Written by Although not an artist, Stan Lee stands astride the comic book industry as one of it’s
Stan Lee
most influential figures. President and chairman of Marvel Comics, he was also a comic writer and editor, an actor, producer and publisher and also something of a ‘personality’.
Born in New York in 1922, his original name was Stanley Martin Lieber; his parents were Romanian-Jewish. He had a relatively poor upbringing and worked many part-time jobs while at school. After graduating he joined the Federal Theatre Project, an attempt to fund artistic performances during the Great Depression run by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He didn’t spend long at this project and in the same year his uncle helped him get a job as an assistant at Timely Comics (which would later become Marvel).
It’s fair to say that Lee started life in the comic book industry at the very bottom of the ladder; as Lee himself later recalled:
“I had to make sure the inkwells were filled. I went down and got them (the artists) their lunch, I did proofreading, I erased the pencils from the finished pages for them.”
Not until 1941 did Stan Lee get to write any actual content but even then it wasn’t his own work; he was just filling in text for other artists. Just a couple of issues later however, he did begin to create content. The Destroyer was his first in issue 6 of Mystic Comics in 1941 and this superhero was followed by Jack Frost and Father Time during the same period.
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were the editing and creative team at Timely Comics at this point and when they left towards the end of 1941, Lee was given the chance to stand in as editor on a temporary basis. Performing so well, Martin Goodman the publisher gave him the job on a permanent basis. In 1942 he was conscripted into the U.S. Army and did not return to Timely until 1945. Vincent Fago stood in for him during this time.
During the 1950s Timely Comics began to be known as Atlas Comics as part of
Fantastic Four
Goodman’s restructuring of his various companies. It was also the period when Stan Lee was turning the company into one of the most influential comic book creators. It’s main rival was DC Comics and when that company introduced a new version of The Flash and the Justice League of America, Atlas needed to reply with something impressive.
By the early 1960s that process had begun and Lee had overseen the creation of a number of now famous characters. Spiderman, the Hulk, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four all saw their first action in this period and Lee, inspired by his wife Joan, added extra dimensions to his characters by giving them human frailties and adding details to their lives that fleshed out a deeper story than may have previously been revealed. Stan Lee also attempted to create a connection between the creators and readers by introducing the ‘credit panel’ with each story – naming each person involved rather than just the writer and penciller.
Part Two follows….
