Stan Lee: An American Icon

For our very first Real New York Profile, we’re going to discuss an upcoming guest. As we mentioned before, Stan Lee will be appearing at the J&R stores for a signing next Friday, Feb 23rd. What we didn’t mention was that he’s been a huge influence on American popular culture, and his most influential period was spent here in his home city of New York.

Lee was born Stanley Leiber, in an apartment on the corner of West End Avenue & 98th Street. He lived there until the Depression, when his family moved uptown, to cheaper Washington Heights. While attending high school in the Bronx he worked as a delivery boy, carrying sandwiches to offices in Rockefeller Center. He also took occasional writing jobs for a local news service. Stanley’s uncle noticed his interest in writing & put in a word with a friend at Timely Comics. The boy became a writer’s assistant at Timely, where he was first published under the pen name “Stan Lee.”

Lee served in the Army for 3 years during World War II. While in the military, he continued writing — manuals, scripts for training films and occasional cartoons. Returning to New York in 1945, he went back to Timely (now Atlas Comics) and became one of their most prolific writers. He was tired of the business by the late 1950s and was ready to leave, when a sudden change occurred in the business: Superheroes became popular again. Up to the end of World War II, superheroes were a mainstay in comics. Their popularity had died off after the war, but new super-powered characters like The Flash and the Justice League were grabbing kids’ imaginations and selling like hotcakes. In superheroes, Lee saw an opportunity to tell a new kind of story — one that went beyond the usual Western, romance, horror or sci-fi of other comics. Intrigued, he stuck around. Timely Comics was renamed Marvel, and Lee became their editor-in-chief.

As an experiment, he and veteran artist Jack Kirby created a superhero team, the Fantastic Four. It was a runaway hit and inspired Lee & Kirby to continue. Together, they created The Hulk, Iron Man, the X-Men and others. Working with artist Bill Everett, he Daredevil. With Steve Ditko, he created Dr. Strange and a character that would become world-famous: Spider-Man. They were the most creative and original characters anyone had ever seen; many are still popular with kids and adults today.

We like to think a part of the Marvel characters’ charm was their New York attitude. Nearly all the major Marvel characters were native New Yorkers, just like Lee. A lot of their early adventures are centered in & around the city, mainly because Lee knew it so well. New York was such an important backdrop for the heroes, it became a running gag in the comics themselves: What kind of idiot would commit a crime in New York, where anyone from Spider-Man to Captain America would bust them? (It was also easier to draw: Marvel’s offices at the time were on Madison Avenue. Using New York as a setting for so many stories was probably a big timesaver: Illustrating a background was as easy as walking down the street with a sketchpad.)

Lee moved to California in 1981, to be more involved in his creations’ TV and movie appearances. Still, he’s a native New Yorker through and through - just like the characters he created. We’re thankful for the extra color he gave our city, and for the daydreams of swinging down Broadway on a web he gave so many of us.

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