The Untold Truth Of Stan Lee

Stan Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922, which was perfect timing to enter the workforce during the Great Depression. He was always interested in writing and made some extra cash in school by drafting preemptive obituaries for famous people the papers thought might die soon. When he turned 18, he got a job with Timely Comics, the company which would later make a fateful name change to Marvel. At the time, the company was owned by Martin Goodman, who was married to Lee's cousin. How much this family connection helped Lee get the job remains disputed, with Captain America creator Joe Simon remarking that "Stan was always embarrassed about being related to Martin." Lee even claimed that Goodman had no idea he worked there until they bumped into each other in the hall, although Simon says that can't be true, since "we didn't have a hall." 

Stan Lee had been working at Marvel for less than a year when veterans Joe Simon and Jack Kirby discovered that Martin Goodman had been stiffing them out of royalties on Captain America. The pair were supposed to get 25 percent of the profits between them, but Goodman had been deducting the expenses of the whole office from the Captain America sales, making profits much lower than they should have been. Outraged, Kirby and Simon quit Timely for National Comics (which later became DC).

Goodman immediately appointed the 19-year-old Stan Lee to replace Simon as editor-in-chief. At the time, he had mostly written short "filler" comics, as well as brief text stories that were only included so the comics could technically qualify as "magazines" and get a cheaper rate on postage. Lee himself says the appointment was supposed to be temporary, but Goodman became distracted with other branches of his publishing company and forgot to replace him. As it turned out, Lee remained in the post for the next three decades (he's pictured above in the 1960s), although he did take a few years out to serve in the army during WWII, where he designed anti-VD posters reading "VD? Not Me!"

In the early days of Marvel, Stan Lee was scripting multiple books every month while also serving as editor. As the years went on, he would hand books off to other creators (Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four were the only ones he stayed on for over 100 issues). Lee still maintained the position of overseeing and approving the entire line in addition to being the public face of Marvel Comics. That was a lot of work, and, in 1974, it hit critical mass in the weirdest possible way.

At the time, Stan had moved to the position of publisher (a job that he would later leave after claiming that it was more about the business side of the industry than the creative work he enjoyed). While a series of successors filled the role of editor-in-chief, Stan still had the final say on what happened in the books. When he was looking at an issue of Iron Man, he asked Roy Thomas, his former assistant, who had been promoted to EiC, why his helmet didn't have room for a nose. Thomas assigned artist George Tuska to fix the "problem," and in Iron Man #68, the armored Avenger debuted a new helmet with a big triangular nose on his face mask.

Needless to say, it looked pretty silly. So silly, in fact, that according to an issue of Marvel Age, when Stan picked up an issue of Iron Man a year later, he asked why Iron Man had a nose on his armor. He had completely forgotten he asked for it in the first place.

The "Marvel Method" produced some great comics, but it also caused a rift between Stan Lee and Marvel's artists, who felt he was hogging credit and payment for stories they had at least co-written. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, the other members of Marvel's "Holy Trinity," also resented that the charismatic Lee had become the face of the company. Ditko eventually stopped speaking to Lee at all and left Marvel in 1966. Kirby followed Ditko out in 1970 and soon kicked off a huge controversy by claiming that he alone had created hit characters like the Hulk, Thor, and the Fantastic Four.

According to Kirby, Lee contributed virtually nothing but used his power as editor to make sure he was credited anyway. He later railed that "Stan Lee wasn't a guy that read or that told stories ... It wasn't possible for a man like Stan to come up with new things, or old things, for that matter." Daredevil artist Wally Wood was just as scathing, writing that Lee only ever "came up with two surefire ideas ... the first one was 'Why not let the artists write the stories as well as draw them?' And the second was 'Always sign your name on top — BIG!'"

On the other hand, Spider-Man artist John Romita Sr. defended Lee, telling Jon B. Cooke that he "would bet my house that Jack never read the books after Stan wrote them; that's why he could claim with a straight face that Stan never wrote anything ... [Stan's] a con man, but he did deliver ... that's why I never begrudged him getting any of the credit, and as far as I'm concerned, he can have his name above my stuff anytime he wants."

