ITEM! Didja hear about STAN THE MAN rapping for hours with JOE McDONALD, BARRY MELTON, and their manager, ED DENSON? Or maybe you know them better as COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH!
—Marvel Bullpen Bulletins in comics dated June 1970
Joe McDonald, born January 1, 1942, was a pre-boomer, as were many of his fellow rock musicians of the late ’60s, entering the world before the baby boom starting gun of 1945. He and his band, Country Joe and the Fish, addressed charged topics of the late 1960s, including in “Superbird,” a 1967 song that portrayed Marvel’s superheroes—specifically the Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange—as representing new-era thinking that would topple the outmoded philosophy of the eponymous Superbird, an alternate identity, according to the song, for then-president Lyndon Johnson.
Interestingly, in the song, Johnson is portrayed as a version of Superman gone mad, not a villain so much as a cracked hero. One could also see the Superbird figure as an outdated hero of an older generation, while the ones who will help the narrator of the song—either the Fish themselves, or possibly the entire generation the Fish represents—have their “brand new day,” are the more modern superheroes from Marvel’s comics.
In a 2018 interview with the Aquarian Drunkard website, McDonald, fifty years later, recalled the connection between the comics and the song:
It was the beginning of Marvel Comics and that comic book hero, ironic humor, so [the idea] was to turn the president into a comic book character. We just did it and thought it was funny.1
While the Fish were never as popular as other San Francisco Bay Area bands of the era like the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead, they were quite well known in their heyday and, though they played their share of love songs and feel-good rockers, did tend to wear their politics a bit more on their sleeves than many of their contemporaries.
Their best-known song was the sardonic anti–Vietnam War “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” written by McDonald, and released in November 1967, which darkly sang from the point-of-view of the era’s soldiers that, “whoopee, we’re all gonna die.” McDonald would make the song most famous in his solo set at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969, as well as in the 1970 movie of the festival.
The band’s songs were often darkly humorous and shot through with self-mocking irony as well as with a sense of dramatic urgency.
Much like a Marvel comic book.
While many celebrities would come to visit Marvel Comics and Stan Lee, the Fish were perhaps the only high-profile, ’60s-era band that were reported, via the Bullpen Bulletins, to have visited Marvel at least a couple of times, possibly even more. Plus, they actually appeared in an issue of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. So while a third party, Peter Asher, had to tell Stan that the Beatles dug Marvel, the Fish demonstrated their affinity for the company, its characters, and its staff from early on, in its music and in person. The band’s relationship with Lee opens an interesting window into his own growing celebrity in the late ’60s.
The relationship began with a letter from the band to Lee dated May 19, 1967. This would be about a week after the May 11 release of the band’s first album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, which contained “Superbird.” (For historical context, the Beatles’ classic album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released in the United States on May 26.) The letter was from “Country Joe and the Fish,” probably written by band manager ED Denson, apparently accompanying a copy of Electric Music, and told Stan:
No doubt you’ll be pleased to know that your creations have so entered the consciousness of the generation that they emerge, yes actually emerge, in the folk music of the times. If you listen carefully to this record … you’ll hear and see two actual figments [Fantastic Four and Dr. Strange].2
Lee’s response, dated May 26, was:
Hi, Piscatorial Pals!
… we’re deliciously delighted that our somewhat forensic fame has reached as far as the hallowed harmonious halls of Berkeley—and penetrated, how’er insidiously, the liltin’ lyrics of thine own rollickin’ record!
What I’m trying to say, guys, is—enjoyed your tintinnabulatin’ tunes—got a kick out of our mention—and are glad to dub thee—one and all—Merry Marchers in Perpetuity!…
Hang loose, gang—you’re our type of heroes.3
The Fish would have a breakout performance on June 17 at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival. Soon after that, sometime in “the summer of 1967,” according to Marvel staff writer/editor Gary Friedrich (who passed away in 2018), during a stand in New York where the Fish played at venues, including the Café Au Go Go, band keyboardist David Bennett Cohen arranged a visit to Marvel.
