CHAPTER 4
All arms and legs, almost like an animated character careening across the screen, Stan Lee proved a frenetic blur weaving in, out, around, and by agitated pedestrians window-shopping along Broadway. He dashed the two-and-a-half-mile route south from his new two-room abode at the Alamac Hotel to the Timely Comics office in the majestic Empire State Building. Passing the riding stables in Central Park, he sometimes jumped on a horse and spent some time galloping around the hard-beaten paths before getting on with his daily grind at the office. His feet scratching across the sidewalk created a wild beat matched only by the thoughts bursting in his head and the scripts these ideas represented.
The postwar years brimmed with opportunity for go-getters like Lee. Comic book sales had soared during World War II. People wanted a diversion, especially the men on the front or those working on various bases at home and abroad to support the effort. Comic books filled a need for easy, quick reading that was fun filled, exciting, and a diversion from the brutality of the constant media attention regarding death tolls, fierce battles, and innumerable injuries. After the war, industry insiders estimated that 90 percent of children and teens from ages eight to fifteen read comic books on a regular basis.
Because Lee had stayed active in the comic book game during his army stint, he knew that although genres might change periodically, comic book readers were hooked. The nation seemed electric after the war ended. Popular culture in all its variations burst forth in vivid new colors, sounds, and images after the war years defined by rationing and sacrifice. It was a good time to be in publishing.
Lee returned to New York City and Goodman’s Timely Comics headquarters after his army hijinks in the great American Midwest. The Alamac Hotel on Broadway and Seventy-First Street was a stately nineteen-story, dark brown brick edifice that had been completed in 1925. The hotel became a home for many jazz groups in the mid- to late 1920s, as well as an away trip locale for major league baseball teams. The Alamac had some six hundred guestrooms, as well as a handful of shops and a restaurant on the ground level. Later, in the early 1950s, the CIA would use the Alamac as a safe house for German scientists and technicians working for American national defense operations during the Cold War.
After being shuttled around to different army bases and training facilities in the middle of nowhere during the war, Lee thrilled at returning to his home city. The Alamac provided a steady flow of new friends and acquaintances. More importantly, it gave him a forty-block walk to the Timely office. Although more than an hour by foot, Lee walked back and forth, his frantic energy keeping his loopy legs loose. He walked almost everywhere in the city, regardless of the distance, because he wanted to stay in shape and work off his excess energy. Lee fully embraced the sights and sounds of the city on his daily commute, from the thrills of Times Square to the towering skyscrapers and mass of humanity coursing through the streets. Sometimes he would rent a boat and row out on the lake in Central Park.
Lee thoroughly enjoyed his job. He felt like he had a new lease on life with a nice place to live, a steady (and growing) income, and plenty of young women to date. Yet there were aggravations, too. “One thing that both irritated and frustrated me,” he explained, “was the fact that nobody, outside of our own little circle, had a good word to say about comic books.”1 With most people finding them nothing more than a waste of time, Lee felt as if he were spinning his wheels.
All the outside negativity led to bouts of self-consciousness about working in comics, despite his general happiness in the business. For someone so intent on success and with feelings running through his head almost from birth that he would achieve greatness, exasperation set in. During the war, he had served with some of the great creative minds in the nation; now he was back to being just a comic book writer. Only in his mid-twenties, Lee felt that he still had his whole life in front of him, but what kind of life would it be in an industry that most people thought simply catered to young children, simple teens, and underachieving young adults?
Although Lee bristled at the reaction he received from people who asked him what he did for a living, he really loved the focus on writing and creating at Timely. Working among his colleagues in the Signal Corps Training Film Division, the young man witnessed firsthand the true value of animation, films, and entertainment as a means to educate and enlighten audiences. If anything, the war demonstrated just how widespread the entertainment and creative industries would become.
Consumers turned to these cultural forms at exactly the moment when they had more money to spend on them and additional free time because of the technological advances made during the war and the booming postwar economy. The United States reached true superpower status and the benefits propelled the creation of thriving middle- and upper-middle classes. Yet, Lee also had to reconcile his daily joy with the sideways glances he got when people found out what he did for a living.
