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When someone passes away, you tend to think of all the great things they had done. The thing though is someone like Stan Lee has done so much with their life that they have impacted the world in ways you never would have considered. Although Stan Lee is dead, controversy around how much impact he had actually created at Marvel continues.
Stan Lee’s real name was Stanley Martin Lieber. Like many artists such as Joe Kubert and Frank Frazetta, he started at a young age. Early in life before turning 18, he became part of what would later be called Marvel Comics. With no educational background in the field, he would contribute to shock waves that would change history.
Stan Lee’s first comic writing was in Captain America #3. He explained during a 2014 interview with Playboy that it was a prose story and that:
Nobody read those stories. That’s why they let me do one. But you couldn’t call a comic book a magazine and get the magazine postal rates unless you had two pages of type.
In 1978 came a book that became a classic drawing guide, reprinted more times than anyone could count.
Was Stan Lee A Liar? Unfortunately, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee did not get along well. The reason for this is not clear. But it seems as if he took credit for a lot of work that Jack Kirby had actually done.
Stan Lee’s brilliant ideas, such as for the Fantastic Four, has been debated in the book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. It says that Jack Kirby found Marvel “on its ass” and his devotion to creating books that is what kept the company alive.
At the 2012 NICE Convention, guest speaker and writer Alan Moore claimed that Stan Lee at one point took credit for creating Captain America. He also points out that he would have been too young at the time for it to be true.
This page here collaborates what Alan Moore discusses, and shows some margin notes that imply that all the writing was actually done by Jack Kirby all along. Despite all this, the bottom line may be that both people involved simply exaggerated, and became too old to remember exactly what had happened.
The first time I heard of this controversy was in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, which breaks it down rather well. Leave a comment with your opinion on this topic.