SAN FRANCISCO, November 13, (THEWILL) – Stan Lee, who dreamed up Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk and a cavalcade of other Marvel Comics superheroes has died at the age of 95, his daughter said on Monday.
As a writer and editor, Lee was key to the ascension of Marvel into a comic book, titan, in the 1960s and these comics became mythic figures in pop culture with soaring success at the movie box office.
He then, in collaboration with artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, created superheroes who would enthrall generations of young readers.
“He felt an obligation to his fans to keep creating.
“He loved his life and he loved what he did for a living. His family loved him and his fans loved him. He was irreplaceable,” his daughter, J.C. Lee, said in a statement to the media.
She did not mention Lee’s cause of death but the TMZ celebrity news website said an ambulance was called to Lee’s Hollywood Hills home early Monday and that he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Lee was widely credited with adding a new layer of complexity and humanity to superheroes.
His characters were not made of stone – even if they appeared to have been chiseled from granite. They had love and money worries, and endured tragic flaws or feelings of insecurity.
His creations included web-slinging teenager Spider-Man, the muscle-bound Hulk, mutant outsiders, The X-Men, the close-knit Fantastic Four and the playboy-inventor Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man.
Dozens of Marvel Comic movies, with nearly all the major characters Lee created, were produced in the first decades of the 21st century.
They grossed over 20 billion dollars at theaters worldwide, according to box office analysts.
In 2008, Lee was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest government award for creative artists.
Lee was born as Stanley Martin Lieber in New York on Dec. 28, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania.
He often wrote standing on the porch of the Long Island, New York, home he shared with his wife, actress Joan Lee, whom he married in 1947 and who died in 2017.
The couple had two children, Joan Celia born in 1950 and Jan Lee who died within three days of her birth in 1953.
In 1961 Lee’s boss saw a rival publisher’s success with caped crusaders and told Lee to dream up a superhero team.
Lee at the time felt comics were a dead-end career, but his wife urged him to give it one more shot and create the complex characters he wanted to, even if it led to his firing.
The result was the Fantastic Four. There was stretchable Mr Fantastic, his future wife, Invisible Woman, her brother, the Human Torch and strongman, The Thing.
Lee became Marvel’s publisher in 1972.
He went on the lecture circuit, moved to Los Angeles in 1980 and pursued opportunities for his characters in movies and television.
Through it all, he kept connected with fans, writing a column called “Stan’s Soapbox” in which he often slipped in his catchphrase “‘Nuff Said” or the sign-off “Excelsior!”
He also made cameos in most Marvel films, pulling a girl away from falling debris in 2002’s “Spider-Man” and serving as an emcee at a strip club in 2016’s “Deadpool.”
The Walt Disney Co bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009 for four billion dollars in a deal to expand Disney’s roster of characters, with the most iconic ones having been Lee’s handiwork.
By that point, Lee had all but parted ways with Marvel after being made a chairman emeritus of the company.
But even in his 80s and 90s, Lee was a wellspring of new projects, running a company called POW! Entertainment.
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