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A child from a family of modest means, the Marvel Comics writer and editor Stan Lee, who died this week at 95, grew up in a Manhattan bedroom whose window faced a wall. He resented that wall, craving a vantage on the world with nary a brick in sight. From one way of thinking, his insatiable, lifelong drive for fame and fortune was a quest to tear the offending barrier down, the better to see what lay beyond it.
Though he is most famous for helping bring a host of heroes — Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Iron Man and others — into the world, the only character that was wholly his own may have been Stan Lee himself. With each figurative brick he pulled down, he built himself up a little more, becoming something at times corny and at times self-lacerating, but always inexplicably lovable. A master of personal branding, he remained instantly identifiable from his catchphrases (“Excelsior!”) and his signature look, featuring oversized sunglasses and a Member’s Only jacket that he sported well into his 90s.
Success never came easily to Lee despite appearances to the contrary. His reputation was repeatedly challenged over the course of a long career. In the ’40s and ’50s, many of his contemporaries in the magazine publishing world considered him a lightweight. Later, they questioned his loyalty to his collaborators, citing his attempts to claim creative credit for the intellectual properties he once oversaw. If Lee nevertheless prospered – still attracting fans that would pay a premium just to take a photo with him – it was surely because he remade himself as the unofficial ambassador of comic books to the world. While he may have once been preoccupied with the bricks outside his bedroom, he ultimately helped demolish the wall that separated popular culture from the culture itself.
No cosmic watcher surveying Lee’s earliest efforts could have predicted the trajectory of his career. For two decades, he soldiered on as an anonymous, unremarkable writer, penning countless short stories in a variety of genres, from romance to horror to adventure. And though he would later grow famous for the goofily hackneyed grandiloquence of his prose, it was never really his writing that drove his reputation. In the 1960s, after he and his collaborators became successful with a new group of superheroes who are the basis of today’s Marvel movie empire, Lee created a way of making comics now known as the Marvel Method. The writer – most often Lee himself – would provide the artists with little more than a short summary, sometimes just a sentence or two, of the issue’s plot. Only after the pages were laid out and illustrated would the writer dream up dialogue and captions.
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The Marvel Method ostensibly freed up Lee’s time to work on more comic books, conveniently allowing him to make more money from scripting work. Its real effect, though, may have been that it enabled him to stamp his personal imprimatur on the entire line of Marvel comics, ensuring that readers would read the disparate titles as products of his unified vision. The irony of his relatively hands-off approach may have been that it offered his collaborators the freedom to experiment aesthetically, lending Marvel’s titles a look that was at once more varied and more sophisticated than almost anything on display at its competitors.
And that competition was critical, especially in the fertile creative era of the 1960s that would define Lee’s career. Rival publisher DC Comics had beat Marvel to market by a half-decade with newer versions of its classic superhero characters like Green Lantern and the Flash. Marvel couldn’t simply join this movement; it had to innovate by offering something new, something that readers quickly noticed: heroes with feet of clay; good guys that failed; villains that were heroes of their own stories. Lee, meanwhile, turned out to be an exceptional editorial director, as he shepherded his small group of regular artists to tell these stories. He was an even better production manager, smartly using the limits of a restrictive distribution deal to keep the line small but potent. Even the “lightweight” criticism of years past worked to Marvel’s advantage in the ’60s when Lee was able to attract artists who found the strong editorial personalities at DC to be more abusive than supportive.
Lee was also initially helped by the relative lack of sophistication in the coverage of comic books. His outsize personality played well with journalists sent to cover the publisher’s growing success, few of whom challenged his claims to be a creative genius at the forefront of Marvel’s collective success. By the time Marvel passed DC Comics in 1972 to become the top-selling comic book publisher, a new generation of fans-turned-pros stepped in to play in the sandbox Lee had helped build and continued to popularize. “Written by Stan Lee” became “Stan Lee Presents . . .” Few seemed to worry that the innovation on the company’s core titles had drastically slowed. Characters whose actions were once hard to predict settled into recognizable patterns; narratives became cyclical. This, too, would eventually play into Lee’s legacy, effectively incubating the company’s stable of characters for decades so that their eventual film and television stewards could cherry-pick the most viable creative projects from thousands of pages of similar material.
The backlash against Marvel’s impresario came faster. Lee was cast as an industry villain twice in his career. The first time was for betraying his status as co-creator on so many of the previous decade’s Marvel comics. As the 1970s progressed, hardcore fans and an emerging industry press noticed that Marvel was doing more with toy tie-ins, spin-offs and narrative stunts such as company crossovers than the innovative character creation and storytelling through which the company had made its name. Marvel wasn’t just stagnant: It was crassly commercial, betraying the very things that had once revitalized its reputation.
Far more serious was a charge from Lee’s 1960s frequent creative partner and co-creator Jack Kirby, an industry legend who, in interviews given from 1982 to 1989, claimed that Lee did far less actual writing on the classic Marvel superheroes than even the most explicit descriptions of the Marvel Method had allowed people to believe. Perhaps more damning, Kirby and some supporters alleged that Lee had been a poor advocate for his co-creators throughout. In time, many came forward to describe predatory contracts that had deprived them of all but the most minimal compensation for the colossally valuable intellectual properties they had helped to create. Lee’s nickname – “The Man” – took on new connotations.
If Lee’s reputation somehow weathered the storm, it may have been because fans were – and are still – loath to accuse him of actively working against artists such as Kirby and Steve Ditko. To do so would have been a rebuke to the world these titans of the industry shaped together, a world in which heroes might sometimes bicker, only to reunite in the end. Lee’s final years – in which he ran afoul of a web site media company partner, broke with Marvel and then later settled over issues of money and credit, engaged in a number of unsuccessful media creation efforts, and suffered personal crises – may not have rehabilitated his image, but they likely softened it. For many fans he has always remained that beloved, comics-crazy uncle, linked forever to the Marvel Universe.
Lee’s true saving grace may have been that he was so disproportionately famous compared to his contemporaries in the business that his desires couldn’t help but shape comics. He longed to transcend the medium, while also maintaining the possibly misguided belief that Hollywood success would legitimize the funnybooks that made him famous. He lived long enough to see Marvel’s characters grow into billion-dollar properties, even as he played cameo roles in the films that drove their popularity, linking their cinematic present to their pen and ink past.
And yet Lee himself was no media mogul. His true talent may have been as simple as his ability to extend the appeal of superhero comics: You could read Marvel Comics as an 8-year-old and want to be Spider-Man; you could read them as a 16-year-old and want to work for Marvel, drawing the character; you could read them as an adult and simply admire the skill and panache with which they were told. It was Lee who showed us that these possibilities were open to us. He knew how to wink at readers without putting them down, leading us by example to the way we interact with all popular culture now.
In a sense, then, Lee was always bringing walls down. He gave us a new way of looking at comics, at pop culture and maybe at the world more generally. That may not have been the view he longed for when he was a child, but it’s one we all share today.
Spurgeon is the co-author (with Jordan Raphael) of “Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book” and produces The Comics Reporter website.
First published by The Washington Post
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