Stan Lee Dead at 95

STAN LEE

Godfather of Marvel Comics, dead at age 95

(December 28, 1922 - November 12, 2018)

[Source: Yahoo!News] Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics godfather who helped create Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man and so many more “feet of clay” superheroes, characters that both reinvented the comic genre and formed the basis for the now-dominant motion-picture form, died Monday, according to TMZ and the Hollywood Reporter. He was 95.

In 2018, as the latest Marvel movie, Black Panther, was winning over audiences and critics, Lee canceled public appearances due to an irregular heartbeat and pneumonia. While he returned to the convention circuit a couple of months later, longtime friends and admirers, such as filmmaker/podcaster Kevin Smith, said they were no longer able to communicate with the comic legend, and a report said a battle over the control of Lee’s estate was underway.  

Lee, Marvel’s longtime editor and publisher, was credited as an executive producer on nearly 150 films and TV shows based on Marvel titles, including the billion-dollar-grossing X-Men, Spider-Man, Avengers, and Iron Man franchises. Other productions bearing Lee’s name include the Wolverine, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor and Doctor Strange films, as well as the Jessica Jones and Luke Cage series.

As of 2017, four of the world’s top 20 all-time box-office hits were based on characters co-created by Lee: The Avengers; Avengers: Age of Ultron; Iron Man 3 and Captain America: Civil War. Many more Marvel movies bearing Lee’s name, if not featuring one of Lee’s signature onscreen appearances, are in the pipeline. In 2018 alone, Lee appeared in Black Panther; Ant-Man and the Wasp; Avengers: Infinity War; and Venom. He will also appear in the untitled Avengers movie, due out in 2019.

“Stan’s impact on popular culture is immeasurable,” Tobey Maguire, star of the 2000s’ Spider-Man movies, once said at a Comic-Con event honoring Lee.

Hard as it was to sum up what Lee meant to what we watch, read and consume, the world kept trying. Lee was presented with the Producers Guild’s Vanguard Award, the National Medal of the Arts and a Disney Legends Award. At age 91, he was placed among Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas on Forbes’ annual ranking of the most influential celebrities.

Lee had an aw-shucks take on his career and legacy: “I’m just a guy who wrote comic books,” he would say.

Lee’s own origin story went like this: He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in New York City. In 1939, when he was 17, Martin Goodman, his cousin Jean’s husband, launched Timely Comics, the forerunner to Marvel. Goodman hired the young Lee to refill inkwells for Timely’s editing team, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, both already renowned for having created the star-spangled Captain America.

When Kirby and Simon left Marvel in 1941, Lee was transformed like Peter Parker was from nerdy high-schooler to Spider-Man: The former gofer was tapped to be Timely’s lead writer, art director and editor-in-chief. The latter title was something Lee, outside a break to serve in the Army during World War II, would hold until the 1970s.

In the 1950s, Timely, which morphed to Atlas, which morphed to Marvel, churned out monster, mystery and cowboy tales. Superheroes surfaced only occasionally. Marvel was on the ropes, and Lee was bored.

“Around 1960, I told my wife, ‘I can’t stand this anymore,'” Lee said. “…My wife said, ‘If you want to quit anyway, before you leave why not do a comic or two the way you want.'”

Around the same time, Lee would recall, Goodman told his editor he wanted a superhero team-up title, à la Justice League of America, a then-hot, new hit for rival DC Comics.

A year later, in 1961, the first issue of The Fantastic Four, co-created by Lee and Kirby, who’d returned to the Marvel fold, was published. The title was unlike anything comic-book fans had seen.

Where the JLA was an all-for-one collective of do-gooders, the Fantastic Four was a group of mutants who bickered.

“I changed the whole line around,” Lee would say. “New ways of [characters] talking, hangups, introspection and brooding.”

Lee’s vision for the superhero came down to this: “Inside their colorful, costumed booties they’d still have feet of clay,” he wrote in his book, Origin of Marvel Comics.

The thinking was revolutionary.

“The beauty of Stan Lee’s characters is that they were characters first and superheroes next,” Jeff Kline, a producer of animated series (Transformers Prime, Dragon Tales), once said. “They never just had superpowers.”

Hulk, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, Nick Fury, the Silver Surfer, Ant-Man and Black Panther were among the flawed heroes and antiheroes Lee and Kirby cranked out, one after the other, through the early 1960s.

“Lee and Kirby were the Lennon and McCartney of comics,” Dark Horse Comics founder Mike Richardson once told the Los Angeles Times.

