Sad to see such a great mind go. But everybody has to die someday…
He’ll be missed. I am sad, especially since he was in the middle of that mess, and he deserved so much better than that for the end of his life.
Saddening. A complicated person, but one of the great storytellers of the last century, with his heart in the right place.
Is that Drew Carey on the right?
RIP.
The Marvel Years
Stan Lee spent 78 of his 95 years in the comics and/or superhero business, but he’s most famous for just ten of them.
In 1962 Stan Lee was 40. Up to that point Lee’s career had been mostly unremarkable, writing and editing a bunch of forgettable romance, western, and monster comics. But that year Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, and what was called (by Stan, natch) the “Marvel Revolution” quickly followed. This revolution included a host of new superheroes – Spider-man, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Daredevil, the Avengers, the X-Men – but even more importantly it included a whole new attitude about how superhero comics should work.
Instead of made-up places like Metropolis or Gotham City, Marvel’s stories took place in real-world New York, with references to real-world trends and pop-culture. Instead of all heroes talking the same way (at DC the editor of The Justice League of America demanded each hero use distinct catchphrases – “Suffering Sappho!” – because otherwise readers couldn’t tell the heroes apart,) characters had distinct speech patterns and personalities: Peter Parker was a wisecracking teenager, Ben Grimm a gruff regular guy, Namor a grandiloquent anti-hero, Scott Summers self-conscious and serious, etc. In Lee’s universe the heroes squabbled with each other instead of getting along; they also graduated from school, got married and had kids, and generally spent as much time on the sort of drama you’d get in a soap opera as they did on superheroics. And just like soap operas, superhero comics became serialized, with plotlines spilling over multiple issues (much to the annoyance of the business types, who thought continuing storylines were bad for sales.) Not only that, but characters spilled over into other comics, with the Fantastic Four and the Avengers teaming up to take on the Hulk, or Daredevil teaming up with Spider-man. And to keep it all straight there were helpful little footnotes from your trusty editor, Smilin’ Stan.
During this period, Lee became the most famous superhero creator ever. As part and parcel of this, Lee often got credit for things he didn’t do. He didn’t revive superheroes single-handed – the revival was already underway at DC, with revivals of Flash, Green Lantern, and other characters (Fantastic Four was a response to DC’s new team book, The Justice League of America.) He didn’t invent the Marvel Universe by himself - due to the way Lee worked, giving outlines to artists and then filling in the captions and dialog later, artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were as much creators as Lee.
Moreover, many of his character concepts weren’t original; like every superhero comics creator ever, he did a whole lot of borrowing. For the Fantastic Four, he revived an old character Marvel owned the rights to, the Human Torch. For Mr. Fantastic, he borrowed the powers of an old Quality comics character (later acquired by DC,) Plastic Man. And for the other two he drew inspiration from the Universal monster movies – Sue Storm got the power of the Invisible Man, and Ben Grimm was a combination of the Wolfman and the Frankenstein monster. Other characters had even more obscure roots: Lee’s concept for Iron Man seems to have come from an obscure 1940s character, Bozo the Iron Man.
Being a master of shameless self-promotion (and being quite open about it – he’d actually use the phrase in his editorial pages,) Lee didn’t shy away from the limelight. Not that he kept the names of other Marvel employees some kind of a secret: thanks to Lee’s hype-driven editorial style, Marvel’s staff probably got more mention than the employees of any US comics publisher before it.
But as a super-extrovert in an industry full of introverts, Lee just couldn’t help blowing his own horn louder than those of the others. This rankled both Ditko and Kirby, who both left Marvel during the height of its success, certain that braggart Lee wouldn’t be able to hit the same heights without them - and this turned out to be true. But by the same token, neither Ditko nor Kirby were able to hit the same heights without Lee, either.
(Meanwhile the fallacy, still sometimes seen today, that Lee was a no-talent hack completely dependent on Ditko and Kirby is disproven by Lee’s creditable post-Ditko run on Spider-man with John Romita; it introduced notable characters like Kingpin, Mary Jane, and Gwen, and featured notable storylines like the death of Captain Stacy and the controversial issue where Harry was addicted to heroin.)
Lee was easily able to get past the loss of two of the company’s major talents because the Marvel Revolution had produced an army of eager recruits. A tide of young people showed up at Marvel wanting to work with Stan the Man. Lee took many of them in, got them started, and launched a whole bunch of careers.
In 1972, Lee was 50 and the most famous person in the US comic book business. He walked away from it.
(cont’d)
The Visionary Years
Lee knew something about the comics business in 1972 that most of his readers didn’t: it was doomed. While Marvel was grabbing more and more market share, the industry as a whole was in decline. The number of comics sold each year was falling, and had been for literally decades. The places that sold comics then - mostly newsstands and drug stores – hated comics because the markup was low relative to the amount of shelf-space needed. Plus comics attracted the “wrong element,” namely kids. It was easy to see a time coming soon when the combination of rising paper prices and low profit margins would crowd comics out of convenience stores entirely – a prediction that indeed came to pass.
(In the end, of course, the comics industry was saved by the invention of dedicated hobbyist comics shops: Lee had helped create a generation of fans who were so devout that they were willing to build an entire alternate retail channel just to keep superhero comics alive. But this alternate channel simply didn’t exist in 1972.)
