Stan Lee

by Bob Batchelor

  The fateful day sales figures finally arrived. Goodman stormed into Lee’s office, as always awash in art boards, drawings, mockups, yellow legal pads, and memos littering the desk.

  Goodman beamed, “Stan, remember that Spider-Man idea of yours that I liked so much? Why don’t we turn it into a series?”15

  If that wasn’t enough to knock Lee off-kilter, then came the real kicker: Spider-Man was not just a hit, the issue was in fact the fastest-selling comic book of the year, and indeed the decade. Amazing Fantasy, perpetually at the bottom of the sales charts, skyrocketed to number one with issue #15, due to Lee’s efforts to bring the character to life.16 Although it had been months since Lee and Ditko had created Spider-Man, the overwhelming popularity meant that the creative team would need to begin work immediately to turn the character into a series.

  Despite Goodman’s initial negativity and the indifference Kirby had about drawing Spider-Man, the success of Amazing Fantasy #15 elevated Lee and Ditko, since the new character would be the keystone of Marvel’s superhero-based lineup. More importantly, the combination of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man transformed Marvel from a company run by imitating trends of other publishers to a hip and relevant hot commodity.

  Because of the long lag in obtaining sales figures and the length of the printing and distribution system, it wasn’t until six months later that the new Spidey comic book debuted. To make way for the new title, Lee had to drop one, since the distribution agreement with Independent News only allowed Marvel to carry eight titles, regardless of the number of pages. Thus, a little less than a year after its debut, The Incredible Hulk ceased publication based on limited sales. In March 1963, The Amazing Spider-Man #1 burst onto newsstands.

  When The Amazing Spider-Man finally arrived, comic book fans could not believe their eyes. The teen superhero seemed suspended in midair and encased in clear tubing, captured by none other than Lee’s supergroup, the Fantastic Four. The Human Torch blazes up to eye level as if checking on the captured hero, while on the ground the Thing shakes his powerful fists, eager for a fight.

  The appearance of Marvel’s other breakout hit—the Fantastic Four—in Spider-Man’s debut revealed how Lee hedged his bets and hoped to boost sales by bringing the two hot commodities together in one book. This idea seemed to carry over from the final issue of Amazing Fantasy, when Lee told readers to look forward to the next issue, even though the comic book faced cancellation. Lee always left the door open to possibilities, probably because he had experienced so much change in the industry over the preceding two decades of ups and downs. Goodman’s sales figures showed just how popular Spider-Man promised to be, but using the Fantastic Four as reinforcement made good business sense and spurred a new creative form along the way.

  For the cover image of The Amazing Spider-Man, Lee once again turned to veteran Kirby, which worked well, particularly since he was the artist and cocreator of the Fantastic Four. The difference between Kirby’s cover and Ditko’s work on the rest of the issue is immediately noticeable on the splash page. Here, Spidey seems slightly less muscular and truer to his creature namesake. A crowd led by publisher J. Jonah Jameson calls out: “Freak! Public Menace!” as the hero retreats to a web, gripping a tendril for balance. Lee’s call-out to the audience is full of hype and hyperbole, “There’s never been a story like this one—because there’s never been a hero like—Spider-Man!”

  The first AS issue carried two separate stories, which was not uncommon in comic books of the era. The two stories were connected, but had different purposes. The first focused on recounting the hero’s origin story, a much-needed rehashing for fans that might have missed the Amazing Fantasy issue but eagerly looked for the debut. The second half of the book brought Spider-Man face-to-face with the members of the Fantastic Four and introduced the first stand-alone villain that the teen hero would face.

  The first Spider-Man story emphasizes the plight Parker and Aunt May face with no money and the lengths the boy goes to to support the family. His efforts are thwarted, however, when his manager writes him a check for his “town hall” show and the bank won’t cash it. Then, Jameson publishes a headline labeling the hero a “menace” and lectures around town, declaring, “Spider-Man must be outlawed! There is no place for such a dangerous creature in our fair city.” The newspaperman offers his son, test pilot John Jameson, as an example of a real hero, as he is about to orbit Earth in a space capsule.

