Stan Lee is dead.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/stan-lee-marvel-comics-legend-721450


The co-creator, with artist Jack Kirby, of the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and the Avengers, and of Spider man with artist Steve Ditko, the founder and first editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, and one of the most towering figures in comics, has passed away at the age of 95.

The straightforward biographical information is available in a million places: the various obituaries that are already rolling out, his Wikipedia page, and so forth, but I'll tell it my way. He was born Stanley Martin Lieber in New York, and as a Jewish teen in the 1930s got a job as a gofer at his uncle Martin Goodman's fly-by-night publishing outfit, which was just getting into the new "comic book" craze that was sweeping the nation.

The original comic books were collections of popular newspaper strips, printed and stapled together, until some bright bulb had the idea that you could just do your own comics and cut out the newspaper syndicates altogether. The first comics were a lot like the newspaper strips of the time - they were wise-cracking ducks and talking mice ("funny animal books," as they were called in the business), and romance stories, and pulp stuff in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Doc Savage. Then Superman came along and blew the doors off the business and dozens of little "studios" - often just a couple kids in an apartment - began cranking out superheroes to cash in on the craze.

One of those studios was Timely Comics, and one of those artists was Jacob Kurtzberg - Jack Kirby - who, with his partner Joe Simon, created Captain America in 1941. Stan Lee was the kid who got their mail and filled their inkwells, and, according to one person who was there at the time, fiddled around with a slide whistle on his off hours, and got pretty good at it. Lee's first published work was a back-up text story in the back of an issue of Captain America. He gradually got more work at Timely as he got older, but then he joined the army and did PR and educational work.

After the war, Lee returned to his uncle's company. The superhero fad was beginning to wind down with the end of the war; what would later be known as the "Golden Age" of superheroes was coming to a close, and most superhero comics besides a few stalwarts like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Captain Marvel (Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel, aka Shazam) would cease publishing. Timely switched gears back into romance comics, science fiction, and horror, although Lee, who had always had affection for superheroes, presided over a brief early-50s attempt to revive Captain America.

In the 1950s, child psychologist Frederick Wertham published a book, Seduction of the Innocent, claiming that comics were full of horrific violence and were leading children into delinquency and homosexuality. He was actually right about the horror and violence: EC Comics, founded by several future creators of MAD Magazine, was raking in the bucks with books like Eerie and Tales from the Crypt which were funny, adult, very well-drawn, and sometimes shockingly violent and sexually risque even to modern eyes. There was a public outcry, Congress got involved, and the comics business agreed to self-regulate, forming the Comics Code Committee, a body whose strict rules neutered the medium and more or less drove EC out of business. The comics industry spent the next half a decade in the doldrums. Lee, who was managing Timely (now called Atlas) for his uncle, had to lay off a lot of his friends during this time.

But at the end of the 1950s, the editor Julius Schwartz at DC had an idea: if comic books couldn't publish adult material, maybe they should get back into the superhero business in a big way. Schwartz and a team of innovative creators at DC dusted off a lot of their unused properties and revamped them as new characters, turning previously magical, pulp-flavored heroes like the Flash and Green Lantern into sleek 1950s science fiction characters. The debut of Barry Allen, the new Flash, in Showcase #4 is now considered the start of the Silver Age of Comics. The new characters (and the new, science-fiction flavored spin put on old characters like Batman and Superman) took off, and DC saw its market share rise.



Things were pretty dour at Atlas, and Lee was about ready to pack it in. He hadn't done any work he was proud of in years and was looking for advertising jobs on Madison Avenue. The story goes that his wife told him that, if he was going to quit the business anyway, shouldn't he try doing one last thing he actually liked? He agreed, and pitched his uncle on trying to get back into superheroes one more time. He rounded up Jack Kirby and the two created the Fantastic Four.


As with DC's new heroes, the Fantastic Four were science-themed superheroes built for the Jet Age, who flew around in rockets and dealt with aliens and atomic radiation, but what made this new Marvel - the company had changed its name once again - book different was that it had, compared to DC, a grittier, more lo-fi edge to it. Kirby's blocky figures and dynamic camera angles were a sharp contrast to the slickly-perfect anatomy and flat, dishwasher-instruction-manual compositions that DC used. He zoomed in to show people's CRAZY EYES, or used an entire page to show a giant machine in insanely knotty detail. As scripted by Lee, who was a bit of a lounge lizard, the characters in Fantastic Four used hip modern slang. They dropped references to media and popular culture, the same stuff their audience was watching and listening to. And they had soap-operatic character conflicts and crushingly ordinary struggles with money, celebrity, depression and so forth mixed in with the superhero action. And after a few issues, the FF left their made-up burg of "Central City" and moved into the Baxter Building in New York, planting themselves firmly in the real world that readers actually lived in.