Naysayers didn’t know Lee’s past and the emphasis that it drove deep into his thinking about having a steady job and paycheck. Like so many of the Eastern European and Jewish artists and writers who populated the comic book industry, Lee’s experience with poverty and his father’s chronic unemployment weighed on him. Timely provided a job and the editor’s position paid well, plus he liked the work. Finding a way to wipe the smirk off people’s faces when they found out he wrote and edited funny animal and teen romance comics would have to wait.
In his absence, Goodman had created a small staff to run Timely—most notably turning over the editorial reins to his friend Vince Fago—but that crew had turned out millions upon millions of comic books during the war. Goodman’s wallet got fatter and fatter, which made Lee’s return to civilian life and the top of the masthead at the comic book company painless. Fago wanted to get back to full-time drawing, so Lee’s homecoming went smoothly as the comic book division reverted to the young editor’s control.
Timely’s focus had changed while Lee served in the military. Fago’s expertise in non-superhero comics pushed the emphasis in that direction, while readers grew interested in other topics outside superheroes. Goodman’s publishing house was serving an almost entirely different audience when Lee returned. The whole industry had reacted to the growing popularity of Archie and his teenage gang of friends in Archie Comics, which had first published in late 1942. Like a good company man, Lee quickly turned his efforts to comics featuring young female heroines and teen humor, which the public craved.
Ruth Atkinson, a renowned artist and writer, created the smash hit Millie the Model, which began its long run in late 1945, just as Lee was settling back into the editor’s chair. As one of the first females in comic books, Atkinson paved the way for other women to join the industry. She also came up with Patsy Walker, a spin-off from the old Miss America Magazine series. In typical Timely manner, Lee jumped on any and all bandwagons, creating Nellie the Nurse, another nod to the new teen humor/romance category.
As 1945 came to an end, paper restrictions set in place during the war were lifted and the comic book industry took flight. Across 1946, some forty million copies sold monthly at newsstands. While the stalwarts continued to sell pretty well, including Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and DC’s Superman and Batman, readers moved away from superhero titles and on to crime stories, teen romps, and science fiction.
Late in 1946, Lee tried to mix the popularity of the female heroine stories with the superhero genre by cocreating Blonde Phantom.2 As secretary to private eye Mark Mason, Louise Grant kept her Blonde Phantom identity a secret. But at night she wore a bright red evening gown and mask, fighting criminals with a mix of martial arts skills and a trusty .45-caliber pistol. Blonde Phantom was in the vein of DC’s Wonder Woman and the Timely’s own Miss America. Her character was launched as a solo comic, beginning with Blonde Phantom Comics #12, which lasted about two years. During that time, she appeared in anthologies in several other Timely collections.
In a kind of last-ditch effort to revive the superhero stories, Lee combined a number of Timely’s heroes into a super team, much like DC’s Justice Society of America, which had debuted in All Star Comics #3 (Winter 1940–1941). All Winners Comics #19 (Fall 1946) featured Captain America, Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, Whizzer, Miss America, and their various teen sidekicks. Lee’s typical cover blurb jumped out at the reader, promising: “a complete SIZZLING, ACTION THRILLER!” The editor hired famed Batman cocreator Bill Finger to script the new superhero team. Finger centered the initial story on a villain’s attempt to steal a nuclear weapon. In a sweeping indictment of the decline of superheroes among comic book readers, the All Winners team proved a shipwreck of All Losers. The title appeared once more before Goodman canceled it. This decision came on the heels of another team ending, Young Allies Comics #20, which had been going strong since its launch in Summer 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. For Lee, the evolving marketplace meant throwing every possible genre at the wall to see what would stick.
