[msb-alumni] Legendary Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee Dies at 95
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2018 13:38:22 -0500
BlankLegendary Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee dies at 95 Brian Truitt , USA
TODAY
Stan Lee, the cultural icon responsible for many of Marvel's most popular
superheroes in comic books and movies, has died at the age of 95. Lee died
Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Kirk
Schenck,
an attorney for Lee's daughter, J.C. Lee. Lee's POW! Entertainment company
confirmed the news to USA TODAY.
"His passing today marks a devastating and painful moment in time, but the
legacy of Stan Lee, through his creative genius and his universes of
characters,
will continue to reach the world of true believers for generations to come,"
POW! CEO Shane Duffy said in a statement. He called Lee "the father of pop
culture."
Born Stanley Martin Lieber, the New York City native co-created Spider-Man,
Hulk, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, Daredevil,
Doctor Strange and a host more heroes while working as a writer and then
editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics in the 1960s.
From the 1970s (when he became publisher) until the '90s, Lee was the face of
Marvel and a frequent staple at comic and pop-culture conventions, entertaining
fans and "true believers" with his stories and signature catchphrase
"Excelsior!"
He created his own POW! Entertainment in 2001 to develop film, TV and comic
properties, but always stayed connected to his original superhero roots as geek
culture rose in Hollywood.
While Lee's infectious enthusiasm for his heroes and his devotees lasted late
into a legendary life, recent years were marked by ill health and legal
wrangling involving those closest to him. Following the death of his wife of 69
years, Joan, in 2017, Lee was hospitalized in February 2018 for an irregular
heartbeat and shortness of breath, and also struggled with pneumonia.
In March of that year, Lee reported $1.4 million stolen from his bank account,
and in April he sued former business manager Jerardo Olivarez for fraud and
elder abuse and then a month later filed a $1 billion fraud suit against POW!
In
addition, Lee denied signing a document in April 2018 stating that daughter
J.C.
Lee and friend/business manager Keya Morgan were trying to gain control of his
assets and property, though Morgan was revealed to have a restraining order on
him during the Los Angeles police's investigations of elder abuse against Lee.
Lee was a progressive force in his chosen medium. He tackled prejudice and
intolerance in his "Stan's Soapbox," challenged the obsolete Comics Code
Authority with a 1970s anti-drug story line in "The Amazing Spider-Man," and
introduced Black Panther, an African king and great scientist, the first major
black superhero in comics.
"I wanted to go against type," Lee said. "Even though he had a little
thatched-hut village in Africa, that was only to fool people. Underneath that,
he had this modern civilization."
"I always felt at Marvel we had to do things different. The reader had to be
surprised and had to be meeting characters the likes of which he or she hadn't
met before."
When fans asked, Lee would say that Spider-Man was his favorite heroic
creation,
mainly because of his Everyman nature. "You feel you know him. He's not just a
cardboard figure with a lot of muscles," said Lee, who served in the U.S. Army
for three years during World War II, first as a member of the Signal Corps and
then as a "playwright" in the Training Film Division.
Lee's last tweet before his death was a Veterans' Day message thanking fellow
vets for their service. "Thank you to all of America's veterans for your
service. Fun fact: Stan's official US Army title during WW2 was 'Playwright."
For Lee, his heroes always were meant for much more than being on the
comic-book
page. He moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1981 to develop Marvel movies
and
TV shows, and while he'd narrate cartoons such as "Spider-Man and His Amazing
Friends," Lee and fans would have to wait nearly 20 years to see the big-screen
potential of these characters.
Yet Lee was also able to see them up close -- he had a cameo in nearly every
Marvel movie, beginning with Bryan Singer's "X-Men" in 2000. There was nothing
more fun for him than stealing a scene in a blockbuster movie, Lee said in 2014.
"It doesn't require a lot of rehearsal, you get there, you do it, you get the
hell out of there in a few minutes, and you're on the screen forever."
