ASSOCIATED PRESS
STAN LEE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25
Stan Lee, standing, discusses
a comic book cover with artist
John Romita at Marvel headquarters in New York in 1976.
industry, where he was recently
crowned the most successful
filmmaker of all time, owing to
the $15 billion worldwide
grossed by movies featuring his
eccentric scions.
Born into poverty as
Stanley Martin Lieber and
growing up during the Great
Depression, Lee landed a gig at
Timely Comics in 1939, when
he was 17 years old, filling inkwells for staff writers and artists. A voracious reader, he
took the job with the sole
intention of providing some
money to help his struggling
family, while he dreamed of
one day penning the Great
American Novel.
Within two years, at the
age of 19, he was improbably
named the company’s interim
editor, and promptly authored
a Captain America Comics
adventure and then hatched
his first original protagonist,
the Destroyer.
The rest, as they say, is history.
When The Connection catches up with the
robust nonagenarian bard in sunny Southern California, he’s wearing a mint green V-neck sweater
over a white dress shirt. His bountiful white mane is
vigorously slicked back. Despite being enswathed in
his trademark sunglasses (his own version of a
superhero’s mask, he concedes), Lee’s eyes remain
visible and positively radiant, scintillating at several
topics of conversation, including his personal origin
story; Joan Clayton Boocock, the “love of his life,”
whom he married nearly seven decades ago; and his
upcoming slate, including Chakra the Invincible and
The Zodiac Legacy, two new comics titles, and a
jocular, often intimate, lushly illustrated graphic-novel-style autobiography, Amazing Fantastic
Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir.
In his modest Beverly Hills office, Lee speaks in
the burst balloons and boldface, teasing ellipses of
comic book dialogue itself, shuffling together wisecracks and wisdom but with a sincere incredulousness that he has lived, for nearly a century, a life,
well, amazing, fantastic and incredible.
The Costco Connection: The psychological
complexity of your superheroes sets them apart in the
world of comics, particularly when they began
appearing half a century ago.
Stan Lee: Well, I’m not 100 percent sure about
this, but I don’t think most human beings can fly or
swing through a big city on spiderwebs, but we all
the zeitgeist’s most pressing issues—from drug
addiction to civil rights, Cold War paranoia to
women’s liberation, psychological frailties and
aberrations to acne. What made them unique
as superheroes were their attempts at self-
improvement and their collection of
character flaws. Lee’s gallery of char-
acters may be able to spin webs or
take flight, but their personal lives
tend toward vales of sorrow.
In the 1960s, Lee was a major
force in the publishing industry,
establishing Marvel Comics as a cultural juggernaut that in 1965 sold 32
million books, ushering in the so-called Silver Age of Comics with his
unique amalgam of classic mythology,
Victorian and Romantic tropes, operatic grandeur and psychotherapy.
From Lee’s fertile imagination cascaded
indelible, influential narratives and a roll
call of some of contemporary literature’s most enduring characters.
Lee’s revolutionary tenure at Marvel has been
bested only by his triumphs in the motion picture
Dr. Strange
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cover story
X-Men