Remembering Stan Lee: A man as extraordinary as the characters he created

A superhero in his own right to Marvel fans around the world, Stan had the power to inspire, to entertain and to connect

Stan Lee, who brought a modern sensibility to comic books and provided lucrative fodder for Hollywood as co-creator of such sympathetically imperfect superheroes as Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men, and Iron Man, has died. He was 95.

From his start as a writer for Timely Comics in 1941, Lee rose to editor and publisher of Marvel Comics. He made his mark starting in the early 1960s by conjuring superheroes with troubled lives and temperamental personalities, a leap from the comic-book characters of the past.

“For once I wanted to write stories that wouldn’t insult the intelligence of an older reader, stories with interesting characterization, more realistic dialogue and plots that hadn’t been recycled a thousand times before,” Lee wrote in his 2002 memoir, Excelsior: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee. He was describing the 1961 creation, with artist Jack Kirby, of the Fantastic Four, the human quartet who gain special powers after being exposed to cosmic radiation.

So pleased was Lee with the quick success of the Fantastic Four that he added to the cover of follow-up issues the slogan, “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.”

He followed up by helping create the Incredible Hulk —he said he asked Kirby, “Can you draw a good-looking monster, or at least a sympathetic-looking monster?” —then the Mighty Thor, Iron Man and X-Men in the early 1960s.

A Marvel till the End → Stan Lee Forever