James Robert Parish - Stan Lee: Comic-Book Writer and Publisher

Stan Lee is the creator of Spider-Man and other famous comic-book characters.

Source: Landov.

In the 1960s Stan Lee created the characters that would make up the "Marvel Universe." In that world, heroes such as Spider-Man protected New York City and other metropolises from sinister forces bent on world domination.

Not content to rest on his laurels, Lee (known to his fans as "Stan the Man" and "Mr. Marvel") went on to become publisher of Marvel Comics in 1972. Still later, he became the firm's key spokesperson and goodwill ambassadora post he actively continued for many years. Having begun in the business in 1940, over the decades Lee experienced the industry's many financial ups and downs and shifting trends. Despite the swings in popularity and changing fortunes of the comic-book profession, Lee has always remained highly enthusiastic about the medium through which he captured the imagination of generations.

From his beginnings in the comic-book field right through his professional heyday in the 1960s and thereafter, Stan Lee had one guiding principle: "I tried to write stories that would interest me. I'd say, what would I like to read? Then I'd try to write them clearly enough so that a youngster could enjoy and appreciate and understand the story, and I tried to write them intelligently enough so that an older person would enjoy it too." He adds, "I know what I like, and I can't believe I'm so unique. If I could write a story that really pleases me, there must be millions of people who have the same taste I do. So if I like it, there'll be a lot of other people who like it. And I've always used that rule."

Stanley Martin Lieber was born in New York on December 28, 1922, the first child of Jack and Celia (Solomon) Lieber. His parents were Jewish-Romanian immigrants. Jack worked as a dress cutter in the city's garment industry. When the Great Depression choked the U.S. economy in the late 1920s, Jack lost his job and could find no new employment. The family was forced to move from their comfortable Manhattan apartment to a cramped little place in the Bronx.

In these tiny new quarters Stanley had to sleep in the living room. This did not bother him as much as the fact that the family's new apartment looked out on the side of another building. As the future celebrity recalled, "My dream was to one day be rich enough to have an apartment that faced the street." When Stanley was eight, his second and only sibling, Larry, was born. Because there was such an age gap between the brothers, they were not close in their younger years. But later in life they would work side by side in the comic-book industry.

During Stanley's early years, his parents constantly arguedusually over money matters. Despite Jack's best efforts, the bright man was unable to find steady employment. As a result the family often had to rely on financial help from Celia's sisters, who were weathering the Depression better than the Liebers. This situation was humiliating for Jack, and he channeled some of his frustration into his relationship with his sons. In contrast, Celia was warm and encouraging to her children.

To escape the household arguments and the general gloom of the Depression, young Stanley found great pleasure in reading. He graduated from reading the Hardy Boys adventures and the works of Mark Twain (author of, among others, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), Edgar Rice Burroughs (the creator of Tarzan), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the author of the Sherlock Holmes detective tales) to reading Shakespeare before he was 10 years old. He would later remember, "I didn't understand a lot of it in those days but I loved the words. I loved the rhythms of the words." He often read books to his adoring mother and also enjoyed reading the newspaper comic strips of the era, especially "Krazy Kat" and "They'll Do It Every Time."

Besides his growing love of literature, Stanley loved to scribble "little illustrated stories to amuse myself. I would draw a straight horizontal line for the horizon and then add stick figures above it, around which I built simple stories and plot lines. I was, without knowing it, creating my first comicbooks. This was a make-believe world I loved because I could retreat to it from the outsideparticularly from school."

Stanley also loved going to the movies when he could scrape together the pennies for admission. There he reveled in the big-screen westerns, detective stories, and swashbuckling heroes of the day. "There on the screen were worlds that dazzled my mind," he says, "worlds of magic and wonder, worlds which I longed to inhabit, if only in my imagination." Then too, Stanley was excited by the animated cartoon short subjects he saw, especially the work of Walt Disney and his most famous cartoon creation, Mickey Mouse. In fact, Stanley was so inspired by Disney's animation output that it prompted the future comic-book king to say, "I admired him so when I was a kid. I probably created many more characters, but he created an empire. I'm not an empire creator."