The man who put his name on everything never owned any of it.
At a glance
- Known for
- Co-creating Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and most of the Marvel universe
- Before fame
- Filled inkwells and fetched lunch as a teenage assistant at Timely Comics
- Off-screen
- Proposed to his wife Joan within two weeks of meeting her; they stayed together 69 years
Rise to Fame
Twenty-two years into writing comics, he was ready to quit. His wife talked him out of it: if you're leaving anyway, write what you actually want. The result was Fantastic Four #1 with Jack Kirby, superheroes who bickered about money and lost their tempers.
The 'Marvel Method' was born from a bottleneck, not a vision. His distributor limited Marvel to eight monthly titles, so Lee wrote plot synopses of a paragraph or less, let the artists draw the full story, then added dialogue afterward. It was a production hack. But it let him and Kirby and Steve Ditko populate an entire universe in under three years. The characters weren't aspirational. They were anxious, broke, and petty. It turned out that was enough.
In the Spotlight
The credit question is the crack in the monument. The 'Marvel Method' meant Kirby and Ditko drew complete stories from minimal synopses but got credit only as artists, not co-writers. A New York Herald Tribune profile in early 1966 crowned Lee the creative force behind Marvel. Ditko left and never worked with him again. Kirby departed for DC in 1970.
Characters he co-created have generated over $31 billion at the global box office. Disney paid $4 billion for Marvel in 2009. He never owned any of it, working on a $1 million annual salary as chairman emeritus. He had to sue in 2002 just to get 10% of his own characters' film profits. He built the highest-grossing film franchise in history and ended up an employee of it.
Side Notes
A British hat model caught his attention, and he proposed within two weeks. Joan got an annulment from her previous husband and married him in the room next door the same day. When he moved, he moved.
The Signal Corps classified him as a 'playwright' during the war, one of only nine in the entire Army, and put him in a room with Frank Capra, Charles Addams, and Dr. Seuss. He chose 'Excelsior!' in 1968 specifically because competitors wouldn't know what it meant or how to spell it. Nothing about the persona was accidental.
Final Chapter
A private funeral service was held on November 16, four days after his death. He'd asked for nothing large. Captain Marvel (2019), the first MCU film released afterward, replaced its standard Marvel logo sequence with a montage of his previous cameos. His final recorded cameo, in Avengers: Endgame, had him de-aged and driving past a military base shouting 'Make love, not war!'