Stan Lee

The Biography of Stan Lee Dressed in a dark replica of a sailor outfit, complete with a Tam O'Shanter hat perched at an angle atop his head, young Stanley Lieber sits on an antique desk, leaning on his tiny right arm. This is the kind of popular posed photograph that parents force their kids to endure in the 1920s. Although only a youngster, the boy reveals dark, mesmerizing eyes and a faraway look that seems to hide the key to some distant mystery. Telling amusing stories that created a vivid scene and a great deal of excitement also appealed to Stanley's other passion--watching movies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the boy thought about a bigger-than-life future, his idea of heaven was embodied in film icon Errol Flynn. The actor burst onto the scene in 1935's Captain Blood, which showcased his good looks, flamboyant charm, and athletic grace. Flynn became the top action film star and drew in young viewers like Lieber with detailed and finely choreographed fight scenes and swordplay, as in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Flynn's first color film. For a boy creating his own comic stories and devouring books and magazines, the movies demonstrated how the marriage of visual elements and dialogue drove the action. "There on the screen were worlds that dazzled my mind, worlds of magic and wonder, worlds which I longed to inhabit, if only in imagination," he remembered. Stanley grew into a self-described "voracious reader." In later years, he often cited Shakespeare as his most important influence, because of the commitment to drama and comedy, which shaped the young Lee's ideas about creativity and storytelling. Lee enjoyed Shakespeare's "rhythm of words," explaining, "I've always been in love with the way words sound." The boy's desire to read had no real boundaries. He took a book or magazine with him everywhere, even the breakfast table, using a little wooden contraption his mother found for him that held the pages open while it propped up the book. Although he loved reading and film and dabbled with drawing, young Stanley had no illusions about working in comic books. Comic books during Stanley's boyhood years were primarily reprints from newspaper strips and looked more like books or magazines. In the 1920s, black and white strips were popular, particularly the slapstick humor of Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff, which were reprinted as oversized comic books. He read them, like other children his age, but they did not capture his imagination the way film and novels did. "Creating comic books was never part of my childhood dream," he explained. "I never thought of that at all." He did, however, read Famous Funnies, widely considered the first modern American comic book, which Dell published in 1934 and distributed through Woolworth's department stores. He specifically remembered enjoying Hairbreadth Harry, a strip created by C. W. Kahles that featured the hero in various melodramatic adventures to keep his rival Rudolph Ruddigore Rassendale from the heroine Belinda Blinks. Book Outline Early Life The House of the Man of Ideas More than 60 Superheroes Memorable Villains Other Aspects of the Creator Chapter 1 - Stan Lee's Parents Chapter 2 -First Generation Family Chapter 3 - New York Way of Life Chapter 4 -Stan the Comic Chapter 5 -Dawn of the Fantastic Chapter 6 - The New Yorker Chapter 7 - Celebrities Chapter 8 - The Birth of the Hero Chapter 9 - The Evolution of the Hero Chapter 10 - The Hero and His Journey Chapter 11 - Further Evolution of the Hero