The Man Who Made the Marvel

My honest preference has always run East—manga over Western comics, the visual grammar of Otomo or Urasawa over anything from the House of Ideas. But Stan Lee was never really just a comics person. He was a cultural institution in the same way certain buildings become institutions: you stop seeing them as constructed things and start experiencing them as simply part of the landscape.

Born Stanley Martin Lieber in New York in December 1922, son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, Lee started at Timely Comics in 1939 as an assistant—literally filling inkwells and reading proof. His first published work appeared in 1941. Two decades later he was editor-in-chief. The company would eventually rename itself Marvel, and no single name became more synonymous with it than his.

The 1960s were the peak of the creation years: the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, Ant-Man, Black Panther, Spider-Man. The list reads like a catalogue of the twentieth century’s anxieties given spandex and purpose—outsiders, mutants, the brilliant and the monstrous, the man bitten by something he never saw coming. He wrote the monthly column "Stan’s Soapbox" with the directness of someone who genuinely believed comics could carry moral weight, and who was usually right.

In later decades he became the face, the cameo, the man in the crowd—a brief appearance in nearly every Marvel film, always slightly delighted to be there, always earning the laugh. He moved to California in 1981 to develop film and television projects, received the National Medal of Arts in 2008, and kept turning up in cinemas right to the end. He was 95. The cameos are done.