Stan Lee
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Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber on December 28, 1922, at home at West 98th Street and West End Avenue, New York City) is an American writer, editor, and memoirist, who — with several artist co-creators, especially Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko — introduced complex, naturalistic characters and a thoroughly shared universe into superhero comic books. His success helped change Marvel Comics from a small publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.
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Early career
Lee was born to Celia and Jack Lieber, Jewish immigrants from Romania. His father, trained as a dress cutter, worked only sporadically after the Great Depression. The family moved further uptown to Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood. When he was nine, his only sibling, brother Larry Lieber, was born. Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. A voracious reader who enjoyed writing as a teen, he worked such part-time jobs as writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Center; delivering sandwiches for the Jack May pharmacy to offices in Rockefeller Center; working as an office boy for a trouser manufacturer; ushering at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway; and selling subscriptions to the New York Herald-Tribune newspaper. He graduated high school early, at age 16 1/2, in 1939, and joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project.
With the help of his uncle, Robbie Solomon, a relative of pulp magazine and comic-book publisher Martin Goodman, Lee was brought in as an assistant at the newly formed Timely Comics division of Goodman's publishing company. Timely, by the the 1960s, would evolve into Marvel Comics. Lee, whose cousin Jean was married to Goodman, was formally hired by Timely editor Joe Simon.1
Lee's first published work, the text filler "Captain America Foils The Traitor's Revenge" in Captain America Comics #3 (May 1941), used the pseudonym "Stan Lee", which years later he would adopt as his legal name. He graduated from writing filler to actual comics with a backup two issues later. When Simon and his creative partner Jack Kirby left later that year, following after a dispute with Goodman, the publisher told Lee, just under 19 years old, to be the interim editor. The youngster showed a knack for the business that led him to remain as the comic-book division's editor-in-chief until 1972, when he would succeed Goodman as publisher.
Lee enlisted in the U.S. Army in early 1942 and served in the Signal Corps, writing manuals, training films, and slogans, and occasionally cartooning. His military classification was "playwright"; Lee has said only nine men in the U.S. Army were awarded that title. Vincent Fago, editor of Timely's "animation comics" section, which put out humor and funny animal comics, filled-in until Lee returned from his World War II military service in 1945.
In the mid-1950s, by which time the company was now generally known as Atlas Comics, a decency campaign led by psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham and Senator Estes Kefauver blamed comic books for corrupting young readers with images of violence and sexuality. Comic-book companies responded by implementing strict internal regulations, and eventually adopted the stringent Comics Code.
During this period, Lee wrote comics in a various genres including romance, Westerns, humor, science fiction, medieval adventure. horror and suspense. By the end of the decade, he had become dissatisfied with his career and considered quitting the field.
Marvel revolution
In the late 1950's, DC Comics revived the superhero genre and experienced a significant success with its updated version of the Flash (comics), and later with super-team the Justice League of America. In response, publisher Martin Goodman assigned Lee to create a new superhero team. Lee's wife urged him to experiment with stories he preferred, since he was planning on changing careers and had nothing to lose.
Lee acted on that advice, giving his superheroes a flawed humanity, a change from the ideal archetypes that were typically written for pre-teens. His heroes could have bad tempers, melancholy fits, vanity, greed, etc. They bickered amongst themselves, worried about paying their bills and impressing girlfriends, and even were sometimes physically ill. Before him, superheroes were idealistically perfect people with no problems: Superman was so powerful that nobody could harm him, and Batman was a millionaire in his secret identity.
Lee's superheroes captured the imagination of teens and young adults who were part of the population spike known as the post World War II baby boom. Sales soared.
The first superhero group Lee and artist Jack Kirby created was the family the Fantastic Four. Its immediate popularity led Lee and Marvel's illustrators to produce a cavalcade of new titles. With Kirby, Lee created the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, the Mighty Thor and the X-Men; with Bill Everett, Daredevil; and with Steve Ditko, Doctor Strange and Marvel's most successful character, Spider-Man,
Throughout the 1960s, Lee scripted, art-directed, and edited most of Marvel's series; moderated the letters pages; wrote a monthly column called "Stan's Soapbox"; and wrote endless promotional copy, often signing off with his trademark phrase, "Excelsior!" (which is also the New York state motto). To maintain his taxing workload yet still meet deadlines, he used a system that was used previously by various comic-book studios, but due to Lee's success with it, is now known as the "Marvel method" or "Marvel style" of comic-book creation. Typically, Lee would brainstorm a story with the artist and then prepare a brief synopsis rather than a full script. Based on the synopsis, the artist would fill the alloted number of pages by determining and drawing the panel-to-panel storytelling. After the artist turned in penciled pages, Lee would write the word balloons and captions, and then oversee the lettering and colouring. In effect, the artists were co-plotters, whose collaborative first drafts Lee built upon.