*****
Stan Lee, a writer and editor often credited with helping American comics grow
up by redefining the notion of a superhero, including the self-doubting
Spider-Man, the bickering Fantastic Four, the swaggering Iron Man and the
raging
Incredible Hulk, died today at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 95. The
Associated Press reported the death, citing an attorney for Lee's daughter. The
cause was not immediately available. Lee's name became synonymous with
the company that would become Marvel Comics, which he joined as a teenage
assistant and stayed with for much of his adult life. After toiling in comics
for 20 years as a self-described hack, on the verge of quitting the business,
he
was ordered by his boss to emulate a line of superheroes done by rival
DC comics. Lee's full-color, morally complex heroes helped foster a revival in
a
largely moribund profession. Comics had entered a dark age after Senate
hearings in the early 1950s that condemned the trade for contributing to
juvenile delinquency. What followed was a comics code to monitor standards and
ban content deemed immoral and unsuitable for children. In the '60s, Lee took a
distinctly new approach to characters and setting, as well as to the very
interaction with readers who had grown used to comics that were aimed solely at
a younger audience and that featuring flawless, square-jawed heroes who
had uncomplicated morals. Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
the comic-book-themed novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,"
said in an interview that Lee's best-known characters were "vain, pompous,
conceited. ... Everything that works in comic books today is indebted to him
for that. "There's no question that Stan and the innovations he came up with
saved the comic book and the superhero," Tom Brevoort, Marvel's senior vice
president of publishing, told The Washington Post in 2011. "By crafting
characters with feet of clay and personal problems and not writing down to an
audience
that was perceived to be primarily 8-year-olds Stan opened the doorway for more
sophisticated and interesting treatments of any subject matter in comics.
He made comics interesting and relevant and fun again. Lee told The Post in
2012: "All of our characters were freaks in their own way. The greatest example
was with X-Men they were hated because they were different. The idea I had, the
underlying theme, was that just because somebody is different doesn't make
them better. ... That seems to be the worst thing in human nature. Tension with
Jack Kirby Much of Lee's success was indebted to his Marvel partnership
with artist and frequent co-creator Jack Kirby. Their first superheroes,
appearing in 1961, were the Fantastic Four. They were unlike the perfectly
genial
Superman, a DC Comics character. Fantastic Four were constantly were at odds
with one another. Mr. Fantastic was a boring scientist whom the rest of the
group constantly interrupted. One of the Four, the Thing, looked like a monster
and often acted like one, and he hated the powers that made him look that
way. Other heroes came with their own weaknesses, such as the
Jekyll-and-Hyde-like Incredible Hulk, who could not control the anger that gave
him his strength;
Daredevil, whose blindness helped develop other heightened senses. Iron Man was
a billionaire industrialist modeled after Howard Hughes; his weakness was
a a piece of shrapnel dangerously close to his heart, acquired on a trip to
Vietnam to inspect the weapons he produced for the war. (Lee wrote in his 2002
memoir, "Excelsior! : "Due to his injury, he always had to either wear the iron
armor, or an iron chest plate he had fashioned for himself, to keep his
heart beating. If that explanation doesn't sound medically correct, hey, he's a
comicbook hero and I'm not a cardiologist.") With artist Steve Ditko, Lee
created Spider-Man in 1962, of whom cartoonist and author Jules Feiffer said,
"He took the anxiety and schlumpiness that had become part of the culture
from the '60s on and put them into the character of a superhero. Besides giving
the characters human personalities, the artists further attracted readers
with the comics' realistic settings. While other heroes protected fictional
cities such as Metropolis and Gotham, Lee's lived in his native New York. Lee
constantly addressed and engaged the readers. In his memoir, written with
George
Mair, he remembered one particular author's note: "On the cover I wrote
something like, 'Look, this may not be one of the best stories we've ever done,
but we've given you enough good ones so that you owe it to us to buy this
lemon anyway.' "Stan was the first writer to bring an ironic distance to the
material," said Marvel artist Gerry Conway, as quoted in Tom Spurgeon and
Jordan Raphael's "Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book"
(2003). Behind the scenes, Lee worked to foster a different kind of
collaborative
process with his artists. Traditionally, comics were drawn from a
screenplay-like script provided by the writer. Instead, Lee said, he would
offer
his
artists plot ideas and brainstorm with them. The artists would then draw the
story, and he would later fill in dialogue and text. Artists in his "bullpen,"
where the artists worked in proximity to each other and to him, were much more
involved in the creative process. This became known as the Marvel Method.