  When the orbit mission goes awry, Spider-Man springs to action, even though the pilot’s father is the source of his inability to make money performing. When the older man calls Spidey out for being a “publicity-seeking phony . . . trying to grab a headline!” the hero responds in Lee’s smart-alecky style, saying, “Instead of flapping your lips, mister—just watch and see what I can do!” Within minutes, Spider-Man is hanging onto the shooting missile and replaces a control unit that enables Jameson to land safely.

  Rather than celebrate the heroics, the newspaper editor resumes the fight, explaining that the difficulties were a “plot by Spider-Man to steal the spotlight . . . sabotaging the capsule.” Later, Parker is shown listening to a crowd of workers demanding that the hero be “run out of the country” and reported to the FBI. Even Aunt May turns against Spider-Man and the episode ends with Parker nervously wondering if becoming “a menace” is the “only course left for me.”

  In the second story, Parker decides that he will show off his powers to the members of the Fantastic Four and that they will invite him to join them. Showing off, he breaks into the Baxter Building. When the super group picks up his arrival by camera, Johnny Storm quips, “Why didn’t he phone for an appointment, like anyone else?” Thing answers: “Cause he’s a teen-age cornball show-off, just like the Torch.”

  Later, the group squares off with the teen, trying to contain him. They basically battle to a draw, then Spider-Man announces his plan, exclaiming, “I’m worth your top salary.” Sue Storm tells him, “We’re a non-profit organization,” while Reed Richards explains, “We pay no salaries or bonuses! Any profit we make goes into scientific research!” Johnny, like Parker, a sarcastic teen, says, “You came to the wrong place, pal! This isn’t General Motors!” Lee’s ear for teen-specific dialogue captures the cadence and sarcasm of the era.

  Meanwhile, Spider-Man is about to face his first super villain—the Chameleon—a highly intelligent criminal who can disguise himself as anyone, even the teen hero. Chameleon orchestrates a plan to frame Spider-Man by stealing secret missile defense plans. The real Spidey escapes from the police and slingshots himself across New York to catch the villain’s helicopter. He speeds out in a motorboat to a waiting Soviet submarine, uses his webbing to keep its hatch from opening, and then takes control of the helicopter.

  Chameleon then uses a number of tricks to escape momentarily, including impersonating a policeman, forcing the real police to grab Spider-Man. The police realize the ruse, but the hero scampers up a wall, “in a fit of white-hot fury,” and vows to let the officers catch the criminal, rather than try to help. As Spider-Man flees the scene, he tears up, thinking, “Nothing turns out right. I wish I had never gotten my super powers!” The Fantastic Four is then shown wondering if Spider-Man will ever turn evil. The ten-page story ends with Lee’s narrative: “And the whole world will have to wonder—until our next great issue! Don’t miss it!!”

  Over the course of the next year, Lee and Ditko introduced almost every one of Spider-Man’s most significant super villains, from Vulture and Electro to the Lizard and Doctor Octopus. While battling these criminals provided the comic book with the requisite action of a superhero comic book, it was the large supporting cast around Peter Parker that propelled the stories. Peter’s interactions with Aunt May, Jameson, and a series of love interests made the youth seem more convincing as a teen who stumbled into his role as a superhero.

  As a comic book author, Lee used Spider-Man to introduce several innovations that separated him from other writers. Besides nar
ratives directed at the audience that transformed the force of the superhero books, Lee also pulled the reader deeper into the story via thought balloons. As Lee explained, they “let our readers know what a character was thinking as often as possible . . . and add a whole additional dimension to the story.”17 These advances in style and voice shouted at readers to pay attention, while simultaneously making them aware that a person existed within the pages. Lee’s easygoing manner let you know that he was a friend and just as excited about what you were reading.