As Cohen recalled in 2010:
I was the one who instigated the visit. I called Marvel Comic Books to thank them for their comics. There was just something about Marvel’s comics. They were grown-up comics. It wasn’t like teenage stuff, or kid stuff. Of course, it was fantasy, and it was beyond the realm of reality, but it had a maturity about it.…
So I called the office to thank them, and I told them I wanted to come up and meet them. I told them I was from Country Joe and the Fish … and I think somebody may have invited me up.4
Friedrich, a Fish fan, went out to the lobby to greet the band when they came to visit the office, apparently without an actual appointment. He convinced Stan, who seemed to—despite the recent correspondence—never have heard of the band, to make an appointment for them to come meet him. In 2010, Friedrich recalled that despite some reluctance on Lee’s end
after some arm-twisting on my part, mainly buttressed by my pointing out the value of mentioning the meeting in the Bullpen Bulletins, he relented, and a meeting was arranged.
A couple of days later, David showed up with Joe, Barry [Melton] and the rest of the band.… I escorted the band into the inner sanctum and we were greeted by the ever-smiling Stan. He was very cordial, as always.… The meeting didn’t last long. Joe asked Stan a few questions … the band was somewhat awestruck. I think Stan, as always, just wanted to get back to work, though he’d never have let his guests know that.
After a few minutes, Stan very graciously broke it all up, shook hands all around, and the big meeting was over.… Stan would light up the room with his smile for guests, make them feel perfectly at home and that they could spend the day if they wanted. Then, in no time flat, he’d wrap it up, shake their hands and move them out so he could get back to work. And I never talked with one of Stan’s guests after one of those meetings who didn’t feel they’d been treated royally and that this had been one of the highlights of their lives. It was the same with CJ and the Fish.5
Cohen would say of the meeting:
Stan Lee made an impression in my life. Meeting him was almost anticlimactic, because, you know, those comics really sustained us a lot of times.6
As band cofounder Barry Melton said in 2010:
Of course I remember meeting Stan—I could never forget meeting one of the greatest creative minds and inspirational human beings of my generation.… Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer, and to some degree, the Fantastic Four, were just part of our subculture in San Francisco, which ultimately became the subculture of the country’s young people.…
I remember Stan being really encouraging. I thought he must be an old beatnik or something, because he wore dark glasses.… Marvel comics, sociologically, was part of the youth movement of the Sixties.… I am totally enamored of Stan Lee and the impact he’s had on our culture. I mean, the guy was truly a giant.7
The Fish, it seemed, were indeed Stan Lee’s “piscatorial pals.” Cohen’s memory was that the band members at the meeting that day were just him and either Gary “Chicken” Hirsh or Melton, as opposed to Friedrich’s recollection of the entire band showing up, and that the whole band was there for at least one subsequent visit. Obviously, time has blurred some of the details of the band’s visits to Marvel.
Lee’s recounting of that meeting, though, seemingly didn’t make the Bullpen Bulletins until the September 1967–dated comics, out in June, so the entry was probably written in April, when Lee signed off his “Stan’s Soapbox” editorial with: “And now we’ve gotta cut out—Country Joe and the Fish just arrived to visit us—and we don’t wanna keep ’em out of the water too long!”
The Fish then appeared as part of the story in the November ’69–dated issue #15 of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., written by Friedrich, with art by Herb Trimpe, Dick Ayers, and Sam Grainger. In the scene, the band played “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” and the superhero-name-dropping “Superbird,” both from Electric Music for the Mind and Body.
Their next appearance in the comics was in the June ’70 Bulletins, out in March, probably written in January or February:
ITEM! Didja hear about STAN THE MAN rapping for hours with JOE McDONALD, BARRY MELTON, and their manager, ED DENSON? Or maybe you know them better as COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH!
