Stan Lee didn't invent the superhero, it just seems that way. He was there at
the beginning, working as a lowly copy boy for the nascent Marvel Comics
when the adventures of Superman and Captain America roused a nation crawling
out of the Depression and heading off to war. And he was there 20 years
later at the dawn of a new age, when desperate and on the verge of quitting
a job he felt had frustrated his literary ambitions he created a new roster
of heroes that not only reinvigorated a dying genre but became an indelible
part of popular culture and made billions. Spider-man, the Hulk, Iron Man,
the Fantastic Four, Thor, the X-Men, the Silver Surfer, Daredevil, they all
flowed from his pen. A good writer can create one memorable character but it
takes a legend to create a universe.
At 86, Lee is still the zippy showman, tirelessly spreading the Marvel word on
the 70th anniversary of the company's birth. To fans, he is "Stan the
Man", the story-spinning whiz of an uncle they always wished was their
own. At comic conventions they greet him with levels of adulation normally
reserved for rock stars; his catchphrases, "True believer!" and "Excelsior!"
- corny to the outside world - can cause ripples of excitement. His grin is
broad and cheerful, his affection for the fans genuine and unabashed. You
get the feeling that he would happily spend his days answering their
questions, no matter how esoteric or banal. "I loved communicating with
the fans - I was even the guy who answered the readers' letters," he
says. The trait stems from Lee's youth, when he wrote a fan letter to his
own hero, Floyd Gibbons, an adventurer who wrote a column for the Chicago
Tribune. Gibbons took the time to reply in person, which made a huge
impression on Lee. "I wanted the fans to feel that they were part of
the Marvel family. If I received a letter that started 'Dear Editor' and was
signed, I don't know, 'Charles Smith', I would write back, 'Hiya Charlie!' I
wanted it to sound friendly and I signed all my replies Stan, not the
Editor. I think it worked because when I met fans at conventions, they came
up to me as though we were old friends. 'Hi Stan, how are ya? I've always
wanted to meet you.'"
The persona of Stan Lee is as much a creation of the comic world as Captain
America or Superman. The 17-year-old kid who went looking for work at the
company that would eventually become Marvel was in fact Stanley Lieber, a
working-class Jew from the Bronx who dreamt of writing the Great American
Novel and who signed his comic work Stan Lee because he didn't want his real
name tarnished by kiddie-material. Superheroes didn't feature in Lee's
childhood, the Great Depression did. He was born in 1922 in New York, the
first of two children by Jack and Celia Lieber, two Jewish-Romanian
immigrants. His father, a dress-cutter by trade, was perpetually out of work
and the family lived in fear that they would never have enough to pay the
rent each month. Lee's industriousness stems from this period. Idleness
terrified him and his desire to write the Great American Novel, like much of
his persona, speaks of a longing for recognition and a fear that he might
become, like his father did, one of the Forgotten Men Franklin Roosevelt
talked about in the New Deal. The strain his father's unemployment caused
was counter-balanced by the affection Lee's mother lavished on him. She told
him that he was special, the perfect son and he thrived under such positive
influence. But such affection was withheld from his father and his younger
brother, Larry. Lee always carried the guilt that he was loved more, guilt
led him to ensure his brother always had work at Marvel. He felt that while
he was able to do anything, like a superhero, his brother was less able,
less confident: the Peter Parker to his Spider-man.
As Lee grew up he escaped into a world of books and films. Most of the comics
published during his youth were reproductions of popular newspaper strips,
such as Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon and Krazy Kat. The first superhero
comic, Action Comics 1, featuring Superman, did not appear until April 1938.
When the first issue of Marvel Comics hit the stands in October 1939, Lee
was 16 and looking for work. "My cousin's husband, Martin Goodman,
owned Timely Publications. I didn't know him very well but I heard that he
was looking for an assistant. I didn't even know that the position was in
the comic book department because Martin published other magazines - a movie
magazine, a men's magazine, a number of pulp magazines. I had never thought
of working in comics but I had just graduated from high school and I needed
a job so I thought I would try it for a while and then graduate to the stuff
the grown-ups read.
"I wasn't there too long before Joe Simon, the editor, left and suddenly
there was no editor. So Martin said to me, 'Do you think you can hold down
the job of editor until I can hire a real person, some adult?' Well, when
you are 19 years old, what do you know, so I said, 'Sure, I can do it.' And
I think he must have forgotten about me because I stayed on as the editor
and the art director ever since."
