The Costco Connection - December 2015

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.