If Lee was to keep his creations alive as a viable part of popular culture, he’d have to transplant them into other media. So he left his hands-on role at Marvel and headed to Hollywood to bring the Marvel touch to TV and movies.
From the standpoint of today, where the top box-office lists for the year – and indeed of all time – are mostly superhero movies, many featuring Lee’s characters, it’s clear that Lee was a genuine visionary.
But part of the story of being a genuine visionary is everyone thinking you’re a crackpot when you start. Which certainly fits most of Lee’s early attempts to bring Marvel characters to the mainstream. They were almost all, to be blunt, flops. No one today remembers the (unproduced) Captain America Broadway show, or the Spider-man rock opera album, or the Dr. Strange TV movie, and for good reason: they were terrible. Of Lee’s early multimedia attempts, only a few got any traction – a string of Saturday morning cartoons (none very good until the 1990s, but they kept the characters in front of kids and kept the merchandising cash flowing) and the Hulk TV show, which ran for five seasons in the late 70s and early 80s. Lee was keeping his characters out there, but it’s not like Hollywood was banging down his door demanding to work with him.
In retrospect it’s clear why. First off, Hollywood just couldn’t deliver on the Marvel universe properly, even after Star Wars upped the game of Hollywood’s visual effects. With the technology of the 70s and 80s, Hollywood could create spaceships or a lumbering Wookie or a stiff ‘droid - but not a lithe Spider-man agilely swinging through the skyscraper canyons of NYC.
Second, the people running Hollywood in 1972 just didn’t care. Super-heroes were kids’ stuff, and 1972 Hollywood didn’t give a damn about kids (Disney was at its lowest ebb at this time as well.) Hollywood wouldn’t start caring about super-heroes until super-hero fans started running the studios.
So Lee waited. And waited. And waited. For more than 25 years, as it turns out. It took extra long because of many legal entanglements (nobody involved in the original Marvel had a head for IP management, Lee included.) But finally in 2000 Hollywood caught up to Stan Lee: an X-Men movie appeared, followed by a Spider-man movie in 2002. And now, of course, Marvel is a movie behemoth and Lee’s characters are known the world over.
And one of those internationally known characters is … Stan Lee. Thanks to a string of cameos over 19 years, Lee’s face is as well-known to modern movie audiences as Spider-man’s mask or Thor’s hammer. Lee always called super-heroes modern mythology. Today, he joins his creations in the pantheon.
Aww, man. I figured this was coming, but that sucks.
RIP to a true legend.
Awesome write-up, HumanTon. A sad day, but what a life and legacy to leave behind!
Damn! No more cameos… :( But 95 is a pretty good run.
Amazingly, he took comics from a niche genre for children and nerds, to the basis for the biggest grossing movies of all time…
Thanks for posting that. It was fun to play along. Having only seen Stan Lee during the past maybe 10 or 20 years, I didn’t know what he looked like when he was younger. Nonetheless, I was sure I recognized him, since I’ve seen him in lots of pictures and shows lately. And yet I picked the wrong one!
I was a DC guy myself when I was a kid, but as I grew older, my loyalties turned around. While I still enjoy both, Marvel eventually edged out DC for me in the end.
RIP, Mr. Lee. You were a big part of my childhood, and all the way into my 30’s.
It seemed fairly obvious to me once they started talking. When they showed them at first I couldn’t pick him though. He looks different without the glasses.
Fun video though, thanks for sharing @Woolen_Horde
Met him twice. My favorite time was when my son was 8. We brought Stan’s autobiography to get it autographed, and Carter drew him a picture of a bunch of Marvel Super-Heroes. It was cute for an 8-year-old, but not, like, a budding Alex Ross or anything. :)
So we get to Stan in line, he autographs his biography, and then Carter hands him the picture.
Stan: “Do you want me to autograph this?”
Carter: “No, Mr. Lee, I drew this for you.”
Stan: “Well, this is excellent!” (to his assistant) “Keep this safe so we can take it back and frame it.”
(to Carter) “Thank you very much”
Carter: “You’re welcome!”
Stan, to his assistant: “If you lose that, you’re fired.”
It was so kind of him to take a little extra time with my son, and to make him feel good about his drawing. I doubt that picture ended up framed in Stan’s office, but 8 years later my son remembers that exchange word for word.
I love that!
Great story, Denny.
Nice story. And it’s one the type of thing I’m seeing going again in the anecdotes that I’ve read: he was a person that genuinely cared about the fans.
The word is he shot a bunch of unreleased cameos for future use. I imagine stuff like in-movie commercials or something like that, otherwise I’m not sure how they integrate Stan into the scene.
But now that he’s gone, I wonder how weird it’ll be to actually watch them. You know he’s sure to show up in the next Avengers and Captain Marvel, as they’re already done shooting.
Nah, given how many digital avatars they have to make for these films for the special effects they can also toss in a Stan Lee or two.
Excelsior fellow human!
For all the Marvel cameos, for my money, they best and definitive Stan Lee cameo will always be Mallrats.
“I think you ought to get him some help. He seems to be really hung up on superhero sex organs…”
I was happy to see Lee make a CGI cameo in (spoilers!) the PS4 Spider-Man game.
Thanks for that analysis, @HumanTon.
Ah, not quite!
Now if the writers/directors are smart, they’ll find a way to smoothly work Stan (photo, old vid footage, shot of his grave, etc) into every movie going forward. Basically no cost to them and fans will love them for it.