Stan Lee

Stan Lee was an American comic book writer, editor, and publisher whose 70-year career — primarily as the chief writer-and-editor of Marvel Comics across the 1960s — produced one of the foundational bodies of 20th-century American comic-book superhero characters. He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on December 28, 1922, in Manhattan, New York City, into a Romanian-Jewish immigrant family. His father Jack Lieber was a dress-cutter who was unemployed across the Great Depression years, and his mother Celia Solomon was a homemaker.

His 1939 hiring as a teenage office assistant at Timely Comics (the precursor to Marvel Comics) launched his comic-book career. His 1941 first comic-book writing credit on the Captain America Comics #3 backup story "Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge" — published when he was 17 under the pseudonym Stan Lee (which he later legally adopted) — launched his early-career comic-book writing career.

The 1961–1963 collaboration with artist Jack Kirby produced multiple foundational Marvel superhero characters — particularly the Fantastic Four (November 1961), the Hulk (May 1962), Thor (August 1962), Iron Man (March 1963), the X-Men (September 1963), and the Avengers (September 1963). The 1962–1963 collaboration with artist Steve Ditko produced two additional foundational Marvel characters — Spider-Man (August 1962) and Doctor Strange (July 1963).

His co-creations across the 1961–1963 Marvel Age of Comics produced over 1,000 distinct Marvel superhero, supervillain, and supporting-character creations across the next six decades. His subsequent commercial career across the 1980s and 1990s — including his 1981 founding of the West Coast Marvel Productions division — expanded the Marvel multimedia franchise. His later cultural impact has been extended by his cameo appearances across approximately 60 Marvel-related feature films from 1989 through 2019. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (launched 2008 with Iron Man) became the highest-grossing film franchise in cinema history. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2008. He died on November 12, 2018, at age 95, in Los Angeles, of pneumonia and heart failure.

His name Stan is the English short form of Stanley (from the Old English place-name meaning "stone clearing"). Stan was a popular American boys' name through the early-to-mid-20th century.