As the whole of the world deals with the Avengers mania with the release of the end game movie, we all here at the Newsmen travel back in time to tell the tale of the man behind the marvel comics, Stan Lee. Lee didn’t just dream up some of fiction’s greatest heroes, he rewrote popular notions about what a hero can or can’t be.
Lee dedicated nearly 80 years of his life to the craft, co-creating legendary characters like the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Hulk and Black Panther. Born Stanley Martin Lieber to Romanian immigrants in 1922, Lee grew up in New York. He developed a love for the fantastic early on and while his family struggled through the Great Depression, Lee bore witness to the golden age of Hollywood.
Lee’s first break came when relative Martin Goodman offered him a gig at his Timely Comics. Lee started out as “do-boy,” fetching coffee and keeping ink wells topped. Within two years, he was named editor. In 1942 Lee enlisted in the US Army just weeks after the attacks on Pearl Harbor and he resumed his position as editor after his return. In 1961,Timely Comics renamed itself to Marvel — and found its new money-maker: The Fantastic Four.
Lee was 40 when Marvel became a real success and under his leadership, the company embraced the so-called “Marvel Method.” By the 1980s, Lee was looking to get comics onto the big screen but it wasn’t until the late ’90s that Marvel really had a hit movie. After aborted attempts at big-screen versions of Captain America and The Fantastic Four, Marvel found its breakout Hollywood hero in an unlikely place — vampire-hunter Blade in 1998.
The character played by Wesley Snipes paved the way for the modern, interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe, inaugurated by 2008’s “Iron Man” starring Robert Downey Jr. That film world would go on to be populated not just by Lee’s c-creations, but by Lee himself. He fashioned himself in the public eye as a sort of comics ambassador, and his regular cameos in the Marvel films endeared him to a new generation. Stan Lee passed away in 2018.
