This news article highlights Stan Lee's significant role in shaping Marvel Comics and the comic book industry, particularly during the 1960s, when he created or co-created many of the company's iconic characters. The article also discusses how Lee's vision and creative approach continue to influence Marvel and the industry today.
Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee was an absolute quote machine. As prolific of a writer as Lee was, he loved to talk even more. Especially when the topic was the art of the comic medium, and how he and Marvel changed the comic book game permanently starting in the 1960s.
From the early '60s onward, Lee was at the center of a creative revolution at Marvel Comics. He created, or co-created, most of Marvel's major players: Avengers, X-Men, Spider-Man, Hulk, Thor, Daredevil, and more. Beyond that, though, Stan Lee helped redefine what comics, specifically superhero stories, could be. Which, in turn, helped make Marvel the cultural juggernaut it is today. 60+ years later, Marvel is very different than it was in Stan Lee's time.
In just about every way, both creatively and commercially. Yet Stan the Man's vision for"the House of Ideas" and what the comic book medium could accomplish still looms large over the company, and the industry at large. Studying Stan's POV on comics can help us better understand where comics are at today.
The quotes collected here come from four interviews Stan Lee gave, ranging from the apex of his Marvel career in the late 1960s to the '90s, when he had become something like the"professor emeritus" of Marvel Comics. Each illuminates something crucial about Stan's creative approach, his understanding of the business, and his own idiosyncratic personality, which suffused the Marvel books of his heyday.
"Any New Idea Is Worth Exploring" The Comics Journal, 1968 Marvel Comics' groundbreaking 1960s era can be boiled down to two words: creative freedom. Of course, comic creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby couldn't exactly put anything they wanted on the page; in fact, the highly restrictive Comics Code was still in effect in the '60s, limiting the kinds of stories comics could tell, and even dictating how stories could and couldn't be told.
Yet within the context of that code, Marvel effectively gave Lee and his co-creators free rein. Case in point: when Stan Lee's boss told him Spider-Man would never work as a superhero, Lee put him in a comic anyway. And the rest is history. That's just one example of the creative philosophy that led directly to Marvel's creative boom period starting in 1963.
Lee summed it up to The Comics Journal a few years later like this: “To me, any new idea is worth exploring. Even a bad new idea is better than a good formulized rut you might be in. ” Without this ethos, Marvel's crop of hit new superheroes might have had half the yield in the '60s.
It's fair to say that Stan Lee's signature writing style became a formula of its own once it produced massive success, but there's still a vital lesson here that Marvel would do well to remember today: getting out of a"formulaic rut" starts by recognizing you're in one.
"We're Trying To Elevate The Medium" The Comics Journal, 1968 Here's one thing Stan Lee and Watchmen creator Alan Moore have in common: they're both captivated by the endless possibilities of comics. In the mid-1980s, Watchmen was the result of Moore looking at the preceding generation of superhero stories, including Stan Lee's work, and deciding the genre hadn't gone far enough. Hadn't lived up to its full potential.
Ironically, Stan Lee's success two decades earlier came from the exact same place. Lee was dissatisfied with the state of superhero comics in the early 1960s. He saw the medium as more than just drivel made for children. He decided it could, and should, be art.
Artist Jack Kirby agreed, and together they"elevated" comics. Lee articulated their goal to The Comics Journal: “We really are trying to make comics as good as comics can be made. We’re trying to elevate the medium. We’re trying to make them as respectable as possible.
" Again, it would be easy to mistake this for an Alan Moore quote. Within the context of the '60s and '70s, Lee, Kirby, and Marvel's other boundary-pushing creators succeeded. But even more important than making comics"respectable,' they made comics iconic, ensuring their long-term place in American pop culture.
"The Human Race Needs Superheroes" IT Magazine, 1970 The 18th-century French satirist and philosopher Voltaire once remarked:"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. " Funnily enough, Stan Lee said something strikingly similar almost exactly two hundred years later. According to Lee: “I think the human race needs superheroes, and if we don’t have real ones, we’re almost forced to create them.
Because I think we're all away, consciously or unconsciously, that the problems that face us are just too big and too grave for us to solve ourselves.
