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Stan Lee, the former editor-in-chief, publisher, and chairman of Marvel Comics,
died this morning in Los Angeles at age 95. Lee was best known for co-creating much of Marvel’s pantheon of beloved superheroes: Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Daredevil, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange, among others.
Lee’s comics career began in 1939, when the 17-year-old took an assistant job at Timely Comics, the predecessor to Marvel. Born Stanley Martin Lieber, he adopted Stan Lee as a pen name when he started writing comic book stories, and later made it his legal name.
His style of scripting — giving the artist a brief synopsis, then returning to nail down the details after the story was drawn — would later be dubbed “The Marvel Method,” and offered collaborators and co-creators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko enormous creative input into the work. Later, there would be sometimes bitter conflicts about precisely who created — or co-created — which characters, though the work-for-hire nature of their contracts meant that none of them retained the rights.
