LUCIDMEDIA

Journey into Mystery: The Amazing Stan Lee

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 15 April 2008 04:21

Born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922, Lee grew up in different neighbourhoods across Manhattan; his father was a dress cutter and work was scarce during the heydays of the Great Depression. As a teenager Lee loved reading and writing and was a bright enough fellow to be able to graduate high school before the age of 17. As a teenager he worked several different odd jobs from being a theatre usher to selling newspaper subscriptions to delivering lunch orders to offices in Rockefeller Center. Eventually, Lee was given a job by his uncle Rob Solomon at a new division of Martin Goodman’s Columbia Publications called Timely Comics. At Timely, Lee met and worked with artists Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, but creative differences between Kirby, Simon and Goodman left Lee as editor in 1941.

That year, Lee had already started on his course as being founder of the Marvel Universe of superheroes as he contributed story and dialogue to the Kirby/Simon creation Captain America. Lee’s intention had always been to do “more literary work”, but after serving in the signal corps in World War II, it was Timely, now called Atlas Comics, that he returned to. In the 1950s though, comics were put under fire with the one-two punch of psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham and Senator Estes Kefauver, who accused comics of containing numerous hidden and not-so-hidden depictions of drugs, sex, violence and “deviant” lifestyles. Comics were forced to start censoring themselves through new tough regulations and the even more stringent Comics Code Authority.

The era was also not bright for superhero fare; instead the emphasis was put on other forms like westerns, horror, crime, romance and sci-fi. At Atlas, it was the same deal, but over at DC Comics enterprising creator Gardner Fox put together a new team of superheroes called the Justice League of America. At the same time, Fox also updated and reinvented Golden Age hero The Flash, giving him a new costume and a new identity. DC’s success did not go unnoticed by Martin Goodman, who ordered Lee to create an Atlas companion to the JLA, a rip-off if you will. Lee, however, had other ideas and he and Jack Kirby pounded out a whole new paradigm and a whole new way of making comics.

The year was 1961 and Lee had grown a little tiresome of the restrictions of the medium and was looking to start a career outside of comics. When Lee got Goodman’s directive, he decided to stretch the formula and do something new involving the superhero genre. “For just this once, I would do the type of story I myself would enjoy reading,” Lee said in the book Origins of Marvel Comics. “The characters would be the kind of characters I could personally relate to: they'd be flesh and blood, they'd have their faults and foibles, they'd be fallible and feisty, and — most important of all — inside their colourful, costumed booties they'd still have feet of clay.”

Lee followed through with his musings by creating the Fantastic Four, a superhero team that broke all the rules concerning how you make a superhero team. The simple story about a scientist, his girlfriend, her brother and their pilot, who get exposed to cosmic radiation that gives them super powers has been mined repeatedly for hidden layers and subtext. With the FF, Lee and Kirby sidestepped the usual trappings like secret identities and even costumes at first. The superhero archetypes of the love interest, the teen sidekick and the monster stood on equal footing with the main hero. The focus of the book was on a group a people who were really just a family, a highly dysfunctional family that frequently bickered even in the midst of fighting the bad guys, but a family nonetheless.

The Fantastic Four quickly became a best-seller, despite the departure in form and substance that Lee and Kirby brought to the genre. Lee continued to reach for realism in his characters and drew from his vast literary knowledge for inspiration. Lee combined nuclear fears and Jekyll and Hyde to create the Hulk. He brought Norse mythology into the mainstream by turning Thor the Thunder God into a hero. The persecuted mutants of X-Men became a metaphor for the racial divide in the US. Lee’s most famous co-creation, Spider-Man, talked to fans the most, as the teenaged Peter Parker dealt with many of the same problems they were dealing with aside from the usual super-villains.

Nearly every major character to appear in a Marvel Comic between 1961 and 1971 was created by Lee including Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Nick Fury, the Silver Surfer, the Avengers, Iron Man, and all the supporting characters that appeared alongside them. But Lee didn’t just use these characters to tell fun stories of adventure, he also occasionally made some pointed social commentary. One famous example was a three-part story in Amazing Spider-Man where one of the Wall-crawler’s best friends develops a drug habit. The Comics Code Authority considered the story to be gratuitous in it’s depiction of drug use, even though it was demonstrating the negative effects of drug use and the fact that Lee was asked to develop the story by no less than the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Lee was able to convince the publisher to go to press without the CCA seal and the move won him praise from social workers and a victory over the strict guidelines of the CCA.

Aside from narrative matters, Lee also pioneered the “Marvel Method” where Lee and an artist would brainstorm ideas to create a plot synopsis over a complete script. The artist would then plot out the entire book panel-to-panel and Lee would polish of the finished pencils with captions and dialogue. The Method allowed Lee to work on multiple books at once, although it did lead to disagreements between Lee and some artists as to the allocation of credit. Other changes Lee made during this time included greater fan/creator interaction through the letters’ page and the introduction of the credit box at the beginning of the issue that listed all those involved in the book’s creation.

Lee stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics in 1972, but he remained very active in the goings on at the company. He continued to write the “Stan’s Soapbox” columns that appeared regularly in Marvel’s books and continued to pen the Spider-Man nationally syndicated comic strip. In 1981, he made the move to California to develop Marvel properties for film and television, an endeavour that was largely hit or miss until the premiere of Blade in 1998. When not pushing Marvel heroes on Hollywood, Lee continued to lecture and make public appearances at comic conventions across America and around the world.

In the 90s, Marvel launched a new imprint called “Marvel 2099”, which envisioned life in the Marvel Universe at the turn of the 22nd century. New versions of Spider-Man, Punisher, X-men and Doctor Doom were created and starring along side them in the new line was a brand new Stan Lee creation called Ravage. In the new millennia, Lee did the unthinkable and went across the road to DC Comics to create the “Just Imagine…” series, that saw Lee re-imagine the origins of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and several other DC top heroes.

In 1998, Lee embraced the new media by co-creating Stan Lee Media, a company whose purpose was to create superhero content for the Internet. In 1999, they launched their first property called The 7th Portal and signed deals with musicians The Backstreet Boys and Mary J. Blige to create properties and characters based on their personas. Unfortunately, these best laid plans fell apart as the dot-com bubble burst over Stan Lee Media and the fact that Lee’s partner Peter Paul was being pursued by the Securities and Exchanges Commission for allegedly inflating the stock price of the company. Paul fled to Brazil but was later extradited and pled guilty to the charges. This did not deter Lee from embracing the Internet, though, and in 2004 he signed a deal with Komikwerks.com to write a Sunday strip and a new weekly “Stan’s Soapbox” column.

This past December, Stan “The Man” Lee turned 84 years old and he’s still going strong. Marvel celebrated his 65 years at the company last year with a series of one-shots where Lee met his most popular creations. Currently though Lee is best know for his various cameo appearances in films, especially in Marvel-based movies like X-Men, Hulk, and Fantastic Four. His next appearance will be in Spider-Man 3 where he’ll reportedly have a few lines of dialogue with Peter Parker played by Tobey Maguire. Lee’s also demonstrated a willingness to poke fun at himself as he voiced a slightly deranged version of himself in The Simpsons episode “I am Furious Yellow” in 2002.

While many in his age bracket kick back with their feet up, Lee still pounds the pavement like the lunch runner he was in his teenage years. His legacy is a vast universe of comic characters that resonate with millions of kids (and adults) worldwide, and as an inspiration to every comic’s creator for the last forty years—and probably the next forty as well.