Who was Stan Lee and why he was famous ?

In late September 2012, Lee underwent a serious surgery to have a pacemaker implatned, cancelling planned appearances at conventions. Fans were disappointed but ultimately happy their idol was going to be sticking around.

Four years earlier in 2008, President George W. Bush presented Stan with the American National Medal of the Arts. Stan is the only comic book writer to ever receive the honor.

Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four with Jack Kirby is considered the greatest and most influential superhero comic of all time.

Since 2000’s X-Men, Lee has appeared in 16 films based on Marvel Comics characters that he either created or helped create during his time with Marvel.

One of the exclusive offers for the game adaptation of The Amazing Spider-Man was playing a short side-quest via DLC where you play as Stan himself, looking for lost pages of his manuscript while using all the powers at Spider-Man’s disposal. It’s actually quite fun to see someone other than Spider-Man doing Spider-Man things, let alone Stan freaking Lee!

Stan Lee owns his own comic book convention, sort of. In 2012, Stan Lee and Regina Carpinelli, founder and CEO of Comikaze Expo, announced that Stan Lee would become a partner in the company and soon after Comikaze was rebranded as Stan Lee’s Comikaze. Talk about getting closer to your fans.

Stan Lee has donated large portions of his personal effects to the University of Wyoming at various times, between 1981 and 2001.

The Stan Lee Foundation and was founded in 2010 to focus on literacy, education and the arts. Its stated goals include supporting programs and ideas that improve access to literacy resources, as well as promoting diversity, national literacy, culture and the arts.

Lee championed close collaboration between comic book writers and artists. The collaborative approach was known as the “Marvel Method.” In 2010, he told CNN, “All of my life in comics I have worked with artists, so I’ve collaborated with them. I would write down the original story, they would draw it and then I would edit it and do the art direction. So everything I’ve done has always been a collaboration.”

Lee and his Marvel collaborators unveiled the Fantastic Four in 1961. The group is known as Marvel’s answer to the Justice League from rival publisher, DC Comics.

In 2001 Stan started POW! Entertainment. The Company is a multimedia development and licensing company that creates and licenses animated and live-action fantasy and superhero entertainment content and merchandise, leveraging the creative output and branded image of Stan Lee.

The History Channel launched the series “Stan Lee’s Superhumans” in 2010, which documented people with extraordinary skills and abilities. The show was moderately successful but was cancelled four years after it first aired.

Stan partnered with the NHL in 2011 to form Guardian Media Entertainment. The company creates superhero characters for each NHL hockey team. The promotion was also short lived, but thanks to the internet, the heroes are available for your viewing pleasure.

After leaving Marvel in the late ’90s Stan Lee was approached by a man named Peter Paul who pitched Lee on a project called Stan Lee Media. This was a company where Lee could release any project that he wanted to without having the Marvel executive approval. Lee thought this was great, but there was just one problem. Paul was using the Stan Lee brand to rob their investors. While Lee was releasing new characters like the web series The 7th Portal, and a sci-fi version of The Punisher called The Accuser, Paul was exaggerating the company’s profits to their investors, and manipulating stocks. The SEC eventually caught up to Paul and busted him for fraud in 2001. Lee was cleared of all wrongdoing but was embarrassed in front of the comic book community at large.

Stan created an animated one season wonder for Spike TV, Stripperella, that starred Pamela Anderson. The show wasn’t renewed for a second season, something Anderson was happy about. In an interview with Vulture, Anderson simply commented, “Stan wanted nudity, I didn’t.”

Lee admitted that when he created Iron Man (and Tony Stark) that the character was designed so audiences not relate to him and even dislike him. Lee also wanted to see if he could market the character so well that audiences would buy the comic despite their reservations around the character. “I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.” Given the success of the Iron Man franchise, we’d say this was a huge success.

Stan Lee told Newsarama in 2015 when there was a dust up about the notion of creating of a black Spider-Man: “I wouldn’t mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way. But we originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that.” We’ll chalk this up to old people being old.

Lee has received a ton of acclaim as THE creator in his time in the comic book industry, but he rarely spreads any of that around. While Lee was definitely a part of the creation of many famous characters he wasn’t the sole creator of any of them. He’s oddly reluctant to give credit to any of the others that he worked with on characters like Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Thor, etc. According to veteran comics writer Gerry Conway, “Stan’s gotten far too much credit. People have said Stan was out for No. 1, and to a very large degree, that’s true. He’s a good guy. He’s just not a great guy.”

Although Stan is known for his midas touch, not everything he has done has been a hit. For one example theres Dragons vs. Pandas, a children’s book targeted at the Chinese market. There’s also Stan Lee’s Hero Command, a mobile game where you play as a super hero you’ve never heard of. Then there’s his Backstreet Project, a comic book and web series featuring the members of the Backstreet Boys.

At the height of Lee’s fame he pitched a comic to Playboy that would be drawn by John Romita, an Eisner Award winning artist who worked on The Amazing Spider-Man among other massive projects. According to Romita the comic would have featured characters named “High Priestess Clitanna” and “Lord Peckerton.” Wait a minute…

Even though Stan was receiving a nice payout from Marvel through much of the ’90s and 2000s, he owned no equity in Marvel when it was sold to Disney for $4 billion. Lee later said: “One of my lifelong regrets is that I’ve always been too casual about money. It’s been made abundantly clear to me, by friends others, that I should have realized I was creating a whole kaboodle of characters that became valuable franchises, but I was creating them for others.” We’re glad to see his luck has changed.