Such were the times that the visit of a fairly politically radical band to see Lee was not only allowed but was trumpeted in the Bullpen Bulletins. Lee might not have fully understood the times, but he was somehow in tune with them, or was at least making the effort to be. Equally of note was the counterculture’s fascination with Lee’s superheroes, who, even as hip Marvel versions of such figures, were essentially vigilante power fantasies.
And, of course, the parade of celebrities to the offices was a mere trickle compared to the endless stream of fans, often children, who would come by to try to catch a glimpse of the creators of their superhero fantasies (not realizing that most of them worked at home), as often as not stopped by the gatekeeping—usually verbal, sometimes physical—of “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg.
The summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love in San Francisco, when young people from all over the country flocked to the slums of Haight-Ashbury, intent on living out some kind of hippie dream. It was also the year when “underground comix” started appearing in strip form in alternative newspapers, such as The East Village Other and Berkeley Barb. The work of pioneer underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson was not yet as well known as it would be, so the energetic and colorful Marvel Comics of the era would be a natural to appeal to people looking for some kind of “outlaw” cultural fix, sometimes in conjunction with usage of mind-altering substances. (By early 1968, though, the first true underground comic books, such as Crumb’s Zap Comix, would appear and would before too long have a curious effect on kids’ adventure comics publishing companies, as we shall see.)
Though beloved by many, comic books were still generally considered junk, at least a decade away from most mainstream cultural arbiters even being willing to consider they might be some kind of legitimate art form. So the “outlaw” appeal of mainstream comics to youth culture lingered and became especially strong when idiosyncratic visual innovators such as Jim Steranko came on the scene.
Steranko, born in 1938 (the same year that Superman debuted in Action Comics #1), had been with Marvel since 1966, when, through sheer force of personality, combined with astonishing talent, he had, shortly after Ditko’s resignation, made his way past gatekeepers Steinberg, Brodsky, and Thomas to a meeting with Lee. Steranko had walked out with a regular assignment to be the penciler and, within five months, the plotter and scripter on the “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” series in Strange Tales.
One of the few new creators to enter the field in over a decade, Steranko, hardly a hippie, nonetheless brought a breath of fresh air into the comics mainstream, with a sense of what was current in design and a style that absorbed and synthesized the greats of the business—Eisner, Kirby, Infantino, Kane—and infused them with his own passion and wide-ranging life experience. Steranko would be one of the people through whom Lee would reduce the workload he and Kirby labored under. His youthful enthusiasm and boundless talent began the process that would gain steam and come to full fruition by the ’70s, whereby veteran talent would be supplemented by younger creators who realized that not only were comics expanding in terms of employment opportunities as well as content but that they were, if not yet a respectable career choice, then at least not as great a source of shame as they had been.
Lee, perhaps smarting from losing Wood and Ditko, was willing to give Steranko the kind of creative freedom and explicit credit he wouldn’t fully grant Kirby. Or perhaps he gave it because Lee really didn’t care that much about S.H.I.E.L.D.—Steranko has claimed that he asked Lee to give him his lowest-selling series—and figured there was nothing to lose by letting Steranko take credit (or blame, if such was needed) for whatever the newcomer would do with it. On the other hand, with his favorites such as Fantastic Four, Lee still took enough pride of authorship to let the credits say only “by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” (This wording was a concession made to Kirby, where the ambiguous attribution would mean that Kirby was no longer relegated to being credited as “just” the penciler. The credit also echoed collaborations of earlier in Kirby’s career, which were announced as being by “Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.”)
While certainly not an underground artist, Steranko brought a modern look and feel to his work that, while it was well in the ballpark of what readers associated with Marvel, brought a caffeine jolt—and a dollop of psychedelia—that most of the regular Marvel creative crew, at least the artists, wasn’t able to summon up. Though the younger writers like Thomas, Friedrich, and O’Neil were each, in their own way, connected to the ever-elusive zeitgeist, their stories were inevitably drawn by established, talented, but older professionals who were not. It was the rare middle-aged artist who, like Kirby, could plug into the zeitgeist or, if need be, invent his own.
