![]() ![]() Comic's Justice League of America was selling well and he asked me to do a book about a team of superheroes. "Meanwhile my publisher had found out that D.C. My wife said, `If you want to quit anyway, before you leave why not do a comic or two the way you want? The worst that could happen is you get fired.' "Around 1960, I told my wife `I can't stand this anymore. My orders were to keep the stories simplistic and to use language that people who weren't too bright could understand. "About the same time," Lee said, "I had been working for a publisher who felt comics were for young kids or not-too-intelligent adults. The Comics Code Authority constraints sent the industry into free fall. ![]() Questioning authority wasn't allowed in comics. Comics were seen as a threat to children. ![]() When the war ended, comics were the subject of Senate hearings, from which grew a censorship board, the Comics Code Authority. When World War II came, Lee was one of eight writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright William Saroyan, who wrote scripts for training films. At age 17, Lee was named creative director of Timely Comics, which eventually became Marvel Comics. Lee worked as a gofer for Timely Comics while in high school, and when the chief editor and art director quit, he became the temporary replacement while the publisher looked for new staff. He grew up in Manhattan, a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, but less so of the mysteries than "of Holmes himself," he said, "and his peculiarities. Lee recently celebrated his 75th birthday. "Even though Spider-Man is a normal young man in real life, he should have the same problems that any normal young man would have," Lee said from his Los Angeles office. "The beauty of Stan Lee's characters is that they were characters first and superheroes next," said Jeff Kline, executive producer of the "Men in Black" animated TV series. Rick Moody's acclaimed 1994 novel, "The Ice Storm," used The Fantastic Four as a metaphor for his book's dysfunctional family. Lee, one of the founders of Marvel Comics, gave comic books credibility. Others questioned openly if this superhero business was worth the trouble. He gave them complete sentences to speak, complete thoughts to think.Some, like his Fantastic Four, didn't even conceal their identities. He figured kids would read a comic where a man dressed like a giant spider merely shuffled down the street, wondered where his next check would come from, or just sat around his apartment feeling lonely. He introduced them to the idea of down-time. The creator of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and The Incredible Hulk decided in the early 1960s that Spandex-clad crime fighters needed to get a life. Stan Lee's genius was giving superheroes nothing to do. ![]()
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