DIS Walt Disney Co

By Ben Fritz 

Stan Lee, the comic book writer and editor who cocreated Spider-Man, the Avengers and the X-Men, has died at the age of 95.

Mr. Lee in the 1960s didn't just write the origins and early tales of many Marvel Comics characters that now dominate cinema screens -- and have become a multibillion-dollar business for Walt Disney Co. He also revolutionized his industry by bringing real-world problems to the stories of spandex-clad superheroes for the first time.

An energetic promoter who loved the public eye, he tirelessly promoted the comic book as an integral piece of American pop culture that deserved to be taken seriously. In the process, he became their best-known creator with the general public.

"He was the gold standard as the ambassador for comic books," said Jim Lee, a longtime Marvel artist who is now co-publisher of competitor DC Comics, owned by Time Warner Inc. He is not related to Stan Lee.

Though he admitted over the past few years that his eyesight had become so bad he could no longer read comic books, there were no other signs of ill health for the nonagenarian, who until recently continued to attend comic book conventions and promote his latest creations.

Born Stanley Lieber in New York City, Mr. Lee grew up poor and lonely during the Great Depression and spent much of his time escaping into books, he wrote in his 2015 illustrated memoir "Amazing Fantastic Incredible." In 1939, he got a job as an office assistant at Timely, later renamed Marvel, and soon started writing stories for characters including Captain America and editing the company's entire line of comic books.

Following service in World War II, Mr. Lee kept writing and editing comics books for decades but didn't make his mark until 1961, when Marvel's publisher asked him to imitate the success of DC's "Justice League" by coming up with a new superteam. Mr. Lee's creation, the Fantastic Four, broke the mold of flawless and unrelatable super-beings that had long defined the genre.

The Fantastic Four, by contrast, were family members who bickered and considered their powers more curse than blessing.

The quartet were an instant sales success and were quickly followed by other superheroes with very human problems including Spider-Man, a geeky teenager who worried about girls and bullies, and the X-Men, a team of misunderstood "mutants" widely viewed as a metaphor for oppressed minority groups.

"This was coming at a time when the baby boomers were teenagers," Lee biographer Tom Spurgeon told the website Vulture in 2016. "If Stan hadn't been doing those stories that were for teenagers and not children, comics would have disappeared."

(More to Come)

Write to Ben Fritz at ben.fritz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 12, 2018 14:44 ET (19:44 GMT)

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