Stan Lee
Hired at 16 to fill inkwells; at 38, told by his wife to finally write a comic he liked.
- Born
- 1922 · Manhattan, New York, US
- Roots
- Romanian-Jewish immigrant parents
- Family
- Working class
- His dress-cutter father was mostly unemployed through the Depression; the family of four shared a one-bedroom apartment.
- Education
- DeWitt Clinton High School; no college
- Started with
- An inkwell job
- Office assistant at his cousin-in-law's Timely Comics — filling inkwells, fetching lunch, erasing pencil lines.
- Affiliations & societies
- None documented.
- Information only — claims like these are often unverifiable and may be wrong.
The pathway
- 1939 · age 16Timely Comics
The publisher's teenage gofer is interim editor within two years.
- 1941 · age 18"Stan Lee" appears
A pen name — Stanley Lieber was being saved for serious novels.
- 1961 · age 38Fantastic Four
Ready to quit, he takes his wife Joan's advice to write one book his own way; with Jack Kirby, it works.
- 1962 · age 39Spider-Man
The publisher objects that teenagers can't be heroes and spiders disgust people; it runs in a dying title's last issue and outsells everything.
- 1972 · age 49Publisher
Credit disputes with artists Kirby and Ditko shadow the legacy for decades.
- 2008 · age 85The cameo era
The Marvel films make his face known to a billion people; he dies in 2018.
Sources
Compiled from these references and contemporaneous press reporting. Figures are approximate; verify before relying on them.