He crisscrossed the country as a popular college speaker, visiting campus
chapters of the official fan clubs he founded, the Merry Marvel Marching Society
and later the Friends of Ol' Marvel. Marvel became and remains one of the
best-selling comic book companies in the country. In 2009, the Walt Disney Co.
reached an agreement to acquire Marvel Entertainment in a deal worth more than
$4 billion. Lee has been criticized for not doing enough to acknowledge
Kirby and Ditko's roles in creating Marvel's most popular characters. Marvel
publicity and press coverage frequently played up Lee's role and minimized
his collaborators. They were minimized legally, as well. Historically, none of
the creators had any ownership rights, not even Lee. Because there were
no royalties, comic artists often struggled financially after they stopped
working. In the 1970s, Kirby attempted to get back some of his original artwork
to help support his family and sued. Lee, who was Marvel's public face,
refrained from taking an active role in the case. An elderly Kirby eventually
received
some of the art, years later, after agreeing to relinquish all claim to
copyright. Kirby and Lee had a falling-out. Kirby died in 1994. "I made whatever
I made because I was the editor ... and I was the publisher and one-time
president and chairman of the company," Lee told The Post in 2012. "I was the
scriptwriter. I made no more money than Jack, and at times he made more than I
did. ... If it hadn't been for those other guys like (comic-book artist)
John Romita (Sr.) who took over so many of the (comics), I don't think these
comics" would be as popular today. "Jack was great, and I have taken pains
to say over and over again what a great collaborator he was and how much he
contributed," Lee continued. "But even when he was alive, I was the guy doing
the publicity. I was ... the guy boosting Marvel on the front lines. Jack was
the voice of Jack Kirby, and at times he left to work at D.C., and when it
served his interests better he came back to Marvel. Took pen name in his teens
Stanley Martin Lieber was born in New York City on Dec. 28, 1922, the eldest
son of Romanian Jewish immigrants. His father was a dress cutter who was
frequently out of work. Lee came by his pen name as a teenager. He claimed he
changed his name not because of antisemitism, like many comic book artists, but
because he wanted to preserve his real name to write a real book. After
graduating high school, Lee took a job with Timely Publications, a company that
published Marvel and was owned by his cousin-in-law Martin Goodman. He
was hired by Timely editor Joe Simon, who with Kirby co-created Captain
America.
During World War II, Lee served in the Army and spent three years in New
Jersey writing scripts for training films. After his discharge, he continued
spinning out science-fiction and monster comics for Timely, which was renamed
Atlas. In 1947, he married Joan Boocock, a British hat model. She died in 2017.
Their daughter Jan died days after her birth in 1953. Survivors include
another daughter, Joan Celia "J.C. Lee; and a brother, comic book artist and
writer Larry Lieber. Lee credited his wife with pushing him to create the
Fantastic Four instead of leaving Marvel in frustration at midcareer. His
breakthrough against the industry's self-imposed "Comics Code" came in 1971 when
the government asked him to produce a Spider-Man story line that came down
harshly on drug use. The code had a zero-tolerance policy for drugs, even in
a negative light, but Marvel ignored the regulations, published without the
seal
of approval and saw no change in sales. Comic books across the industry
stopped following the code's guidelines. Lee moved from editor to publisher in
1972, and then moved to Hollywood around 1980, attempting with little success
to attain cinematic respectability for his characters. The few projects that
came to fruition, such as "Howard the Duck" (1986) and "The Punisher" (1989),
were critical and commercial failures. In 1999, Lee entered the Internet age
with the company Stan Lee Media, which produced Web cartoons and briefly gave
Lee a paper worth of $100 million. The company collapsed in 2001 amid
allegations of a massive scam run by Lee's partner, Peter F. Paul, who turned
out
to be a convicted felon. Paul fled to Brazil but eventually returned to the
United States and pleaded guilty to securities fraud. In 2002, "Spider-Man,"
directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire, opened at the box office and
eventually grossed more than $800 million worldwide. Citing a previously
ignored line in his contract, Lee sued Marvel for 10 percent of the profits in
what he told Variety was "the friendliest lawsuit in the world. He won the
case in 2005. Retaining his lifetime contract with Marvel, he started a new
comic company, P.O.W. (Purveyors of Wonder) Entertainment. In 2008, he received
the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to artists by the U.S.
government. Lee, who has had cameos in many Marvel-based films, was known for
an economy of humility. As a teenage boss at Marvel, he would sit on a file
cabinet and yell, "I am God! at his artists sitting below. In his memoir, he
said, "If I may be totally candid, I'm my biggest fan.
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