  Another Lee and Ditko novelty centered on using New York City as Spider-Man’s stomping grounds, having the youth living in a cramped apartment in Queens with his surrogate parents. Lee and Kirby had done the same with the Fantastic Four, plopping them down in Manhattan, but while they jetted around the globe and universe, Spider-Man stayed central to the city, bringing it alive on the pages. For readers familiar with the city, the stories came to life at the mention of Manhattan or the Brooklyn Bridge, while others could imagine Spidey swinging through the steel and concrete canyons created by the city’s massive skyscrapers. “Instead of living in a fictitious Gotham City or Metropolis,” Taking a swipe at his DC Comics competitors, Lee explained, “[Spider-Man] has his digs in good ol’ New York City and . . . might be found running after a taxi anywhere from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side.”18

  Placing all his heroes in and around the Big Apple enabled Lee to accurately depict the setting in his native city and gave him another innovation—having super-heroes casually (or not so coolly) run into one another. Beginning with AS #1, the “guest starring” notion kept comic book audiences thrilled at the idea that Spider-Man could engage with (and potentially battle) the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, or other characters.

  The web slinger’s growing popularity also enabled Lee to use him as a means of introducing new characters or sprucing up existing ones. Fans could not get enough of the teen hero, so Lee and Marvel pushed the limits. For example, Spider-Man appeared in Strange Tales Annual #2 (September 1963), a seventy-two-page crossover between him and the Human Torch. And in Tales to Astonish, which had moved from odd, macabre stories to superheroes, Spidey guest-starred in #57 (July 1964), which focused on Giant-Man and Wasp. When The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 appeared in 1964, with Lee dubbing himself and Ditko “the most talked about team in comics today,” it featured appearances by every Marvel hero, including Thor, Dr. Strange, Captain America, and the X-Men.

  Spider-Man now stood at the center of a comic book empire. Stan Lee could not have written a better outcome, even if given the chance.

  All this from a risky run in a dying comic book!

  CHAPTER 8

  HORDE OF SUPERHEROES

  “Amonster!” Martin Goodman turned on his heels, shaking his head.

  Following the success of The Fantastic Four, the publisher wanted Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create another superhero team. When Lee told him that he had a different idea, a solo book centered on what he described as an “offbeat” monster, Goodman audibly sighed and walked away. The notion of not following up on the popularity of the superhero team with another one—derivative or not—seemed ludicrous to Goodman. Lee watched his boss leave the room, dreaming of the powerful behemoth that he and Kirby had been kicking around.

  “I had been wracking my brain for days, looking for a different superhero type, something never seen before,” Lee said.1 The new character had to have super strength, but not mirror the Thing or the competitor’s venerable Superman.

  Mountains of fan mail had poured into Marvel’s Madison Avenue office in support of The Fantastic Four. But the insatiable fans also pleaded for a new superhero. Although he had created hundreds of comic book characters over the previous two decades, Lee agonized over a follow-up to the hit supergroup. A victim of his own success, Lee felt the pressure to keep up the momentum.

  Lee pulled from classic stories and familiar narratives. Like other great artists in that era, whether Bob Dylan reimagining old folk songs into protest anthems or novelist John Updike transforming the Peter Rabbit story into a 1960s existential every-man named Rabbit Angstrom, Lee turned to his deep reading of classics. He would give fans what they wanted: an almost invincible monster as antihero. Lee created the Hulk out of traces of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Then, to add to the dramatic tension, he contextualized the comic with heavy doses of Cold War anxiety. As the world wrung its hands about the potential devastation of atomic technology, Lee made nuclear weapon testing the cataclysmic event that turns a brilliant young scientist into a rampaging behemoth. Introducing the Incredible Hulk, a brooding—somewhat terrifying—monster and convoluted antihero to the Marvel family, Lee and Kirby took another intellectual leap forward, deducing that fans would gravitate to the giant’s failures and frailties, just as they had with the Fantastic Four.

  The ongoing success of The Fantastic Four—measured by mountains of fan mail, critical acclaim, and later, sales data that confirmed the heady circulation numbers—and the quick introduction of Hulk, Thor, and Iron Man, along with other heroes, set off a two-year run that changed the way people looked at comic books and their creators. Lee and Kirby became celebrities. Lee gave them monikers that readers would adopt: Jack “King” Kirby and Stan “the Man” Lee.