With Steve Ditko, Lee co-created Spider-Man, the web-slinging outsider who would become, status-wise, Marvel’s equivalent of Superman. It was Lee who penned, in the very first Spider-Man adventure in Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the words that would famously be boiled down to, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Lee was front and center as Marvel rose like a rocket, and he became a star (complete with his own catchphrase, “Excelsior!”) to baby-boomer and Gen-X readers of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1960s, Hollywood began mining Marvel for fodder for children’s cartoons. As comics moved into the mainstream, Marvel heroes went primetime with the 1970s shows The Amazing Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk.

Lee’s characters had a tougher time transitioning to the big screen. While DC scored successes with the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise and the Tim Burton Batman movies, Spider-Man and his cohorts languished in development hell. For a time, the most famous Marvel movie was the one that never got released: the low-budget, Roger Corman-branded Fantastic Four. (Lee was not a producer on that fiasco.) In 1996, Marvel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Then, in 2000, X-Men opened in theaters, and everything changed. The bigger-than-expected hit spawned multiple spinoffs, including the Wolverine and Deadpool movies, and, along with the Sam Raimi Spider-Man that followed in 2002, sent Hollywood on a superhero binge from which it has yet to back away from.

Lee’s name not only appeared in the credits, but the man himself appeared onscreen, a cameo tradition that dated back at least to the 1989 TV-movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk and will continue with the upcoming Wreck It Ralph sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, which open Nov. 21. His 2017 cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 teased that Lee’s omnipresence was due to his being one of the all-seeing Watchers — yet more characters created by Lee and Kirby.

Lee once joked his cameos were the reason the Marvel movies were so successful. “The cameo is very brief,” he said. “Somebody might miss it, you might’ve reached down for popcorn. If you missed a cameo, what do you do? You run to the box office and buy another ticket! So half of the money they’ve made is because of my cameos!”

In 2009, Disney bought Marvel Entertainment, and a price tag was essentially affixed to the characters, adventures and titles that originated at the Lee-era Marvel Comics: $4 billion.

Lee, who stepped down as Marvel publisher in the 1990s, kept a hand in the company as its chairman emeritus. Always a hustler, Lee founded the media company POW! Entertainment and starred in his own reality-TV series, Who Wants to Be a Superhero?.

In 2017, the man who’d left an imprint on so many literally left his prints at the TCL Chinese Theatre. The ceremony was held less than two weeks after Lee’s wife of 69 years, Joan Lee, died at the age of 95.

Lee grappled with claims of elder abuse, which were being investigated by Los Angeles police, in the past year. He was granted a temporary restraining order against a former business manager in June, following a bizarre series of events, including the disappearance of millions from his bank accounts and the sale of his blood to fans. However, he insisted just last month, “There really isn’t that much drama.”

Through it all, Lee showed no signs of slowing down or of losing the ability to spin a good story. Asked once which of his characters was his favorite, Lee answered as any proud parent would: “I love ’em all,” he said.

"Excelsior, True Believers!" 

"Nuff Said."

Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko Dies

STEVE DITKO
(November 2, 1927 – c. June 29, 2018)

[Source: Syfy] Steve Ditko, the visionary comics artist and writer who co-created, with Stan Lee, the characters of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, has reportedly died at the age of 90.

 

Reports of Ditko's death began surfacing Friday night (June 29) on social media, and now the New York Police Department confirms (per The Hollywood Reporter) that Ditko was found dead in his apartment that day, and that he was believed to have died two days prior (June 27). Ditko leaves behind no known survivors. 

The extremely reclusive artist, who was still said to work in a midtown Manhattan studio as of 2016, did not give an interview or make a public appearance in more than five decades. His contributions to comics and pop culture, however, cannot be understated. Launching his career in 1953, Ditko got a job two years later at Marvel Comics precursor Atlas. In 1962, editor Stan Lee began developing a teen superhero and, after initially working with Jack Kirby, turned to Ditko.

Spider-Man debuted in Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962), with Lee and Ditko's initial 38-issue run setting Peter Parker on the path to become one of the world's three most popular superheroes (alongside Batman and Superman). A year later, in Strange Tales #110 (July 1963), they introduced Doctor Strange, the master of the mystic arts. 

Ditko continued to work at Marvel, DC, Charlton, and other publishers before leaving mainstream comics in 1998, creating or co-creating characters like Squirrel Girl, the Question, the Creeper, and many more. While remaining on the fringes of the industry until his passing, Ditko and his sumptuous, instantly recognizable artwork influenced it in ways that will never be forgotten.