The comic book industry grew overall, despite the dark clouds over the super-hero set. Lee received a major dose of positive publicity in November 1947 when Writer’s Digest magazine asked him to pen its cover story. Still not yet twenty-five years old when the magazine appeared on newsstands, the boyish Lee chomped on a pipe in the cover image, struggling to look older and wiser than his actual years. Although he still doubted that his long-term future resided in the comic book business, he took on the persona of a seasoned pro in discussing the industry. The field’s growing popularity made it a good feature for Writer’s Digest and gave Lee his first national exposure.
The story: “There’s Money in Comics!” offered would-be writers advice for breaking into comic books, including the emphasis on realistic dialogue and its relation to character development. The article is an early and significant indication of Lee’s thinking about writing. He would use these same foundational ideas when he later created the tenets of the Marvel style during the company’s 1960s heyday. Like many young writers who are working their way through a unique voice, Lee demonstrated that he had a mature vision of what it took to be successful in the field.
While Lee’s personal brand started generating interest, Goodman dropped the “Timely” name, fiddling with variations on “Marvel,” but ultimately axing those, too. Sales continued to grow across the comic book industry, but publishers scrambled to find the magic elixir that the reading public desired. They jumped from topic to topic, ultimately dipping into different ideas, including the new teen romance field, which Simon and Kirby launched with Young Romance (September 1947) for Crestwood/Prize. The longtime creative duo struck gold. As a first-person narrative of “true” stories, Young Romance sold in the millions. The success enabled Simon and Kirby to launch and then oversee a mini-empire built on the comic book’s tremendous sales. Always on the lookout for talented freelancers, the industry veterans hired a handful of the best to produce the comic book under their attentive, scrutinizing eyes. Some estimates assert that the Young Romance books and the various offshoots derived from the title sold about five million copies a month for the rest of the 1940s.3 The series ran through June 1963, when Crestwood sold the series to DC, which then published it until 1975.
In the postwar era and as the Cold War gripped the nation, the comic book industry endured successive waves of genres that seemed to change annually. Readers bounced from one to the other. Superheroes gave way to teen comedy, which then morphed into romance titles, and next mutated into cowboy comics and true crime books. Of course, Goodman’s now anonymous comic book line continued to appear on the newsstands and stay in the upper echelon of publishers, but never with the creative spark that enabled it to gain much ground on the larger firms. As always, he ordered Lee to follow the lead set by competitors. As a result, in late 1947, Sub-Mariner Comics suddenly became Official True Crime Cases Comics #24, with the latter taking over the sequential order of the superhero title.4
As people’s entertainment preferences settled on film and television, each medium exerted influence on comics. The popularity of cowboy movie stars—first Gene Autry, then Roy Rogers—sparked interest in western comics. Rogers, along with his trusty horse Trigger and wife Dale Evans, appeared in popular films like King of the Cowboys (1943) and Home in Oklahoma (1947). From the early 1940s through the late 1950s, Rogers stood as the nation’s most popular and successful cowboy actor. His groundbreaking licensing agreement put his image and likeness on countless products, second only to those of Walt Disney. Rogers had released hit records and starred in a long-running radio show that he later moved to television after it became a staple in American homes.
Western-crazed readers turned to Fawcett’s Hopalong Cassidy, which sold four million copies in 1947 and eight million the following year. DC brought out Dale Evans Comics in late 1948 to capitalize on the actress’s popularity and connection to Rogers. Goodman published series like Wild Western (1948–1957) under the Western Fiction Publishing Company imprint, one of the publisher’s ploys for keeping costs spread across the organization. Wild Western was a vehicle for the character Kid Colt, but also introduced a rotating group of other heroes, ranging from Apache Kid to Arizona Annie. Lee served as general editor of Wild Western and wrote some of the stories himself. A rotating cast of freelancers and staff artists drew the issues.
By March 1948, Lee was fully aboard the cowboy wave, launching Two-Gun Kid #1, a singing hero, just like Rogers and Autry. Five months later, Kid Colt, Hero of The West #1 hit newsstands, giving the popular character its stand-alone book. The comic featured a fast-draw sharpshooter who kills the bad guy who murdered his father and then hunts for redemption by becoming Kid Colt, despite his fugitive status. The hero that is neither fully good nor fully bad was an early precursor to the superheroes Lee and his team would create a little more than a decade later.