" Now, considering that Lee was a voracious reader, it's possible he was actually paraphrasing Voltaire here. But his words came off the cuff in a 1970 interview, and could've just as easily been an organic musing. In any case, what Stan Lee is saying here is fundamental to Marvel Comics' success. All-too-often, real life heroes tend to come up short, or"live long enough to...become a villain," as The Dark Knight memorably put it.
Which is why stories about heroes are so important. And as the 20th century made real world heroism increasingly hard, the fantasy of heroism became that much more alluring. Related 12 Strongest Hulk Villains Created by Stan Lee, Ranked by Power Level Some of the Hulk's most powerful villains have been around from the very beginning, all thanks to his co-creator Stan 'The Man' Lee.
Posts 9 By Robert Wood Which made the next-level idea of superheroes so ripe for revitalization in the 1960s. Though superheroes had been around for decades, Stan Lee and Marvel Comics made them essential to the '60s and '70s. Which led them to become a staple of American popular fiction from that point forward.
"I'm Naturally Half A Preacher At Heart" IT Magazine, 1970 Part of Stan Lee's project of"elevating" superhero stories was making them socially relevant. At the dawn of the superhero genre, comics were full of social commentary. Think Captain America punching Adolf Hitler's lights out, in a comic published a full year before the U.S. entered the Second World War.
But in the decades that followed, comics lapsed into a"formulaic rut" that failed to use the medium's ability to convey a message. And Stan Lee thought that was a shame. Lee believed stories were meant to have a point, and that superheroes could be modern moral paragons for Marvel's readers.
As Lee told IT Magazine in 1970: “If millions of kids and adults read these books every year, then they must have some power to shape their thoughts, their actions, a bit. I try to moralize as much as possible... I’m naturally half a preacher at heart. I find I enjoy it.
” That moralizing quality might feel archaic by today's standards, but in Stan Lee's era it was a crucial element in making Marvel distinct from its rival DC Comics. Lee said it came naturally to him, and that's clear from the ease with which he built his stories around his ideas about the most pressing social themes of his day.
"Let's Suppose Michelangelo And Shakespeare Were Alive Today... " OUI Magazine, 1977 It seems silly to say comic books aren't art, but comic creators have been fighting that battle since the formative days of the medium. After all, comics were a"pulp" product, mass-produced on cheap paper for a commercial audience of mostly children. According to comics' critics, being illustrated didn't make them art, nor was there any art to their stories.
Stan Lee strongly disagreed. Speaking with OUI Magazine in 1977, he evoked two of the greatest artists in world history to make his case. Lee said: “As far as comics being a viable art form, let's suppose Michelangelo and Shakespeare were alive today and Shakespeare said,"Hey, let's team up and do a comic You draw; I’ll write. If that happened, nobody would say that comics weren't a worthwhile form of art.
" It might seem like a big swing, considering the reputations of these two historical artists, but actually, Lee's point is backed up by the reality of Michelangelo and Shakespeare's biographies. That is to say, both were commercial artists in their day, hardly different than a comic book writer of the 1960s or '70s.
Take Michelangelo out of 15th/16th-century Rome and put him in '60s America, and he might very well decide that there's more money in drawing comics than making sculptures or painting chapels. Likewise, a time-displaced Shakespeare might've eschewed the West End, or Broadway, in favor of writing for Marvel, if it was a more steady living.
"I Was Dying Of Boredom" OUI Magazine, 1977 The true mortal sin all writers must avoid is being boring. Stan Lee knew that. Readers will stick with a book, or a comic book, through a lot, but not if it bores them.
Through the early part of Lee's career, up until the breakthrough years of the early '60s, Stan the Man was on the verge of quitting the industry because he was so bored by the comics he was reading, and worse, the comics he was writing. In 1977, Lee framed this existential crisis of boredom as the catalyst for his transformative work from 15 years before. He explained to OUI Magazine: The whole thing started out of sheer boredom.
The readers were dying of boredom; I was dying of boredom. Every day I would tell my wife that I wanted to quit, and she kept saying,"Instead of writing the same old slop, write something better.
" Notably, Stan Lee cited his wife as the one who pushed him to"write something better. " He knew he could do it, but he wasn't actualizing this potential. Joan Lee, who was her husband's creative muse in many ways, prodded him to be the change he wanted to see in the comic book medium. To both of their credit, he did.
