Listen to your wife

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

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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7 other things …

• Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, thrusting the outspoken Midwestern statesman into the national spotlight while adding a key ally to her fast-moving campaign for the presidency. A military veteran, former public school teacher and six-term congressman, Walz, 60, is now serving the sixth year of his eight-year stint as governor of the North Star State. (USA Today)

• Google illegally monopolized the search market through exclusive deals, a judge ruled, handing the government a win in its first major antitrust case against a tech giant in more than two decades. Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said that the Alphabet Inc. unit’s $26 billion in payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market. (Bloomberg)

• President Joe Biden held crisis talks on Monday on a potential Iranian counterattack on Israel as his administration said it was working around the clock to avoid all-out war in the Middle East. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken engaged in frantic diplomacy to try to ease tensions sparked by a suspected Israeli attack that killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. (AFP)

• "Nvidia scraped videos from Youtube and several other sources to compile training data for its AI products, internal Slack chats, emails, and documents obtained by 404 Media show. When asked about legal and ethical aspects of using copyrighted content to train an AI model, Nvidia defended its practice as being ‘in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of copyright law.’” (404 Media)

• This year’s media meltdown chaos is picking up again. Six month after layoffs, labor unrest and contracts began rocking the media sector, the business continues to face dramatic challenges. Tuesday saw a number of examples. In a major deal, Ziff Davis cut a deal to acquire CNet from Red Ventures for about $100 million -- which was once worth $1.8 billion and also sold four years ago for $500 million. (Hollywood Reporter)

• Microplastics have been found in the ocean and the air, in our food and water. They have been found in a wide range of body tissues, including the heart, liver, kidneys and even testicles. But are they actually harming you? Evidence suggests they might, but it's limited in scope. (AP)

• It may seem unlikely in the middle of the desert, but water power could have helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, a new study suggests. A complex system of dams and channels has been uncovered near the Step Pyramid, which sits to the northwest of the ruins of Memphis at the Saqqara plateau. Experts believe that the arrangement was designed to funnel pressurised water into a shaft in the building site, creating a hydraulic lift that could raise the huge stones to the upper heights of the monolith. (The Telegraph)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.