Stan Lee

Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber ; December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018) was an American comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business called Timely Comics, which later became Marvel Comics. He was Marvel's primary creative leader for two decades, expanding it from a small publishing house division to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics and film industries.

In collaboration with others at Marvel—particularly co-plotters and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko—he co-created iconic characters, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Ant-Man, the Wasp, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, the Scarlet Witch, and Black Widow. These and other characters' introductions in the 1960s pioneered a more naturalistic approach in superhero comics. In the 1970s, Lee challenged the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to changes in its policies. In the 1980s, he pursued the development of Marvel properties in other media, with mixed results.

Following his retirement from Marvel in the 1990s, Lee remained a public figurehead for the company. He frequently made cameo appearances in films and television shows based on Marvel properties, on which he received an executive producer credit, which allowed him to become the actor with the highest-grossing film total ever. He continued independent creative ventures until his death, aged 95, in 2018. Lee was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. He received the NEA's National Medal of Arts in 2008.

Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber on December 28, 1922, in Manhattan, in the apartment of his Romanian-born Jewish immigrant parents, Celia (née Solomon), originating in Huși, Romania, and Jack Lieber (born Iancu Lieber), originating in Botoșani, Romania, at the corner of West 98th Street and West End Avenue. Lee was raised in a Jewish household. In a 2002 interview, he stated when asked if he believed in God, "Well, let me put it this way... [Pauses.] No, I'm not going to try to be clever. I really don't know. I just don't know." In another interview from 2011, when asked about his Romanian origins and his relationship with the country, he said that he had never visited it and that he did not know Romanian because his parents never taught it to him.

Lee's father, trained as a dress cutter, worked only sporadically after the Great Depression. The family moved further uptown to Fort Washington Avenue, in Washington Heights, Manhattan. Lee had one younger brother named Larry Lieber. He said in 2006 that as a child he was influenced by books and movies, particularly those with Errol Flynn playing heroic roles. Reading The Scarlet Pimpernel, he called the title character "the first superhero I had read about, the first character who could be called a superhero." By the time Lee was in his teens, the family was living in an apartment at 1720 University Avenue in The Bronx. Lee described it as "a third-floor apartment facing out back". Lee and his brother shared the bedroom, while their parents slept on a foldout couch.

Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In his youth, Lee enjoyed writing and entertained dreams of writing the "Great American Novel" one day. He said that in his youth he worked such part-time jobs as writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Center; delivering sandwiches for the Jack May pharmacy to offices in Rockefeller Center; working as an office boy for a trouser manufacturer; ushering at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway; and selling subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. At fifteen, Lee entered a high school essay competition sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune, called "The Biggest News of the Week Contest". Lee claimed to have won the prize for three straight weeks, goading the newspaper to write him and ask him to let someone else win. The paper suggested he look into writing professionally, which Lee claimed "probably changed my life." However, Lee's story is apocryphal, and so is his story of a life-changing plea from the editor, because the likelier story is that Lee won a seventh-place prize of $2.50 and two honorable mention awards. He graduated from high school early, aged sixteen and a half, in 1939 and joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

With the help of his uncle Robbie Solomon, Lee became an assistant in 1939 at the new Timely Comics division belonging to pulp magazine and comic-book publisher Martin Goodman. Timely, by the 1960s, would evolve into Marvel Comics. Lee, whose cousin Jean was Goodman's wife, was formally hired by Timely editor Joe Simon.

His duties were prosaic at first. "In those days [the artists] dipped the pen in ink, [so] I had to make sure the inkwells were filled", Lee recalled in 2009. "I went down and got them their lunch, I did proofreading, I erased the pencils from the finished pages for them". Marshaling his childhood ambition to be a writer, young Stanley Lieber made his comic-book debut with the text filler "Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge" in Captain America Comics #3 (cover-dated May 1941), using the pseudonym Stan Lee (a play on his first name, "Stanley"), which years later he would adopt as his legal name. Lee later explained in his autobiography and numerous other sources that because of the low social status of comic books, he was so embarrassed that he used a pen name so nobody would associate his real name with comics when he wrote the Great American Novel one day. This initial story also introduced Captain America's trademark ricocheting shield-toss. It would be adapted into a sequential art story in 2014 by Lee and Bruce Timm in Marvel's 75th Anniversary Celebration.

Lee graduated from writing filler to actual comics with a backup feature, "'Headline' Hunter, Foreign Correspondent", two issues later, using the pseudonym "Reel Nats". His first superhero co-creation was the Destroyer, in Mystic Comics #6 (August 1941). Other characters he co-created during this period, called the Golden Age of Comic Books, include Jack Frost, debuting in U.S.A. Comics #1 (August 1941), and Father Time, debuting in Captain America Comics #6 (August 1941).

When Simon and his creative partner Jack Kirby left in late 1941 following a dispute with Goodman, the 30-year-old publisher installed Lee, just under 19 years old, as interim editor. The youngster showed a knack for the business that led him to remain as the comic-book division's editor-in-chief, as well as art director for much of that time, until 1972, when he would succeed Goodman as publisher.