Lee’s favorite cowboy character was Black Rider, a doctor by day who donned a secret identity to battle criminals. The comic allowed Lee a rare opportunity apart from his writing and editing duties. Goodman did not get involved with the dayto-day intricacies of running his magazines and comics, especially when titles made money, but he did have a lifelong fascination with covers. He preferred featuring photographs on the covers of his comic books, as he did with early Miss America comics and many of his pulp slicks. For one of the Black Rider issues, Lee donned the black outfit and mask, appearing on the cover holding two six-shooters and looking ominous.
The shifting interests of comic book readers made publishers nervous. In the frenzy to keep sales figures soaring, it seemed as if the publishers started pushing too hard and began toying with standards of decency, similar to the wave of semi-pornographic slick mags many publishers produced in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the most influential categories that took flight at the end of the decade also brought with it a bout of negativity that would later nearly topple the entire comic book industry—true crime and crime-based books.
In 1948, the crime comics market took off and every publisher launched new titles, some relatively tame, others filled with lurid tales and overt violence. For example, the cover of Murder Incorporated (January 1948) from Fox showed a buxom, angry female firing a bullet into a man who had cheated at cards and his reaction as if the bullet had just entered his chest. Although the cover blurb announced “For Adults Only,” certainly the creators aimed the stories at a younger audience.
Overall, the popularity of crime comics raised the number of titles published that year by 20 percent over the previous year and up 50 percent over two years. The downside of the crime book mania was that adults saw the violence and lurid images as threats to the morals of younger readers. In 1948, Time published an article that implied some juveniles committed copycat crimes after being influenced by reading comic books. The panic grew into a nationwide crisis. Stories about delinquency and crime sold newspapers and magazines, so the media picked up on the story and created further controversy. Frederic Wertham, an influential author and psychiatrist, also fueled the anti-comics propaganda. He organized a symposium that concluded comic books glorified crime, violence, and sexuality. Suddenly, the comic book industry had a real crisis on its hands.
Throughout the postwar years, Lee managed the comic book division, always staying extremely busy. He had boundless energy and an engaging imagination, but did not seem to possess the entrepreneurial spirit to launch his own gig, the savvy that pushed other artists and writers like Joe Simon and William Gaines to resist the indentured servitude attitude held by the publishers. For Lee, the steady paycheck meant something, and he genuinely enjoyed working with the other writers, editors, and artists that teamed to bring out comics, even if he found much of their work derivative. He summed up a typical interaction with Goodman, explaining, “Every few months a new trend and we’d be right there, faithfully following each one. . . . I felt that we were a company of copycats.”5
Although his career prior to World War II revolved around comic books, Lee grew restless after his return from military service. Perhaps he realized that his words had meaning and power outside of zany animal stories or monster books directed primarily at children.
When Lee did venture away from Goodman’s clutches, he focused on safe projects that played to his strengths. The success of the Writer’s Digest cover story led him to think about the budding industry and how writers and artists might get a foot in the door. In 1947, he self-published the magazine Secrets Behind the Comics, which he priced for one dollar, a high price for readers at a time when comic books sold for ten cents. Using comic book–like fonts and illustrations of the writing and drawing process, the book featured “by Stan Lee” in prominent script on the cover and contained his typical zest and enthusiasm. The book’s dedication is to Lee’s little brother, Larry, and Goodman’s children, Iden and Chip.
Ironically, Lee is “Secret No. 1,” which answers the reader’s questions about who Lee is and why he wrote the book. Accompanied by an illustrated headshot of Lee looking studious, with a pencil behind his ear and a dotted bow tie, the introduction lists the many publications Lee worked on as “Managing Editor and Art Director” at Timely.6 The Lee trademark writing style jumps out on nearly every page: “NOW, for the first time ever in the world, Stan Lee will show you exactly how comic strips are WRITTEN!!!”7 In addition to Lee’s “secrets,” the book had blank illustration areas where readers could attempt to draw the Blonde Phantom based on Lee’s script.
