57 Fun Facts About Stan Lee

What was Stan Lee's birth name?

Stanley Martin Lieber split his first name in two to sign his earliest comics work, and the pen name took over so completely that he eventually made Stan Lee his legal name.

In the second Guardians of the Galaxy film, Stan Lee's cameo has him telling stories to which cosmic beings?

The Watchers scene nodded to a fan theory: it showed Lee as a roving informant reporting on events on Earth, implying that every one of his cameos had been the same man.

Which hero of a French Revolution adventure novel did Stan Lee call 'the first superhero I had read about'?

The Scarlet Pimpernel is a foppish English baronet who secretly rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine and leaves a small red flower as his calling card: a double life decades before comic books took up the idea.

Which Guardian of the Galaxy began life in a 1960 Stan Lee monster story as an invader come to abduct humans?

Groot arrived as the boastful king of Planet X, speaking in full sentences as he sealed off a town with walking trees; only decades later was he reinvented as the gentle hero of three words.

Which Martin Goodman publishing division, later Marvel, did Stan Lee join as a teenage assistant?

Timely. An uncle who worked there told him the comics office needed an assistant, and the owner happened to be married to Lee's cousin.

Which task was among Stan Lee's first duties as a teenage office assistant?

Filling the artists' inkwells. The $8-a-week gofer also fetched lunch and erased pencil lines from finished pages, the humble start of some six decades with the company.

Stan Lee's first published story, a two-page text filler in 1941, starred which superhero?

Captain America. The prose tale ran in the hero's third issue only so the comic could qualify for cheap magazine postage, and Lee admitted nobody read such filler, but it made him a published writer.

Stan Lee said he adopted his pen name to save his real name for what?

A serious novel. Comics had such low status that he kept his birth name back for the Great American Novel he hoped to write, yet Stan Lee was the name he later made legally his own.

Which wealthy Stan Lee hero did he expect 1960s readers to dislike?

Iron Man. Lee wanted the challenge of taking an arms inventor profiting from the Vietnam War, a man young readers should hate, and turning him into a hero they rooted for.

When Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left in 1941, which job did Martin Goodman hand the teenage Stan Lee?

Editor. Goodman asked him to hold the job only until he could find an adult, then never replaced him, and Lee ran the comics line for decades.

What military classification did Lee say he held in the US Army, shared by only nine men?

Playwright. The Army gave him the title after moving him to a unit that wrote training films and manuals, where Frank Capra and Dr. Seuss also served.

Which tool did Stan Lee use to open a locked army mail room for a comics assignment, nearly landing in prison?

A screwdriver. He unscrewed his way in to fetch a letter with his next script assignment, and was threatened with Leavenworth prison until a colonel stepped in.

Stan Lee joined which rock band as their blood was mixed into the red ink of their 1977 Marvel comic?

Kiss. The band flew to the printers near Buffalo and added their blood to the ink in front of a notary, so Marvel could say the comic was printed in the band's own blood.

Whose advice led Stan Lee to give his superheroes human flaws, since he was ready to quit comics anyway?

His wife's. Joan told him to write one comic exactly the way he wanted, because the worst that could happen was being fired from a job he no longer wanted.

Which rival publisher's 1960 super-team prompted Martin Goodman to ask Lee for one of his own?

The Justice League of America. Goodman heard the rival's new team comic was selling well and told Lee to invent a super-team to match; Lee answered with heroes who squabbled like a family.

What was the first superhero team Lee and Jack Kirby created together, in 1961?

The Fantastic Four. They had no secret identities and bickered among themselves, a break from flawless heroes that made the comic a hit; Lee and Kirby later disputed who deserved the credit.

With which artist did Lee co-create Spider-Man and Doctor Strange?

Steve Ditko. He plotted the stories himself and left notes in the margins for Lee's dialogue, but the pair fell out and he quit Marvel in bitterness in 1966.

Which artist, creator of the Sub-Mariner in 1939, co-created Daredevil with Stan Lee?

Bill Everett. His Daredevil of 1964 wore yellow; the all-red costume fans know arrived only in issue seven, drawn by another artist.

What did Lee call the fan club for which he recorded messages in 1965?

The Merry Marvel Marching Society. A dollar bought fans a membership card, stickers and a record of Lee and his staff clowning around to welcome them to the club.