Because of this system, the exact division of creative credits on Lee's comics is still disputed, especially in the cases of comics drawn by Kirby and Ditko. Although Lee has always effusively praised these artists, some observers argue that their contribution was greater than for which they are given credit. The dispute with Ditko over Spider-Man has sometimes been acrimonious.
In 1971, Lee indirectly reformed the Comics Code. The US Department of Health, Education and Welfare asked Lee to write a story about the dangers of drugs and Lee wrote a story in which Spider-Man's best friend becomes addicted to pills. The three-part story was slated to be published in Amazing Spider-Man #96-98, but the Comics Code Authority refused it because it depicted drug use; the story context was considered irrelevant. With his publisher's approval, Marvel published the comics without the CCA seal. The comics sold well and Marvel won praise for its socially conscious efforts. The CCA subsequently loosened the Code to permit negative depictions of drugs, among other new freedoms.
Later career
In later years, Lee became a figurehead and public face for Marvel Comics. He made appearances at comic book conventions around the country, lecturing and participating in panel discussions. He moved to California in 1981 to develop Marvel's TV and movie properties. He has been an executive producer for, and has made cameo appearances in, Marvel film adaptations. He can be spotted as a jury foreman in the TV movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989), as a beach hot-dog vendor in X-Men (2000), as a festival salesman in Spider-Man (2000), about to cross a street with a newspaper in Daredevil (2003), as a security guard leaving a building (with former TV series Hulk Lou Ferrigno) in Hulk (2003), and dodging debris in Spider-Man 2 (2004). In Fantastic Four (2005), Lee has his first speaking cameo, as Willie Lumpkin, the title characters' mail carrier.
Lee also made a cameo in Kevin Smith's motion picture Mallrats (1995) recorded interviews with Smith as in the non-fiction video Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters, and Marvels (2002), and appeared as himself on the thirteenth season of The Simpsons ("I am Furious Yellow", April 28, 2002). He voiced himself as a character on a Spider-Man animated series in 1998 ("Spider Wars, Chapter 2: Farewell Spider-Man", January 31, 1998) and on the MTV-prouduced series in 2003 ("Frank Elson" in "Mind Games" Part 1 & 2, Aug. 15 & 22, 2003). Lee also appears as himself in the Mark Hamill-directed Comic Book: The Movie (2004), a direct-to-video mockumentary primarily filmed at the 2002 San Diego Comic-Con.
Lee befriended Hollywood entrepreneur Peter Paul when Lee was tapped by movie legend Jimmy Stewart in 1989 to chair the American Spirit Foundation established by Paul and Stewart to direct entertainment industry resources and creativity to education reform and democracy movements in the Communist world. Lee's Entertainers for Education initiative was launched by former President Ronald Reagan at a gala in Beverly Hills in 1991. Paul attempted to liberate Lee from his figurehead position at Marvel first by trying to buy Marvel in 1992, then by approaching major Hollywood studios to create a Stan Lee Super Hero production division. While Marvel was being reorganized and sold to Toy Biz in bankruptcy in 1998, Paul helped Lee obtain a $1 million a year contract with Marvel, as Chairman Emeritus. He was given the right to spend 90% of his time engaging in his own competitive endeavors with the right to use the names and images of his Marvel creations to compete with Marvel.
Paul joined with Lee to create an online animation studio, Stan Lee Media, in 1999. It grew to 165 people and went public, but by the following year was out of business.
Some of Stan Lee's projects at Stan Lee Media included The 7th Portal where he played Izayus. The Drifter, and The Accuser were his other webisode works. The licensed characters of 7th Portal even became part of a touring interactive 3-D movie attraction that played at several amusement parks. In 2005, Lee recovered a settlement of more than $10 million from Marvel for the profits of Marvel's blockbuster movies.
In the 2000s, Lee did his first work for DC Comics, launching the Just Imagine... series, in which Lee reimagined the DC superheroes Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and the Flash.
In 2001, he did the narration for the film "Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger Part IV", under the pseudonym "Peter Parker".
Lee created the risqué animated superhero series Stripperella for Spike TV, and in 2004 announced plans to collaborate with Hugh Hefner on a similar superhero cartoon featuring Playboy Playmates.
In August 2004, Lee announced the launch of Stan Lee's Sunday Comics [1], to be hosted by Komikwerks.com, where monthly subscribers will be able to read a new, updated comic every Sunday. As well, "Stan's Soapbox" will be a weekly column run alongside the Sunday strip.
