Stan Lee Is Dead at 95; Superhero of Marvel Comics
By Jonathan Kandell and Andy Webster
Published On Nov. 12, 2018
If Stan Lee revolutionized the comic
book world in the 1960s, which he did, he left as big a stamp — maybe bigger —
on the even wider pop culture landscape of today.
Think of “Spider-Man,” the
blockbuster movie franchise and Broadway spectacle. Think of “Iron Man,” another
Hollywood gold-mine series personified by its star, Robert Downey Jr. Think of
“Black Panther,” the box-office superhero smash that shattered big screen
racial barriers in the process.
And that is to say nothing of the
Hulk, the X-Men, Thor and other film and television juggernauts that have
stirred the popular imagination and made many people very rich.
If all that entertainment product
can be traced to one person, it would be Stan Lee, who died in Los Angeles on
Monday at 95. From a cluttered office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan in the
1960s, he helped conjure a lineup of pulp-fiction heroes that has come to
define much of popular culture in the early 21st century.
Mr. Lee was a central player in the
creation of those characters and more, all properties of Marvel Comics. Indeed, he was for many the embodiment of
Marvel, if not comic books in general, overseeing the company’s emergence as an
international media behemoth. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive
and tireless promoter (of Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in
what comics fans call the medium’s silver age.
Many believe that Marvel, under his
leadership and infused with his colorful voice, crystallized that era, one of
exploding sales, increasingly complex characters and stories, and growing
cultural legitimacy for the medium. (Marvel’s chief competitor at the time,
National Periodical Publications, now known as DC — the home of Superman and
Batman, among other characters — augured this period, with its 1956 update of
its superhero the Flash, but did not define it.)
Under Mr. Lee, Marvel transformed
the comic book world by imbuing its characters with the self-doubts and
neuroses of average people, as well an awareness of trends and social causes
and, often, a sense of humor.
In humanizing his heroes, giving
them character flaws and insecurities that belied their supernatural strengths,
Mr. Lee tried “to make them real flesh-and-blood characters with personality,”
he told The Washington Post in 1992.
“That’s what any story should have, but comics
didn’t have until that point,” he said.
“They were all cardboard figures.”
Energetic, gregarious, optimistic
and alternately grandiose and self-effacing, Mr. Lee was an effective salesman,
employing a Barnumesque syntax in print (“Face front, true believer!” “Make
mine Marvel!”) to market Marvel’s products to a rabid following.
He charmed readers with jokey,
conspiratorial comments and asterisked asides in narrative panels, often
referring them to previous issues. In 2003 he told The Los Angeles Times, “I
wanted the reader to feel we were all friends, that we were sharing some
private fun that the outside world wasn’t aware of.”
Though Mr. Lee was often criticized
for his role in denying rights and royalties to his artistic collaborators ,
his involvement in the conception of many of Marvel’s best-known characters is
indisputable.
Reading
Shakespeare at 10
He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on
Dec. 28, 1922, in Manhattan, the older of two sons born to Jack Lieber, an
occasionally employed dress cutter, and Celia (Solomon) Lieber, both immigrants
from Romania. The family moved to the Bronx.
Stanley began reading Shakespeare at
10 while also devouring pulp magazines, the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar
Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, and the swashbuckler movies of Errol Flynn.
He graduated at 17 from DeWitt
Clinton High School in the Bronx and aspired to be a writer of serious
literature. He was set on the path to becoming a different kind of writer when,
after a few false starts at other jobs, he was hired at Timely Publications, a
company owned by Martin Goodman, a
relative who had made his name in pulp magazines and was entering the comics
field.
Mr. Lee was initially paid $8 a week
as an office gofer. Eventually he was writing and editing stories, many in the
superhero genre.
At Timely he worked with the artist Jack Kirby (1917-94), who, with a writing
partner, Joe Simon, had
created the hit character Captain America, and who would eventually play a
vital role in Mr. Lee’s career. When Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, Timely’s hottest
stars, were lured away by a rival company, Mr. Lee was appointed chief editor.
As a writer, Mr. Lee could be
startlingly prolific. “Almost everything I’ve ever written I could finish at
one sitting,” he once said. “I’m a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the
fastest.”
Mr. Lee used several pseudonyms to
give the impression that Marvel had a large stable of writers; the name that
stuck was simply his first name split in two. (In the 1970s, he legally changed
Lieber to Lee.)
His daughter Joan Celia Lee, who is
known as J. C., was born in 1950; another daughter, Jan, died three days after
birth in 1953. Mr. Lee’s wife died in 2017.
A lawyer for Ms. Lee, Kirk Schenck,
confirmed Mr. Lee’s death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
In addition to his daughter, he is
survived by Ms. Lee and his younger brother, Larry Lieber, who drew the
“Amazing Spider-Man” syndicated newspaper strip for years.
