Listen to your wife

If you're going to quit anyway, why not go out the way you wanted to?

Aug 07, 2024

The top movie in the U.S. right now -- like, number one box office in a movie theater, if you remember those -- is Deadpool & Wolverine, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, which brought in at least $825 million in its first two weeks.

The success of this latest Marvel blockbuster gives us a good opportunity to share the story of why we have Marvel blockbusters in the first place, and especially the story of the most famous creator behind it all.

Actually, there's another reason for telling it today, but we'll get to it.

We're talking about Stanley Martin Lieber, better known as Stan Lee, who is credited along with co-creators Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko with coming up with most of the original Marvel superheroes that people still know today: Spider Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, and the like.

Born into a Romanian immigrant family in 1922, Lee later said that one of his enduring childhood memories was his constant fear that his parents would not have enough money to pay the rent, and that they'd be forced out of their apartment.

He found his escape in books and movies, especially Errol Flynn's roles, and worked hard to graduate high school early, at age 16. From there he worked for the WPA Federal Theatre Project before getting a job at one of the earliest New York-based comic book companies, Timely Comics.

At first he did things like run errands and make sure that the artists' supplies were kept up, but eventually he got to write an early Captain America comic in 1941. Lee chose his pen name at the time, explaining later that he was sort of embarrassed to be writing comic books, and he hoped that if he one day wrote the Great American Novel, he could use his real name without anyone making the connection.

Lee joined the military in World War II, and based on his comic book writing got assigned to the army's Training Film Division, where he was one of fewer than a dozen enlisted soldiers with the official job title, "playwright."

He kept writing for Timely Comics on the weekends the whole time, and returned to the company after the war, but became frustrated with his career. That leads us to my favorite Stan Lee story, which is the one about how he almost quit Marvel comics before most of the things he's known for today.

His boss at this time was his cousin's husband, Martin Goodman, and Lee was burned out writing the same kinds of one-dimensional characters -- mostly geared at pre-teens -- that he'd been doing for nearly 20 years at this point.

Here's how he explained the situation, and what he did -- and who he owed the credit to -- back in about 2009:

I said to my wife, "I don't think I'm getting anywhere. I think I'd like to quit." She gave me the best piece of advice in the world.
She said, "Why not write one book the way you'd like to, instead of the way Martin wants you to? Get it out of your system. The worst thing that will happen is he'll fire you -- but you want to quit anyway."
...
So in 1961 we did The Fantastic Four. I tried to make the characters different in the sense that they had real emotions and problems. And it caught on.
After that, Martin asked me to come up with some other superheroes. That's when I did the X-Men and The Hulk. And we stopped being a company that imitated.

The cover date on the first Fantastic Four comic, which was a massive hit, was November 1961. But the true publishing date when it hit news stands was either August 8 or August 9 -- so 63 years ago this week.

Lee kept writing only until 1972, but he then became publisher of Marvel, stayed involved through its sale to Disney in 2009, and had cameos and executive producer credit on most of the Marvel movies. The result of that last point is that Lee owns the record for the highest total gross revenue of all movies in which he's acted -- edging out stars like Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansen, and Robert Downey Jr. (who are also at the top because of their roles in Marvel films).

Lee's wife, Joan Boocock, who gave him the fantastic advice, died in 2017; Lee died in 2018 at age 95.

Lesson for the day: When you're about to quit anyway, make your last effort count.

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Understandably by Bill Murphy Jr.

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