Stan "The Man" Lee (1922-2018)
Stan Lee in his younger days
Stan Lee- (Dec. 28, 1922 -November 12, 2018) --Stan Lee is perhaps the world's best known comic book creator. As a writer and editor at Marvel Comics beginning in the 1940s, Stan Lee created or co-created some of the best known superheroes, supevillians, and other comic book characters in the world.
Stan Lee's Marvel Characters:
A short list of Stan Lee's best known creations includes: The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Marvel's version of Thor, the Avengers, the X-Men, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Ant-Man and the Wasp, the Black Panther, Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, the Black Widow, the Inhumans, Nick Fury and his Howling Commandoes, SHIELD, and many more.
Stan Lee's Villains include: Dr. Doom, Galactus, Baron Zemo, Fin Fang Foom, the Mandarin, Crimson Dynamo and the Titanium Man, Doctor Octopus, Kraven the Hunter, the Vulture, Sandman, the Wrecking Crew, the Absorbing Man, Kang the Conquerer, Magneto and his Brotherood of Evil Mutants, the Skrulls, MODOK, AIM, Hydra, and many more.
Other, supporting Marvel characters created by Stan Lee include: Spider-Man's Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Tony Stark's butler Jarvis, the Fantastic Four's mailman Willie Lumpkin, Agatha Harkness, Peter Parker's bosses, J. Jonah Jameson and Robbie Robertson, the Hulk's friend Rick Jones, Captain America's girlfriend, Sharon Carter, Bruce Banner's girlfriend Betty Ross and her father General Thunderbolt Ross, and more.
Stan Lee's Life:
Stanley Lieber was born in 1922 in his parent's New York City apartment. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania. He grew up in New York, and took to writing while in hisgh school. Stan's uncle, Robbie Solomon, helped Lee get a job as an assistant in 1939 at Timely Comics, which was owned by another relative, Martin Goodman. Timely, later became Marvel Comics.
When he first began working at Timely, Stan was the office gopher. Eventually, he was allowed to write a two-page text story titled "Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge" in Captain America Comics #3 (cover-dated May 1941). For this, his first real writing assignment, he used the pen name of Stan Lee (a play on his first name, ”Stanley”). Years later, he changed to Stan Lee as his legal name.
This two-page story launched Stan Lee's writing career. Two issues after his first story, he wrote the script for an actual comic-book story "'Headline' Hunter, Foreign Correspondent." Lee's first superhero co-creation was the Destroyer, appearing in Mystic Comics #6 (August 1941). Other characters co-created by Stan Lee during Golden Age of Comics include Jack Frost, debuting in U.S.A. Comics #1 (August 1941), and Father Time, debuting in Captain America Comics #6 (August 1941). He soon was named the editor-in-chief of Timely Comics.
With the onset of World War Two, Lee joined the Army in 1942, and worked in the Signal Corps and later the Army's Training Film Division, where he wrote scripts for Army publicatons and training films. While in the Army, Lee still was a creative force at Timely, sending in correspondance by mail.
Following his military service, Lee returned to work at Timely, which went through several name changes, from Atlas to finally, Marvel Comics. In the 1950s, the superhero genre dried up, and Lee wrote mostly romance, western, war, and monster/sci-fi stories for Marvel. He served as the main writer, as well as the editor.
Then, in the ealry 1960s, Marvel's publisher, Martin Goodman, told Lee to create new superhero stories that would enable Marvel to compete with DC Comics, which was experiencing a revival with new versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, and had a new superhero team called the Justice League of America. Lee then created (with artist Jack Kirby), an unusual group of new superheroes for Marvel, called the Fantastic Four, in 1961.
Stan Lee went on to create hundreds of characters for Marvel Comics, and he was an active participant in the Marvel movies created by Sony, Fox, Marvel Studios, and Disney. Stan Lee's frequently funny cameos in over 60 movies and television shows based on his characters have been a staple of the movie-going experience for a generation of Marvel film fans. The final cameo filmed by Stan Lee appeared in the April, 2019 Marvel movie, Avengers: Endgame, and, it could be argued, featured a musical homage to Stan Lee as a Mr. Fantasy who created a fanstasical world of wonder for fans over the past seven decades.