Remembering Stan Lee: A True Marvel Hero

"You know, my motto is ‘Excelsior’. That’s an old word that means ‘upward and onward to greater glory’. It’s on the seal of the state of New York. Keep moving forward, and if it’s time to go, it’s time. Nothing lasts forever." – Stan Lee, Playboy, 2014 

Global pop culture fandom has been brought to a standstill today by the news that Marvel Comics Chairman Emeritus and Silver Age visionary Stan Lee had died at the age of 95 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, following a medical emergency. 

Unsurprisingly, tributes have flowed thick and fast from all corners of the comic book and film industries, Lee’s army of True Believers mobilising to memorialise the nigh-immeasurable social and cultural impact and legacy of the man born on December 28, 1922, as Stanley Martin Lieber. 

Lee’s early life was typical of the Depression-era United States; the elder of two sons born to Romanian-born Jewish immigrants Celia and Jack Lieber, Lee spent his childhood in modest surrounds, attending school in the Bronx and engaging in a string of menial part-time jobs during his early teens. 

In 1939, the year he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, Lee became an assistant at Timely Comics – the future Marvel Comics – before earning his first byline under the ‘Stan Lee’ pseudonym in 1941, writing a B-feature in Captain America Comics #5.

Though best known for work that was still yet to come, the aspiring writer was prolific from the earliest days of his career, co-creating his first three superheroes – The Destroyer, Father Time and Jack Frost – in August 1941. It’s OK that you don’t remember them.

The following year, Lee joined the US Army Signal Corps, serving until the conclusion of World War II in 1945. After the war, he returned to Timely (or Atlas Comics, as it became in 1951), writing a range of titles across a diversity of genres not usually associated with the superheroes for which he would become most famous, and married his sweetheart, Joan, in 1947. 

Despite Lee’s ubiquity with the Silver Age of comics (c. 1956-1970), it was actually rival publisher DC Comics that inadvertently paved the way for the imminent revolution at Marvel Comics, as Atlas became known in 1960. Having seen the success DC enjoyed in the late 1950s with an updated take on their classic hero, The Flash, Atlas publisher Martin Goodman tasked Lee and legendary artist Jack Kirby with creating a new superhero team to compete with their ascendant competitor. Thus was born the first group of the duo’s seminal characters: the Fantastic Four. 

Certainly, Kirby at least partially self-plagiarised in creating Marvel’s First Family, taking ‘inspiration’ from his earlier, DC-based creation the Challengers of the Unknown – not what you’d call an uncommon practice at the time – but the results were inarguable: the team, who made their debut in November 1961, was an immediate hit for the newly minted label known as Marvel Comics. 

The Fantastic Four’s success opened the floodgates on a string of similarly successful superheroes dreamed up by Lee and Kirby; Iron Man, Thor, the X-Men and the Hulk all spilled forth from this most bountiful of collaborations, as did the collective title of The Avengers. 

In 1962, with Steve Ditko, Lee created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. Despite now being Marvel’s most successful export, Spider-Man was initially hated by Lee’s publisher and only given life because Amazing Fantasy, the book in which he made his debut, was facing cancellation. Lee also co-created Daredevil, with artist-writer Bill Everett, among other characters.

It’s interesting to note, here, the contrast between Lee and some of his contemporaries of the day as far as writer-artist relationships are concerned. Where other creators, such as Bob Kane, have had their legacies tarnished by revelations that they weren’t exactly the solo geniuses they initially claimed, Lee was much less shy about the contributions others had made to his creations. 

Nonetheless, his partnerships have not been without their share of external (and internal) criticism, not all of it undeserved; Kirby, in particular, is often cited as someone who didn’t receive their fair financial share, to say nothing of various other creative disputes over the years. However, Lee – who, himself, owned no rights to any of the characters he helped concoct – was consistently steadfast in his denial of responsibility for the artist’s (lack of) fortunes.

“I always tried to show [the artists] in the most favourable light, even in the credits,” Lee told Playboy in 2014. “There was never a time when it just said ‘by Stan Lee’. It was always ‘by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’, or ‘by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’. I made sure their names were always as big as mine.

“As far as what they were paid, I had nothing to do with that. They were hired as freelance artists, and they worked as freelance artists. At some point, they apparently felt they should be getting more money. Fine; it was up to them to talk to the publisher. It had nothing to do with me.”

“Twice, not once, I offered a job to Jack Kirby,” he continued. “He wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to … He didn’t want a staff job. With him, as with Ditko, I don’t see where they were unfairly treated.”

(Interestingly, in Amazing Fantastic Incredible, a memoir released the year after the Playboy interview, Lee went to great lengths to appropriately credit his collaborators including Kirby and Ditko, hinting that he may not truly have even believed himself in 2014.)

There was another good reason for Lee’s considerable success rate when dreaming up new superheroes of the day: while helping to create some of the best-known, most profitable properties in pop culture history, he also ushered in the second superhero revolution in as many decades by introducing relatable personality flaws, relationship problems, and other dimensions to his characters, where heroes had traditionally been infallible beacons of superhuman hope. 

This was not an idea that was received well at the time; as Lee told EW in 2002: “I was told in chapter and verse by the fellow who was then my publisher that it was the worst idea he’d ever heard. ‘People hate spiders! You can’t call a hero Spider-Man!’ ‘Stan, don’t you understand that teenagers can only be sidekicks?’

“When I told him that I wanted Peter Parker to have a lot of problems and worries and be unsure of himself, he said, ‘Ugh! It’s obvious you have no conception of what a hero really is!’”

