Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
In the eye of the Newt storm: Thar she blows!
Gingrich affair heating up D.C. Exactly when did it begin? Somebody say "blackmail"? Finally, some good news: Cher definitely not involved; and more good news: Experts say Prince Philip is not an idiot!
By Amy Reiter
[08/17/99]

Nothing Personal
Sizing up "Tattoo's" lost years
Late "Fantasy Island" actor focus of tell-all profile; mama of Jagger's new nipper ignites flag furor in Brazil. Plus: Michelle Williams afflicted with new virus that causes celebrities to publicly praise their own breasts.
By Amy Reiter
[08/16/99]

People Feature
Loren Coleman, Loch Ness snowman of cryptozoology
In the magical land where all things are possible, he's a god, who insists that his adopted field is not just a cataloging of myths.
By Steve Burgess
[08/16/99]

Nothing Personal
Sharon Stone tells all and then some
She's "very happy" with her breasts, not very happy with Steven Seagal; Pat Boone reveals his dark side; America wants to put Ryan Phillippe in tights. Plus: Sprockets!
By Amy Reiter
[08/13/99]

People Feature
Rick Lazio: Is he or isn't he? And who the heck is he?
He's the man who might have been the next senator from New York. If he were a candidate. If he could beat Hillary. If Rudy weren't around.
By Keith Moore
[08/13/99]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Stan Lee | page 1, 2, 3

Debuting in 1961, Fantastic Four No. 1 was a masterful step forward in comic-book evolution. Like the JLA, it too was a team of heroes: a super-stretching Mr. Fantastic, an Invisible Girl, the Human Torch and an orange monstrosity called the Thing. A statement Lee made about the Torch, a character brought back from an earlier Marvel era, summed up his new philosophy: "The original Torch had been an android, so I made the new Torch a human being." In other words, also Lee's, "I tried to give them more authenticity by making them more realistic ... Who do you know who has a really perfect life? I mean, I don't care how rich the guy is, how handsome the guy is, how sexy his wife is. There's nobody who doesn't have a hard time. I mean, when we were doing those books, Kennedy seemed to have a perfect life, and he got shot. Everybody has problems, and everybody has secret sorrows." The Thing's appeal lay in his mix of rage and self-pity, his grandiloquent Brooklynese and self-deprecating humor. He was a Shakespearean invention compared with his contemporaries.

The Fantastic Four revived Marvel's fortunes, revitalized the industry and revolutionized the form. "Nearly all modern superhero comics have drawn and continue to draw on the first 80 or so issues of the Fantastic Four for inspiration and material," comics historian Robert Harvey writes in "The Art of the Comic Book." Just a few years earlier, the industry, publishing far more horror, adventure, western, mystery and love comics than tales of superhumans, had almost collapsed. Soon DC and Marvel produced nothing but superhero comic books, and -- ZOK! -- sales went through the roof for the entire industry. "Without Stan Lee, there wouldn't be a modern comic-book industry," Bill Liebowitz, the owner of Golden Apple, a big Los Angeles comic-book store, told the Dallas Observer. "He really is to comics what Elvis Presley and Col. Tom Parker were to music."

Lee had considerable help from Kirby, who is worshipped today in comic-book circles as one of the first artists to realize the form's potential with his continuous, panel-to-panel action. To crank out enough product, the dynamic duo created an efficient method: Lee would supply the characters and rough plot ideas, letting artists flesh out the scenes, which Lee then scripted. He met Kirby's skills halfway with his vivid dialogue and story lines that stretched out over several issues. Kirby's art transformed Lee's story ideas into dramatic action; Lee embellished the action with colorful verbiage, writing captions and speech balloons laced with mocking irony. Their process, known as the Marvel Method, was necessary because of Lee's prolific pace, but it soon became an industry norm.