Every so often, Lee edited or managed a magazine for adults (or maybe better put, Goodman dangled the chance in front of his young protégé). Although comics sold enormous numbers of copies during World War II, the medium barely registered as a “real” career for adults. The pulps, however, had a bit more respectability, even the schlock that Goodman put out. When he needed extra hands, Goodman would get Lee to work on a magazine, such as the celebrity pinup Focus in 1950. Dubbed a “photo bedsheet” magazine because it measured ten inches wide and fourteen inches tall, Focus aimed squarely at American male readers (or at least those men interested in looking at pictures) with bikini-clad cover models (including future screen star Marilyn Monroe) and lurid cover headlines. The next year, though, the publisher changed the format to a small pocket-sized magazine, only four by six inches.8 Goodman notoriously fiddled with magazine cover images, titles, and the physical size of the publication, always hoping that some minor change in a magazine idea he got from one of his competitors would lead to huge sales.
Lee’s dissatisfaction continued, but he did not want to rock the boat too much or risk losing his job. Like so many people who remembered the ravages of the Great Depression, Lee carried an inborn fear of joblessness and lack of security. He did not have to go back very deep in his memory to remember his parents arguing about scrounging up the next month’s rent and what would happen if the family were evicted.
Lee’s boundless energy led to numerous additional freelance opportunities. Many of these went unsigned or were done under someone else’s name, since the writer did not want to risk getting fired by Goodman. “I ghosted them under other people’s names,” Lee explained. The work ran the gamut from television shows and radio programs to writing advertising copy. One of the few he did sign his name to was the Sunday Howdy Doody newspaper strip, which ran during the puppet’s height of popularity from 1950 to 1953.9
The busy editor spent long hours running Goodman’s comic book division. However, he also enjoyed the energy and revitalized spirit of postwar New York City nightlife. The city seemed like the best place in the world to Lee, plenty of attractive women to date, many things to do, and a vibrancy that is uniquely New York. In 1947 his life changed dramatically when he met English model and actress Joan Clayton Boocock. Lee’s cousin had planned to set him up on a blind date with a model he knew and told Lee to meet her at the modeling agency. However, when he knocked on the door, Joan answered. Lee blurted out that he loved her and had been drawing her face since he was a little boy. Rather than run in horror, she laughed at the offhanded exultation and went out with him. Soon they were an item.
Joan had a successful career as a hat model, but had come to the United States as a war bride after marrying an American officer in Great Britain. Realizing the marriage had been a mistake, she planned to go to Reno, Nevada, for a divorce, since New York state laws made divorce nearly impossible. In the Wild West of Nevada, a woman only had to be in residence for six weeks.
Lee waited nervously while Joan served her time in Reno, but the young model drew many suitors. After Lee received a letter from her addressed, “Dear Jack,” he knew he had to take quick action. Throwing caution to the wind, he took a circuitous, twenty-eight-hour plane trip west. When he finally arrived, Lee convinced Joan of his love and they pulled a Reno special: meeting with the judge to nullify the marriage in one room, then walking into the next room over, where the same judge then married them. In a matter of minutes, Joan Boocock became Mrs. Stan Lee.10
The young couple took the train back across the nation as the Christmas holiday shopping season descended on the Big Apple. They moved into a tiny apartment in Manhattan on Ninety-Sixth Street, between Lexington Avenue and Fifth Avenue, not far from the Central Park Reservoir, and on the other side of the park from his former digs at the Alamac Hotel. For the city boy who lived almost his entire life in tiny apartments, the place seemed palatial. He and Joanie settled in and got two dogs, cocker spaniels named Hamlet and Hecuba.
