1922– 
WRITER AND ILLUSTRATOR UNITED STATES
No single figure can lay claim to the omnipresent influence that Lee has had on American comic books and on popular culture.
—JEFF MCLAUGHLIN, EDITOR
Stanley ran to the mailbox and threw open the flap. Inside were three envelopes, and he sifted through them until he saw what he was looking for: a letter from the Herald-Tribune. The newspaper had an ongoing contest called The Biggest News of the Week, and Stanley had won the past two weeks in a row. He hoped he won again.
He ripped open the envelope and pulled out the page inside. Yes, he had won again! But there was more to the letter. Stan read on and found that the editor of the Herald-Tribune was politely asking him not to enter the contest again. Stanley’s writing was so good, the editor wrote, that nobody else had a chance. He ended the letter with a recommendation that Stanley think about writing professionally. At just fifteen years old, the news editor at one of the most important papers in New York was telling him he wrote like a professional!
Stanley Lee was born Stanley Lieber in his parents’ New York City apartment in 1922. His mom and dad had emigrated from Romania, and Stanley was their first son. The family did not have much money, though, and when Stanley’s little brother, Larry, was born, they had even less. Stanley remembered his parents always fighting about money. His father would leave every day to look for work, but every night when he came home and still didn’t have a job, the family’s future looked even bleaker. Every few years, they moved when they could no longer afford the apartment they were staying in. To keep from getting too depressed about all this, Stanley read—a lot. In the living room, at school, at the dining room table, everywhere. He loved the Hardy Boys series, and if he didn’t have a good book, he’d read the food labels on the boxes and bottles on the table in front of him.
Stanley has always preferred to read while eating. When he was a kid, his mom bought him a stand for holding his books, complete with clips at the bottom to hold the pages open, because he was always reading at the table.
Stanley was good at school too. He was always breezing through his homework, and his mom wanted him to finish school early so he could work and help support the family, so he skipped some grades. Being the youngest kid in class by a couple years meant Stanley didn’t have a lot of friends, though, so he continued to read as an escape. And he started to draw.
In the fantastical world in Stanley’s mind, people wearing capes were flying in the sky, and that’s just what he drew—starting with one line across the page to separate the ground from the sky and then a few stick figures up with the clouds. Then he began adding words and boxes, connecting more pictures to the first one, so when they all lined up, they told a story.
In high school, Stanley started writing for money, but it wasn’t as glamorous as he’d hoped. He was an obituary writer, and it was so depressing always writing about dead people. Then he started writing for the National Tuberculosis Hospital. Again, though, Stanley thought the writing was boring and dreary. He tried some nonwriting jobs for a while until his Uncle Robbie told him the publishing company he worked for might need some help. Now that Stanley was finished with high school, he should talk to the hiring manager.
That publishing company was Timely Comics, now known as Marvel Comics. When Stanley was hired on as an assistant in 1939, at just seventeen years old, he had no idea he was launching his lifelong career.
Stan was afraid to go to war, but he thought enlisting in the Army was the right thing to do when so many other young men were fighting. He never ended up fighting, though, because the Army found out he was a writer and assigned him to write manuals.
Timely Comics published—you guessed it—comic books. It was owned by Martin Goodman, who was Stanley’s uncle, but they didn’t know each other very well yet. Over the years, Stanley would learn a lot about comics and business from his uncle. One of Timely’s biggest superheroes in 1939 was Captain America, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, two of the comics world’s most influential writers and artists. One of Stanley’s first assignments was to write two pages of filler text to go into the latest Captain America issue. He titled it “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge” and signed it Stan Lee. He didn’t want to use his real name because he thought he might write serious novels in the future. A pen name would be better for this silly comic book stuff, he thought. Years later, when he no longer thought writing for comics was silly, Stanley Lieber would permanently change his name to Stan Lee.
In 1941 Joe and Jack decided to leave Timely Comics. Because there was no one else in the comics department, and because Stan had already helped with about a dozen comic book issues, Mr. Goodwin told Stan he could make the comics until they were able to find someone more experienced. But Mr. Goodwin never hired anybody else. At eighteen years old, Stan was in charge of what Timely Comics published!
With the exception of 1942 to 1945, when Stan served in the Army for World War II, Stan remained editor in chief at Timely Comics until 1972, when he was promoted to publisher. The 1950s proved to be tough for the comics world, though. People started blaming children’s poor behavior and dirty language on comic books, and sales dropped. But then Julius Schwartz from DC Comics came up with the Justice League of America, and comics readers went wild again. Mr. Goodwin tasked Stan with creating a similar team of superheroes.
Stan talked with Jack Kirby about this assignment, and they agreed it was a good idea to create superheroes who had human problems with things like love, money, greed, and family—issues their powers couldn’t fix for them. By the early 1960s, Timely was renamed to Marvel Comics, and Jack came back to the company to help Stan. Together they created the Fantastic Four, with the human flaws they had agreed upon. It was a stroke of genius! Teen readers loved that they could relate to the heroes’ problems while still looking up to them.
Stan and Jack reveled in this new popularity and kept going. Soon they had also created the X-Men, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the Silver Surfer. The duo’s most successful character of all time was Spider-Man.
And Stan changed the face of comic book production. Instead of just crediting the writer and penciller for each comic, he also acknowledged the inker and letterer. When he was very busy, Stan would have brainstorm sessions with the artists and then write a basic summary of what would happen in the comic issue. From that, the artists would draw all the panels and give the work back to Stan, who would write in the words. This method gave artists more control over the creative process, and it freed up Stan’s time so he could work on more comics.
Stan also developed three Spider-Man issues that depicted drug use. This was considered unacceptable in the comics world, even though the context of the story was that drugs could do a lot of harm. Marvel Comics published them anyway, and they sold incredibly well. This inspired other comic makers to push the boundaries for the sake of helping kids learn. Stan especially wanted kids to learn not to be prejudiced.
The 1980s saw lots of comics turned into movies and television cartoon series, and Stan moved to California to help. Since then, the trend has hardly slowed. Iron Man and The X-Men are two popular series, not to mention The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. And he’s helped with the video games too! Stan narrated the three Spider-Man games that came out in 2000, 2001, and 2010. Despite his work on the television and movie series, Stan still writes and edits Marvel comic books as he has done for more than seventy years. He’s even helped DC Comics with a couple of their products over the years.
Every Marvel comic book featured “Stan’s Soapbox,” where Stan wrote about upcoming projects from Marvel and also about current events. In the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights were a hot topic in America, and Stan spoke out against racism.
In 1994 Stan won the Will Eisner Comics Industry Award and was inducted into the Hall of Fame. His autobiography, Excelsior!, was published in 2002, and in 2010 the History Channel released a documentary called Stan Lee’s Superhumans.
My dream is to become an illustrator of books. I love to draw and create images that come alive on paper. This will rock the world because I will turn words into pictures and become a famous illustrator. I want to create a whole new technique for illustrating that explains things as well as words can. This will help people visualize their world in a whole new way.
DANIEL SOLOW 
AGE 11