Creator of Marvel Comics Superheros Stan Lee No More

Guwahati: Creator of Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk and a cavalcade of other Marvel Comics superheroes that became mythic figures in pop culture with soaring success at the movie box office, Stan Lee, died at the age of 95, on Monday.

Lee was key to the scaling of Marvel into a comic book titan in the 1960s when in collaboration with artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Stan Lee had created superheroes who would enthrall generations of young readers.

Lee ‘s daughter J.C. Lee in a statement to the media confirming the news of her father’s demise said, “He felt an obligation to his fans to keep creating. He loved his life and he loved what he did for a living. His family loved him and his fans loved him. He was irreplaceable.”

Lee was widely credited with adding a new layer of complexity and humanity to superheroes. His characters were not made of stone — even if they appeared to have been carved from granite. They had love and money worries and endured tragic flaws or feelings of insecurity.

Talking about his creation in a media interaction Lee once said, “I felt it would be fun to learn a little about their private lives, about their personalities and show that they are human as well as super.”

He had help in designing the superheroes but he took full ownership of promoting them.

His creations included web-slinging teenager Spider-Man, the muscle-bound Hulk, mutant outsiders The X-Men, the close-knit Fantastic Four and the playboy-inventor Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man.

Spider-Man is one of the most successfully licensed characters ever and he has soared through the New York skyline as a giant inflatable in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

In 2008, Lee was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest government award for creative artists.

Born as Stanley Martin Lieber in New York on December 28, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania, Lee at the age 17, became an errand boy at Timely Comics, the company that has evolve into Marvel.

Lee soon earned writing duties and promotions. He penned Western stories and romances, as well as superhero tales, and often wrote

The result was the Fantastic Four. There was stretchable Mr. Fantastic, his future wife Invisible Woman, her brother the Human Torch and strongman The Thing. They were like a devoted but dysfunctional family.

“Stan's characters were always superheroes that had a certain amount of humanity about them or a flaw,” said Shirrel Rhoades, a former executive vice president of Marvel and its publisher in the mid-1990s.

Lee involved his artists in the process of creating the story and even the characters themselves, in what would come to be known as the “Marvel Method.” It sometimes led critics to fault Lee for taking credit for ideas not entirely his own.

“His greatest legacy will be not only the co-creation of his characters but the way he helped to build the culture that comics have become, which is a pretty significant one,” said Robert Thompson, a pop culture expert at Syracuse University.

It may be mentioned that Lee’s wife Joan Lee, whom he married in 1947 died in 2017.

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