Fictional portrayals
Jack Kirby, during his years of working for DC Comics in the 1970s, created the character Funky Flashman as a blatant parody of Stan Lee. With his hyperbolic speech pattern, gaudy toupee, and hip 70s Manhattan style beard (a style Lee sported at the time) this ne'er-do-well charlatan first appeared in the pages of Mister Miracle.
Kirby later portrayed himself, Lee, production executive Sol Brodsky, and Lee's secretary Flo Steinberg as superheroes in What If #11, "What If the Marvel Bullpen Had Become the Fantastic Four?", in which Lee played the part of Mister Fantastic. Lee has also made numerous cameo appearances in many Marvel titles, appearing in audiences and crowds at many character's ceremonies and parties, and hosting an old-soldiers reunion in an issue of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos.
In Alan Moore's satirical miniseries 1963, based on numerous Marvel characters of the 1960s, Moore's alter ego "Affable Al" parodies Lee and his allegedly unfair treatment of artists.
The "Young Dan Pussey" stories by Daniel Clowes, collected in Pussey!, feature an exploitative publisher who relies on Lee's gung-ho style and "Bullpen" mythology to motivate his stable of naïve and underpaid creators; the stories mainly satirize the state of mainstream comics in the 1990s, but also the subculture of young superhero fans that Lee helped to create.
Footnotes
- Note 1: Lee's account of how he began working for Marvel's predecessor, Timely, has varied. He has said in lectures and elsewhere that he simply answered a newspaper ad seeking a publishing assistant, not knowing it involved comics, let alone his uncle, Goodman:
"I applied for a job in a publishing company ... I didn't even know they published comics. I was fresh out of high school, and I wanted to get into the publishing business, if I could. There was an ad in the paper that said, "Assistant Wanted in a Publishing House." When I found out that they wanted me to assist in comics, I figured, 'Well, I'll stay here for a little while and get some experience, and then I'll get out into the real world.' ... I just wanted to know, 'What do you do in a publishing company?' How do you write? ... How do you publish? I was an assistant. There were two people there named Joe Simon and Jack Kirby – Joe was sort-of the editor/artist/writer, and Jack was the artist/writer. Joe was the senior member. They were turning out most of the artwork. Then there was the publisher, Martin Goodman... And that was about the only staff that I was involved with. After a while, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left. I was about 17 years old [sic], and Martin Goodman said to me, 'Do you think you can hold down the job of editor until I can find a real person?' When you're 17, what do you know? I said, 'Sure! I can do it!' I think he forgot about me, because I stayed there ever since." [2]
However, in his 2002 autobiography, Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (cited under References, below), he says:
"My uncle, Robbie Solomon, told me they might be able to use someone at a publishing company where he worked. The idea of being involved in publishing definitely appealed to me. ... So I contacted the man Robbie said did the hiring, Joe Simon, and applied for a job. He took me on and I began working as a gofer for eight dollars a week...."
Joe Simon, in his 1990 autobiography The Comic Book Makers (cited under References, below), gives the account slightly differently:
"One day [Goodman's relative known as] Uncle Robbie came to work with a lanky 17-year-old in tow. 'This is Stanley Lieber, Martin's wife's cousin,' Uncle Robbie said. 'Martin wants you to keep him busy.'"
In an appendix, however, Simon appears to reconcile the two acounts. He relates a 1989 conversation with Lee:
Lee: I've been saying this [classified-ad] story for years, but apparently it isn't so. And I can't remember because I['ve] said it so long now that I believe it."
...
Simon: "Your Uncle Robbie brought you into the office one day and he said, 'This is Martin Goodman's wife's nephew.' [sic] ... You were seventeen years old."
Lee: "Sixteen and a half!"
Simon: "Well, Stan, you told me seventeen. You were probably trying to be older.... I did hire you."
References
- StanLeeWeb.com
- POW! Entertainment
- StanLeeBook.com
- Stan Lee.org
- IMDb: Stan Lee
- Lee, Stan. Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee. (Fireside, 2002). ISBN 0684873052
- Raphael, Jordan and Tom Spurgeon. Stan Lee: And the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book. (Chicago Review Press, 2003). ISBN 1556525060
- Ro, Ronin. Tales To Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution. (Bloomsbury USA, 2004). ISBN 1582343454
- Simon, Joe, with Jim Simon. The Comic Book Makers. (Crestwood/II, 1990). ISBN 1887591354
External links
- Myth and the Hero's Journey: Big Screen blockbusters
- The Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators
- StanLeeBook.com "Extras" section includes audio interview
- Stan Lee's Sunday Comics