Under Lee's stewardship, Marvel also dipped its oars, gently, into the waters of 1960s liberal politics. The Fantastic Four confronted a racist demagogue called the Hate-Monger; Spider-Man's J. Jonah Jameson stood up for a black window-washer against a vicious crew boss. It was kind of wishy-washy and almost certainly had to do with Lee's knack for guessing what the kids would be into, but it still struck a sharp contrast to DC's much more suburban, whitebread world. By the end of the 1960s, Spider-Man was joining student protest marches and his old bully Flash Thompson had come back from Vietnam with "shell shock."

The response was positive, and sales reflected it. Without really knowing or meaning to, Lee and Kirby had tapped into a different audience for comics than the gradeschoolers who normally bought them; they were getting back some of the preteens and teenagers who had been reading those sexy, violent EC comics in the 50s. Lee and Kirby, in a sustained burst of creativity lasting four years, went on to create Thor, the Hulk, the X-Men, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Iron Man. They brought back Captain America (and made it stick this time) and revived writer/artist Bill Everett's 1930s creation Namor the Sub-Mariner. And with artist Steve Ditko, who specialized in unnerving, horror-flavored artwork full of little spidery linework and neurotic, bug-eyed people, Lee created Doctor Strange and Spider-Man, who would go on to become Marvel's most iconic property.

On the back of the success of this new wave of characters, Lee found himself not just a writer, but editor-in-chief of an entire line of comics. He became the face and voice of Marvel, communicating to their readers in the text boxes and letters pages of his comics, not in a distant, impersonal "editorial voice" the way DC did, but as himself, or at least as a persona - "Smilin' Stan." Where DC comics were published anonymously (and would continue to be for a decade), Lee made sure everyone got a credit on the front page of every Marvel comic, including the letterer and colorist, and his columns would recount, in breathless prose, the various personalities and adventures of the people in the "Bullpen," making Marvel sound like a fun clubhouse where a bunch of swinging hep cats hung out making pop art.

It's important to understand that this all happened between 1961 and 1964. They were creating these new characters at the same time as they were drawing and publishing other books. The demands on their time were immense. To save time, Lee and Kirby and Ditko began collaborating in shorthand, in what would later be called the "Marvel method" - writer and artist would spitball a plot idea together, then the artist would go off and draw the plot based on this (often incredibly vague!) outline, and then give the pages back to the writer, who added in the dialogue as a final touch.

This game the artists enormous creative latitude, and they used it; Ditko would just add in scenes of characters having arguments and leave it to Lee to figure out what was going on and what they were arguing about. Kirby would just create new characters in random panels, ones he hadn't even discussed with Lee, and leave Lee to figure out what they were doing there and how they talked.

In the middle of the 1960s, both artists began souring on the relationship, however. Kirby ws overworked and stressed-out, and while Marvel had been essentially saved by his and Lee's work on the Fantastic Four, Kirby, who was on a work-for-hire contract, saw none of it. Ditko's reasons were more ideological: a staunch Ayn Rand devotee, he was upset that Lee kept writing Spider-Man with a more liberal point of view, and when they had an argument about who the recurring villain the Green Goblin should be - Ditko wanted him to just be some schmo, while Lee wanted the more melodramatic revelation that it was Peter Parker's best friend's dad - Ditko left Spider-Man.

Both frustrated artists also stated that they had created these characters on their own, that Lee had just put "words in their mouths" and had stolen the credit by making himself the face of the company. This is the controversy that would continue to dog Lee for the rest of his life. Was he just a huckster? Had he stolen the credit? This tied into the wider issue of work-for-hire and creators' rights. Marvel and DC were making millions in sales and licensing off the work of people who received no royalties and, in DC's case, no credit.

As Lee began to manage the entire Marvel line, he stepped back from the day-to-day writing, except on Spider-Man, which he continued to work on up until nearly 1970 (and for many more years thereafter on the daily Spider-Man newspaper strip). In the late 1960s, Lee's uncle Martin Goodman sold the publishing business to an investment firm, and Lee, in his capacity as publisher, was kept on but chose to move to California to try and push Marvel media properties in Hollywood, a venture that for many years had very mixed success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUtziaZlDeE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DB3NqAKKk0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErhFqQOEUDE

While he still oversaw what he could from California, his involvement in the day-to-day work of publishing dwindled, and he was effectively done as a creative force by the mid-1970s. But his tireless hucksterism actually got Marvel some success in areas it doesn't typically get credit for - Marvel Productions helped create the Muppet Babies, for instance, and Marvel and Hasbro had a lucrative deal wherein Marvel helped the toy company come up with storylines for its products, which is where we got GI Joe (retooled from a pitch for a SHIELD vs HYDRA comic) and the Transformers.

