Lee, Stan

Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber ; December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018) was an American comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business called Timely Publications which would later become Marvel Comics. He was the primary creative leader for two decades, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics and film industries.

In collaboration with others at Marvel—particularly co-writers/artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko—he co-created iconic characters, including superheroes Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Ant-Man, the Wasp, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, the Scarlet Witch, and Black Widow. These and other characters' introductions in the 1960s pioneered a more naturalistic approach in superhero comics, and in the 1970s Lee challenged the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to changes in its policies. In the 1980s he pursued the development of Marvel properties in other media, with mixed results.

Following his retirement from Marvel in the 1990s, Lee remained a public figurehead for the company, and frequently made cameo appearances in films and television shows based on Marvel characters on which he received an executive producer credit, which allowed him to become the highest grossing person in film of all time. He continued independent creative ventures into his 90s until his death in 2018. Lee was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. He received the NEA's National Medal of Arts in 2008.

Biography

Early life

Stanley Martin Lieber was born on December 28, 1922, in Manhattan, New York City, in the apartment of his Romanian-born Jewish immigrant parents, Celia (''née'' Solomon) and Jack Lieber, at the corner of West 98th Street and West End Avenue. Lee was raised in a Jewish household. In a 2002 interview, he stated when asked if he believed in God, "Well, let me put it this way... auses.No, I'm not going to try to be clever. I really don't know. I just don't know." On another interview from 2011, when asked about his Romanian origins and his relationship with the country, he said that he had never visited it and that he did not know Romanian because his parents never taught it to him.

Lee's father, trained as a dress cutter, worked only sporadically after the Great Depression. Lee & Mair 2002, p. 5 The family moved further uptown to Fort Washington Avenue, in Washington Heights, Manhattan. Lee had one younger brother named Larry Lieber. He said in 2006 that as a child he was influenced by books and movies, particularly those with Errol Flynn playing heroic roles. Reading '' The Scarlet Pimpernel'', he called the title character "the first superhero I had read about, the first character who could be called a superhero." By the time Lee was in his teens, the family was living in an apartment at 1720 University Avenue in The Bronx. Lee described it as "a third-floor apartment facing out back". Lee and his brother shared the bedroom, while their parents slept on a foldout couch.

Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In his youth, Lee enjoyed writing, and entertained dreams of writing the "Great American Novel" one day. He said that in his youth he worked such part-time jobs as writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Center; delivering sandwiches for the Jack May pharmacy to offices in Rockefeller Center; working as an office boy for a trouser manufacturer; ushering at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway; and selling subscriptions to the ''New York Herald Tribune'' newspaper. At fifteen, Lee entered a high school essay competition sponsored by the ''New York Herald Tribune'', called "The Biggest News of the Week Contest." Lee claimed to have won the prize for three straight weeks, goading the newspaper to write him and ask him to let someone else win. The paper suggested he look into writing professionally, which Lee claimed "probably changed my life." He graduated from high school early, aged sixteen and a half, in 1939 and joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

Marriage and residences

From 1945 to 1947, Lee lived in the rented top floor of a brownstone in the East 90s in Manhattan. He married Joan Clayton Boocock, originally from Newcastle, England, on December 5, 1947,Lee, Mair
p. 69
and in 1949, the couple bought a house in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island, living there through 1952. Their daughter Joan Celia "J. C." Lee was born in 1950. Another daughter, Jan Lee, died a few days after her birth in 1953.Lee, Mair, p. 74

The Lees resided in the Long Island town of Hewlett Harbor, New York, from 1952 to 1980. They also owned a condominium on East 63rd Street in Manhattan from 1975 to 1980, and during the 1970s they owned a vacation home in Remsenburg, New York. For their move to the West Coast in 1981, they bought a home in West Hollywood, California, previously owned by comedian Jack Benny's radio announcer Don Wilson.

Philanthropy

The Stan Lee Foundation was founded in 2010 to focus on literacy, education, and the arts. Its stated goals include supporting programs and ideas that improve access to literacy resources, as well as promoting diversity, national literacy, culture and the arts.

Lee donated portions of his personal effects to the University of Wyoming at various times, between 1981 and 2001.

Legal concerns

Lee engaged in several legal actions in his later years.

Intellectual property

In 2017, POW! was acquired by Camsing International, a Chinese company, during the period Lee was caring for his terminally ill wife and dealing with his own failing eyesight. Lee filed a lawsuit against POW! in May 2018, asserting that POW! had not disclosed the terms of its acquisition by Camsing to him. Lee stated that POW! CEO Shane Duffy and co-founder Gill Champion had presented him with what they said was a non-exclusive license for POW! for him to sign, under Camsing, to use his likeness and other intellectual property. This contract turned out to be an exclusive license, which Lee claimed he would never have entered.

Lee's lawsuit contended that POW! took over his social media accounts and was impersonating him inappropriately. POW! considered these complaints without merit and claimed that both Lee and his daughter J.C. were aware of the terms. The lawsuit was dropped in July 2018, with Lee issuing the statement: "The whole thing has been confusing to everyone, including myself and the fans, but I am now happy to be surrounded by those who want the best for me" and saying that he was happy to be working with POW! again.