Steranko had been freelancing around, including for Joe Simon at Harvey, but had run into resistance to his innovations at other companies. But his work had a raw energy that Lee had been looking for and had, indeed, always been open to. Here, again, Lee’s relative freedom to act on his editorial instincts served him well. As he told radio host Neal Conan (then an eighteen-year-old at the beginning of his illustrious career) in a 1968 interview:
Jim Steranko, he violates all the rules, and whenever he does, the job is beautiful. I’m not even really an editor where he’s concerned.… The nuttier it is, the more I say “Go ahead and do it.”8
If, as Spurgeon and Raphael say, Lee was by this period “a great comic book editor, perhaps the most successful in the medium’s history,”9 it was instinct-based decisions, like giving Steranko relatively free rein, that were part of that success. Lee was autonomous enough in his position to be able to take calculated risks that other editors couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Born the same year as Jack Kerouac, Lee could have plausibly been, as Barry Melton thought, an “old beatnik.” (Lee would have been forty-four at that first 1967 meeting with the Fish.) Of course, he, Kirby, and Ditko were about as far removed from being participating members of bohemian countercultures as it was possible to be.
While the Marvel writers and artists worked in a creative, albeit marginalized, field, their lives caught up in telling stories, their actual day-to-day existences, away from their drawing boards or typewriters, were involved in things that hippie boomers and pre-boomers could hardly have found especially interesting. Lee and Kirby were suburban dads, preoccupied with supporting their families and with the traditional trappings of success. And Ditko’s Randian philosophy was anathema to the collectivist leanings of many in the counterculture. The Fish and other popular music groups were, of course, pursuing careers and success as much as Lee and his peers but were perhaps more conflicted about it, trying to thread the needle of having successful careers while staying true to an amorphous, but generally nonmaterialistic, set of ideals.
Of course, no generation is all one thing. While many young people were active in the civil rights and anti-war movements, many were on the other side of the fence. And as always, most young people were just trying to get by in school and develop some kind of social life. But the ever-escalating war in Vietnam and the military draft were impacting daily on the lives of young people, whether they were massing in Golden Gate Park or shipping off to Saigon. Generalizing about a generation—or multiple generations, which the baby boom encompasses—is always tricky, and yet generalizing is ultimately what the art, craft, and business of popular culture are all about: finding something that will appeal to and excite a large segment of a demographic while offending or alienating as few as possible. Marvel’s comics were achieving that, offering stories that could be interpreted in multiple ways.
Sure, children were, as always, buying and reading comics. But here was a new phenomenon. Hip, smart, educated young adults—people who might well have been listening to bands like the Fish while they were reading Marvel’s comics—were enamored of Stan Lee and Marvel. Whether they had followed their dreams to become celebrity musicians or were taking more traditional routes by pursuing professional educations or serving in the military, young Americans were finding inspiration in Marvel Comics. And like Cohen and Melton, they were finding that inspiration embodied in Stan Lee, who had become the physical incarnation of Marvel.
It must all have seemed like a dream to Stan Lee. Starting at a job at age seventeen in 1940—one that likely seemed to be just another temporary gig like the many he’d gone through since graduating DeWitt Clinton the previous year—he had now progressed, after a twenty-five-year career that encompassed the ups and downs of the comics business, to an extraordinary position. He’d become the head editor of Timely Comics at age eighteen and had presided over what had been, until 1957, one of the largest-volume producers of comics in the country. He was well known in the field, and generally well liked, even admired, by his peers. But in the ’50s, he was by no means famous and certainly not considered any kind of influence on the overall culture, popular or otherwise, and not even really on comic books outside of the ones he oversaw.
