Stan Lee died at age 95; Marvel Comics Super Hero

By opting for the police rather than accepting legislation, the cartoon industry has created the authority of the Cartoon Code to ensure healthy content. The graphic gore and moral ambiguity were at the rendezvous, but the spirit, literary influences and attention to social issues were largely. Harmless cookie-cutter exercises were in progress.

Many found the comics sanitized boring and, with the new television bracket offering competition, readership, which had reached 600 million sales a year, has declined by nearly three quarters in a few years.

With the alleviation of the golden age of superhero comics, Mr. Lee has had enough of writing generic stories of humor, romance, westerns and monsters for what has become Atlas Comics . Reaching a professional impasse in his thirties, he was encouraged by his wife to write the comics he wanted, not just what was considered marketable. And Mr. Goodman, his boss, encouraged by the popularity of a flash (and later of Green Lantern) restarted at DC, wanted him to revisit the superheroes.

Mr. Lee responded to his suggestion to Mr. Goodman, but he went much further.

Enter the four fantastic

In 1961, MM. Lee and Kirby – who he had reported several years ago to the company, now known as Marvel – published the first issue of The Fantastic Four, devoted to an overpowering team with humanizing dimensions: non-secret identities, internal quarrels and, in the thing to the orange peel, torment. It was a blow.

Other Marvel titles – such as the creation of Lee-Kirby, The Incredible Hulk, a modern story of Jekyll and Hyde about an honest man turned by monster radiation – proposed a similar pattern. Lee's hero par excellence, introduced in 1962 and created with artist Steve Ditko (1927-2018), was Spider-Man.

A shy high school intellectual who gained his powers when he was bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider-Man was inclined to search for his soul, fueled by sarcasm – a key to the character's enduring popularity on many entertainment platforms including movies and a Broadway musical.

Mr. Lee's dialogue encompassed Catskills shtick, such as Spider-Man's speech in action; Elizabethan idioms, like Thor; and braggart of the working class of the Lower East Side, like Thing's. It could also include poetry in store, as in this eco-oratory on humans, pronounced by Silver Surfer, an extraterrestrial:

"And again – in their uncontrollable madness – in their unforgivable blindness – they seek to destroy this brilliant jewel – this spinning gently gem – this tiny blessed sphere – what men call Earth! "