The comic book titan who made superheroes human

In 1961, Stan Lee tore up the comics rule book. A writer at Marvel Comics, he was bored with churning out generic stories filled with cardboard characters. So when Lee was instructed to create a team of superheroes that could challenge rival DC Comics’ new Justice League of America, he saw the chance to push the format’s limits. Together with artist Jack Kirby, Lee dreamed up the Fantastic Four: Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing. Unlike the bland, perfect Superman, the Fantastic Four were very human; they squabbled and struggled with self-doubt and angst. “I tried to make them real fleshand-blood characters,” said Lee, “which should not be considered radical.” The comic was a hit—Marvel’s circulation nearly doubled to 13 million in a year—and in 1962 Lee introduced his defining hero: the neurotic, wisecracking Spider-Man. As editor and later publisher of Marvel, Lee was superhumanly productive, helping create Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, and the Mighty Thor. The Marvel Universe now offers bottomless material for Disney blockbusters, and while Lee wasn’t involved in movie production, he delighted in his creations’ ubiquity. “If I may be totally candid,” he wrote, “I’m my biggest fan.” Stanley Lieber was born in New York City to Romanian Jewish immigrants, his father “a dress cutter who was frequently out of work,” said The Washington Post. After high school he took a job at his cousin-in-law’s Timely Publications, which published Marvel and was home to Captain America. Lee earned $8 a week running errands, but was soon thinking up stories—he went by several pseudonyms and “Stan Lee” stuck. After serving stateside during World War II, Lee returned to Timely just as the so-called Golden Age of comics was coming to an end. Under pressure from politicians who claimed comics promoted juvenile delinquency, the industry imposed a draconian self-censorship code in 1954. “Graphic gore and moral ambiguity were out, but so largely were wit, literary influences, and attention to social issues,” said The New York Times. Readers found the sanitized comics boring, and within a few years annual sales dropped by three-quarters from a high of 600 million. Lee was on the verge of quitting the industry in 1961 when his wife pushed him to shake things up with the Fantastic Four. Re-energized, he wrote up to five comic books a week and helped devise a string of other “memorable but flawed superheroes,” said The Times (U.K.). Iron Man was a billionaire industrialist with a piece of shrapnel dangerously close to his heart; the Hulk couldn’t control the anger that gave him his strength; Daredevil’s blindness boosted his other senses. But many of Lee’s Marvel collaborators thought they weren’t given sufficient credit for their work. Steve Ditko, who co-created Spider-Man, quit Marvel in 1966; Kirby defected to DC in 1970. Lee became Marvel’s publisher in 1972 and “spoke directly to fans in columns and letter pages with an enthusiastic, personable voice,” said The Wall Street Journal. His missives concluded with trademark signoffs, “Nuff said” and “Excelsior!” Lee moved to Hollywood in 1980 to develop Marvel TV shows and movies but found little success outside the CBS series The Incredible Hulk. He spent much of the past two decades on business ventures outside Marvel—owned by Disney since 2009—and “had no involvement in the wave of Marvel-based movies that began with 2000’s X-Men, save for cameos that fans came to love.” Lee played a mailman in 2005’s Fantastic Four, a Hugh Hefner lookalike in 2008’s Iron Man, and a strip club DJ in 2016’s Deadpool. He remained fiercely prolific, churning out new characters and story concepts into his 90s. “I want to do more of everything I’m doing,” Lee said in 2010. “The only problem is time. I just wish there were more time.”