Stan Lee, the colorful Marvel Comics patriarch who helped usher in a new era of superhero storytelling — and saw his creations become a giant influence in the movie business — has died. He was 95.
Kirk Schneck, an attorney for Lee’s daughter, tells CNN the comic giant was taken by ambulance from his Los Angeles home on Monday morning to Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center, where he later died. The cause of death is not yet known, according to Schneck.
Lee began his career at what was then Timely Comics in 1939. Over the years he was a writer, editor and occasional illustrator. But, bored with the output, he was preparing to leave the company when history took a sudden turn.
For many years, the business had been dominated by DC (then National) Comics, creators of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Green Lantern.
In the late ’50s, DC started reimagining its heroes — kicking off what comics historians call the “Silver Age” of the business — but those figures were still, largely, otherworldly and two-dimensional, living in made-up places such as Metropolis and Gotham City.
In the early ’60s, Lee was asked to come up with a team of superheroes to compete against DC’s Justice League. With the notable help of artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he helped instigate a revolution, though Lee didn’t see it that way at the time.
“If my publisher hadn’t said ‘let’s do superhero stories,’ I’d probably still be doing ‘A Kid Called Outlaw,’ ‘The Two-Gun Kid’ or ‘Millie the Model’ or whatever I was doing at the time,” he told CNN in 2013. Read more