Lee went on a superhero-creating rampage, adding new characters to his family of flawed heroes -- the Hulk, a wandering brute baffled by civilization, and the X-Men, genetic mutants with weird powers. "In those days, if you gave him something, no matter what, he was adept at placing balloons, at using dialogue, at heightening the characterizations," Gil Kane, an artist who apprenticed with Kirby, once said of Lee. "He wrote one book a night for 10 years. Not only was it easy for him, but it was also the best thing that happened to comics." In 1963, Lee unveiled what would become his most enduring character in a throwaway book called Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the pre-ordained final issue of the series (a mint-condition copy of which now commands $27,500 from collectors). Billed as "the hero that could be you," Spider-Man was just a regular science nerd, until he was bitten by a radioactive arachnid. (Lee's heroes, unlike DC's, were of the atomic age; countless superhero powers are derived from run-ins with nuclear radiation.) The comic broke down a wall, allowing you into the interior life of a superhero whose alter ego, Peter Parker, was a fragile teenager stuck in a tragicomedy of unrequited crushes, peer rejection and money problems. Its intimacy connected to readers where they lived and opened the imagination up to the idea of a superhuman in the real world. The change was a revelation.

If Spider-Man altered our orientation toward power in subtle ways, then two of Lee's next works hit the Zeitgeist head-on. In 1964, Captain America, the hero who at one time had put Timely into the top rank of comic publishers, was resurrected. Instead of modernizing him, Lee and Kirby explored him as he was; frozen since an Arctic plane crash in 1944, he had little comprehension of the modern world, no loved ones, no purpose. The Cap, a melancholy anachronism, foreshadowed the fading influence of the World War II generation. Also in 1964 came Doctor Strange, a practitioner of White Magic, whose tales offered a vision of the ambiguity of good and evil. ("It is as I suspected! He is evil, true ... but only by our human standards!" he says of his enemy, Dormammu, in Strange Tales No. 127. "According to his own lights, he has his own moral code!") The mysticism of the comic caught on with budding hippies, who saw Strange as a hallucinatory endorsement of psychedelia. (Lee would later prove them wrong with a Spider-Man anti-drug series.) The Doctor and his creator became a college cult; a 1965 psychedelic rock happening in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury was called "A Tribute to Dr. Strange." Francis Ford Coppola reportedly hoards a huge stash of the comics.

Around the same time that novelist Ken Kesey was asserting that Marvel had as much to say about life as any contemporary literature, Lee initiated a wave of black superheroes. The list included the Black Panther, the Falcon and Luke Cage, who got his own title in 1972. Lee maintains that he didn't have the civil rights movement in mind, just diversity. "I had a lot of friends who were black and we had artists who were black," he once said. "So it occurred to me ... why aren't there any black heroes?" But the Black Panther -- king of a secret, underground African kingdom that just happened to be the most highly industrialized, scientific country in the world -- showed that, in the Marvel Universe, color was something that came between the lines, not the characters.

The Silver Surfer, a futuristic being assigned to warn Earth of its impending doom at the hands of the galaxy-swallowing Galactus, was another perfect hero for '60s college students and the pop-culture intelligentsia. Cursed to wander in Earth's atmosphere lamenting his lost freedom and bemoaning the folly of humankind, the Silver Surfer was Lee's surrogate philosopher: "Why is there so much hatred and bigotry? Why do we hate people who seem to be different than we are instead of enjoying the variety? It was so perfect for me ... it was so easy to have him say the things that I would like to say because he was from another world. He had just arrived here on Earth and he was viewing mankind with fresh eyes, and he could react."

By the early 1970s, thanks to the strength of Lee's characters, Marvel was the dominant comic-book publisher. Fast behind his heroes, Lee became a cultural icon in his own right. He lectured at colleges (where students would ask if the Silver Surfer was modeled on Christ) and served as Marvel's emissary to the entertainment and media worlds. Lee moved into the publisher's seat in 1972. He began writing less (today he is said to script about a book a year), and comic books began coming out from under his long shadow.

Next page | Doctor Doom is said to have been an inspiration for Darth Vader