In the mid-1940s, the peak of the
golden age of comic books, sales boomed. But later, as plots and characters
turned increasingly lurid (especially at EC, a Marvel competitor that published
titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), many adults clamored
for censorship. In 1954, a Senate subcommittee led by the Tennessee Democrat
Estes Kefauver held hearings investigating allegations that comics promoted
immorality and juvenile delinquency.
Feeding the senator’s crusade was
the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s
1954 anti-comics
jeremiad, “Seduction of the Innocent.” Among other claims, the
book contended that DC’s “Batman stories” — featuring the team of Batman and
Robin — were “psychologically homosexual.”
Choosing to police itself rather
than accept legislation, the comics industry established the Comics Code
Authority to ensure wholesome content. Gore and moral ambiguity were out, but
so largely were wit, literary influences and attention to social issues.
Innocuous cookie-cutter exercises in genre were in.
Many found the sanitized comics
boring, and — with the new medium of television providing competition —
readership, which at one point had reached 600 million sales annually, declined
by almost three-quarters within a few years.
With the dimming of superhero
comics’ golden age, Mr. Lee tired of grinding out generic humor, romance,
western and monster stories for what had by then become Atlas Comics. Reaching
a career impasse in his 30s, he was encouraged by his wife to write the comics
he wanted to, not merely what was considered marketable. And Mr. Goodman, his
boss, spurred by the popularity of a rebooted Flash (and later Green Lantern)
at DC, wanted him to revisit superheroes.
Mr. Lee took Mr. Goodman up on his
suggestion, but he carried its implications much further.
Enter
the Fantastic Four
In 1961, Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby — whom
he had brought back years before to the company, now known as Marvel — produced
the first issue of The Fantastic Four, about a superpowered team with
humanizing dimensions: nonsecret identities, internal squabblesand, in the
orange-rock-skinned Thing, self-torment. It was a hit.
Mr. Lee in 2012 at New York Comic
Con. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive and tireless promoter (of
Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in what comics fans call the
medium’s silver age.CreditMarion Curtis/STARPIX, via Associated Press
Other Marvel titles — like the
Lee-Kirby creation The Incredible Hulk, a modern Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a
decent man transformed by radiation into a monster — offered a similar
template. The quintessential Lee hero, introduced in 1962 and created with the
artist Steve Ditko (1927-2018), was Spider-Man.
A timid high school intellectual who
gained his powers when bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider-Man was prone to
soul-searching, leavened with wisecracks — a key to the character’s lasting
popularity across multiple entertainment platforms, including movies and a
Broadway musical.
Mr. Lee’s dialogue encompassed
Catskills shtick, like Spider-Man’s patter in battle; Elizabethan idioms, like
Thor’s; and working-class Lower East Side swagger, like the Thing’s. It could
also include dime-store poetry, as in this eco-oratory about humans, uttered by
the Silver Surfer, a space alien:
“And yet — in their
uncontrollable insanity — in their unforgivable blindness — they
seek to destroy this shining jewel — this softly spinning gem —
this tiny blessed sphere — which men call Earth!”
Mr. Lee practiced what he called the
Marvel method: Instead of handing artists scripts to illustrate, he summarized
stories and let the artists draw them and fill in plot details as they chose. He
then added sound effects and dialogue. Sometimes he would discover on penciled
pages that new characters had been added to the narrative. Such surprises (like
the Silver Surfer, a Kirby creation and a Lee favorite) would lead to questions
of character ownership.
Mr. Lee was often faulted for not
adequately acknowledging the contributions of his illustrators, especially Mr.
Kirby. Spider-Man became Marvel’s best-known property, but Mr. Ditko, its
co-creator, quit Marvel in bitterness in 1966. Mr. Kirby, who visually designed
countless characters, left in 1969. Though he reunited with Mr. Lee for a
Silver Surfer graphic novel in 1978, their heyday had ended.
Many comic fans believe that Mr.
Kirby was wrongly deprived of royalties and original artwork in his lifetime,
and for years the Kirby estate sought to acquire rights to characters that Mr.
Kirby and Mr. Lee had created together. Mr. Kirby’s heirs were long rebuffed in
court on the grounds that he had done “work for hire” — in other words, that he
had essentially sold his art without expecting royalties.
In September 2014, Marvel and the
Kirby estate reached a settlement. Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby now both receive
credit on numerous screen productions based on their work.
Turning
to Live Action
Mr. Lee moved to Los Angeles in 1980
to develop Marvel properties, but most of his attempts at live-action
television and movies were disappointing. (The series “The Incredible Hulk,”
seen on CBS from 1978 to 1982, was an exception.)