Following Lee's death, his daughter J.C. gathered a legal team to review the legal situation relating to Lee's intellectual property from his later years. In September 2019, J.C. filed a new lawsuit against POW! in the United States District Court for the Central District of California not only related to recent events but also to regain the intellectual property rights that Lee had set up when founding Stan Lee Entertainment in 1998. The complaint identified a period between 2001 and 2017 during which Lee's partners Gill Champion and Arthur Lieberman were said to have misled Lee about various intellectual property rights deals.

In June 2020, Judge Otis D. Wright II dismissed J.C. Lee's lawsuit against POW! Entertainment, declaring it "frivolous" and "improper", sanctioning J.C. Lee for $1,000,000, and sanctioning her lawyers for $250,000 individually and severally. The court also gave POW! Entertainment the right to make a motion to recover legal fees. "We feel vindicated by the Court's decision today," said POW! in a statement. "Stan purposefully created POW! eighteen years ago with me as a place to safeguard his life's work. Before he passed, Stan was adamant that POW! continue to protect his creations and his identity after he was gone, because he trusted that we would safeguard his legacy for generations to come."

Sexual harassment allegations

On January 10, 2018, the ''Mail Online'' alleged that Lee was accused by a small number of nurses of sexually harassing them at his home in early 2017. Lee denied the allegations and claimed that the nurses were attempting to extort him.

Victim of elder abuse

In April 2018, '' The Hollywood Reporter'' published a report that claimed Lee was a victim of elder abuse; the report asserted that, among others, Keya Morgan, Lee's business manager and a memorabilia collector, had been isolating Lee from his trusted friends and associates following his wife's death in order to obtain access to Lee's wealth, estimated to amount to . In August 2018, a restraining order was issued against Morgan to stay away from Lee, his daughter, and his associates for three years. The Los Angeles Superior Court charged Morgan in May 2019 with five counts of abuse for events that had occurred in mid-2018. The charges were false imprisonment, grand theft of an elder or dependent adult, fraud, forgery, and elder abuse.

Another figure in the alleged abuse was Lee's former business manager Jerardo Olivarez, who was introduced to Lee by J.C. after his wife's death. Lee filed suit against Olivarez in April 2018, calling him one of several "unscrupulous businessmen, sycophants and opportunists" that approached him during this period. According to Lee's complaint, after gaining Lee's power of attorney, Olivarez fired Lee's personal banker, changed Lee's will, convinced him to allow transfers of millions of dollars from his accounts and used some of the funds to purchase a condominium.

Later years and death

In September 2012, Lee underwent an operation to insert a pacemaker, which required cancelling planned appearances at conventions. Lee eventually retired from convention appearances by 2017.

On July 6, 2017, Joan Boocock, his wife of 69 years, died of complications from a stroke. She was 95 years old.

Lee died on November 12, 2018, just one month before his 96th birthday, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, after being rushed there for a medical emergency earlier in the day. Lee had previously been hospitalized for pneumonia in February of that year. The immediate cause of death listed on his death certificate was cardiac arrest with respiratory failure and congestive heart failure as underlying causes. It also indicated that he suffered from aspiration pneumonia. His body was cremated and his ashes were given to his daughter.

Roy Thomas, who succeeded Lee as editor-in-chief at Marvel, had visited Lee two days prior to his death to discuss the upcoming book ''The Stan Lee Story'' and stated "I think he was ready to go. But he was still talking about doing more cameos. As long as he had the energy for it and didn't have to travel, Stan was always up to do some more cameos. He got a kick out of those more than anything else."

Publishing career

Early career

With the help of his uncle Robbie Solomon, Lee became an assistant in 1939 at the new Timely Comics division belonging to pulp magazine and comic-book publisher Martin Goodman. Timely, by the 1960s, would evolve into Marvel Comics. Lee, whose cousin Jean was Goodman's wife, was formally hired by Timely editor Joe Simon.

His duties were prosaic at first. "In those days he artistsdipped the pen in ink, oI 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". Marshaling his childhood ambition to be a writer, young Stanley Lieber made his comic-book debut with the text filler "Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge" in ''Captain America Comics'' #3 ( cover-dated May 1941), using the pseudonym Stan Lee (a play on his first name, "Stanley"), which years later he would adopt as his legal name. Lee later explained in his autobiography and 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 wrote the Great American Novel one day. This initial story also introduced Captain America's trademark ricocheting shield-toss. It would be adapted into a sequential art story in 2014 by Lee and Bruce Timm in ''Marvel's 75th Anniversary Celebration''.

Lee graduated from writing filler to actual comics with a backup feature, "'Headline' Hunter, Foreign Correspondent", two issues later, using the pseudonym "Reel Nats". His first superhero co-creation was the Destroyer, in '' Mystic Comics'' #6 (August 1941). Other characters he co-created during this period, called the Golden Age of Comic Books, include Jack Frost, debuting in ''U.S.A. Comics'' #1 (August 1941), and Father Time, debuting in ''Captain America Comics'' #6 (August 1941).

When Simon and his creative partner Jack Kirby left in late 1941 following a dispute with Goodman, the 30-year-old publisher installed Lee, just under 19 years old, as interim editor. The youngster showed a knack for the business that 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 within the US 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"; he added that only nine men in the U.S. Army were given that title. In the Army, Lee's division included many famous or soon-to-be famous people, including three-time Academy Award-winning director Frank Capra, '' New Yorker'' cartoonist Charles Addams, and children's book writer and illustrator Theodor Geisel

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