  As a creative duo, Lee and Kirby caught a star as it shot skyward, able to bring dazzling characters to life and contextualize their stories with content drawn from what was happening in the real world around them. These heroes were different from past ones or those of the competition—they talked differently, inhabited a world that seemed authentic and right outside the window, all the while turning on fantastic plots and strong visuals.

  Lee no longer had to simply kowtow to Goodman’s request to copy the super-hero team concept. But he still had to turn out new concepts to keep Goodman at bay. Under this pressure, but finally being allowed to create the kinds of comic books that he had imagined doing over the years, Lee and his artist cocreators churned out a succession of superheroes that captured the attention of rapt fans and turned others into readers for the first time. Lee now headed the hottest comic book publisher in the business, and he grew into the voice bringing those superheroes to readers around the world.

  Lee felt flabbergasted when fans started writing in after The Fantastic Four debuted. Subsequently, he read the letters and put admin staff on the task of writing back. Taking the notion of using fans as a kind of focus group, Lee also asked them to write more in the pages of the comics, because he knew that he could use the insight later in developing new characters.

  Many of those letters, Lee remembered, screamed “more innovative characters.” When he sat down and stared at a blank piece of paper in his typewriter, he considered these missives. He drew on what he considered the craziest idea possible, “Think of the challenge it would be to make a hero out of a monster,” he asked himself. “We would have a protagonist with superhuman strength, but he wouldn’t be all-wise, all-noble, all-infallible.”2 That monster would have elements of Frankenstein, but turn the idea on its ear by making the townspeople chasing him the real monsters, while the monster would turn heroic, though always misunderstood.

  Readers picking up The Incredible Hulk #1 could get a sense of the character on the splash page. Kirby drew massive, tree-trunk arms, but also faraway, almost pleading eyes, capturing the Hulk’s pathos and internal strife. A few pages later, when brilliant but meek scientist Bruce Banner endures gamma bomb rays and transforms into the Hulk for the first time, the monster bats young Rick Jones away, demanding, “Get out of my way insect!” Via Kirby’s masterful artwork, Hulk (initially with gray skin) seems to burst from the page, charging at the reader. “Lee had come up with the perfect vehicle for exploring the notion of what it would be like to possess super powers in the real world,” one comic book historian explained. “Kirby’s chunky, monster style art” gave the hero/monster energy and also added to the existential angs
t and inner id that Hulk represented.3

  This single panel embodies the essence of the character, as well as the achievement of its creators. Readers almost feel like they are inside the art, watching Jones’s feet lift off the ground as the monster shrugs him off. In terms of capturing the giant’s bewilderment, Lee decided to use the word “insect,” which provides immediate insight into the Hulk’s strength and feelings about “normal” human beings. He shreds the wall of the military base to escape, then demolishes a jeep that runs into him in his escape. “Have to go! Have to get away . . . to hide,” Hulk murmurs as he “storms off, into the waiting night.”

  Just six months after the debut of The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk shot out of the gate in May 1962, but struggled in subsequent months. Readers lost interest quickly, perhaps giving credence to Goodman’s criticisms. Lee couldn’t provide the comic with room to grow because the egregious distribution contract limited the number of titles Marvel could ship. When Lee grasped Spider-Man’s popularity, he had to cancel a title to make room. So, the Hulk was cut to make room for the first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man in March 1963, less than a year after the rampaging hero had debuted.

  The failure of the Hulk book also highlighted the incredible pressure on Lee. Goodman reviewed the sales figures and wondered what was going on with the book, always urging his editor to cancel titles that undersold. In only six issues, Lee had made wholesale changes to Hulk, so he transforms into the monster at nightfall, then later when angry; next, he kept modifying the character’s intelligence, sometimes making Hulk imbecilic and other times having him keep Banner’s super-genius capabilities. The strangest Hulk occurred in the final issue when Hulk transformed but kept Banner’s human-sized head. This version had to don a Hulk mask to keep his identity secret. When he faces off against Metal Master, he exclaims: “Don’t look so surprised, peanut! Everyone on earth isn’t a puny weakling!” Clearly, the character had gone off the rails and Lee took the revisions into absurdity.