Avi Arad, an executive at Toy Biz, a
company in which Marvel had bought a controlling interest, began to revive the
company’s Hollywood fortunes, particularly with an animated “X-Men” series on
Fox, which ran from 1992 to 1997. (Its success helped pave the way for the
live-action big-screen “X-Men” franchise, which has flourished since its first
installment, in 2000.)
In the late 1990s, Mr. Lee was named
chairman emeritus at Marvel and began to explore outside projects. While his
personal appearances (including charging fans $120 for an autograph) were one
source of income, later attempts to create wholly owned superhero properties
foundered. Stan Lee Media, a digital content start-up, crashed in 2000 and
landed his business partner, Peter F. Paul, in prison for securities fraud. (Mr.
Lee was never charged.)
Chadwick Boseman, left, as
T’Challa/Black Panther and Michael B. Jordan in “Black Panther.” It was the
first Marvel movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starred
an almost all-black cast.CreditMatt Kennedy/Marvel, Disney
In 2001, Mr. Lee started POW!
Entertainment (the initials stand for “purveyors of wonder”), but he received
almost no income from Marvel movies and TV series until he won a court fight
with Marvel Enterprises in 2005, leading to an undisclosed settlement costing
Marvel $10 million. In 2009, the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to pay
$4 billion to acquire Marvel, announced that it had paid $2.5 million to
increase its stake in POW!
In Mr. Lee’s final years, after the
death of his wife, the circumstances of his business affairs and contentious
financial relationship with his surviving daughter attracted attention in the
news media. In 2018, Mr. Lee was embroiled in disputes with POW!, and The Daily
Beast and The Hollywood Reporter ran accounts of fierce infighting among Mr.
Lee’s daughter, household staff and business advisers. The Hollywood Reporter
claimed “elder abuse.”
In February 2018, Mr. Lee signed a
notarized document declaring that three men — a lawyer, a caretaker of Mr.
Lee’s and a dealer in memorabilia — had “insinuated themselves into
relationships with J. C. for an ulterior motive and purpose,” to “gain control
over my assets, property and money.” He later withdrew his claim, but longtime
aides of his — an assistant, an accountant and a housekeeper — were either
dismissed or greatly limited in their contact with him.
In a profile in The New York Times
in April, a cheerful Mr. Lee said, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” adding
that “my daughter has been a great help to me” and that “life is pretty good” —
although he admitted in that same interview, “I’ve been very careless with
money.”
Marvel movies, however, have proved
a cash cow for major studios, if not so much for Mr. Lee. With the blockbuster
“Spider-Man” in 2002, Marvel superhero films hit their stride. Such movies
(including franchises starring Iron Man, Thor and the superhero team the
Avengers, to name but three) together had grossed more than $24 billion
worldwide as of April.
“Black Panther,” the first Marvel
movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starring an almost
all-black cast, took in about $201.8 million domestically when it opened over
the four-day Presidents’ Day weekend this year, the fifth-biggest opening of
all time.
Many other film properties are in
development, in addition to sequels in established franchises. Characters Mr.
Lee had a hand in creating now enjoy a degree of cultural penetration they have
never had before.
Mr. Lee wrote a slim memoir,
“Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee,” with George Mair, published in 2002.
His 2015 book, “Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir” (written with
Peter David and illustrated in comic-book form by Colleen Doran), pays abundant
credit to the artists many fans believed he had shortchanged years before.
Recent Marvel films and TV shows
have also often credited Mr. Lee’s former collaborators; Mr. Lee himself has
almost always received an executive producer credit. His cameo appearances in them became something of a
tradition. (Even “Teen Titans Go! to the Movies,” an animated feature in 2018
about a DC superteam, had more than one Lee cameo.) TV shows bearing his name
or presence have included the reality series “Stan Lee’s Superhumans” and the
competition show “Who Wants to Be a Superhero?”
Mr. Lee’s unwavering energy
suggested that he possessed superpowers himself. (In his 90s he had a Twitter
account, @TheRealStanlee.) And the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledged
as much when it awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2008. But he was
frustrated, like all humans, by mortality.
“I want to do more movies, I want to
do more television, more DVDs, more multi-sodes, I want to do more lecturing, I
want to do more of everything I’m doing,” he said in “With Great Power …: The
Stan Lee Story,” a 2010 television documentary. “The only problem is
time. I just wish there were more time.”
Correction: November 12, 2018
An earlier version of this obituary
misstated the amount of money the Marvel movie
“Black Panther” has made
worldwide. It is more than $1.3 billion, not $426 million.
Correction: November 12, 2018
An earlier version of this obituary
misstated the last year of the animated “X-Men” series that made its debut on
Fox in 1992. It lasted until 1997, not 1995.
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed
reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/obituaries/stan-lee-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Television