Lee entered the U.S. Army in early 1942 and served within the U.S. as a member of the Signal Corps, repairing telegraph poles and other communications equipment. He was later transferred to the Training Film Division, where he worked writing manuals, training films, slogans, and occasionally cartooning. His military classification, he said, was "playwright"; he added that only nine men in the U.S. Army were given that title. In the Army, Lee's division included many famous or soon-to-be famous people, including three-time Academy Award-winning director Frank Capra, New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, and children's book writer and illustrator Theodor Geisel, later known to the world as "Dr. Seuss".

From 1945 to 1947, Lee lived in the rented top floor of a brownstone in the East 90s in Manhattan. He married Joan Clayton Boocock, originally from Newcastle, England, on December 5, 1947, and in 1949, the couple bought a house in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island, living there through 1952. Their daughter Joan Celia "J. C." Lee was born in 1950. Another daughter, Jan Lee, died a few days after her birth in 1953.

The Lees resided in the Long Island community of Hewlett Harbor, New York, from 1952 to 1980. They also owned a condominium on East 63rd Street in Manhattan from 1975 to 1980, and during the 1970s, they owned a vacation home in Remsenburg, New York. For their move to the West Coast in 1981, they bought a home in West Hollywood, California, previously owned by comedian Jack Benny's radio announcer Don Wilson.

In September 2012, Lee underwent an operation to insert a pacemaker, which required cancelling planned appearances at conventions. Lee eventually retired from convention appearances by 2017.

On July 6, 2017, Joan Boocock, his wife of 69 years, died of complications from a stroke. She was 95 years old.

Lee died on November 12, 2018, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, after being rushed there for a medical emergency earlier in the day. Lee had previously been hospitalized for pneumonia in February of that year. The immediate cause of death listed on his death certificate was cardiac arrest with respiratory failure and congestive heart failure as underlying causes. It also indicated that he suffered from aspiration pneumonia. His body was cremated and his ashes were given to his daughter.

Roy Thomas, who succeeded Lee as editor-in-chief at Marvel, had visited Lee two days prior to his death to discuss the upcoming book The Stan Lee Story and stated "I think he was ready to go. But he was still talking about doing more cameos. As long as he had the energy for it and didn't have to travel, Stan was always up to do some more cameos. He got a kick out of those more than anything else." Lee's last words to Thomas was "God bless. Take care of my boy, Roy", leading fans to speculate that he was referring to Spider-Man. However, Lee had long before nick-named Thomas as Roy "the Boy" Thomas, in line with the way Lee sometimes styled himself as Stan "the Man" Lee.

The County of Los Angeles and the City of Long Beach declared October 2, 2009, "Stan Lee Day".

Boston's Mayor Marty Walsh named August 2, 2015, as "Stan Lee Day" for the city during the annual Boston Comic-Con event.

The office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that October 7, 2016, was "Stan Lee Day" for the city during the New York Comic Con event.

At the onset of the 2016 Stan Lee's Comikaze Expo in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles City Council announced that October 28, 2016, was "Stan Lee Day".

On July 14, 2017, Lee and Jack Kirby were named Disney Legends for their creation of numerous characters that later comprised Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Stan Lee appears in one panel as "third assistant office boy" in Terry-Toons #12 (September 1943). Stan Lee is featured prominently as a story character in Margie #36 (June 1947).

He later appears in a mask on the cover of Black Rider #8 (March 1950), albeit as a character model, not as Stan Lee.

Lee and Jack Kirby appear as themselves in The Fantastic Four #10 (January 1963), the first of several appearances within the fictional Marvel Universe. The two are depicted as similar to their real-world counterparts, creating comic books based on the "real" adventures of the Fantastic Four.

Kirby later portrayed himself, Lee, production executive Sol Brodsky, and Lee's secretary Flo Steinberg as superheroes in What If #11 (October 1978), "What If the Marvel Bullpen Had Become the Fantastic Four?", in which Lee played the role of Mister Fantastic.

Lee was shown in numerous cameo appearances in many Marvel titles, appearing in audiences and crowds at many characters' ceremonies and parties. For example, he is seen hosting an old-soldiers reunion in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #100 (July 1972), in The Amazing Spider-Man #169 (June 1977), as a bar patron in Marvels #3 (1994), at Karen Page's funeral in Daredevil vol. 2, #8 (June 1998), and as the priest officiating at Luke Cage and Jessica Jones' wedding in New Avengers Annual #1 (June 2006). Lee and Kirby appear as professors in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 (2006).

Lee had cameo appearances in many Marvel film and television projects, including those within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A few of these appearances are self-aware and sometimes reference Lee's involvement in the creation of certain characters. He additionally voiced a cameo appearance as himself in the 2018 DC Comics movie Teen Titans Go! To the Movies. Out of respect for Lee, Marvel Studios enacted a new policy following his death that forbids cameos by Lee in new films by using archive footage of him, with Avengers: Endgame (2019) marking his final appearance; the film was released several months after his death.

Lee was featured with his colleagues and family in the 2010 documentary With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, which explored his life, career, and creations. A special titled Stan Lee, chronicling the life and legacy of Lee, was released on June 16, 2023, on Disney+. It was directed by David Gelb and premiered at the Tribeca Festival.