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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The father of Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer invented the modern superhero, revived a dying industry and created a mythology.
Aug 17, 1999 | Much of my childhood was spent spellbound in the Marvel Universe, immersed in a mythos hatched largely in the mind of writer and editor Stan Lee in the early '60s. New York City was where the superheroes lived. It was one of those childhood truths, a Big Apple bustling with vibrantly costumed superhumans. Spider-Man lived in Queens, the Fantastic Four in Midtown and Doctor Strange down on Bleecker Street.
It was important that Lee's heroes lived in the real world, and not in Gotham City or Metropolis, because they were real people. That is, Marvel Comics imagined how real people might act if they suddenly gained superpowers -- confused, conflicted and not necessarily eager for the responsibility. They were a departure from that straight-arrow hero of the Golden Age, Superman. The next age belonged to Marvel. And Stan Lee ushered it in with his creations.
The Marvel Age brought its own sensibility and vernacular, expressed by characters who developed through their adventures instead of merely bouncing over tall buildings in a single bound from one escapade to the next. Marvel's heroes were tragi-bombastic, beset by every variety of psychological affliction, but usually smart-assing their way through it. Lee invented the vocabulary and the attitude of the modern superhero, placing his characters and their complex stories in a vivid, literary landscape. Lee was also a principal architect of the modern comic book, a major signpost in popular culture and one of the great American art forms of the 20th century.
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Stanley Lieber was the teenage cousin of the wife of Martin Goodman, owner of Marvel (then Timely) Comics. He entered the family business in 1939, one year after the debut of Superman, in Action Comics No. 1 (a copy of which sold at auction in July for $46,000). Lieber's first writing for the company was a piece of prose in Captain America No. 3, a two-page text filler that qualified comic books for inexpensive mailing rates. He signed it "Stan Lee," he later recalled, "because I felt someday I'd be writing the Great American Novel and I didn't want to use my real name on these silly little comics." Lee worked with editor Joe Simon and one of the giants of the industry, artist Jack Kirby, of whom Lee once said, "He never drew a character who didn't look interesting or excited. In every panel there was something to look at." But within three years, Simon and Kirby, who had created the successful Captain America serial for Timely, left the company for the competition, DC Comics.
The rival publisher had a fleet of new superheroes, including Superman, Batman and the Flash. They protected their secret identities and never wavered from their battle with evil. The characters caught on, and comics became the ideal medium for their adventures. But to some, including Lee, the DC heroes were as flat as their exploits were predictable. Of Superman, Lee once said, "He was never very interesting to me, because I was never worried about him. And if you're not worried about the jam your hero is in, there's no excitement."
At age 20, Lee became Timely's editor and chief writer. With his literary aspirations and his youth, he resisted the typical comic-book heroes, with their bland invincibility and adolescent subordinates. Lee was an underdog himself, but he felt readily able to fill Simon's heroic shoes. Luckily for the industry, he had the ambition to match his imagination. His new pen name would become the most recognized in the history of comics.
By the '60s, however, the newly renamed Marvel Comics -- and much of the comic-book industry -- teetered on the edge of extinction. Jack Kirby returned to the company that year and, lore has it, found Lee sobbing while movers took the furniture out of Marvel's offices. Rival DC had managed to score a hit with a new team of superheroes, the Justice League of America, headed by the Man of Steel himself. Goodman, Lee's boss and cousin-in-law, demanded a response from Marvel, and, born of necessity, a long artistic flowering began.
