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Stan Lee, the co-creator of Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four, is dead. He was 95.
Kirk Schenck, the attorney for Stan Lees daughter confirmed to Deadline that the comics culture legend passed away this morning after being admitted to Cedars Sini hospital.
As a writer and editor for Marvel Comics, Lee became the most famous comic book creator in the history of the medium — he was the only creator in the field whose fame rivaled that of the characters he created. His career began in 1941 when — at age 17 — he got his first published work, a prose story that appeared in the fifth issue of Captain America Comics. It was the 1960s, however, when Lee minted his reputation and tapped into a vein of pop-culture creativity that made history.
“No one has had more of an impact on my career and everything we do at Marvel Studios than Stan Lee,” Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige said in a Monday statement. “Stan leaves an extraordinary legacy that will outlive us all. Our thoughts are with his daughter, his family, and the millions of fans who have been forever touched by Stans genius, charisma and heart. Excelsior!”
Beginning with the publication of Fantastic Four No. 1 in 1961, which teamed Lee with Jack Kirby, the pages of Marvel Comics became the landscape for a new and dynamic brand of superheroes that were far different than the old-guard heroes of industry leader DC Comics (which published Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern). The Fantastic Four bickered with each other, one looked like a monster and none of them had secret identities.
The melding of superhero concepts with the melodrama of soap operas continued with Spider-Man, created by Lee and Steve Ditko, whose first appearance came in Amazing Fantasy No. 15, in 1961. Peter Parker who was a bespectacled, scrawny teenager who often lost his battles, fretted about paying his bills and routinely suffered indignities at the hands of school bullies and disinterested girls. Lee would say often that the character was the closest to his heart and to his own experience growing up in New York as a bookish kid with big dreams and a small life.
Ditko died earlier this year and his passing weighed on Lee. The two were considered the last living links to the “Golden Age” of comics, which began with the June 1938 introduction of Superman, the first superhero, and ended in 1950.
The “Silver Age” of comics was the era, however, when Lee proved his mettle. The introduction of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man signaled the beginning of the Marvel Comics surge that redefined comics and superheroes — and created the intellectual property that have powered some of the biggest movie franchises in history. The heroes and villains that were churned out of Marvel in the 1960s would later lead to franchises for Sony (Spider-Man), Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four) and Marvel Studios (Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man) and Lee had a direct hand in most of those creations.
Lee working with artists such as Kirby, Ditko, John Buscema, Wally Wood and Don Heck would fill the skies of the so-called Marvel Universe not just with superheroes but with aliens, gods, vampires, monsters and mutants, a bizarre pantheon that was cosmic in scale but also defined by heartfelt tales of yearning and outsider ethos. The X-Men (created by Lee and Kirby) had amazing powers but they were reviled and misunderstood as mutants. Bruce Banner was a brilliant scientist but overwhelmed with guilt due to the uncontrollable rages of his alter ego, the Hulk, also created by Lee and Kirby. The same tandem introduced the Silver Surfer, a gleaming space traveler who sacrificed his freedom to save his home world.
Lee and Kirby became the Lennon and McCartney of the comic book world during the 1960s but by the end of the 1970s Lee was looking to Hollywood for the next act of his long and illustrious career. (The last true Marvel superhero that Lee created for the companys ongoing monthly adventures came in 1979 with She-Hulk, the female cousin of the green Goliath.) Lee moved to the West Coast and became a familiar voice on Saturday morning cartoons that featured the likes of Spider-Man and the X-Men.
Marvel made its first leap to the big screen in 1986 with the ill-fated Lucasfilm adaptation of Howard the Duck. As hard as it is to imagine now, the reputation of Marvel in Hollywood up thought the 1990s was as a sad, second-place brand compared to DC Comics, which had mega-success on the big screen with Superman (1978) and Batman (1999). It wasnt until Foxs X-Men in 2000 and Sony/Coumbias Spider-Man in 2002 that Marvel became a screen sensation on par with its publishing-world success story.
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Deadline
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