Stan Lee

I was never really a Marvel person—always preferred manga—but you couldn’t ignore Stan Lee. He created or co-created nearly every major superhero of the last seventy years. Spider-Man, the X-Men, Hulk, Thor, Daredevil, Iron Man, Black Panther. The catalog is almost absurd. He died at 95, and American pop culture doesn’t make sense without his fingerprints on it.

Stanley Martin Lieber was born in 1922, son of Romanian Jewish immigrants in New York. Timely Comics brought him on in 1939 to do the grunt work—reading proofs, filling ink bottles, the apprentice stuff. His first published work appeared in 1941. Twenty years later he was running the place. When the company became Marvel, he became inseparable from it.

In the 1960s he was everywhere in Marvel’s machinery. Writing, editing, answering fan mail, publishing his monthly Stan’s Soapbox column, building this whole infrastructure of fandom that made comics feel like a conversation. He became the public face at conventions and panels. In 1981 he moved to California to push Marvel’s expansion into film and television. For years after that he’d appear in movies in those tiny cameos, an autograph on everything.

What endures isn’t whether he actually drew the pages or wrote the dialogue—there’s a whole argument about that. It’s that he made superheroes human enough to survive him. The National Medal of Arts in 2008 was almost ceremonial. He’d already made himself permanent.