Timely Publications
Stanley Martin Lieber was an American comic book writer and publisher who was the primary creative leader of Timely Publications, who would later be known as Marvel Comics. For a period of two decades, Stan Lee lead the Marvel Comics expansion from being a small publishing house, to the giant multimedia corporation that has dominated the comics and film industries today. As part of a collaborative effort with other writers at Marvel, Stan Lee co-created iconic characters, including superheroes Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Thor, the Hulk, Daredevil and Doctor Strange. Lee's duties at Timely Publications were initially prosaic, doing supportive tasks for the main writers and illustrators such as making sure the artists' pens were filled with ink, the pencils erased from their finished pages, and getting the artists their lunch every single day.
The Stan Lee Pseudonym
With the help of his uncle, Stan Lee became an assistant at Timely Comics in 1939 and eventually started writing fillers for the company two years later. Lee made his comic-book debut with the text filler "Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge" in Captain America Comics #3, where he first used the pseudonym Stan Lee, an imaginative play on his first name Stanley. Because of the low status of comic books back in the day, Lee said he had to use a pseudonym so nobody would assoicate his real name with comics in case he had to change his writing career. At only 19 years old, Lee became Timely's comic-book division's editor-in-chief, as well as art director until 1972, when he surpassed Martin Goodman as the publisher for Marvel Comics.
Avengers Assemble
In the late 1950s, Lee and artist Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, which instantly became the team's immediate popularity, succeedingly creating the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the X-men and Marvel's most successful character Spider-Man, all of whom lived in a shared universe. Eventually, Lee and Kirby gathered their newly created superhero characters into one super team calling it The Avengers, and revived the most important character of the group from the 1940s who would lead them - Captain America. Lee's Spider-Man was inspired from the crime fighting non-superhuman comic character Richard Wentworth a.k.a The Spider, creating a teenage superhero called Spider-Man in 1962. Throughout the 1960s, Lee scripted, art-directed and edited most of Marvel's series, creating works that built a sense of community between the fans and creators.
Playwright
Before working with Marvel Comics, Lee entered the United States Army in early 1942 and served as a member of the Signal Corps, repairing communication equipment for the military. Because of his influence in writing and cartooning, he was transferred to the Training Film Division where he, along with nine other men from the entire US Army were given the title "Playwright". Lee's division included many soon-to-be famous people, including three-time Academy Award-winning director Frank Capra who directed It's A Wonderful Life, New Yorker cartoonist Charles Adams, and children's book writer and illustrator Theodor Geisel, who would later be known to the world as Dr. Seuss. While in the Army, Lee continued to write stories every week for the editors at Timely, and was nearly sent to prison, after using a screwdriver to tamper with the mailbox hinges at the Army post office, in an attempt to retrieve his assignment mail for the week from Timely.
King of Cameo Apperances
Lee ultimately became the public face for Marvel Comics, making appearances at comic book conventions around America, working as an executive producer for and making cameo appearances in Marvel film adaptations and other movies. In the 2000s, the public started to see more of Stan Lee's persona penetrating the public consciousness through merchandising, branding, and even appearances in the Marvel Universe as an official character. In 2006, as a tribute to Lee's 65 years work for Marvel, the studio commemorated him by publishing a series of one-shot comics starring Lee himself, meeting and interacting with many of his superhero co-creations Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Silver Surfer and Doctor Doom. Lee was 96 years old when he died on November 12, 2018, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, after a bout with pneumonia and heart failure.
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