Two years later, Lee’s mother passed away. Larry, his fifteen-year-old brother, needed a place to stay, so he joined the young married couple. Sensing that they needed a more suburban setting, the little family moved to a small town on Long Island, purchasing an eight-room house on West Broadway in Hewlett Harbor. They bought a green Buick convertible that had been owned by a Blue Angel pilot, and had the novelty of “a huge flying female as a radiator ornament.”11
Lee and Joan enjoyed the fruits of his successful career (like many men in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he did not want Joan pursuing a career). In 1951, the couple and their young daughter, Joan Celia (born a year earlier in 1950, then called “Little Joan,” but later known as “J.C.” as an adult), moved into a house not far away at 226 Richards Lane in Hewlett Harbor. Stan and Joan liked the charm of the slightly aged house, built about a quarter of a century before the Lees moved in. The street name in their new home most certainly influenced Lee’s decision years later to name the head of the Fantastic Four Reed Richards.12
Only a couple miles away lived Martin Goodman and his family. The Goodman children spent a lot of time at the Lee home. Goodman’s son Iden even learned to drive in the Lee’s driveway.13 Although Lee distanced himself from his boss/relative and made their relationship seem detached, there is quite a bit of evidence that shows how intertwined they actually were. The Lees needed support of family and friends when their second child, a daughter named Jan, died just three days after her birth in 1953. Unlike many couples that lose a child, Stan and Joan managed to overcome their grief and build a stable, happy family for themselves and J.C.
The Hewlett Harbor carriage house sat on a two-acre property and had a separate room for Lee to work. After moving to Long Island, Lee took the one-hour commute back into Manhattan to meet with artists and get their completed pages but gradually started working from home one or two days per week. Staying on Long Island gave Lee a method for meeting the frantic pace necessary for delivering numerous comic books on a tight schedule. Since his job included managing the staff and freelancers, as well as approving art and editorial, the handful of hours he saved each week made a difference. Goodman’s strategy centered on flooding the marketplace with comics. Lee had to create that deluge.
Lee also benefited from being at home with his family. On warm days, he would take his typewriter out to the patio and place it on a bridge table, creating a makeshift standing desk, so he could act out the stories and type while standing up. Joan bought the family a little twelve-foot, round plastic pool to use when the summer sun really heated up. Lee joked that he could “swim” the length of the pool in a stroke and a half. Later, in the Timely office, he would joke with coworkers, “Well, I did 100 laps today.”14
Committed to making money to keep the upper-middle-class dream alive, Lee hunkered down, pouring his energy into writing, editing, and art direction for Goodman’s comic book division. Although prone to visions of grandeur and some wild behavior, like jumping up on desks to act out scenes as his freelancers watched in awe, Lee developed into an energetic, encouraging, and savvy editorial director.
The more scripts he wrote, the more important he became to Goodman’s bottom line, and the more page-rate bonuses he earned, which kept the Lee family afloat. Talented and with an inhuman amount of creativity and speed, Lee wrote fast and enjoyed the benefits of being the boss, but he still couldn’t shake bouts of depression and worry about his future. Lee called this era his “limbo years.” It seemed as if he had slipped into a rut: “Go to the office—come home and write—weekends and evenings. Between stories, go out to dinner with Joanie, play with little Joanie, look at cars.”15 The money afforded the Lees a great lifestyle, but he had to work nonstop to keep it moving.
As the nation slipped from postwar euphoria to Cold War fear and the Truman years transformed into the Ike age, Lee had achieved what most Americans aspired to: gain meaningful employment, start a family, and own a home. But, just like so many others in his shoes, he felt unfulfilled professionally. While he enjoyed the one-on-one relationships with his staff and freelance team, the relentless production cycle created a pressure-filled workplace.
More importantly, he bristled at the perception that writing for comic books wasn’t real writing. As a result, Lee questioned his future in comic books. When he had the time, he dabbled in outside writing—much of it anonymously—and took on additional opportunities that might enable him to leap out of the business.
Lee wasn’t quite sure what he should do next.