If Stan Lee's partnership with Jack Kirby deteriorated into enmity, his relationship with Spider-Man and Doctor Strange co-creator Steve Ditko went in a different direction. It became nonexistent. Ditko had always been a little intense. He was, for instance, the only member of the Marvel bullpen who refused to appear on the Voices of Marvel record, a truly bizarre artifact given to members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club where the original staff, led by Lee, wandered through skits about working on comics. Given the quality of the jokes, Ditko's lack of interest is understandable. Another bone of contention was, according to Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, when Stan put a blurb on a title page claiming that an issue had been voted "Most Likely to Succeed (By Stan and Steve)," a joke which rubbed Ditko the wrong way — he demanded Lee change it since no such vote had taken place.

As his tenure on Amazing Spider-Man continued, Ditko attempted to inject the stories with references to Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy, in which he was an ardent believer. That put him at odds with Lee, who was writing the dialogue. Eventually, they just stopped speaking to each other, even as they continued working on Amazing Spider-Man. The final straw came when the two creators disagreed over the true identity of Spider-Man villain the Green Goblin. Lee wanted it to be Norman Osborn, the father of Spider-Man's best friend; Ditko allegedly wanted the Goblin to be an unrelated criminal. Lee won the argument. Ditko exited the book and was replaced by John Romita Sr., who stayed with Marvel for many years.

For his part, Ditko would work on and off for Marvel and DC for the next few decades and is still creating and publishing comics on his own today, usually with a hardcore Randian bent like the work seen in his comic Mr. A. Ditko does not, however, do any interviews, and despite co-creating one of the 20th century's most popular fictional characters, has no interest in talking about his time at Marvel.

In the 1960s, Marvel was just a small division of a company called Magazine Management, and while Stan Lee and the other creators in the original bullpen were revolutionizing superheroes, they weren't actually the most profitable part of the company. That honor, dubious as it might be, went to a line of softcore "Men's Magazines" with names like Complete Man, Male, and Stag. The names, as you can see, are very creative.

Lee, sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the success that former Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman was having with a strip called Little Annie Fannie that ran in Playboy, decided that there might be some success to be found by combining Magazine Management's two most prominent departments. The result was what he called a "nudie-cutie" comic called The Adventures of Pussycat, which made its debut in the pages of Male in 1965. As befitting the era where James Bond and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. were ruling pop culture, Pussycat's "misadventures of a magnificently proportioned miss" focused on a naive secretary working for a secret organization called S.C.O.R.E. — the Secret Council of Ruthless Extroverts — as they sought to thwart their nemeses in L.U.S.T. And just in case you were wondering how much effort was put into the plots of these comics, L.U.S.T. didn't actually stand for anything.

While the original story was plotted and drawn by Wally Wood, who was no stranger to the erotic side of comics, Lee would later script issues drawn by artists Jim Mooney and Al Hartley, the latter of whom would leave Marvel after providing art for the softcore strip and devote much of his career to drawing Christian-themed comics stories. Needless to say, despite having an incredible roster of talent behind it, including Lee, Wood, Mooney, Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, and more, Marvel is in no hurry to acknowledge the existence of Pussycat. The strips have only been reprinted once in the '60s. However. a character named Agent Pussycat, inspired by the original version, did make an appearance in a 2012 issue of Defenders.

Although he was the public face of Marvel from the 1960s onward, Stan Lee was always an employee and never owned the rights to the characters he co-created. In fact, he even had to sue Marvel in 2002, claiming that the company failed to honor an agreement to pay him 10 percent of the profits from any movies featuring his characters. The case was settled out of court in 2005, with Lee dropping his claim in return for around $10 million.

That probably seemed like a good deal at the time since Marvel wasn't producing its own movies and only received a small portion of the profits from outside productions like Spider-Man. However, shortly after Lee settled, Marvel launched its own film studio and was soon raking in billions from hits like Iron Man and The Avengers. Despite potentially losing hundreds of millions, Lee insisted he wasn't bitter, telling Playboy that "my daughter was looking at the internet the other day and read that Stan Lee has an estimated $250 million. I mean, that's ridiculous! I don't have anywhere near that ... I never dreamed I should have $100 million or $250 million or whatever that crazy number is. All I know is I created a lot of characters and enjoyed the work I did."