Joan Lee passes away at age 93

JOAN LEE
(March 1922 – July 6, 2017)

Stan Lee's wife of nearly seven decades

dies at age 93

[Source: Syfy] Our thoughts are with Stan Lee and his family right now, as Joan, his wife of 69 years, passed away this morning in Los Angeles.

 

According to The Hollywood Reporter, after suffering a stroke and being hospitalized earlier this week, Joan passed "quietly and surrounded by her family." She was 93, and survived by Stan and their daughter J.C. (Joan Celia).

Born Joan Clayton Boocock in England, she would go on to become a hat model. She impulsively married an American soldier during World War II, and moved to New York, only to find out the man and the city weren't exactly to her liking.

It was at that time that a friend wanted to set up Stan with a model named Betty. But instead of Betty, apparently the girl of Stan's dreams, answered the door:

"When I was young, there was one girl I drew; one body and face and hair. It was my idea of what a girl should be. The perfect woman. And when I got out of the Army, somebody, a cousin of mine, knew a model, a hat model at a place called Laden Hats. He said, 'Stan, there's this really pretty girl named Betty. I think you’d like her. She might like you. Why don’t you go over and ask her to lunch.' Blah, blah, blah. So I went up to this place. Betty didn’t answer the door. But Joan answered, and she was the head model. I took one look at her — and she was the girl I had been drawing all my life. And then I heard the English accent. And I’m a nut for English accents! She said, 'May I help you?' And I took a look at her, and I think I said something crazy like, 'I love you.' I don’t remember exactly. But anyway, I took her to lunch. I never met Betty, the other girl. I think I proposed to [Joan] at lunch.”

Stan's love eventually won Joan over, and the couple moved to Nevada for the requisite amount of time necessary to arrange for a divorce (it was apparently the easiest way to get one back in the day). After it was finalized, Stan and Joan were married an hour later.

Good thing too, A) because they obviously loved each other very much. And B) because if you think about it, without Joan, we may never have been gifted some of our most beloved Marvel tales. As the legend goes, when would-be novelist Stan worked at Marvel's precursor, Timeley/Atlas Comics, he became increasingly frustrated with the medium, particularly its lack of flawed characters. So much so, that he contemplated quitting.

But as Stan told THR, Joan said, "Before you quit, why don’t you write one comic you are proud of?"

That comic became the Fantastic Four. From there, Stan would go on to create some of the most beloved titles in the business. He would also become the most recognized cameo-ist while he was at it. Joan also got into the acting action a bit, as a voice actress in two '90s Marvel cartoons -- Miss Forbes in Fantastic Four and Madame Web in Spider-Man. She also played herself in last year's X-Men: Apocalypse. And she was a writer too, having published a novel titled The Pleasure Palace in 1987.

But to Stan, she was Joanie. May she rest in peace.

"The Pro" Comic to become a movie

T H E   P R O .

[Source: Deadline] A lot going on at Paramount Pictures, but they are still making deals. The studio has picked up rights to The Pro, a graphic novel by Garth Ennis, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti. Erwin Stoff of 3 Arts is producing and Zoe McCarthy has been hired to write the screenplay. She is best known for her script Bitches On A Boat.

The graphic novel writers and illustrators all have stuff going on in Hollywood. Palmiotti’s graphic novel Painkiller Jane has just attached Jessica Chastain, and he is currently writing the comic Harley Quinn along with Conner for DC Comics. Ennis is producing the AMC series Preacher, based on the graphic novel series he created with Steve Dillon.

First published in 2002, The Pro is in its eighth printing with Image Comics and Paperfilms. The logline: A prostitute who wakes up one day with superhero powers and is asked to join the League of Honor to help curb her anti-heroic behavior. The film puts a humorous twist on the superhero genre.

WATCH THE ANIMATED COMIC HERE.

Stan Lee in ‘The Reflection’

Stan Lee Ventures Into Anime Territory Again With ‘The Reflection’

[Source: Fandom] Comic book pioneer and regular cameo star Stan Lee (X-men and The Avengers) will venture again into anime territory with THE REFLECTION. At Los Angeles Comic Con, Stan Lee revealed a teaser visual and staff for anime project THE REFLECTION. The new series is a collaboration between Pow! Entertainment company (Lee’s company), Studio Deen and director Hiroshi Nagahama (Flowers of Evil, Detroit Metal City, Mushi-Shi)

THE REFLECTION

Studio DEEN describes the story:

“After THE REFLECTION, some of the people in all parts of the world are discovered with super powers. Some become heroes, and others villains. How did the Reflection happen? What was the cause of it? With many unsolved mysteries, the world is lead into turmoil.”