He then weathered the implosion of 1957, and, in its wake, gathered his wits and his forces to improvise the phenomenon of Marvel Comics. The comics were successful and were being noticed not just by children—as rabid in their love for the stories and the characters and the creators as they were—but by college students. In addition, they were being noticed by adults who had loved the comics of their childhoods and now were interested in what Marvel was doing—highly educated adults like Roy Thomas and Dr. Jerry Bails. And celebrities like Federico Fellini were noticing, too.
So Stan Lee, who had been eager to leave comics—and nearly desperate enough to actually do so—was now busy reconstructing comics (and himself) into something new. He was even regularly speaking to large crowds at colleges and universities all over the country. No comic book editor or writer had ever been in exactly this position. The entire world was in flux in the late ’60s, and many people seemed to want to know what Stan Lee thought about the political and social upheaval that was going on. What an odd thing.
For whatever reason, Stan was no longer just selling stuff. Of course, his livelihood and lifestyle depended on him making and selling stuff. But now, added to what would turn out to be a lifelong compulsion to tell the truth (even if that truth was disguised with casual wording and surrounded by hype) was the desire to say—in person and in print—things that had meaning. Comic books, which had given him a pleasant way to make a living, had suddenly made him a figure whose opinions people wanted to know. But did he want to share his opinions in public—not just at lunch with his pals or in the relative intimacy of a college auditorium, but in the same pages of the same magazines where Marvel’s characters fought supervillains and emoted grandly?
Well, apparently, he did want to share his feelings and opinions, because that’s exactly what he did. Apparently, he felt he had something to say that needed to be shared. But whose opinions would he be sharing? Stan Lee’s or Marvel Comics’? Because they were now, in many ways, one and the same—except, of course, for the small detail that he was neither the owner nor the publisher of Marvel Comics. Nonetheless, share he did.
For Lee, this would be another “learn while you earn” situation. He would state some usually mild but heartfelt feelings, as he’d already been doing in the letters pages and Bullpen Bulletins, but there using some variant of the editorial “we,” or speaking of “Stan” in the third person. Now, though, he would make it clearer whose opinions he was stating as he introduced the Stan’s Soapbox column into the Bullpen Bulletins, the first appearing in the comics dated May and June 1967. His debut Soapbox topic was “the Marvel Philosophy,” of which he wrote:
We do have a motive—a purpose—behind our mags! That purpose is, plain and simple—to entertain you!… If we can also do our bit to advance the cause of intellectualism, humanitarianism, and mutual understanding … that won’t break our collective heart…!
Admittedly not an especially controversial editorial. By the same token, no other comic book company was advocating “the cause of intellectualism, humanitarianism, and mutual understanding.” It’s unlikely that such advocacy had come as a mandate from Martin Goodman. No, this was coming straight from Stan, even if it was cloaked in the ambiguous disguise of “we.”
By the November ’67 cover–dated comics, the Soapbox informed us:
We do cater to a special intellectual level. Our rollickin’ readers, no matter what their ages, have proven to be bright, imaginative, informal, and sophisticated!
Again, perhaps not the most risk-taking passage, complimenting his readers as it did. Still, there were no doubt those who didn’t like being told they were some kind of elite, snobby person of a “special intellectual level,” who might even have harbored ill will toward that kind of person. It could be seen as a slight but real risk to make such a statement.
In the April ’68 cover–dated comics, Lee stated in the Soapbox:
Didja know that more than a dozen college professors throughout America now use Marvel mags in their English Lit courses as supplemental material? It’s only a start—but we’re getting there, gang!
What percentage of the audience cared about that? What the heck is “supplemental material,” anyway? (And where was “there,” exactly?) Clearly, though, it was important to Lee to get the point across.
In the September ’68 comics, Lee started dancing among some land mines. Noting that some Marvel employees were Democrats and some Republicans, he continued:
As for Yours Truly and a few others, we prefer to judge the person, rather than the party line. That’s why we seek to avoid editorializing about controversial issues … because we share the same diversity of opinion as Americans everywhere.
People were not expecting that from their escapist fantasy in 1968.