What was the name of Lee's monthly column in Marvel comics?

Stan's Soapbox. Between shameless plugs for new comics, Lee used the column from 1967 to speak out against bigotry and intolerance.

Lee's trademark sign-off 'Excelsior!' is also the official motto of what?

New York State. Lee said he adopted the word because rivals kept copying his other sign-offs, and this was one they would not understand or know how to spell.

Under the 'Marvel Method', what did Lee give artists instead of a full script?

A brief synopsis. The artist paced and drew the whole story from it and Lee added the dialogue afterwards, which sped up production but blurred who had created what.

Stan Lee said that if a kid had to go to which book, 'that's not the worst thing that could happen'?

A dictionary. Lee filled his captions and dialogue with long words on purpose, hoping young readers would look them up and learn them.

Which artist took over The Amazing Spider-Man in 1966 and helped make it Marvel's top seller?

John Romita Sr. Within months he gave readers their first look at Mary Jane Watson, who greets Peter Parker with 'Face it, Tiger... you just hit the jackpot!'

Which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby hero of 1966 was mainstream American comics' first superhero of African descent?

Black Panther. T'Challa debuted months before the Black Panther Party was founded, and Marvel later renamed him Black Leopard for a short while to avoid the association.

Which planet-devouring giant did Stan Lee and Jack Kirby send to Earth in a three-part story of 1966?

Galactus. His herald, the Silver Surfer, was Kirby's own addition: Lee is said to have been astonished to find a silver man on a surfboard in the finished art.

What followed when Stan Lee ran a 1971 Spider-Man drug story without the Comics Code seal?

The Code was relaxed. A government office had asked Lee for an anti-drug story, yet the Code office refused its seal; the issues sold well without it, and the rules were rewritten to allow drugs shown as a vice.

Martin Goodman had so little faith in Spider-Man that the hero debuted in the last issue of which anthology comic?

Amazing Fantasy. The title was about to be cancelled, so the gamble cost little; the issue sold so well that the web-slinger had a comic of his own within months.

Which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby hero charges into battle shouting 'It's clobberin' time!'?

The Thing. Lee wrote Ben Grimm with the working-class swagger of New York's Lower East Side, and Kirby, who grew up there, modelled the rocky bruiser on himself.

Which heroine, a lawyer by day, did Stan Lee and artist John Buscema introduce at the end of the 1970s?

She-Hulk. Lee rushed out Bruce Banner's cousin because he feared the makers of the Hulk TV series would invent a female spin-off first, as they had with The Bionic Woman.

What did Stan Lee move from New York to California around 1980 to develop for Marvel?

Film and TV projects. Lee set up an animation studio and chased Hollywood deals, but most of his live-action plans disappointed, and Marvel's big-screen hits came only some twenty years later.

In which Kevin Smith comedy does Stan Lee play himself, giving a lovesick comics fan advice on romance?

Mallrats. Marvel returned the favour after his death: Lee's cameo in Captain Marvel, set in 1995, shows him on a train rehearsing his lines from the Mallrats script.

How did Stan Lee Media, the internet studio Stan Lee co-founded in 1998, come to an end?

In bankruptcy. The start-up ran out of money in about two years, and co-founder Peter Paul fled to Brazil before going to prison for securities fraud; Lee himself was never charged.

Stan Lee sued Marvel in 2002 over what?

Film profits. His contract promised him 10 per cent of Marvel's screen earnings, but he said the hit films had barely paid him; Marvel settled in 2005.

What do the letters in the name of Stan Lee's company POW! stand for?

Purveyors of Wonder. Lee co-founded the company in 2001 to create new properties, having made his famous heroes as an employee who owned none of them.

What was Stan Lee's creation Stripperella?

A risqué animated series for Spike TV. Lee created it around Pamela Anderson, who voiced and inspired the heroine, a stripper leading a secret double life as a crime-fighting agent.

In the 2001 series Just Imagine..., Lee reimagined the heroes of which rival publisher?

DC. Once his Marvel contract stopped being exclusive, Lee wrote his own versions of the rival's best-known heroes for the company he had spent decades competing against.

Which former Beatle did Stan Lee announce as the lead of a superhero cartoon in the mid-2000s?

Ringo Starr. Lee planned to turn the drummer into a reluctant, earth-saving animated hero with a great sense of rhythm, voiced by Starr himself.

