There is a small class of Americans who achieve what I like to think of as P.T. Barnum Status. Stan Lee, who died on Monday at age 95, was one of them.
What I mean by P.T. Barnum Status is this: You cannot imagine the modern circus without him. He was the industry. There are very few people who drive an enterprise as fully as he did. The computer industry, for instance, would still have happened without either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. The automotive industry would have developed without Henry Ford.
But without Ray Kroc, the fast-food industry may not happen. Kroc was fast food. Without Vince McMahon, professional wrestling as we know it today does not exist. And without Stan Lee, comic books—which have eaten American popular culture—would not be what they are. For better and for worse, Stan Lee was the comic book industry.
In each of these cases, you’ll note that the innovator wasn’t coming up with something entirely new: there were circuses before Barnum; there were burger joints before Kroc; there was wrestling before McMahon. And there were comic books before—long before—Lee joined Timely Comics in 1939. But what these men did was radically transform an existing good in order to create an entirely new category, which they dominated.
Which is exactly what Lee did with Marvel.
Comic books, as a format, predate the Civil War. Superhero comic books were born in 1938 with the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1. Lee didn’t even enter the industry until after that and he spent his early years as an editor working on Westerns and romance books. It wasn’t until 1961 that Lee had his breakthrough when he realized that (1) superheroes could be written in a way that appealed to adults, (2) superheroes could inhabit a coherent universe, (3) comic book production could be streamlined, and (4) comic book intellectual property would be incredibly valuable. Lee then capitalized upon these insights with a string of inventions which have become the most valuable literary IP in American history.
First, Lee came up with the idea for the Fantastic Four, a family of heroes who had their own personal lives and problems. There followed the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, and more. In issue #5 of The Amazing Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four’s primary villain, Doctor Doom, appears, which was the first indication that these characters all inhabited a shared universe. And this innovation had the effect of acting as a force-multiplier for all of Marvel’s other intellectual property: They could bootstrap new characters to existing hits, allowing them to manufacture even more IP.
Throughout this revolution, Lee employed what came to be known as the Marvel Method. Before then, comic books were created in a linear process. Writers wrote a script, artists then drew the pictures as they were instructed.
At Marvel, Lee came up with a rough—sometimes very rough—idea for a story. Sometimes by himself, sometimes while collaborating with others. The idea was then handed off to the artists, who would draw the book according to his own thoughts. And then Lee would take the finished art and write dialogue to match it.
It was an incredibly idiosyncratic process—one which has never been successfully employed anywhere except at Lee’s Marvel. But the result was that the process of building each book went faster and the creative skills of the artists were more fully leveraged. Artists had once been hired hands. Lee turned them into creative partners, a transformation which is now thoroughly embedded in the comics culture.
The Marvel Method had other, less salutary, effects: The collaborations were so closely enmeshed that it was never clear exactly who deserved how much credit for what. And this confusion later caused a great deal of acrimony between Lee and his collaborators, especially Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. (In 2016, Lee claimed that Kirby’s last words to him were, “Stan, you have nothing to reproach yourself for.” Which is lovely, if true.)
Lee’s final insight—and the one that made him a very rich man—was that the characters he was creating would eventually be valuable. Almost unimaginably so.
Lee began pushing the idea of extracting downstream revenue from Marvel’s IP early. He sold memberships to the Merry Marvel Marching Society for $1. The response was so great that Mavel then began selling t-shirts and posters. By 1966, Lee was pushing Marvel to get into the television business by licensing animated versions of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Marvel spent decades trying to find a way to make their IP work on both the big and small screens, culminating with the company’s 2009 purchase, by Disney, for $4.24 billion. It was the capstone of Lee’s career and a vindication—a total and complete vindication—of his entire vision for the industry.
It also turned out to be a bargain at five times the price.
In just the last eight years, Marvel movies based on Lee’s intellectual property have grossed $17.5 billion worldwide. And then there are the TV series and the streaming shows and the live shows and the theme parks and the action figures and the video games and the Halloween costumes and the trading cards and the lunchboxes and more, more, more. And then more after that. As Sonny Bunch wrote, “It’s Stan Lee’s universe. We just live in it.”
None of this would have happened without him.
Like Barnum, Lee was a complicated figure, part visionary, part impresario, part huckster. But he was also essential. In a small but real way, he changed the world we live in.
And he changed it for the better. I miss him already.