And then Lee immediately followed that, in the same Soapbox, with the following, which perhaps might have made some readers think he himself had been indulging in some kind of substance experimentation:
We believe that Man has a divine destiny, and an awesome responsibility—the responsibility of … judging each fellow human on his own merit, regardless of race, creed or color … and we’ll never rest until it becomes a fact, rather than just a cherished dream!
Where did that come from, suburban dad who claims to just be concerned about earning a living? Marvel—Stan—somebody—would “never rest” until humankind fulfilled its “divine destiny”?
As a certain Kryptonian refugee might have said: “What th—?!”
By the October-dated comics, Lee reported in the Soapbox that most readers who responded did want Marvel to editorialize. Which led to the November ’68 Soapbox, on newsstands in August, which declared:
Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today.… Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill our hearts with tolerance. For then, and only then, will we be truly worthy of the concept that man was created in the image of God—a God who calls us ALL—His children.
And in case you were wondering who he was speaking for, it was signed, using the Latin for “peace and justice”:
Pax et Justitia,
Stan
It’s not so much the denunciation of bigotry that’s remarkable in the above. It’s the tone and passion. This was far beyond the tongue-in-cheek humor of the Merry Marvel Marching Society or the name-checking of celebrity visitors to the bullpen. This was a man with something to say and, thanks to his own accomplishments, a forum in which to say it. The EC Comics of the 1950s had taken stands, in their text pages, against censorship, that, like the Soapboxes, might have gone over the heads or against the philosophies of significant numbers of readers. But the primary aim of EC’s editorials was survival. They were in the crosshairs of enemies within and without the comics industry, and their goal was to invalidate their critics and live to publish another day.
But this was something different. There was no perceived gain for Lee personally or Marvel collectively to start pontificating on issues, even on something as seemingly noncontroversial as bigotry, or, for that matter, on the subject of editorializing itself. But somewhere inside him, with a schedule overbooked and overextended, Lee decided that expressing his deepest feelings—and conflating them with Marvel’s “feelings”—was an urgent thing to do. If it wasn’t sincere—if it was some kind of pandering to an audience that was already hooked on the company’s comics and merchandise—it seems like a lot of trouble to have gone to simply in order to pretend to care.
Nothing happens in a vacuum, of course. As Lee’s personal universe was convulsing—not unpleasantly—so was the country and the world around him. To say that Lee was compelled to respond to surrounding conditions is a truism. Everyone must respond to the world around them. But Lee had been given a chance to become a role model, and he had not shied from the challenge. He clearly relished the idea that people would look to him—both to his work and to him, personally—for guidance in perplexing times.
Sure, there were figures of Lee’s generation who were popular with boomer kids, such as local New York kids’ show hosts Sonny Fox and Chuck McCann, and national figures like Bob Keeshan, a.k.a. Captain Kangaroo. There was also the phenomenon of Soupy Sales, whose popularity crossed over from kids to teenagers and college students.
But Stan Lee’s situation was different. No one cared what Captain Kangaroo thought about the war in Vietnam.
There were also figures around Lee’s age popular on campuses—Marshall McLuhan and Allen Ginsberg, for instance. William F. Buckley Jr. and Abbie Hoffman. But their job was to confront people with their opinions. Lee was clearly not in that mold, either.
If there were ever a sui generis figure, it was Stan Lee. There was no one in the culture in a similar role: a highly placed (but not top) employee of a publishing enterprise whose products were consumed primarily by children felt he had to speak out on the issues of the day. As his public persona was coming into focus in the late 1960s, somehow or other, Lee had taken it upon himself to be, not a wannabe peer to the boomers, but rather some kind of philosopher-cheerleader, a hip-but-square parent, an adult who hadn’t thrown in the towel on idealism but who also wasn’t a doctrinaire partisan.
Stan Lee said out loud that he was opposed to bigotry. As history has shown us, not everyone is even that brave, especially not someone whose job is, ultimately, to sell stuff.
