The world of comic books and movies, and just the world in general, was rocked on Nov. 12 with the passing of comic guru Stan Lee. Despite being 95 and revealed to have been battling pneumonia, Lee was still able to give film audiences no less than five comic book movie cameos in 2018, which included “Black Panther,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” “Teen Titans Go! To the Movies” and “Venom.” Lee had garnered a reputation in recent years for his colorfully small yet poignant cameos in the recent onslaught of comic book movies. But Lee was so much more than a two-second chuckle in a movie; He was an icon who gifted the world with multiple decades’ worth of characters, worlds, decent human acts, humor and creativity.

Lee, birth name Stanley Martin Lieber, was born on Dec. 28, 1922, in Manhattan. After graduating from high school early in 1939, he joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project. With the help of his uncle, Robbie Solomon, Lee became an assistant at the new Timely Comics division of Pulp magazine. Back then, it was comic-book publisher Martin Goodman’s company, which would later become Marvel Comics. Lee, whose cousin Jean was Goodman’s wife, was formally hired by Timely editor Joe Simon. He called his duties prosaic.

“In those days, [the artists] dipped the pen in ink, [so] I had to make sure the inkwells were filled,” Lee recalled in 2009. “I went down and got them their lunch. I did proofreading. I erased the pencils from the finished pages for them.”

Following his ambition to be a writer, Lieber made his comic-book debut with “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge” in “Captain America Comics” issue three (May 1941), using the pseudonym Stan Lee, which he would eventually make his legal name. Lee later explained in his autobiography and to numerous other sources that because of the low social status of comic books, he was so embarrassed that he used a pen name so nobody would associate his real name with comics when he someday wrote the Great American Novel. This initial story also introduced Captain America’s trademark ricocheting shield-toss.

He graduated from writing filler stories to actual comics with a backup feature, “Headline Hunter, Foreign Correspondent.” Lee’s first superhero co-creation was the Destroyer in “Mystic Comics” issue six (August 1941). Other characters he co-created during this period, which fans and historians call the golden age of comic books, included Jack Frost, debuting in “U.S.A. Comics” issue one (August 1941), and Father Time, debuting in “Captain America Comics” issue six (August 1941). When Simon and his creative partner Jack Kirby left in late 1941, following a dispute with Goodman, he installed Lee, just under 19 years old, as interim editor. Lee’s knack for the business led him to remain as the comic-book division’s editor-in-chief, as well as art director for much of that time, until 1972, when he would succeed Goodman as publisher.

Lee entered the United States Army in early 1942 and served as a member of the Signal Corps, repairing telegraph poles and other communications equipment. He was later transferred to the Training Film Division, where he worked writing manuals, training films, slogans and occasionally cartooning. His military classification, he said, was playwright, a title that was supposedly only given to nine men in the whole army. Vincent Fago, editor of Timely’s animation comics section, filled in until Lee returned from his service in 1945. Lee was inducted into the Signal Corps Regimental Association and was given honorary membership of the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord at the 2017 Emerald City Comic Con for his prior service.

In the mid ‘50s, by which time the company was now generally known as Atlas Comics, Lee wrote stories in a variety of genres including romance, Westerns and many others. However, by the end of the decade, Lee became dissatisfied and considered quitting the field. Around the same time, DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz revived the superhero archetype, which experienced a significant success with an updated version of the Flash and, later, with super-team the Justice League of America. In response, Goodman assigned Lee to come up with a new superhero team.

Lee’s wife suggested he experiment with stories he preferred since he was planning on changing careers and had nothing to lose. Acting on that advice, Lee gave his superheroes a flawed humanity, a change from the ideal archetypes that were typically written. Before this, most superheroes were perfect people with no serious, lasting problems. Lee introduced complex, naturalistic characters who could have bad tempers, fits of anger and depression and who bickered amongst themselves, worried about paying their bills and impressing girlfriends, got bored or were even sometimes physically ill.

The first superheroes Lee and artist Jack Kirby created together were the Fantastic Four, based on a previous Kirby superhero team, Challengers of the Unknown, published by DC Comics. The team’s immediate popularity led Lee and Marvel’s illustrators to produce new titles, which included current icons the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man and the X-Men. With help from Bill Everett and Steve Ditko, he also created Daredevil, Doctor Strange and Marvel’s most successful character, Spider-Man, all of whom lived in a thoroughly shared universe. Lee and Kirby gathered several of their newly created characters together into the team title “The Avengers” and would revive characters from the ‘40s, such as the Sub-Mariner and Captain America.

Comics historian Peter Sanderson wrote in the ‘60s: “DC was the equivalent of the big Hollywood studios: After the brilliance of DC’s reinvention of the superhero…in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it had run into a creative drought by the decade’s end. There was a new audience for comics now, and it wasn’t just the little kids that traditionally had read the books. The Marvel of the 1960s was in its own way the counterpart of the French New Wave…Marvel was pioneering new methods of comics storytelling and characterization, addressing more serious themes, and in the process keeping and attracting readers in their teens and beyond. Moreover, among this new generation of readers were people who wanted to write or draw comics themselves, within the new style that Marvel had pioneered, and push the creative envelope still further.”

As a man who single-handedly revolutionized the comic book medium, Lee proved even through entertainment and storytelling, he could reach everyone. He was one of the few people which no one truly had any bad impression, as everyone with whom he has ever worked had nothing but incredible things to say about him.

On an episode of Collider Live he appeared in on Nov. 13, the day after Lee’s passing, actor Ron Perlman (“Asher”) had this to say about Lee in recanting a statement from his memoir: “There’s a nobility to the storytellers…because what we do when we…when we dig as deep as we can, to the real truth of the human condition is that we provide an opportunity for people to…celebrate their commonalities rather than their differences. Like, you watch a movie and say, ‘Oh, I know exactly what that dude’s going through,’ and you walk out feeling better that you’re not the only one that feels that way, you’re not going through that morass alone, and we do, we uplift people as storytellers, and god bless Stan.”

Rest in peace, Stan. You will be missed.

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