It's a creative lesson anyone can learn from. When it comes to creative pursuits, boredom and dissatisfaction are signifiers. They tell the artist something important:"you can do better than this.
" Stan Lee had to write things that interested him in order to save his own career, and ultimately following through on that saved Marvel Comics, and maybe the medium as a whole. "I Really Don't Like To Write That Much" Interview With Jeffery Goldsmith, Circa 1990s Stan Lee qualifies as"prolific" by any standard. He created more iconic superheroes than practically anyone else in the business, aside from his collaborator Jack Kirby.
He transformed Marvel Comics from a failing magazine publisher to a cultural institution. Most of all, he was a relentless producer of material, pumping out issues of multiple ongoing comics a month for years on end. Subscribe to the newsletter for more Stan Lee insights Hungry for more Stan Lee perspectives and comics history? Subscribe to the newsletter to receive curated quotes, context, and thoughtful analysis that expands your understanding of Marvel's creative legacy and comics craft.
Get Updates By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. Lee wrote over 2,000 comic book issues during his career. He made Marvel the"House of Ideas.
" Yet looking back on his career in the 1990s, Lee gave a curious insight into his creative process: “I’m a little different, I think, than most. Most writers get ideas all the time. They’re thinking of stories no matter what else they’re doing. I don’t.
I really don’t like to write that much. So, I’ll say to myself well, I think I want to do a story now or, I want to create a character now. And I’ll sit down at the computer...and at that moment I’ll start trying to think or trying to work on it. ” Really, there are two ways to interpret this.
The first is, simply put, that this is a humblebrag. It's Stan Lee saying,"I don't need to think about writing like others do. I just sit down and do it.
" Related Marvel's 10 Best Hand-to-Hand Fighters Created by Stan Lee Stan Lee gave the Marvel Universe some of its best hand-to-hand fighters, from Daredevil and Black Widow to some way more surprising entries. Posts 10 By Robert Wood The alternative is that it's a testament to the truly meditative quality of Lee's process that might not have fully appreciated the rareness of.
Most writers spend their entire lives trying to"get into the zone," but Stan Lee seemed to be able to enter a Zen-like state of creative focus at will. It probably wasn't that simple, but there's a mythic quality to the idea that Stan the Man would've appreciated.
"The Artwork Is So Important" Interview With Jeffery Goldsmith, Circa 1990s Most of the Stan Lee quotes here have been about the art of writing comics, from Lee's perspective. However, Lee always also stressed the importance of comic art and artists as an essential part of the equation. Comic books offer a unique admixture of art and prose. When both aspects of a comic are firing on all cylinders, there's nothing like it.
But if one falters, the other can still save the book. As Stan Lee told Jeffery Goldsmith in their '90s conversation: “To me the artwork is so important. The artwork could make a mediocre script look wonderful, or it could make a great script look boring, depending on how it’s drawn. ” In other words, great art alone can make a comic issue unforgettable.
The flip side, though, is that a brilliant story can be dulled by subpar art. Plus, as much as story drives and dictates the art, it is the art that truly makes the first impression on a reader when they flip through a comic book. Words take time to read; story takes a moment to process. Art hits the reader's eyes immediately.
Meaning, in Stan Lee's estimation, the art has to do the story justice. In turn, the writer has to give the artist something exciting to work with. It goes back to Stan Lee's determination not to be"boring.
" Strong art can elevate a"mediocre" script, sure, but doing that with a boring story is trickier. Give an artist a juicy story to draw on, and then all they have to do is make sure their art lives up to, or even exceeds, the script. That was the true recipe for Stan Lee's success during the formative 1960s at Marvel Comics, and it holds as true today as it did over six decades ago.
Tell us what you think, Marvel fans. Which Stan Lee quote is your favorite? Any other iconic quotes from the Man Screen Rant should cover? Follow Followed Stan Lee Birthdate December 28, 1922 Birthplace New York, New York, USA Notable Projects The Avengers, Avengers: Infinity War, Iron Man Height 5 feet 11 inches Professions Writer, Editor, Publisher, Producer, Actor Expand Collapse
Stan Lee Marvel Comics Comic Book Industry Creative Revolution Creative Approach Comics Code Creative Freedom Stan The Man House Of Ideas Professor Emeritus Any New Idea Is Worth Exploring The Comics Journal
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