greengrey eyes hidden by his trademark prescription sunglasses, Lee was much sought after by the media. He did interviews, appeared on TV talk shows, lectured at universities and, in 1972, even presented an ‘‘Evening With Stan Lee’’ at Carnegie Hall.
‘‘Stan, because of his personality and ability to talk in front of people, became the spokesman for all the comic books,’’ Bill Liebowitz, long the owner of Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles, said in an interview before his own death in 2004. ‘‘He’s the guy who got on Johnny Carson, the guy who always got interviewed, because he had a quick wit and easy way about him.’’
Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber to Romanian immigrant parents in New York on December 28, 1922. While in high school, his flair for writing landed him a parttime job turning out advance obituaries of famous people for the Associated Press, a job he quit after growing ‘‘tired of writing about living people in the past tense.’’
After graduating in 1939, Lee landed a job as an editorial assistant at a small publishing company in Manhattan owned by Martin Goodman, the husband of Lee’s cousin Jean. One of the earliest publishers of pulp magazines, Goodman published comic books under the name Timely Comics.
From sweeping floors and proofreading, Lee quickly worked his way up to assistant to Kirby, then the art director, and Joe Simon, the editor.
His first written piece for Timely (later renamed Atlas Comics before becoming Marvel Comics in the early 1960s) appeared in Captain America No 3 in May 1941: ‘‘Captain America Foils The Traitor’s Revenge!’’
By August, he was a published comic book scriptwriter. But instead of using his real name, he used the pen name Stan Lee. With ambitions of becoming a novelist, he later said, he didn’t want to have his real name associated with what he considered ‘‘these silly little books.’’
When both Kirby and Simon left Timely Comics in 1941,
Lee, not yet 19, was asked to fill in as editor and art director. By then, he was writing many of the company’s comic book scripts, finding that his longtime love of reading and going to the movies helped him come up with simple plots.
After Pearl Harbour, Lee enlisted in the army but remained in the US during World War 2, writing instructional manuals and scripts for Signal Corps training films. In his spare time, he freelanced comic book scripts for Timely. After the war, he returned to his old job.
In 1961, he was about to follow through on one of his periodic threats to quit the comicbook business when publisher Goodman asked him to come up with a team of superheroes to compete with DC Comics’ (then called National Periodical Publications) new Justice League of America series featuring its stable of superheroes that, among others, included Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.
He had planned on telling Goodman he was going to leave the company, he recalled, but that night his wife talked him out of it.
As recounted in his 2002 book Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee, his wife told him it was a perfect opportunity for him to create comic book heroes the way he had always wanted to write them: characters who speak like real people and have depth and substance to them, and he could do it in a style he had always wanted to do that would attract older readers as well as younger ones.
On a creative roll throughout the ’60s, Lee scripted most of Marvel’s superhero comic books but began to have less handson involvement beginning in the ’70s. In 1972, he stepped down as editor in chief and became Marvel’s publisher and editorial director.
By the late ’70s, Lee was primarily writing only the SpiderMan newspaper cartoon strip, which his brother Larry drew, and spending the rest of his time supervising the transition of Marvel’s characters into other media such as The Incredible Hulk, the hit TV series starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno.
By the early ’80s, Lee had left New York for Los Angeles to oversee Marvel’s animation studios, which produced cartoon adaptations.
In 1998, Marvel filed for bankruptcy, voiding a $1 millionayear contract with Lee. This set off a complex series of lawsuits, filed by Lee and in some cases filed by others against him. In 2005, Marvel and Lee reached a settlement over film royalties, the terms of which were not made public.
Lee was listed as executive producer on numerous, hugely successful films starring Marvel characters, including SpiderMan, XMen and Iron Man and made dozens of cameo appearances in Marvel blockbusters, usually as an unsuspecting bystander offering a moment of levity. As he advanced in age, Lee began to shoot his cameos backtoback in anticipation.
Stan Lee is survived by a daughter, Joan Celia (J.C.) Lee, and a brother, Larry Lieber. Joan, his wife of nearly 70 years, died in July 2017; a second daughter had died shortly after birth in 1953. —