A 100th Birthday Salute to Stan Lee

tan Lee did not create the Marvel Universe alone. But it is completely fair to say that without him, in collaboration with top artistic talents like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Marvel as we know it would not exist. The result of their efforts is more than 60 years of high adventure, groundbreaking heroes and villains, and one of the most preeminent cinematic and television forces of all time. The Fantastic Four. The Hulk. Thor. Spider-Man. The X-Men. Lee was there at the beginning and at the center of it all. As Marvel’s editor, head writer and art director throughout the 1960s, he not only co-created most of the characters, he wrote the words that came out of their mouths, developed their personalities, kept the continuity straight and oversaw the…

Like many of the superhero characters he co-created, Stan Lee came from humble beginnings—his destiny thrust upon him rather than him seeking it out. It was not his intention to spend most of his career writing and editing comic books, or to become the face of an entire company, but he ended up doing both and emerged a household name as famous as the heroes themselves. Born Stanley Martin Lieber in New York City on Dec. 28, 1922, he was the son of Jewish-Romanian immigrants. His father, Jack, worked as a dress cutter in the city’s garment district, but lost his job in the Great Depression. His mother, Celia, was a housewife. For the first eight years of his life, Stanley was an only child. Eventually, his younger brother, Larry,…

By 1961, Stan Lee had been in the comic business, working for publisher Martin Goodman, for nearly 20 years—and he wanted out. As both an editor and a writer, Lee was tired of cranking out what he felt was increasingly generic and uninspired material, while his personal ambitions for literary greatness were going unfulfilled. Now Goodman was adding to Lee’s workload with the directive to come up with a new series for his company, the recently renamed Marvel Comics, that could compete with the superhero success story coming from rival publisher DC Comics. One year earlier, DC had launched Justice League of America, a “team book” featuring the company’s brightest stars, including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern and Aquaman. It quickly found an audience—and it was a…

After the success of The Fantastic Four, Marvel wanted to add even more superhero titles to its line. According to Stan Lee, his main goal for a follow-up was to be innovative—and to focus on a single character instead of a team. Lee said that, based on the mail coming in from Fantastic Four readers, “It was patently apparent that the Thing was the most popular character.… Not only did the readers like him best, but he grabbed me too.” He became intrigued by the idea of making a hero out of a monster—an unpredictable, potentially dangerous monster, but one that was, at heart, a force for good. “I just wanted to create a lovable monster—almost like the Thing, but more so,” Lee explained in a 1981 interview. “I had…

n the middle of 1962, Stan Lee was hoping to introduce a new superhero who would be even “bigger, better, stronger” than the Fantastic Four and the Hulk. The most logical next step, he felt, was a “Super-God,” one who could inhabit a whole new environment and provide a much grander scope for adventures. Not God himself, though—Lee was not about to risk offending “any reader of almost any religious affiliation.” But a god—emphasis on the lowercase g—as a superhero? That was too good an idea to pass up. For inspiration, Lee looked to the north. “As far as I can remember, Norse mythology always turned me on,” he wrote in Origins of Marvel Comics. “There was something about those mighty, horn-helmeted Vikings and their tales of Valhalla, of Ragnarok,…

In his efforts to build the most exciting and innovative line of comic books in the industry, Stan Lee decided to break the “rules” of the superhero genre. The question was, would his boss—Marvel publisher Martin Goodman—let him do it? While Lee disliked the longstanding comic book trope of teenage sidekicks to adult superheroes—the most notable being Batman’s ward, Robin, and Captain America’s partner, Bucky—he thought it would be different and interesting to have a teenage superhero as a solo operative. Furthermore, since he was aiming for characters with whom readers could easily relate, Lee envisioned this hero constantly beset by problems and failures. “The main character would lose out as often as he’d win—in fact, more often,” he wrote in Origins of Marvel Comics. “Nothing would progress according to…