Actors - Stan Lee

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	Actors - Stan Lee

Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber on December 28, 1922, at home at West 98th Street and West End Avenue, New York City) is an American writer, editor, and memoirist, who — with several artist co-creators, especially Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko — introduced complex, naturalistic characters and a thoroughly shared universe into superhero comic books. His success helped change Marvel Comics from a small publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.

Biography

Early career

Lee was born to Celia and Jack Lieber, Jewish immigrants from Romania. His father, trained as a dress cutter, worked only sporadically after the Great Depression. The family moved further uptown to Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood. When he was nine, his only sibling, brother Larry Lieber, was born. Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. A voracious reader who enjoyed writing as a teen, he worked such part-time jobs as writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Center; delivering sandwiches for the Jack May pharmacy to offices in Rockefeller Center; working as an office boy for a trouser manufacturer; ushering at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway; and selling subscriptions to the New York Herald-Tribune newspaper. He graduated high school early, at age 16 1/2, in 1939, and joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

With the help of his uncle, Robbie Solomon, the brother-in-law of pulp magazine and comic-book publisher Martin Goodman, Lee became an assistant at the new Timely Comics division of Goodman's company. Timely, by the 1960s, would evolve into Marvel Comics. Lee, whose cousin Jean was Goodman's wife, was formally hired by Timely editor Joe Simon.

Lee's first published work, the text filler "Captain America Foils The Traitor's Revenge" in Captain America Comics #3 (May 1941), used the pseudonym "Stan Lee", which years later he would adopt as his legal name. He graduated from writing filler to actual comics with a backup two issues later. When Simon and his creative partner Jack Kirby left later that year, following a dispute with Goodman, the publisher told Lee, just under 19 years old, to be the interim editor. The youngster showed a knack for the business that led him to remain as the comic-book division's editor-in-chief until 1972, when he would succeed Goodman as publisher.

Lee enlisted in the U.S. Army in early 1942 and served stateside in the Signal Corps, writing manuals, training films, and slogans, and occasionally cartooning. His military classification, he says, was "playwright"; he adds that only nine men in the U.S. Army were given that title. Vincent Fago, editor of Timely's "animation comics" section, which put out humor and funny animal comics, filled-in until Lee returned from his World War II military service in 1945.

In the mid-1950s, by which time the company was now generally known as Atlas Comics, a decency campaign led by psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham and Senator Estes Kefauver blamed comic books for corrupting young readers with images of violence and sexuality. Comic-book companies responded by implementing strict internal regulations, and eventually adopted the stringent Comics Code.

During this period, Lee wrote comics in a various genres including romance, Westerns, humor, science fiction, medieval adventure, horror and suspense. By the end of the decade, he had become dissatisfied with his career and considered quitting the field.

Marvel revolution

In the late 1950s, DC Comics's editor Julius Schwartz revived the superhero genre and experienced a significant success with its updated version of the Flash, and later with super-team the Justice League of America. In response, publisher Martin Goodman assigned Lee to create a new superhero team. Lee's wife urged him to experiment with stories he preferred, since he was planning on changing careers and had nothing to lose.

Lee acted on that advice, giving his superheroes a flawed humanity, a change from the ideal archetypes that were typically written for pre-teens. His heroes could have bad tempers, melancholy fits, vanity, greed, etc. They bickered amongst themselves, worried about paying their bills and impressing girlfriends, and even were sometimes physically ill. Before him, superheroes were idealistically perfect people with no problems: Superman was so powerful that nobody could harm him, and Batman was a billionaire in his secret identity.

Lee's superheroes captured the imagination of teens and young adults who were part of the population spike known as the post World War II baby boom. Sales soared.

The first superhero group Lee and artist Jack Kirby created was the family the Fantastic Four. Its immediate popularity led Lee and Marvel's illustrators to produce a cavalcade of new titles. With Kirby, Lee created the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, the Mighty Thor and the X-Men; with Bill Everett, Daredevil; and with Steve Ditko, Doctor Strange and Marvel's most successful character, Spider-Man,

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