The staff includes:
Stan Lee: original work
Pow! Entertainment and Studio Deen: project planning
Hiroshi Nagahama (Flowers of Evil, Detroit Metal City, Mushi-Shi): director, character design, co-creators
Yoshihiko Umakoshi (Casshern Sins, Berserk, Mushi-Shi): animation designer
Trevor Horn (ZTT Records): music producer
9nine (Star Driver, Magi, Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun): incidental music

Stan Lee’s First Anime: Heroman

This isn’t Stan Lee’s first venture into anime. The Godfather of comic book heroes has collaborated with anime studio BONES on the Heroman anime series. And while Heroman received positive reviews for its lighthearted fighting scenes, it did not add anything new or unique to the Shounen genre. However, Lee’s work not only spread to anime but also manga as he and Hiroyuki Takei collaborated on the manga series, which ended in October 2015.

Release Date?

While the panel did not reveal much, we do know that it will get a worldwide release sometime next year. Last year the plan was to release it first in Japan, so luckily, that changed. In the meantime, you can watch Heroman and see if Stan Lee’s magic translates well into anime territory.

Happy 90th Birthday, Stan Lee!

Hey, True Believers, STAN LEE, Turns 90!

[Source: TulsaWorld] Stan Lee turns 90 today, marking decades of amazing contribution to the comic industry. His characters are mentioned in pop songs, are displayed in every toy store, and have been seen in nearly every facet of American society. He's created some of the most iconic images in pop culture, and nearly anyone you meet can tell you who Captain America, The Hulk or the Avengers are.

Stan's contributions are nothing less than epic, and we're counting the great things Stan Lee did to change the industry.

Stan created the Fantastic Four and Avengers

Marvel comics was struggling to sell issues in the late 1940s and featured a usual 'monster of the week' comic as well as other less inspiring titles. When Stan took over, he came up with the idea of a 'superhero family,' and subsequently created the Fantastic Four. What was unusual about the Fantastic Four was their relationship to one another. They were all scientists, but they had other ties besides simply being NASA professionals. Three of the four were related, and the fourth member, "The Thing," was the archetype for societal outcasts. It was a new spin on the superhero genre which, to that point, had only shown loner superheros with sidekicks.

The Avengers was a culmination of Marvel's top-selling heroes in a 'super brand.' Essentially it was a brilliant idea co-written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to take their top-selling individual super heroes and make them a vibrant, cohesive team.

Stan created Spider-man, Thor, The Hulk and Captain America

Stan's character creations were excellent feels on the societal pulse of American society. Spider-man was a typical teenager with emerging abilities that made him heroic and dangerous, the Hulk had an anger problem that turned him into a super-powered Dr. Hyde, and Captain America was the idealization of the American way of life. These characters not only functioned as their own entities, but reflect society of the time with the deep issues they tackled.

Stan created the X-Men as the socially outcast superhero team

In keeping with this theme, Stan created the X-Men in 1963. These five teenagers were similar to Spider-man in that they were going through changes and realizing both their potential and danger. However, Stan decided to take it a step further and placed them as the underdogs, where they were continually hated for what they were and considered outcasts instead of heroes. There was a concerted effort in dialogue to reinforce the idea. There was even a throw-away comment by Cyclops who, when he saved a bus of kids, said "They're probably going to say it was Iron Man's repulsor beams that saved them." This set the stage for some great social commentary later on as the team expanded.

Stan hired Jack Kirby

When Stan Lee took over, Marvel was struggling with keeping its readers visually interested. Stan hired artist Jack Kirby to reinvigorate the characters and titles. Kirby is widely considered the father of modern comic book storytelling and sequential art. His characters would often jump from the pages and perspective was heavily used as well as classical art composition, which had been widely ignored previously.

Stan has had a knack for knowing who to surround himself with and who to hire to get the best quality of work possible for the project. Kirby was just one of the many people Stan hired to bring his ideas and titles to life and capture the imagination of entire generations.

Stan Lee has had one of the greatest impacts on our generation, and he shows no signs of stopping.

We raise a glass of Romulan Ale (Asgardian beer as well) to you, sir.

And just for fun, here's a clips reel of all the cameos Stan has made in comic book movies. Much like the man himself, it's pretty incredible.