STAN LEE
Remembering Stan Lee, the cosmic comic book creator whose characters conquered the media multiverse
The closest we’ll ever come to printing an obituary for God.
With the death of Stan Lee on 12 November, aged 95, the world lost its modern Shakespeare. Highbrow critics may shudder at the comparison, but it’s hardly a ludicrous claim. Lee didn’t create the superhero genre, but neither did the Bard invent drama. They did, however, reinvent their art forms, introducing enduring new tropes, injecting them with a humanity and social conscience and making them crowdpleasers. In Spider-Man, the Hulk and Black Panther, Lee has created iconic characters every bit as resonant as Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello. The hugely successful “shared world” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a live-action extension of the groundwork he laid in the early ’60s, making superheroes more relatable. Spider-Man was just as worried about finding a girlfriend, drug abuse and the Vietnam war as beating the Vulture.
Lee’s success was not overnight. Born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922 in Manhattan, New York to Romanian-born Jewish immigrant parents, he’d been working in the comics business for over 20 years before creating the Fantastic Four. In 1939 he joined Timely Comics (which would metamorphose into Marvel Comics in the ’60s) as a lowly office assistant, keeping the artists’ ink wells full. He immediately showed an aptitude for the business, and just two years later, aged 18, he was promoted to interim editor. He would go on to become editor-in-chief, then publisher. All the while he was honing his writing craft, though his most successful creation of the time – the Destroyer – is largely forgotten.
He’d been contemplating changing careers when his boss at Timely asked him to create a superhero team to rival DC’s Justice League. Lee had always dreamed of writing “the great American novel”, and it was his wife Joan (who he married in 1947 in a hotel room in Nevada, minutes after she divorced her estranged first husband) who encouraged him to experiment with this new team, since he had nothing to lose. The Fantastic Four were a dysfunctional family as much as superhero team. Readers loved it. Lee was more than happy to create more of his “flawed” heroes.
His innovations went further. He introduced credits panels for each issue, namechecking the letterers, colourists and editors, as well as the writers and artists. He wrote monthly Bullpen Bulletins that appeared in every comic, coming up with nicknames for his fellow workers. He and his teams broke the fourth wall, becoming characters in their own worlds. All this encouraged a bond between the readers and creators. Marvel wasn’t a publisher; it was a club. A very cool club.
He created the first black superhero (Black Panther) and first African-American superhero (the Falcon), and often tackled the subject of bigotry in his Stan’s Soapbox editorials. Notably, when hyping Luke Cage’s first appearance, he didn’t use the word “black”.
His post-Marvel ventures never had as much impact, but he gained new fame with his cameos in most Marvel films from X-Men onwards. In fact, when he didn’t turn up in X-Men: First Class, SFX readers awarded the no-show “Biggest Disappointment of the Year”.
Stan Lee is survived by his daughter, JC Lee, and a legion of True Believers. Excelsior. DG
There’ll be a massive tribute to Stan in the next SFX, on sale 3 January.