By the time I started reading comics, in the late 1980s, Stan Lee was a fondly-remembered grandfather of the industry, who was also kind of a reminder of bad labor practices and questionable decisions, as fondly-remembered grandfathers sometimes are. He still promised great things for Marvel movies "any day now" in the letters pages, but people had stopped taking that seriously decades earlier. Until, suddenly, his wheeling and dealing unexpectedly paid off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAkL2-vh2Sk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZGN9fZvQhc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaU2A7KyOu4

...and here we are. It's a weird world we live in, when my comic book grandpa, the name that appeared on the front page of every issue of every comic I bought, is suddenly known and mourned by millions. Lee became a vegetarian and health nut in California and was energetic and avuncular well into his 90s. He did a triple somersault down the aisle at Comic-Con in his 80s. He made a comic with Pamela Anderson and got bilked in the dot-com bubble by an authentic international criminal. He had a weird, checkered life but always seemed to be having a hell of a time.

And for such a friendly guy, he could be a viciously sarcastic son of a bitch in that Don Rickles kind of way that only Jewish guys from the 1930s seem able to manage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmLFGWAyajU&t=5s

This is a thread for talking about the life and legacy of Stan Lee, about comic books in general, and their history. It is not the MCU thread annex; I super don't care about the latest Captain Marvel rumors or whatever.

Anyway, having said all that, I'm going to offer my strictly personal feelings about Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and authorship:

Did Stan Lee rip Kirby, Ditko, etc off financially? No. They were ripped off financially, but multiple sources suggest this was the doing of actual Timely/Atlas/Marvel owner Martin Goodman, a notorious skinflint; after he retired, he sold the business to Cadence Industries, trading kind of stereotypically scuzzy old-world family business practices for modern, ruthless, corporate business practices. Stan Lee himself never at any point actually owned Marvel and could not override its owners' wishes. Lee claims to have fought with his uncle about the subject, and some people suggest that he did, but as they were family and did most of their business privately it's honestly impossible to say if Lee was an advocate for his employees or not. Nevertheless, an advocate was all he could have been.

Creators' rights were pushed forward, decades later, by a combination of powerful, influential industry professionals and pressure from fans. Jack Kirby didn't survive to see this change, but Steve Ditko (who died this year) did, and was offered a big check upon the release of the original Spider-Man. He refused, stating that what he cared about was the principle of Lee acknowledging that he, Ditko, was Spider-Man's creator. Lee emphatically maintains that he, Lee, had the original idea and has never backed down from that claim.

Jack Kirby also claimed at one point in the 1980s to have actually created Spider-Man and then "given the sketch" to Ditko, but those close to Kirby reportedly felt that this was an early sign of Kirby's senility.

Did Stan Lee rip them off creatively? This is, to me, the tougher and more interesting question. It is absolutely impossible to deny Kirby and Ditko's co-authorship of the comics; some of the surviving art boards have their pencilled-in suggestions for dialogue still on the pages. These characters could not have been created or have succeeded without the artists' contributions and they were absolutely entitled to the monetary benefits of that. It's also true that in his role of Marvel salesman, Lee tended to talk about himself as the "creator" of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four rather than the co-creator.

However, it's also the case that Lee was a cocreator; the work bears his stamp, and neither artist ever found equivalent success on their own. Kirby's work creating the New Gods at DC, where he went after Marvel, is much-loved for its inventiveness but not as much for its plotting or dialogue. Steve Ditko went to the C-list publisher Charlton Comics and created the Question, a mean-spirited libertarian vigilante who was the inspiration for Watchmen's Rorschach, and then left Charlton to create and independently publish Mr. A, an even more mean-spirited libertarian vigilante. Kirby was by far the nicer and more creatively successful of the two artists, but in both cases severing their partnership with Lee seems to have cost them something, a humanizing connection.

Lee, meanwhile, cultivated a third fertile creative relationship, this time with the artist John Romita, who replaced Ditko on Spider-Man starting in the mid-#30s and turned Ditko's cast of haunted, bug-eyed neurotics into sexy soap-opera teens in cutting-edge late-60s flower child fashions, sending sales skyrocketing. I think the fact that Lee was creatively fecund with multiple people suggests it wasn't just their talent at work.

And while Lee-the-publisher was quick to sell himself as Mr. Marvel, he never denied his collaborators' work. When he'd come back from California to visit, the younger artists used to complain about his long lectures praising Kirby and exhorting them to draw more like "The King."

Was Stan Lee a genuine artist or just a canny salesman?



Further reading:

Marvel Comics: the Untold Story by Sean Howe
Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution by Ronin Ro