Marvel comics legend who created Spider-Man, Iron Man and the Hulk

Born: December 28, 1922;

Died: November 12, 2018

STAN Lee, who has died aged 95, was an American comic book writer whose co-creation of some of the most iconic superhero characters of our time for Marvel comics led him to a long career as a distinctive media and film personality. Alongside revered artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, the slew of characters Lee devised throughout the 1960s includes Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and Doctor Strange. With all of the above coming together to form an ever-expanding, multi-billion dollar movie franchise in the 21st century, Lee’s short comedy cameos in each film also gave him a filmography most Hollywood A-listers would be proud of.

Born Stanley Martin Lieber in Manhattan, New York, Lee was the eldest son of Romanian Jewish immigrants Jack and Celia; his only sibling, younger brother Larry Lieber, went on to write comic scripts from many of Stan’s plots, and it was he who named Iron Man’s alter-ego Tony Stark. Growing up during the Great Depression, Lee moved north to a one-bedroom apartment in the New York borough of the Bronx, where he went to high school.

Inspired by movies featuring Errol Flynn, Charlie Chan and Roy Rogers, and encouraged by his parents and his favourite teacher, Mr Ginsberg, Lee started writing as a teenager, boosted hugely by a praising letter from the editor of the Herald Tribune in response to a writing contest entry made when he was 15. Leaving school at 16, Lee worked variously as a news service obituary writer, a trouser factory office boy, a copywriter for a hospital and a Broadway usher (he once, legend has it, tripped and fell on his face while escorting Eleanor Roosevelt to her seat).

It was another of these odd jobs which would over the decades lead to define the comic book industry and eventually mainstream Hollywood. When Lee was hired in 1939 by his publisher cousin-in-law Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics, it was as the office help, filling inkwells and tidying pencil art with an eraser. The company hit big with the first edition of editor-in-chief Joe Simon and art editor Kirby’s Captain America in 1941, although the pair left soon after in a dispute with Goodman over bonuses. Lee, who had become a published writer with text stories and comic strips in later editions of Captain America (wishing to keep his birth name for more ‘literary’ projects, he wrote comics under a variety of aliases; ‘Stan Lee’ stuck), was appointed Timely’s editor-in-chief at the age of 19.

“Stan (was a) really free thinker,” recalled Vince Fago, Lee’s successor as editor-in-chief, in an interview with the 1960s fanzine Alter Ego. “He used to play a recorder all day long, it was like a clarinet, it made it very nice for everybody. Everybody felt Stan was wonderful, he kept things pretty loose.” Fago replaced Lee for the three years between 1942 and 1945, while the latter served in the US Army in New Jersey, first in the Signal Corps and then as a ‘playwright’ in the Training Film Division. With the end of the Second World War, Lee returned to his old job at Timely.

Under Goodman’s direction, Lee steered the comic line for the next decade and a half, through Captain America’s closure and the end of the ‘Golden Age’ of superheroes in 1950, the ‘50s rebranding as Atlas Comics with a mixed bag of variously successful war, horror, western, sci-fi and revived superhero titles, and the dismissal of the company’s entire creative staff in 1958 to clear a backlog of paid-for work.

The 1960s brought another low-key rebranding, this time as Marvel Comics, the title of Timely’s first comic publication in 1939, although Lee – approaching 40 by this point – felt jaded with the industry and had all but resolved to leave. Noticing the modest success of competitor DC Comics’ recent superhero revival, Goodman asked Lee to try something similar. Working with Kirby, who needed work and was back in the fold, Lee decided to throw everything he thought the genre could be at the wall before he quit.

The result was November 1961’s first edition of The Fantastic Four, a title which blew a revolutionary gale through the industry. Next to the detached, aloof archetypes of DC’s long-established Superman and Batman, these super-powered heroes were ‘real’ people; a pair of young scientists in a relationship; one of their hot-headed teenage brothers; a dashing test pilot turned into a monster made of bricks.

Generally working with Kirby or (on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange) Ditko, Lee’s prolific slate of co-created follow-ups spun a similar formula. Spider-Man was a nerdy teenager dealing with guilt over his uncle’s death; the X-Men’s powers made them outcasts from society; the Hulk was a man of science turned into an uncontrollable Frankenstein’s monster powered by his own repressed rage. These were contemporary comics populated by troubled teens, Communist spies, black characters, city politics and psychedelic other worlds, and they swept through youth culture.

In 1972 Lee stepped back from full-time comics writing to become publisher at Marvel, but the personality of this unique showman in dark glasses still permeated the line through his ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ editorial page, his trademark verbose writing style addressing readers as “True Believers” and signing off “Excelsior!” Although he returned to write the characters he created many times, and attempted to launch a number of comic, film and television projects for different companies, his main role in his last few decades of life was as the enthusiastic representative and embodiment of Marvel Comics; as well as over 30 Marvel movies, he appeared as himself on television in The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory and Entourage, and in the films Kick-Ass and Mallrats.

Stan Lee married his wife Joan in 1947 and they had two children, Joan Celia and Jan (who died in infancy). For a generation of comic readers and pop culture obsessives, he and his key collaborators were as important as the Beatles. “(He) stole back the annihilating radiation of the Bomb,” said Glaswegian comic writer Grant Morrison in his book Supergods, “and for children like me, raised in its icy shadow, he peopled the glowing darkness with extraordinary heroes.”

DAVID POLLOCK