Larry Lieber

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Larry Lieber could not say where he found the word uru, the name of the mystical metal from which Thor's hammer Mjolnir is made. It first appeared in the debut of Marvel's thunder god, in Journey into Mystery #83, cover-dated August 1962. Lieber only remembered that he liked how short it was and how easy it would be on the letterer. He often built names from pieces of foreign surnames in the biographical section at the back of a dictionary.

  Lawrence D. Lieber was born on the 26th of October 1931. He is an American comic book writer and artist, and he is the co-creator of the Marvel Comics heroes Iron Man, Thor and Ant-Man. Yet his name is far less familiar than theirs. His older brother was Stan Lee, the writer, editor and publisher who became the public face of Marvel.

  How does a messenger boy from the Bronx end up scripting the first adventures of three superheroes? Why did he step away from them so quickly? And what did it cost to be the brother of the most famous man in comics? The answers run through monster stories, Westerns, a short-lived rival publisher and a newspaper strip that outlasted all of them.

  2314

• 2. Bronx To Woodmere

  ›

  Larry Lieber was born in Manhattan, the second child of Romanian-Jewish immigrants Celia and Jack Lieber. When he was six months old, the family moved to the Bronx and settled at 1720 University Avenue. His brother Stanley, later known as Stan Lee, described the home as a one-bedroom, "third-floor apartment facing out back." The two boys shared a bedroom while their parents slept on a foldout couch.

  At about ten and a half, with his brother away in the U.S. Army, Lieber moved with his parents back to Manhattan. They settled in the Washington Heights neighborhood. He already liked art and drawing by then, and he attended George Washington High School.

  The next move is told in different ways. In his autobiography, Lee wrote that their mother died while Larry was a teenager. Larry then went to live with Lee and his wife Joan, and the trio relocated to Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. Lee elsewhere placed that move to a three-bedroom house at 1084 West Broadway in 1949. Lieber told comics historian Daniel Best: "My mother died when I was 16. My brother was back from the Service, he was just married and he moved out outside of New York to Long Island. I lived with him for a while and it didn't work out so well. I wanted to leave, so I left. I was very young and I had a couple of jobs."

  At 17, Lieber became a messenger for The New York Times. He also found work at the Times Square studio of Sam Furber, a letterer whose jobs included movie posters. For roughly a year and a half, he lived at the Hotel Manhattan Towers, a residence hotel at Broadway and West 76th Street. His next job would come through the publishing company where his brother already worked.

  46895

• 3. Paste-Ups And Okinawa

  ›

  Stan Lee had become editor of Timely Comics in 1941. Timely was the future Marvel Comics, then a division of a publishing company owned by a relative, Martin Goodman. Lieber started at Goodman's company as an art assistant on the magazine side, doing paste-ups. He worked by day and studied in the evening at the Pratt Institute, an art school in Brooklyn.

  It was at Pratt that Lieber began illustrating comic books. His first known credit is the four-page crime story "Cop on the Beat" in All True Crime #44, cover-dated May 1951. He penciled and inked it, and the writer is unknown.

  In that same year of 1951, Lieber enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He did boot camp at Sampson Air Force Base, near the Finger Lakes region of New York State. The Korean War was under way, and he spent two years of his four-year enlistment stationed on Okinawa.

  On his return, Lieber studied at Manhattan's Art Students League. "I still wanted to be an artist and do comics, but I had in mind to eventually become an illustrator," he said in 1999. "I was drawing, but I was slow." He drew again for his brother at Atlas Comics, the 1950s forerunner of Marvel. Whether he worked on staff or as a freelancer is uncertain.

  His next confirmed credit is "A World to Conquer," a three-page story in Journey into Unknown Worlds #52, dated December 1956. Romance comics followed, including Love Romances, Love Tales, Stories of Romance, True Tales of Love and The Romances of Nurse Helen Grant. Writers and artists were rarely credited then, so he may have done more than the records show. He recalled writing some or all of those stories, "because I remember Stan was saying to me, 'You write romances really well.'" The last of them appeared in an issue cover-dated July 1958.

  101112142

• 4. Writing For Kirby

  ›

  After a downturn at the publisher, virtually every comics staffer was fired except Lee. He was left doing the writing alone. "Stan said he wanted somebody to help him write, and he had nobody then," Lieber recalled. "I said, 'I'm not really a writer.' He said, 'Oh, I've read your letters.'"

  Lieber was by then living in the Tudor City apartment complex in Manhattan. He began freelancing regularly for the young Marvel Comics, writing stories for Jack Kirby to draw. Kirby had co-created Captain America for the company in 1940. He had recently returned for a long, exclusive stint during which he would co-create many signature Marvel characters.

  In the late 1950s, Kirby was drawing science fiction and fantasy tales, followed by giant-monster stories. Collectors and historians call this period "pre-superhero Marvel." The stories ran mainly in Journey into Mystery, Strange Tales, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish.

  Lieber described his method clearly. "Stan made up the plot, and then he'd give it to me, and I'd write the script," he said. "Tudor City had a park, and when it was nice I'd sit there and break the story down picture by picture." He felt unsure of himself at a blank page. Because he could draw, he pictured each shot first and typed it up later. "After a while, I'd just go to the typewriter," he said.

  His earliest tentatively confirmed monster script is the six-page "I Am the Beast-Man," illustrated by Don Heck, in Strange Tales #77, dated October 1960. His first confirmed script is the 13-page "I Led the Strange Search for Manoo" in Amazing Adventures #2, dated July 1961. Kirby penciled it and Dick Ayers inked it. A year later, his brother would hand him something bigger than a monster.

  1513222018

• 5. Gods And Armored Men

  ›

  Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish each carried a Lieber script that launched a hero. Working from Stan Lee's plots, he wrote the debut origin stories of Thor, Iron Man and Ant-Man. Kirby co-created Thor and Ant-Man with him, and Kirby and Don Heck co-created Iron Man. Lieber also chose the names of their alter egos: Donald Blake, Tony Stark and Hank Pym.

  Lee told the story in 1974 with his usual showmanship. He said he could no longer write every origin himself while juggling the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Spider-Man and a pile of other series. He wanted to groom other writers, and his gaze landed on his brother, who had often said he wanted to write a superhero story. Lieber remembered it far more plainly. "Thor was just another story. I didn't think about it at all," he said. "Stan said, 'I'm trying to make up a character,' and he gave me the plot, and he said, 'Why don't you write the story?'"

  Those eight Thor stories brought in Loki, Odin and Balder from the Norse gods. They also introduced their home of Asgard and Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge that linked it to Earth. For the Human Torch series, Lieber co-created the long-running villain the Wizard in Strange Tales #102, dated November 1962.

  His time with the heroes was short. After the Iron Man debut in Tales of Suspense #39, dated March 1963, Lee replaced Lieber with Robert Bernstein, who wrote as "R. Berns." Don Rico, writing as "N. Korok," later took two issues. On Ant-Man, Lieber wrote the first nine stories, in Tales to Astonish #35-43, dated September 1962 to May 1963. Veteran Ernie Hart did five issues, and then Lee took over.

  Lieber admitted he struggled with dialogue. Lee, he said, grew exasperated and threatened to hire some of the old pros. A week after bringing one in, Lee told him: "Larry, you know something, you're no good, but you're better than these other guys." Lieber called it his first victory. He also credited Lee as a good editor and writing teacher who made few changes to his scripts, and fewer as time went on. Lieber would soon choose a different path himself.

  1617192124

• 6. The Rawhide Kid Years

  ›

  Rawhide Kid #41, cover-dated August 1964, began Lieber's run writing and penciling the Marvel Western. It continued through 1973, after which the title became reprints. He considered it his signature series. He recalled wanting a little more freedom and disliking the style that was developing, which he thought carried too much humor.

  "When I did Rawhide Kid, I wanted people to cry as if they were watching High Noon or something," he said. He wanted to make everything serious. He also wanted to do a little drawing again, which the scripting jobs had not allowed.

  Other assignments came in between. Lieber penciled The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #4-5, dated 1967-68, and the second of those showed the late parents of Peter Parker in a flashback. In Marvel Super-Heroes #20, dated May 1969, he co-wrote and co-penciled the first solo Doctor Doom feature. For the men's magazines of Magazine Management, he also did several stories of a bawdy comedy feature called "Pussycat."

  When the Rawhide Kid run ended, Marvel work thinned out. He scripted, and sometimes drew, the odd Western or Sgt. Fury war story. He also did standalone tales for black-and-white magazines such as Vampire Tales and Haunt of Horror. "It wasn't a very easy period," he said in 1999. "They needed superhero-reprint covers, and I could do them somewhat in Kirby's style."

  Rival DC Comics was not an option. Other Marvel writers and artists went there, but Lieber felt he could not. "That was the price for Stan being my brother," he said. DC, he figured, would have suspected that Stan Lee was sending a spy. In 1974, an offer finally arrived from outside Marvel.

  252623292

• 7. Atlas And Marvel UK

  ›

  In June 1974, Martin Goodman launched a new company to compete head-to-head with Marvel and DC. Goodman had sold Marvel in 1968 and left it in 1972. Historians call the new line Atlas/Seaboard, after its Atlas Comics imprint published by Seaboard Periodicals, to tell it apart from the 1950s Atlas. Lieber left Marvel to become an editor there.

  Goodman gave him the black-and-white comics magazines. He hired Jeff Rovin, a veteran of Warren Publishing, to edit the color line. Lieber later said this was an unfortunate arrangement. His own experience was in color comics, while Rovin knew the black-and-white format. Goodman also had to pay high freelance rates, because nobody wanted to work for a new and unproven company.

  Rovin's books did not turn out well, and Rovin finally left angrily. Lieber took over all of them just as business turned bad. He had to cut rates and tell people they would earn less, which he called "not an enviable position."

  Atlas went under in late 1975. Lieber received six months of severance pay and spent the time trying to devise a newspaper comic strip. Lee then offered him the editorship of Marvel UK, a New York City-based imprint that produced black-and-white reprint comics for the British market. It also produced new stories of the hero Captain Britain.

  With Gary Friedrich as his main co-scripter, Lieber wrote the seven-page lead feature in the weekly Captain Britain #24-37. Those issues ran from the 23rd of March to the 22nd of June 1977. With co-writer Jim Lawrence, he then wrote Captain Britain adventures in Super Spider-Man #233-246, from the 27th of July to the 26th of October 1977. A new Marvel job soon arrived in the Sunday and daily newspapers.

  27282926

• 8. Newspaper Strips

  ›

  In 1978, Lieber began penciling, and sometimes inking, the new daily and Sunday strip The Incredible Hulk. Lee wrote it, and the Register and Tribune Syndicate distributed it. Lieber started writing it as well in early 1979. He gave up the regular art in spring 1979 and the regular writing in mid-1982. He still contributed the odd installment until the strip ended in September 1982.

  He recalled that the Hulk was popular on television, but the strip slipped until Lee offered it to him. "So once again I was writing and drawing, and that I enjoyed even more than the Rawhide Kid," he said. Lee gave a rare compliment, telling him it was "very good" and even more dramatic than the Spider-Man strip.

  Then came Spider-Man. In 1980 and 1981, Lieber contributed some penciling to the daily and Sunday strip The Amazing Spider-Man, until Fred Kida became the regular penciler. After Kida retired, Lieber succeeded him on the daily strip in 1986. He penciled the Sunday page again from 1990 through at least 1995. Around the same time, he wrote and penciled two Spider-Man comic stories, in Web of Spider-Man #21 and #25.

  In a 2010 interview, Lieber described the routine with his brother. "I get a full script," he said, and he could make certain changes, but he welcomed having a full script. He phoned Lee every week and faxed him reduced pencils, sometimes only roughs. When Lee made corrections, Lieber said he fortunately agreed with them. He retired from penciling the strip in July 2018, and his final strip ran on the 8th of September 2018.

  Awards followed. San Diego Comic-Con gave him an Inkpot Award in 2003. In 2008, he was one of two winners of the Bill Finger Award, presented on the 25th of July 2008 at the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. In 2025, the Inkwell Awards gave him their honorary Keeper of the Flame Award for seven decades of work as a writer, editor and artist, including inking.

  3031323334