Still, so notable was Lee’s reputation for humanising the superhuman that, in the words of celebrated comics writer/actual wizard Alan Moore: “The DC comics were … one-dimensional characters whose only characteristic was they dressed up in costumes and did good, whereas Stan Lee had this huge breakthrough of two-dimensional characters. So, they dress up in costumes and do good, but they’ve got a bad heart. Or a bad leg. I actually did think for a long while that having a bad leg was an actual character trait.”

Moore’s half-hearted dismissal of the technique aside, this creative breakthrough redefined superheroes for a new generation. But it wasn’t just his characters that proved relatable to Lee’s audience; it was the man himself. An innate showman and advertising prodigy, Lee also revolutionised the general appearance and contents of then-modern comic books, being responsible for the addition of splash-page credits panels and for the affable, conversational tone that washed over the letters pages and ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ updates.

He was also responsible for the popularisation of the ‘Marvel Method’ of making comics – which put a greater onus on the artist to help shape the overall story, filling pages based on a synopsis rather than a detailed script – and oversaw a period of great political activism in Marvel books during the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Even at the surface level, this includes the introduction of characters such as Black Panther and the Falcon, and a controversial story arc in The Amazing Spider-Man negatively depicting drug use that ultimately served as the catalyst for reform at the Comics Code Authority after Lee published it – to wide acclaim – without CCA consent.

In fact, a sense of social awareness is so ingrained in Lee’s creations that it makes the current day backlash against the apparent ‘infiltration’ of so-called social justice warriors into the world of comics – as espoused by the embarrassing movement known as ComicsGate – patently absurd. Anyone who doesn’t understand the extremely thin veil of racial tension that underscores the entire X-Men mythos is just being wilfully obtuse. Comics have always been political; perhaps ComicsGaters just have very poor reading comprehension.

It’s not like Lee was shy about it; aside from his appropriately named Stan’s Soapbox column, in which he took on all manner of bigotry and nasty –isms, here’s the man himself discussing the X-Men with EW:

“To keep it realistic, I knew most people dislike and distrust those who are different from them. I thought maybe we could even get a little moral lesson in this thing. Here are people who are good, who are trying to help humanity, and the very humans they are trying to help are hunting them and hounding them and harassing them.”

Even clearer, as he told Comicbook.com: “I wanted [the X-Men] to be diverse. The whole underlying principle … was to try to be an anti-bigotry story to show there’s good in every person.”

After an incredibly prolific decade as a creator, Lee stepped away from writing regular comics in August 1972, following his final issue (#125) of Fantastic Four. His association with Marvel would only grow, though, as he stepped into an ever-more public role with the publisher. 

Lee was involved with Marvel’s film and TV adaptations from the early 1980s, narrating episodes of both The Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends and making the first of his laundry list of onscreen cameos as the Jury Foreman in The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989). He also appeared in a fictionalised capacity in Kevin Smith’s cult-favourite flick, Mallrats (1995), which he maintained was his favourite film experience.

In the 1990s, Lee was made chairman emeritus of Marvel, and recognised by the industry with inductions into the Will Eisner Award Hall Of Fame and Jack Kirby Hall Of Fame in 1994 and 1995 respectively. He later co-founded an eponymous studio, Stan Lee Media, though illegal business dealings – none of which involved Lee himself – saw the company file for bankruptcy in 2001. 

In 2001-02, DC Comics landed something of a coup when they conscripted Lee to re-envision their own iconic heroes for the series Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating…, which gave the patented Stan Lee ‘bad leg’ treatment to characters such as Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and more. A few years later, in 2006, Marvel returned serve when, in celebration of Lee’s 65th anniversary with the company, they had him write a number of one-shot issues in which Lee himself met his own creations, because comic books are insane. He was immortalised as a Marvel Legends action figure the following year.

The onset of the age of social media in the late 2000s saw Lee continue to maintain strong ties with his fan base, even launching a YouTube channel, Stan Lee’s World of Heroes, in April 2012, and maintaining a presence on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. He revelled in geeky conversations, and answered fans’ questions at conventions – many of which he’d heard multiple times before – with the same enthusiasm as he did the first time he heard them. He’d even try to mix up the answer a little, just to help keep things fresh.

Sadly, his final years were not without their difficulties. Lee had been in variably fragile health since receiving a pacemaker in 2012, and his ailments were undoubtedly compounded by the heartache of losing long-time spouse Joan in 2017 and this year’s allegations that he had been the victim of elder abuse. However, he never lost interest in his fans, even making the trip to Australia to attend Supanova Comic-Con & Gaming expo last year at the mighty age of 94.

All told, Stan Lee spent more than seven decades telling stories and indelibly shaping the pop culture landscape of the 20th century. The social value of what he achieved during his lifetime cannot be overstated. Seriously, imagine a world without Spider-Man – without the X-Men, without the Avengers, without Robert Downey Jr’s redemptive portrayal of Tony Stark to lead a decade-long shared cinematic universe – and I’ll show you a world that sucks profusely. 

No, nobody would have guessed, 75 years ago, that the aspiring writer who was too mortified to put his real name to a lowly comic book – he was reserving that moniker for more “literary” pursuits – would ultimately become synonymous with the medium as a seemingly bottomless font of creative gold, nor that he would ultimately be OK with that fact.

“I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers,” Lee told The Washington Post. “And then I began to realise: entertainment is one of the most important things in people’s lives. Without it, they might go off the deep end. 

“I feel that if you’re able to entertain people, you’re doing a good thing."

If that’s the case, then he really was one of the greatest that we’ll ever see.

Excelsior, Stan. It’s time.