Marvel co-creator Stan Lee dies at 95
US pop culture legend dies aged 95, leaving an unrivalled legacy
LOS ANGELES: Stan Lee, the creative dynamo who revolutionised the comic book and made billions for Hollywood by introducing human frailties in Marvel superheroes such as Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, died in Los Angeles on Monday at the age of 95.
Lee was considered the architect of the modern comic book. He revived the industry in the 1960s by offering the costumes and action craved by younger readers.
His recent projects included Avengers: Infinity War and Guardians of the Galaxy. Captain America actor Chris Evans mourned his loss on Twitter: “There will never be another Stan Lee. For decades he provided both young and old with adventure, escape, comfort, confidence, inspiration.” Some claim Lee created a new comic book daily for 10 years. “I wrote so many I don’t even know,” he said.
In 1960 Stan Lee was 38 years old, and it could plausibly be argued that he was a failure. He was a comic-book writer, at a time when the comic-book industry — never considered a credible line of work in the first place — had collapsed in on itself and seemed on the brink of extinction.
He wasn’t even a top comic-book writer, working for a company variously named Timely, Atlas and Marvel that was one of the industry also-rans, toiling in the shadow of DC Comics and itself on the brink of bankruptcy. With a wife and two daughters to support, Lee was seriously considering getting out of comics and finding some kind of work that would bring more prestige, more reliable employment and, of course, more money.
In 1970, only a decade later, the comic-book industry was resurgent, Marvel Comics was the industry leader and, as publisher, editor-in-chief and primary writer, the exuberant Stan “The Man” Lee was inarguably the most important person in the comics industry.
In 2010 comics seemed to have absorbed the rest of the entertainment industry. Books, movies, plays, television shows and video games were being built around all the top comics characters, and none more so than those created by Lee. Marvel Comics stood alongside DC at the top of the medium, with the rest of the entertainment world queuing up to mine its riches.
And when Lee, the grand old man of comics, finally died on Monday at 95, a good case could be made that we’d lost American popular culture’s most significant figure of the second half of the 20th century.
How did the nobody of 1960 become the icon of 2010?
Through the years Lee was frequently offered the chance to write novels and screenplays. While he occasionally tinkered with such ideas, however, he never seriously undertook any of these projects. Lee was a comic-book guy, he always said, and got everything he needed as a writer out of comics.
“A comic book is a novel with no page limit, a movie with no budget, a play with an infinite cast,” he said in 1999. “Anything I can imagine, I can put onto the comic-book page. Where else can I do that, and what else could a guy ever need?”
Lee was not, however, a great comic-book writer as such. Though subsequent generations of comics writers and artists venerated his work, he did his last regular writing in the early 1970s and, though he undertook occasional, limited projects in the next four decades, none was especially successful. His earlier work was vastly influential but little read and, when Hollywood came calling for the characters he had created, it was rarely his stories that they wanted to bring to the screen. Lee created the X-Men, Daredevil and Spider-Man, but the film versions were more influenced by later writers: Chris Claremont on the X-Men, Frank Miller on Daredevil and Gerry Conway on Spider-Man.
What Lee had, however, was better than mere talent: He had an idea, he had a method and he had a gift.
Lee’s idea, as the 1960s dawned, was that comic-books didn’t have to be for kids. Instead of the eight-year-old boys who had been the target audience when he started writing for Timely during World War II, and who continued to be the bread-and-butter of DC’s Superman and Batman, Lee targeted high-school and college-age readers of both sexes.
His comics were breezy and irreverent, written in the slang of the day and unafraid to broach such contemporary controversies as race relations, drug abuse and the war in Vietnam, all treated seriously and from Lee’s staunchly liberal perspective. His heroes were not infallible adults like DC’s Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, but believable teenagers and young adults who were as likely to screw up their personal lives as to send the bad guys running.
The X-Men, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch were all teenagers, their struggles to master their own powers and figure out their role in society obvious analogues for 1960s teens’ own struggles to find a place in a rapidly changing America. Even Lee’s older characters were anything but infallible, and he brought humanity even to his villains, some of whom ultimately straightened out and became heroes.
Lee’s method was a production process that became known as “the Marvel Way”. Whereas earlier comics had been dominated by the writer, who would hand the artist dummy pages filled with panel-bypanel sketches to be rendered more or less exactly on the finished page, Lee handed his artists — chief among them Jack Kirby, with whom Lee created the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, the Avengers and the X-Men, and Steve Ditko, who drew the earliest adventures of Spider-Men and Doctor Strange — prose summaries of the stories he had in mind. It was up to the artist to figure out exactly how the story should be told, what should be seen, how and in how many panels.
“I was always a terrible artist,” Lee explained. “Guys like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Buscema, they were brilliant artists — on their worst days they could draw better than I ever could. Who was I to tell them how to do their jobs? I gave them the basic idea, and when it came back to me for the dialogue it was always better than I ever could have pictured it myself.”
Lee’s approach gave much more freedom to his artists, who were often credited as “co-plotters”, and it drew to him not only some of the industry’s top artists but also younger men — men such as Neil Adams, Jim Steranko and Barry Windsor-Smith — who in previous years might have considered comic books beneath them. Marvel’s comics had a cool, up-to-the-minute look that made them vastly more attractive to Lee’s targeted teenagers than anything DC’s veteran crew could offer. Soon DC was scrambling to play catch-up, poaching Marvel artists and trying to match its look.
Equally important, the Marvel Way enabled Lee to do less on each comic and therefore to do more comics. At his peak he wrote as many as a dozen titles each month, ensuring that Marvel comics had a unifying perspective to them, a common stylistic flair that convinced many readers to buy even comics they’d never heard of, simply because they were from Marvel.
They also had a unifying narrative. Because the same writer was behind most of Marvel’s main titles each month, crossovers between the various comics were a regular and hugely popular attraction. Daredevil might turn up in a random issue of Captain America, or Thor in an issue of
Iron Man, sometimes as a central part of the story and sometimes merely in passing, for a page or two. Marvel comics all took place in the same fictional “Marvel Universe”, and they had a continuity. If a villain seemingly died at the end of one issue, when he reappeared his survival would be explained, even if he’d died in
Amazing Spider-Man and reappeared in Incredible Hulk.
Presiding over the whole Universe was the avuncular Lee as “Stan the Man” or “Smiling Stan”, answering readers’ letters and rapping with his fans in “Stan’s Soapbox” editorial columns, all of which combined liberal, humanitarian philosophy with unabashed plugs for Marvel titles, and all of which ended with Lee’s trademark “Excelsior!”.
As for Lee’s gift, it was a simple one. He could create characters better, arguably, than any writer in any medium who ever lived. Claremont, Miller and the other great Marvel writers — Ed Brubaker, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Jim Starlin, J. Michael Straczynski, Roy Thomas, Len Wein and Marv Wolfman among them — brought a depth and diversity to their work that was beyond anything Lee ever tried, but they were building on foundations laid by Lee.
The Marvel Universe that they collectively built was a magical place, but it had sprung from the mind of one man. It was no accident that, decades after Lee had stopped writing and stepped down as editor, even after he was superseded as publisher, each Marvel comic still began its credits with the words: “Stan Lee Presents...”
The Marvel masters of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s had long outstripped Lee even at his best, but they knew where they had come from. Anyone who loved comic books, whether writers, artists or readers, knew that much.
I was always a terrible artist. Guys like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Buscema, they were brilliant artists
A page from issue #33 of Amazing Spider-Man, featuring the hero created by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko.