Stan Lee

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Stan Lee signed off his monthly column with a single word: "Excelsior!" It is also the New York state motto, which suited a man born Stanley Martin Lieber on the 28th of December 1922, in Manhattan. He started his working life filling inkwells and fetching lunch for artists at a small publishing house. He ended it as the actor with the highest-grossing film total ever, a record built almost entirely on brief cameo appearances. Between those two facts sits a question. How does a teenager who used a pen name so nobody would link him to comic books become the public face of a multimedia corporation? Lee chose the name Stan Lee because the low social status of comic books embarrassed him. He wanted to save his real name for the Great American Novel he planned to write one day. He never wrote that novel. He died on the 12th of November 2018, aged 95, having co-created Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, and a roster of characters that would reshape two industries. The story of that transformation is also a story of disputes, lawsuits, and a final lonely year that ended in court.

• 2. The Flawed Hero

  ›

  Before 1961, most superheroes were idealistically perfect people with no serious, lasting problems. Stan Lee changed that with the Fantastic Four, his first co-creation with artist Jack Kirby. He gave his heroes a flawed humanity. They bickered amongst themselves, worried about paying their bills, and fussed over impressing girlfriends. Some got bored. Some even got physically ill. The idea came from desperation. Publisher Martin Goodman, watching a rival succeed with an updated Flash and a new super-team, asked Lee to create a superhero team in response. Lee was dissatisfied with his career and considering quitting the field entirely. His wife suggested he experiment with the kind of stories he actually preferred, since he was planning to change careers and had nothing to lose. The Fantastic Four arrived in 1961, and its immediate popularity opened the floodgates. Working again with Kirby, Lee co-created the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and the X-Men. With Bill Everett came Daredevil. With Steve Ditko came Doctor Strange and Marvel's most successful character, Spider-Man. All of them lived in a single shared universe. Lee and Kirby also gathered new figures into The Avengers and revived 1940s creations like the Sub-Mariner and Captain America. Years later, Kirby and Lee would contest who deserved credit for creating the Fantastic Four.

• 3. The Marvel Method

  ›

  "If a kid has to go to a dictionary, that's not the worst thing that could happen," Lee liked to say, defending the sophisticated vocabulary he packed into his dialogue and captions. Throughout the 1960s he scripted, art-directed, and edited most of Marvel's series. He also moderated the letters pages and wrote a monthly column called "Stan's Soapbox". To survive that workload, he relied on a system that became known as the Marvel Method. Lee would brainstorm a story with the artist, then hand over a brief synopsis instead of a full script. The artist filled the pages, deciding the panel-to-panel storytelling. Only after the penciled pages came back did Lee write the word balloons and captions. In effect, the artists were co-plotters, building first drafts that Lee then refined. Comics historian Peter Sanderson compared the era to film. DC, he wrote, was "the equivalent of the big Hollywood studios" after its late-1950s reinvention of the superhero, but it had "run into a creative drought by the decade's end". The Marvel of the 1960s, by contrast, was "in its own way the counterpart of the French New Wave", pioneering new methods of storytelling and keeping readers into their teens and beyond. The signature achievement of Lee and Kirby is often named as the three-part Galactus Trilogy, which began in Fantastic Four #48 in March 1966. That issue was later voted #24 in a 2001 poll of Marvel's readers.

• 4. A Sense Of Community

  ›

  Letters to most comics publishers in the 1960s opened with "Dear Editor". Letters to Marvel opened with "Dear Stan and Jack". Lee took that familiarity as proof his approach worked, because his goal was for fans to think of the creators as friends. He built that bond deliberately. He introduced a credit panel on the splash page of each story, naming not only the writer and penciller but also the inker and letterer. The Bullpen Bulletins page carried chatty news about staff and upcoming storylines. In 1965, Lee recorded messages for the newly formed Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club. By 1967, the brand was embedded enough in popular culture that a radio program featuring Lee and Kirby was titled "Will Success Spoil Spiderman". Lee pushed the stories outward into the real world too. After Ditko left in 1966, John Romita Sr. became his collaborator on The Amazing Spider-Man, which overtook Fantastic Four as the company's top seller within a year. Their stories addressed the Vietnam War, political elections, and student activism. Robbie Robertson, introduced in The Amazing Spider-Man #51 in August 1967, was one of the first African-American characters in comics to hold a serious supporting role.

• 5. Defying The Code

  ›

  In 1971 the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare asked Stan Lee to write a comic-book story about the dangers of drugs. Lee built a three-issue subplot across The Amazing Spider-Man #96 through #98, in which Peter Parker's best friend becomes addicted to prescription drugs. The Comics Code Authority refused its seal of approval. The stories depicted drug use, and the anti-drug message was treated as irrelevant. Lee published them anyway. With Goodman's cooperation, and confident the original government request gave him cover, he ran the issues without the seal. They sold well, and Marvel won praise for its socially conscious efforts. Afterward the Code loosened to permit negative depictions of drugs, among other new freedoms. Lee had already been using comics for social commentary, often confronting racism and bigotry. He created the Falcon, comics' first African-American superhero, with Gene Colan in Captain America #117 in September 1969. In the Fantastic Four run he and Kirby introduced the Black Panther, an African king and mainstream comics' first black superhero. In 1972 Lee stopped writing monthly comics to become publisher. His final issue of The Amazing Spider-Man was #110, dated July 1972.

• 6. The Mixed Decades

  ›

  In 1981 Stan Lee moved to California to develop Marvel's television and movie properties. The results were mixed. He served as an executive producer and made cameo appearances in Marvel adaptations and other films. He kept returning to the page with Silver Surfer projects, including the Judgment Day graphic novel and the Parable limited series drawn by French artist Mœbius. He was briefly president of the whole company, then stepped down to become publisher again, finding the presidency too much about numbers and finance and not enough about the creative process he enjoyed. When he stepped away from regular duties in the 1990s, he kept an annual salary of $1 million as chairman emeritus. His independent ventures multiplied and often collapsed. In 1998 he and Peter Paul launched an Internet-based studio, Stan Lee Media, which grew to 165 people. Near the end of 2000, investigators uncovered illegal stock manipulation by Paul and a corporate officer. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2001. Lee was never implicated. He sued Marvel in 2002, claiming it had failed to pay his promised 10% share of profits from films featuring his co-creations. The two sides settled in 2005 for an undisclosed seven-figure amount. The same web of partnerships that produced POW! Entertainment in 2001 would, years later, become the source of his deepest troubles.

• 7. The Final Year

  ›

  On the 6th of July 2017, Joan Boocock, Lee's wife of 69 years, died of complications from a stroke. She was 95. Lee had married her on the 5th of December 1947. Her death opened a final, painful chapter. In 2017, while Lee was caring for his terminally ill wife and coping with his own failing eyesight, his company POW! was acquired by a Chinese firm, Camsing International. Lee sued POW! in May 2018, saying he had been handed a contract described as a non-exclusive license that turned out to be exclusive. He dropped the suit that July, stating he was "now happy to be surrounded by those who want the best for me". Other figures circled. The Hollywood Reporter described Lee as a victim of elder abuse, naming business manager Keya Morgan as someone isolating him from trusted friends after his wife's death. A restraining order was issued against Morgan in August 2018. He was later charged with five counts including false imprisonment, fraud, forgery, and elder abuse. Another former business manager, Jerardo Olivarez, was accused of changing Lee's will and moving millions from his accounts after gaining power of attorney. Lee died on the 12th of November 2018 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Roy Thomas, who had succeeded him as Marvel's editor-in-chief, had visited two days earlier to discuss the book The Stan Lee Story. Lee's last words to him were "God bless. Take care of my boy, Roy." Fans speculated he meant Spider-Man, though Lee had long nicknamed Thomas "Roy the Boy", in line with how he styled himself "Stan the Man" Lee.