Stan Lee, the Jewish writer whose creations revolutionized comic books, died on November 12, 2018, at the age of 95. Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, Ant Man, The Mighty Iron Man, Daredevil and other comic book heroes were born from Lee’s fervid imagination.
Lee’s career spanned decades in the comic book industry as it transformed from a smaller scale business that employed many first-generation Jews to today’s sprawling multi-billion dollar superhero industry dominated by global blockbuster movies featuring many of the heroes invented by Lee.
Stanley Lee was born Stanley Lieber in 1922 in New York. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania; he later described his mother as a “nice, rather old-fashioned Jewish lady”. Lee was a voracious reader as a child, reading Shakespeare by the time he was ten and devouring both serious and pulp literature. He initially wanted to be a serious writer but when he graduated high school he was hired by Martin Goodman, a relative who’d worked in the magazine industry and was starting to publish comic books at Timely Publications.