Simon saw the circumstances surrounding Lee's big promotion somewhat
differently. When he and Timely's head artist, Jack Kirby, were fixing to
jump ship to another publisher Lee followed them around and asked to be let
in on whatever the secret was. Simon and Kirby were suspicious, thinking Lee
would rat them out. To them he was Goodman's stooge, the teenager who used
to sit in the office corner annoying the hell out of them by playing flute,
but they eventually confided in him. Their gut reaction, however, was right:
Lee was a fink and ratted them out to "Uncle Martin". They were
fired but told they had to finish the current issue of Captain America. They
did, in silence, and then walked out, without anyone saying goodbye. Kirby,
who would years later help Lee create the Fantastic Four, told Simon: "The
next time I see that little son of a bitch, I'm gonna kill him."
After the war ended America's fascination with superheroes faded and Lee's
career slumped. Timely dropped Captain America and co from its line and
instead concentrated on Western and romance comics. The books were cheaply
produced and heavy censoring strangled creativity. By 1961 Lee had had
enough. "I had been thinking of leaving Marvel - I had been there about
20 years and I felt I wasn't getting anywhere - when Martin offered me the
chance to write a new superhero book. He had found out that the DC book
Justice League was selling very well, so he said to me, 'Why don't you
create a bunch of superheroes?' I told my wife, Joan, and she said, 'Stan,
why don't you do that but why don't you write the book the way you'd like to
write it? Get it out of your system once and for all. The worst that could
happen is that Martin will fire you if he doesn't like it, but so what? You
want to quit anyway.'
The result was the Fantastic Four, a superhero book unlike any other. "I
didn't give the heroes secret identities, I didn't make the girl someone who
was always in trouble and had to be rescued by the men or didn't know who
the heroes really were. I tried to make them talk realistically and I didn't
have them live in a fictional city like Metropolis or Gotham, I had them
live in New York because I wanted the book to be as believable as, well, a
superhero story could be. I lived in New York, I knew the city. It was very
easy for me to think of places where the adventures could take place: in a
subway, by the Hudson River, in the Museum of Natural History, down at the
Battery, the Brooklyn Bridge."
The book was a hit. "Before the Fantastic Four we hardly ever got fan
mail. Occasionally I might get a letter from somebody that said, 'I bought
one of your comic books and one of the staples is missing. I'd like my ten
cents back.' I would tack that letter up on the bulletin board and say,
'We've got a fan letter.' But after the Fantastic Four came out we started
to get genuine fan mail. At the start a lot of the letters were written in
pencil. After a few months they were written in ink. A few months after that
we were getting type-written letters and the return addresses were high
schools and colleges."
Goodman, buoyed by the sales figures, asked Lee to create more superheroes.
The Hulk and Iron Man followed as did Lee's signature character, Spider-man.
Just as the Fantastic Four turned the concept of the super team on its head,
Spider-man redefined what it meant to be a hero. Unlike Superman or Batman,
Spider-man was weighed down by personal problems. His alter-ego, Peter
Parker, was not a fast-talking reporter or billionaire with mansions to
spare but a shy, nerdy kid from Queens whose family, like Lee's own,
struggled to pay the bills. "It struck me that superheroes never had a
personal life. The stories were always about them fighting the villain but
what were they doing when they weren't fighting the villain? Where did they
live? How did they get their money? How did they afford to pay their rent?
What was life like when they weren't wearing a costume? It occurred to me
that if I could take a regular kid, just a teenager, not too popular, not
too handsome, and make him the hero, then that would be a book worth
reading.
"Martin [Goodman] hated the idea. When I told him I wanted to do a
superhero who was not only a teenager but who had a lot of problems and was
named Spider-man, he said, 'You're out of your mind. You can't call a hero
Spider-man. People hate spiders, nobody will buy the book. And you can't
make him a teenager, teenagers can only be sidekicks. And you can't give him
a lot of problems - he's a superhero. Superheroes don't have problems.' He
didn't like anything about it but I managed to sneak the strip in anyway.
The book sold very well, it proved to be very popular. So Martin came to see
me after he got the sales figures and said, 'Hey Stan, you know that
character Spider-man, that idea of yours that we both like so much? Why
don't you do a series about him?'"
Marvel had started off the decade as the lame duck of the industry but by the
end it was the dominant publisher, boasting monthly sales of almost ten
million. It was a period of furious activity for Lee: he was writing and
editing most of Marvel's books, as well as directing the art. "I was
doing so many strips and trying to keep so many artists busy, I often didn't
have time to write a full script. So after a while I would just say to the
artist, 'Look, this is what I'd like the story to be. Let's make the villain
Doctor Doom and he has kidnapped Sue Storm and the rest of the Fantastic
Four have to go to Latveria to rescue her. We'll have this happen and this
is how I'd like it to end.' I would give them a very brief outline like that
and the artists would fill in everything else. Once the drawings were done I
would add all the dialogue and the captions. It was a true collaboration.
The original idea would be mine but they would contribute greatly to the
stories. I would wrap it all together and make it as smooth as I could so
everyone would think that one person had done the story."
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