Remember Stan Lee? This is the story of the creator of Spider-Man

Marvel’s and Stan Lee (1922–2018) the ultimate idea was that superheroes are just like us mere mortals.

– If I had superpowers, wouldn’t I still have to worry about my livelihood or whether my dates like me, Lee asked.

More than a hundred years have passed since the birth of the cartoon legend. Now his life has been published By David Gelb documentary Stan Lee streaming service on Disney+.

Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber to Romanian parents who moved to New York. Lee loved reading even as a child, and important things were, for example Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. The young man’s role model was the big screen hero Errol Flynn.

Timely Comics

As a teenager, he did a wide variety of jobs. According to the family’s values, the most important goal in life was to get a permanent job. Getting fired from the trouser manufacturer turned out to be a stroke of luck, because I might not have found a job working on cartoons without it.

In 1939, Lee got small jobs from Timely Comics, a comic book publisher that later became known as Marvel. At that time, the company’s flagship product was Captain America.

Lee believed that he would only work on comics for a while and later move on to novels. That’s when Stan Lee came up with his stage name: he didn’t want to do comics under his real name because he didn’t think it was real work.

By Timely Comics Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left the company in 1941, Ruipelo’s Stan Lee became interim editor-in-chief. There were no others, he reasons. The deputyship lasted about 30 years.

The power of comics

At the start of World War II, Lee enlisted in the army. Thanks to comics, he didn’t get to go to war. When Lee’s background was found out, he was given the task of writing.

At that time, there were severe delays in salary payments due to the lack of skilled clerks. Six months of training was considered too slow, so Lee was forced to rewrite the opus needed for the training. The six-month training was shortened to six weeks when Lee came up with the idea of ​​using cartoons in the learning material.

– That’s when I realized that cartoons can have a huge impact. The story or information can be changed to be faster, clearer and more enjoyable, Lee says in the documentary.

When Lee was editor-in-chief, Timely Comics published a lot of magazines. Freelancers were used to produce the content, so Lee wrote and drew his own stuff and shopped it to a house that published it.

At some point, making cartoons started to seem childish and pointless to Lee, and they were not generally appreciated. At that time, cartoons went through the censors so that the youth would not “get lost on the path of perversions and crime”.

The Marvel Method

When the company’s competitor, DC Comics, published Justice League, it became a bestseller. It was a collection that brought together all the superheroes in the house.

Published by Timely Comics Martin Goodman wanted a similar collection for their house as well, which excited Lee. By this time, the drawing legend Kirby had also returned to the house. It was decided to change the characters to be more human and suitable for a slightly more adult taste.

That’s when Lee developed The prodigies. Unlike traditional superheroes, the characters were imperfect and struggled with the same problems as normal people. They were set in New York, not in a fictional world. Kirby came up with Lee’s instructions as well The Hulk.

– Don’t try to please people you don’t know. Please yourself, then you’ll know what works, Lee mused.

In the beginning, Lee wrote the stories himself, but could not keep up with the frenetic publishing pace. When he wrote a story for Kirby and Steve Ditko came to ask for work, Lee says that in desperation he only said a plot, which Ditko is free to draw as a story. Based on that, Lee said he would come up with lines and other texts.

The “Marvel method” was born from the emergency aid, which was implemented in the future. In the method, the writer did not know what exactly the draftsman was drawing, and the draftsman did not know what the writer was writing. The end result was successful, even though only the big formulas were known.

The Birth of Spider-Man

With teenagers being the target of general criticism, Lee wanted to create an authentic teenage character with superpowers. He went to the publisher to pitch the idea About Spider-Manbut the idea was shelved – teenagers can’t be superheroes.

Lee was not allowed to publish Spider-Man. When Amazing Fantasy magazine was discontinued around the same time, Lee decided to publish Spider-Man in the last issue of the magazine. However, no one would be interested in the contents of the discontinued magazine.

The sales figures were so great that Lee was allowed to continue the hero’s adventures. Lee admits that Steve Ditko was the perfect illustrator for the hero. The character was different from what you were used to seeing.

– Spider-Man has the strength of 25 men, he can walk on walls and swing himself from building to building, but he doesn’t fight bad guys because his old Aunt May says the air is bad outside and you can catch a cold.

As the comics became more popular, Lee said he wanted to add moral lessons to the stories. The stories might take a stand on, for example, racism. According to Lee, acceptance of diversity was a big theme in all Marvel comics. Specially In Group X.

Criticism

In business sense, Lee made a mistake. When Marvel was sold, Lee was only offered a two-year contract extension. All the characters were copyrighted by Marvel, which means that they now have a new owner. Lee always did his work for the company and did not take care of his personal copyrights.

Later, the main colleagues, Kirby and Ditko, more or less fell out with Lee. Even today, Lee is criticized as to whether or not he deserves as much credit for creating the characters and Marvel as he is being led to believe. The documentary doesn’t take much of a stand on it.

Document Stan Lee will be available to watch on Disney+ on June 16. See program information for streaming services at Telku.