Facts and lore behind Stan Lee’s most famous Marvel creations

Before comic book superheroes became the latest (and perhaps so far biggest) juggernauts of American popular culture, before their heroic deeds dazzled and shined on the silver screen, they were restricted to the panels of pulp paper.

While comic books have been around since the 1930s, most of the characters that we watch in theaters today had their start during the silver age of comics in the ’60s, and no one person is credited with building the foundation of the superhero craze going on today more than Stan Lee with his Marvel characters.

With his birthday, December 28, having just passed, it’s a fitting time to take a look at some of the history behind his most famous creations.

Stan Lee’s most famous Marvel creations

The Hulk

Coming off the success of the sales of The Fantastic Four series (which first appeared in November of 1961), Stan Lee took note of how Thing was by far the most popular character of the group, and aimed to develop a new character that emulated that design.

Lee recognized how, oftentimes, people sympathize the most with the more imperfect characters. Going off of this, he looked toward other characters of similar vein, such as Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Those tragic movie monsters were the base inspiration for the Hulk.

The Hulk made his first appearance in his own solo series (rare for superheroes in those days), The Incredible Hulk #1, which released May 1962. Similar to Frankenstein, the early comics dealt with the Hulk stuck in a hostile world, surrounded by people assuming him to be a monster. In addition to this, there was also internal drama, with the personalities of Bruce Banner and The Hulk at constant odds, resenting the other for what they are.

Such themes of self-hatred and misunderstanding endeared the Hulk to general readers, giving the Avengers’ second member a running start to the cultural success he now possesses.

(Side note: Would you believe the first member of the Avengers to be created was Ant-Man, who first appeared in January 1962? From humble beginnings!)

The X-Men

Speaking of superhero teams, while perhaps not as big a pull as the Avengers, the X-Men is another famous and popular squad of supers, co-created together by Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby.

With great superheroes come great backstories, and there are only so many backstories a writer can come up with. This was the conundrum that Stan Lee was facing. By the X-Men’s first appearance (in X-Men #1, Sept. 1963), he had already used gamma rays, radioactive spider bites, and Godhood as explanations for his heroes’ abilities. What else was there? Well, why does there have to be an explanation? That was Lee’s intentions with the X-Men, a group of superheroes that were simply born the way they were, hence members often being called “mutants”.

“Mutants” was actually the original name for the first run, but was scrapped because higher-ups feared readers would not understand what the word meant (a quaint notion today). So, Lee went with the X-Men, for their extraordinary abilities.

The original run in 1963 gave us the heroes Angel, Beast, Cyclops, Iceman, and Marvel Girl, as well as the villains Magneto and the Scarlet Witch. Just to correct any false assumptions out there, Stan Lee had nothing to do with the creation of the X-Men’s most famous member, Wolverine.

Iron Man

In the ’60s, America and the entire span of the world was in the throes of the Cold War, the ideological battle of American capitalism and Russian communism.

Lee conceived Iron Man to serve as a sort of manifestation of the former, the “quintessential capitalist” whose powers came not from any traditional fantasy source, but a more realistic one: military industrialism. That too was another one of Lee’s intentions, as in the late ’60s, the youth of America had become extremely anti-war, on account of the questionable intentions of the country’s involvement in the Vietnamese War.

A character that represented War, and whose early comic stories depicted battles with Communists and Vietnam intervention, was sure to upset the youth, Lee thought. However, despite the odds, Iron Man found an audience among those young readers. Part of that may have been the vulnerable elements of Iron Man, who showed his imperfections very early on in his tales, like his battles with alcoholism in such storylines as “Demon in a Bottle”.

Spider-Man

Perhaps Marvel’s most popular character, Stan Lee co-created Spider-Man with artist Steve Ditko, who premiered the character in issue #15 of Amazing Fantasy in Aug. 1962. That would be the last issue of Amazing Fantasy in fact, which is the only reason Spider-Man was allowed in it. The series was getting the plug pulled, so why not?

The resulting response from readers was incredible. In the ’60s, there was rarely any superhero of adolescent age that was not de facto downgraded to the sidekick role. Lee wanted to subvert this standard, and created Spider-Man to be a stand alone teenage superhero, who dealt with the typical problems of adolescence in tandem with the slew of villains seeking to stop him.

The inspiration for Spider-Man came from a non-superhero comic book character known simply as the “Spider”, and the two shared some similarities. For instance, being vigilantes, both Spider-Man and the Spider were wanted not only by criminals and villains, but by law enforcement, and faced backlash from certain sects of the public. Additionally, the Spider, through his perilous travels, had developed a “sixth sense” for incoming danger, which carried over directly to Spider-Man’s “spidey-senses”.

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