What prize went to the winner of Stan Lee's reality contest Who Wants to Be a Superhero?

Their own comic book. Lee himself scripted a Dark Horse comic about the first winner's hero, Feedback, the creation of contestant Matthew Atherton.

Guinness listed Stan Lee as cinema's highest-grossing actor in 2022, cameos included; which of his films earned the most?

Avengers: Endgame. It took about $2.8 billion and holds his final cameo, released after his death: a digitally de-aged Lee drives past in 1970 shouting 'Make love, not war!'

Which branch of the US Army did Stan Lee join in 1942, before it put him to work writing training films?

The Signal Corps. He started out repairing communications gear, until the Army noticed he could write and moved him to scripts and manuals; he spent the whole war in the United States.

Stan Lee wrote his poem God Woke to be recited at which New York venue in 1972?

Carnegie Hall. Lee composed the poem for his stage appearance there, and it came back 44 years later as a graphic novel he launched at Comic-Con.

Where did Joan Boocock divorce, then marry Stan Lee next door?

Reno. Joan, a hat model from Newcastle, spent six weeks in Nevada to qualify for a divorce, and the judge who granted it married her to Lee straight afterwards.

In which sitcom did Stan Lee play himself in 2010, calling the police on a fan who turned up at his door?

The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon misses Lee's comic-shop signing because of a court date, so he turns up at the writer's house instead and comes away with a restraining order.

Stan Lee said the Hulk drew on Frankenstein's monster and which other classic horror story?

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Lee wanted a hero who was also the monster, a decent scientist who turns into a brute he cannot control, and he saw Frankenstein's creature as misunderstood, not evil.

Which national honour did President George W. Bush present to Stan Lee in 2008?

The National Medal of Arts. It is the highest honour the US government gives to artists, and Lee received it for reinventing the American comic book with complex stories and humanly flawed heroes.

Which soldier did Stan Lee and Jack Kirby create in 1963 to lead the Howling Commandos?

Nick Fury. He began as a Second World War sergeant leading an ethnically mixed platoon, and Marvel later recast him as the spymaster of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Which Daily Bugle staffer, introduced by Stan Lee in 1967, was among comics' first serious African-American supporting characters?

Robbie Robertson. Lee made him the paper's conscience, a calm voice of reason set against J. Jonah Jameson's campaign to discredit Spider-Man.

Stan Lee's younger brother Larry scripted the 1962 debut of which hero from Lee's plot?

Thor. Larry wrote the thunder god's first stories from his brother's plots, then spent more than thirty years drawing the Spider-Man newspaper strip.

A 1965 Esquire poll of college students ranked Spider-Man and the Hulk alongside Bob Dylan and which revolutionary?

Che Guevara. Student radicals counted the two Lee heroes among their favourite revolutionary icons, a sign that Marvel was no longer read only by children.

As a teenager, Stan Lee held which part-time job in New York?

Writing obituaries for a news service. They were for celebrities who were still alive, written in advance, and Lee joked that you only knew you were famous once yours was on file.

Which job did Stan Lee take up at Marvel in 1972?

Publisher. He stepped back from the monthly comics to spend all his time promoting the company, and became Marvel's public face on campuses and at conventions.

Which French artist drew Lee's Silver Surfer limited series Parable?

Mœbius. Working from just six pages of plot by Lee, the French master drew, coloured and hand-lettered the story himself, and it won an Eisner Award in 1989.

Which Italian film director visited Stan Lee's Marvel office as a fan of Spider-Man?

Federico Fellini. Lee had spent years embarrassed to admit he wrote comic books, and then the director of La Dolce Vita turned up at his office to pay his respects.

In his first on-screen Marvel cameo, in a 1989 TV film, Stan Lee played the foreman of what?

A jury. The film was The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, and the small courtroom part began a run of cameos that lasted three decades, the last released after his death.

In July 2017, Lee and Jack Kirby were jointly given which honour?

Disney Legends. Disney had bought Marvel in 2009, so its hall of fame took in the two men whose 1960s heroes fill its films; Kirby's honour came 23 years after his death.

Stan Lee created a superhero for each team of which league, unveiled at its 2011 All-Star Game in Raleigh?

The NHL. Lee's 30 Guardians were each named after a team, such as the Flame for Calgary, but fans shrugged and the project was dropped within the year.