How I Did It: Stan Lee of Marvel Comics

The creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men talks about how he has stayed creative for more than 60 years.

Jeff Minton

ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE Stan Lee has spent seven decades focused on a single task: inventing superheroes.

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MEET THE SUPERHEROES The Fantastic Four made their debut in 1961. The Hulk burst onto the scene in the spring of 1962, followed by Spider-Man, who first showed up on the cover of Marvel's Amazing Fantasy.

Mention Marvel Comics, and the first thing that comes to mind is superheroes like Spider-Man and the Hulk. The next thing, probably, is Stan Lee -- who helped create those iconic characters and has been the public face of Marvel for decades. So it's not surprising that Lee is pleased about Disney's proposed $4 billion acquisition of Marvel. What is surprising is that Lee doesn't stand to make a dime from it. Lee drifted away from Marvel in the mid-1990s -- indeed, he spent years in litigation with the company -- and now is chairman of another business, POW! Entertainment. Still, Lee never really left Marvel. At 86, he serves as its chairman emeritus, and though the position is largely ceremonial, it acknowledges Lee's role in building one of America's most enduring brands.

I grew up in New York City during the Depression. My earliest recollections were of my parents talking about what they would do if they didn't have the rent money. Luckily, we were never evicted. But my father was unemployed most of the time. He had been a dress cutter, and during the Depression, there wasn't much need for dress cutters. So I started working when I was still in high school. I was an office boy, I was an usher, I wrote obituaries for celebrities while they were still alive. Lots of jobs.

My mother was the greatest mother in the world. She thought I was the greatest thing on two feet. I'd come home with a little composition I had written at school and she'd look at it and say, "It's wonderful! You're another Shakespeare!" I always assumed I could do anything. It really is amazing how much that has to do with your attitude.

My cousin's husband, Martin Goodman, had a company called Timely Publications, and they were looking for an assistant. I figured, Why not? When I got there, I found out that the opening was in the comic book department. Apparently, I was the only guy who had applied for the job. I figured it might be fun. So I became a gofer -- there were only two guys, Joe Simon, the editor, and Jack Kirby, the artist. They were the creators of Captain America, and that's what they were working on at the time. I would fill the inkwells, go down and buy lunch, and erase pages and proofread. Then they were fired for some reason. Martin had no one to run the department. He said to me, "Can you do it?" I was 17. When you're 17, what do you know? I said, "Sure, I can do it."

Martin must have forgotten about me, because he just left me there. I loved it. I was so young, it was sometimes embarrassing. Someone would come into the office and see me there and say, "Hey, kid, can I see the editor?"

By the time I got the job, Superman had been created. We had the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, Father Time, Hurricane. The most important thing in those days was the cover. All these books were on the newsstand, and you had to hope your cover would compel somebody to buy the book. And everything depended on the name. A character like Hurricane was a guy who ran very fast. Later on, when I was looking for new superheroes, it occurred to me that somebody crawling on walls would be interesting. I thought, Mosquito Man? It didn't sound very glamorous. Fly Man? I went down the list and came to Spider-Man. That was it.

Martin was one of the great imitators of all time. If he found that a company had Western magazines that were selling, he would say, "Stan, come up with some Westerns." Horror stories, war stories, crime stories, whatever. Whatever other people were selling, we would do the same thing. I would have liked to come up with my own stuff, but I was getting paid.

After about 20 years on the job, I said to my wife, "I don't think I'm getting anywhere. I think I'd like to quit." She gave me the best piece of advice in the world. She said, "Why not write one book the way you'd like to, instead of the way Martin wants you to? Get it out of your system. The worst thing that will happen is he'll fire you -- but you want to quit anyway." At the time, DC Comics had a book called The Justice League, about a group of superheroes, that was selling very well. So in 1961 we did The Fantastic Four. I tried to make the characters different in the sense that they had real emotions and problems. And it caught on. After that, Martin asked me to come up with some other superheroes. That's when I did the X-Men and The Hulk. And we stopped being a company that imitated.

In the 1960s, we realized we were onto something. I figured we needed a new name, because we were not the same company we had been. I remembered the first book Martin published when I started there was called Marvel Comics. It had the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, and it was very successful. Why don't we call the company Marvel? There are so many ways you can use that word in advertising. I came up with catch phrases like "Make mine Marvel" and "Marvel marches on!"

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