DAWN OF THE FANTASTIC
“Stan, we’ve gotta put out a bunch of heroes. You know, there’s a market for it,” Timely Comics publisher Martin Goodman barked at his editor Stan Lee.1
When he sensed a trend in the making, Goodman wasn’t shy. His eyes lit up with the thought of cash registers across the country ringing up children’s dimes. Those coins would eventually roll into his pockets. He could practically hear those thin dimes hit the cashbox.
Goodman’s feeling didn’t come from divine inspiration or a lucky hunch. A much more practical business leader, he didn’t work that way. Instead, reportedly after golfing with some fellow executives who happened to run the distribution arm of his main rival National Periodical Publications (later simply known as DC), the home of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, Goodman listened in as they bragged about a new line of comic books that were selling fast. In particular, they couldn’t stop when it came to a new superhero team that would be getting its own title later in the year. Never willing to let a little bit of competitive intelligence slide, Goodman jumped at the news. Returning to the office, he squawked in Lee’s ear about creating a new superhero team to match DC Comics . . . and on the double.
Little did Goodman know, however, that his longtime editor had been suffering from bouts of frustration and despair. Lee could not stomach working in comics any longer. He warred with the idea of chucking a twenty-year career, regardless of bringing home the steady paycheck that Goodman’s mediocrity dispensed.
“We’re writing nonsense . . . writing trash,” he told his wife Joan. “I want to quit,” he confided. “After all these years, I’m not getting anywhere. It’s a stupid business for a grownup to be in.”2
Lee had spent decades of his adult life putting out a variety of books that most adults scorned, from silly animal stories to war and romance tales. He had worked alongside Joe Simon and Jack Kirby on the early superhero titles, but they dropped in popularity. The constant flurry of work against tight deadlines and Goodman’s follow-the-leader management philosophy became too much to handle. Lee prepped for the leap into something else—anything else—just not comic books.
Glum and exhausted, Lee arrived at home in Long Island after a tiring day at the Madison Avenue office. Gripped by stress and more than a little anxiety, he contemplated alternative careers but wasn’t sure which way to turn. What if he couldn’t support his family? What would he do? He told Joan about Goodman’s urgent directive and asked her advice.
“If you’re going to quit anyway, why don’t you do a book the way like you’d like to do it, and get it out of your system,” she said. “Worst that will happen is that he’ll fire you and you want to quit anyway.”3 Lee’s life’s work hung in the balance—a career that had already spanned more than two decades. It had provided them with a nice home on Long Island, and money was never scarce, unlike his rough early years when his own father faced chronic unemployment.
Fear and desperation can be great motivators. Lee listened to his wife’s thoughtful words. After all, Joanie was his best friend and closest confidante. On the verge of giving up and frustrated, he reached a breaking point. Maybe, just maybe, if he took a chance, the job would get better and he could break the spell of monotony. Lee realized that he had no choice.
Although unsure about what the future held and concerned that leaving the job might spell financial doom, Joanie’s support and approval gave Lee the boost of confidence that he needed. He would make a last-ditch effort, a final go at the career he had stumbled into as a young high school graduate just looking for a steady paycheck.
Lee decided then and there to follow Goodman’s advice—to a point. He would create an original superhero team, one that he concocted, not based on Goodman’s typical retread of whatever DC or one of the other comic book companies put out. Lee’s boss had even suggested a ridiculous name for the new team: the “Righteous League.” Lee saw that idea as yet another in a long list of uninspiring copies of popular DC titles.
No, Lee thought, these heroes would be more based in reality. “This was the chance to do all the things I would enjoy,” he said. “To get characters who acted like real people, to try to be more imaginative, to make some stories have happy endings and some not, to continue the stories and set them in the real world.”4
Lee decided to risk it all—consequences be damned. Whatever happened, he hoped that creating a comic that he would want to read would bring the joy back into his work life and appeal to fans. He started sketching out the new team right away. “I forgot about the publisher. I was off and running: I was going to have fun,” Lee explained. “It was very easy for me to control, since I was writing virtually all of them. . . . I could keep them in the style I wanted. I was creating my own universe.”5
Giving himself the latitude to take chances and be as creative as possible, Lee took up the challenge to create “a team such as comicdom had never known.”6 He realized that this was a go-for-broke moment in his life. “For just this once,” he thought, “I would do the type of story I myself would enjoy reading if I were a comic book reader.” Joanie’s words still rang in his ear: “You could dream up plots that have more depth and substance to them, and create characters who have interesting personalities, who speak like real people.”7 Her words gave him the impetus to go all-out.
After years of churning out monster comics and suspense-filled science fiction titles, Lee drew on what he knew. The new superhero team would contain elements drawn from across popular culture, not only science fiction stories and popular B movies, but also the real-life Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union over space flight and nuclear weapons.
The first swipe Lee took at the traditional superhero was with Reed Richards, the team’s leader. Rather than make him muscle-bound and overtly handsome with astronaut good looks, Richards would be a thin, brilliant scientist who liked to show off his smarts. Next, Lee needed a female lead. She wouldn’t be the typical, weak girlfriend merely waiting for her man to finish saving Earth. Sue Storm was a full member of the team, not merely pining away for her masked hero. As a matter of fact, he thought, “I was utterly determined to have a superhero series without any secret identities.” Lee figured that if he were a hero, he would want the world to know it. “I’d never keep it secret,” he explained. “I’m too much of a show-off.”8
Once he had the two main characters, Lee decided to turn the genre on its ear again. He needed two more characters to keep the banter even. One would be a hot-headed teenager. Rather than make him a teen sidekick, which had always been the case in comic book history, Lee created Johnny Storm, Sue’s little brother, a central member with enough firepower to stand on his own. Having a brother and sister would add additional tension. Finally, the team needed muscle. Lee brought aboard a rough-and-tumble, blue-collar strongman named Ben Grimm. The battle between brains and brawn played out with Grimm juxtaposed to Richards, the brilliant scientist leader. The scenario created tension, enabling readers to compare the two, and possibly even forcing them to take sides.
Doodling on a pad, scratching out thoughts in his lefty scrawl, Lee crossed out plot ideas and potential characters over and over again, realizing that the story would not be driven solely by action, like a typical comic book for children or young readers. Instead, he focused on the interaction between the teammates, similar to how families got along and people worked in real life. “I wanted to think of them as real, living, breathing people whose personal relationships would be of interest to the readers and, equally important, to me.”9 Lee also aimed for an older audience, believing that if readers could relate to the superheroes as people, then they would enjoy the book. Television and films were certainly skewing toward the teen and young adult audience, so Lee would aim there too.
Now all the team needed was a way to gain superpowers. Once again, Lee thought about the Cold War tensions over atomic weapons. The possibility of nuclear annihilation terrified the public, so it grew into a mainstay plot twist for stories and films. Lee’s team ventured into space in an experimental rocket. When the craft crashed back to Earth, the crew was exposed to cosmic rays, giving them superpowers, but simultaneously nearly scaring them to death. Almost instantly they realized that they had to combine forces for the good of mankind.
Sticking to the alliteration that he liked so much, Lee named his band of misfits the Fantastic Four. In short order, they would not only save Earth and the universe on countless occasions but save Stan Lee’s career and change American culture forever.