Stan Lee's attempts at breaking out of comics and into the other areas of the newsstand were not limited to the world of men's adventure magazines. In the late '70s, he launched Celebrity, a knockoff of People mainly notable for two things. First, it apparently fawned over its subjects. Second, more often than not, its articles featured Lee himself hobnobbing with c-list celebrities and bygone stars.

The whole thing was best summed up by James Monaco in Celebrity: The Media as Image Makers, where he wrote, "If Celebrity's attitude toward the phenomenon seems diffident, that may be because it is published by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame, and primarily devoted to the exploits of Lee, the first comic book author to gain celebrity status." While it ran for a few years, the magazine was never a hit, and when Marvel's parent company was looking to save money, Lee's self-aggrandizing adventures alongside Lucille Ball and Peter Frampton got the axe along with the entire roster of softcore men's mags.

Stan Lee always had a knack for following trends, so it's no surprise that in 1998, he co-founded a company called Stan Lee Media in order to produce "webisodes" for an Internet audience — including an animated comic about the Backstreet Boys. It also shouldn't be surprising that in 2000, when the dotcom bubble burst, SLM went defunct and filed for bankruptcy. What happened after that? It's pretty shocking.

After filing for Chapter 11, Stan Lee Media became what industry magazine ICV2 called "a sleazy internet start-up that could function as the poster child for the excesses of the turn-of–the-century era" made up of an "unsavory bunch of white collar grifters" and "bottomfeeders ... attempting to strike it rich through legal action against Stan Lee and Marvel." The short version is that they claimed that Lee assigned all of the rights to his characters to the company, and they sued Marvel, Disney, and Lee himself for billions of dollars. It probably goes without saying, but the lawsuits and appeals were consistently called "frivolous" and dismissed in court.

It's worth noting that Lee himself did his best to extract himself from both the company and its legal mess. Unfortunately, the one thing that wasn't in dispute is that they owned the name "Stan Lee Media," linking Lee's name to their actions despite his best efforts to shut them down.

One of Stan Lee's weirder projects wasn't just a comic he was writing. It was a comic he starred in: Stan Lee's Mighty 7, published by, believe it or not, Archie Comics. Launched in 2012 with a concept by Lee, Mighty 7 was billed as "the world's first reality comic book," although its relationship to reality was only slightly less tenuous than most comics. Lee also provided help with the script, working alongside writers Tony Blake and Paul Jackson and veteran artist Alex Saviuk.

The premise was pretty simple: Seven aliens, two cops, and five criminals, crash-land on Earth and become superheroes. The difference is that the first person they meet on the planet is Stan Lee — the actual, "real-life" Stan Lee, who wrote comic books. Lee decides that the super-powered aliens would make a great team of heroes, and, in a very Funky Flashman-esque move, decides to mentor them in the fine art of power and responsibility.

Mighty 7 was initially meant to be the first title in a line called Stan Lee Comics, and, at first, it looked to be going well. In addition to the comic, the concept was shopped around for an animated series, and the Hub, the network owned by Hasbro that also launched My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, ordered a pilot in 2014. Unfortunately for Stan and the 7, the series was never picked up, and while the comic was slated for six issues, only three were released, leaving the series unfinished without ever getting to the part where the team comes together. No other Stan Lee Comics titles were ever put out.

On November 12, 2018, Stan Lee passed away at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, near his home in Hollywood Hills. He was 95 years old. 

It's a massive understatement to say that Lee left an incredible impact on pop culture. The personality that came through his work on the page, the engagement he had with fans, and his constant championing of comic books as both an art form and a business inspired generations of fans to believe that they, too, could be a part of these wonderful universes of radioactive spiders and crime-fighting gamma ray monsters. He was the face of an entire industry, and legitimately changed fiction forever. 

While his passing leaves behind a notable absence in a world that got to know his cheerful side through the movies, it's worth noting that he lived long enough to not only see the characters that he created with the likes of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, and more becoming worldwide icons of heroism and villainy, but to become one of those beloved household names himself. Excelsior!