Stan Lee

In 1947, Lee got married to Joan Clayton Boocock and lived on Long Island for the first few years of their marriage. The couple has a daughter, Joan Celia ‘J.C.’ Lee and Joan had a boy, Jan Lee, who died in infancy.

Stan Lee died on on November 12, 2018, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 95.

Stan Lee was born on December 28, 1922 in New York to Celia and Jack Lieber. His father was a dress cutter who did not get much work after the Great Depression. His family had to live in financial difficulties in a one-bedroom apartment.

Lee attended the DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx and side by side worked small jobs like, writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Center, working as an office boy, etc.

As a child his life was influenced by reading and watching movies. He dreamt of one day writing ‘The Great American Novel’. He was hired as an office assistant at Timely Comics and soon became an interim editor.

Lee’s entry into the Timely Comics in 1939 proved to be a big step in his career. He started out by doing menial jobs but soon made his comic-book debut with the text filler ‘Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge’.

In 1941, Lee started getting opportunities to do actual comics with a backup feature. He created the ‘Destroyer in Mystic Comics No. 6’, ‘Jack Frost in USA Comic No. 1’ and ‘Father Time in Captain America Comics No.6’.

When he was only 19 years old, owing to a conflict in the company and his escalating creativity, Lee was made interim editor of the company and worked with the company for a good 31 years, mostly as editor-in-chief.

In 1942, he joined the United States Army and served stateside in the Signal Corps. He continued his creative streak there by writing manuals, training films and slogans, which is why he was classified in the military as ‘playwright’.

After finishing his stint with the army, Lee joined back the company in 1950s, which was now known as the ‘Atlas Comics’. He started experimenting with various genres––writing romantic, sci-fi, horror, humorous stories, etc.

The creation of ‘The Fantastic Four’ superheroes team for Marvel in the early 1960s with his colleague Jack Kirby is considered to be the most famous work of his life that made him into a phenomenon of the comic-writing world.