How Stan Lee transformed the comics business

By D.B.

STAN LEE, who died on November 12th aged 95, was the embodiment of an old-fashioned American archetype: the likeable, industrious hustler, whose enthusiasm for self-advancement was uncorrupted by callousness or cynicism. He was an entrepreneur and an opportunist, a showman, a creative dynamo, and a (sometimes inadvertent) visionary. More than any other individual, he was responsible for turning the comic book, a low-rent pulp art form, into a pop-culture powerhouse. His creations—Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, the Avengers, Iron Man, Black Panther and Thor, to name a few of his most famous—dominate the film industry, having grossed more than $17bn worldwide.

Mr Lee began his career in the “Golden Age” of comic books. He was hired at 17 by Timely—the company he would later transform into Marvel in the “Silver Age”—to help capitalise on the demand created by DC Comics, the publishers of Superman and Batman. His boss, Martin Goodman, had two maxims on which he based his business operations. One was that if something sold, you should keep doing more of it until the market was saturated. The other: “Fans aren’t interested in quality.”