Baby boomer navel-gazing is beyond a cliché. And yet there seems to be no better way to explain Marvel’s popularity and Stan Lee’s celebrity than as a factor of boomer culture. A significant number of kids, who were hooked by Marvel from early Fantastic Four and Spider-Man and the rest, grew from childhood to adolescence, or from adolescence to adulthood, during the period from 1961 to the late ’60s and maintained an interest in Marvel’s characters and creators over those years. Of course, most adolescents dropped comics, but a fair number now did stay with them, including college students, and as Kirby was bursting boundaries of concepts and vision, Lee was doing the same with writing, editing, and promotion.
Certainly, the fact that both men had boomer children could well have been a factor in what they were thinking and storytelling about. They had literal skin in the game. The world in which their children were growing up was knocking constantly at their doors. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” wasn’t just a glib slogan to them; they were realities that their kids faced daily at school and on the streets and, for that matter, on TV and in the movies. It was what everybody’s kids faced. There were seventy million boomers in a country of around two hundred million. A third of the country’s population were the test subjects for the various experiments of the ever-evolving societies of the United States and the world. (And while Steve Ditko was neither a boomer nor the father of one, he did seem to have never lost touch with the Johnstown High School teenager he had been or with the timeless verities of adolescence.)
So the audience that had been in grade school in the early to mid-1960s was now heading for college or Vietnam. Or the Peace Corps. Or Canada. Or Haight-Ashbury. Or a factory or an office. And many members of that audience kept up with Marvel’s comics, as well as the underground comix, and with the movies and, especially, the music of the era. And many of them wanted to know what Stan Lee thought about what was going on.
Why? Largely because Lee had happened upon a personal connection with Marvel’s readers, many of them from the time they were kids—and Lee was synonymous with Marvel. Stan Lee—an actual person with a voluble public persona—was the voice and face of Marvel in a time when, well, Superman and Batman were the voice and face of DC, and no one was really the voice and face of any other comics company.
So it didn’t really matter to most readers what DC editors Julius Schwartz or Bob Kanigher or Mort Weisinger thought about the issues of the day. Those men, whatever their personalities, didn’t think of themselves as publicists or cheerleaders or spokespersons. Their job was to put out entertaining comic books that sold well enough for them to keep on putting out entertaining comic books that sold well enough.
Stan Lee had decided that his job description was something else. A child of the Great Depression and of the peregrinations of the comics business, he seemed to instinctively realize that his desperation-move to provide Marvel with a friendly face also gave him a launching pad for becoming a celebrity who had opinions and feelings and passions, passions that related both directly and tangentially to a medium and a company that he thought he had long ago ceased caring about.
Lee took to this new celebrity like the proverbial duck to water. He developed a new look that involved fashionable suits, a neatly trimmed beard, and a stylish, well-sculpted toupee, as would befit a man now so much in the public eye. It had become clear that, so long as Marvel was prominent, he would be prominent. And if Marvel ever lost its cachet or if it decided it didn’t need Stan Lee anymore, he was now in a position to take his celebrity and do with it whatever he felt necessary and appropriate. Sure, he was in the comics business, but he was now also in the larger entertainment business.
Most important, he was in the Stan Lee business. And that, it would turn out, would be a very interesting business. It was a business that would be the key to pretty much everything professionally—and often personally—that would happen to him for the rest of his life. If there were ever someone in the right place at the right time with the right skill set, experience, and personality to make the most of the possibilities presented to him—and created by him—it was Stan Lee.
Marvel’s 1961 creation of an evolved superhero genre was an incredible turning point in Lee’s life. He took the opportunities offered by this new approach to comic book storytelling that he’d helped invent and made the most of them. By 1967, and certainly by 1968, the creative and business potential of the Marvel juggernaut was a certified cultural phenomenon. Those two years would also prove to be some of the most tumultuous in American and world history.
With his and Marvel’s growing cultural footprint, it was inevitable that Lee would become caught up in the extreme developments of the era. It would prove to be a wild ride for all concerned.