UNCLE'S HELP

Lee was born as Stanley Martin Lieber in New York on Dec. 28, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania. At age 17, he became an errand boy at Timely Comics, the company that would evolve into Marvel. He got the job with help from an inside connection, his uncle, according to Lee's autobiography "Excelsior!"

Lee soon earned writing duties and promotions. He penned Western stories and romances, as well as superhero tales, and often wrote standing on the porch of the Long Island, New York, home he shared with his wife, actress Joan Lee, whom he married in 1947 and who died in 2017.

The couple had two children, Joan Celia born in 1950 and Jan Lee who died within three days of her birth in 1953.

In 1961 Lee's boss saw a rival publisher's success with caped crusaders and told Lee to dream up a superhero team.

Lee at the time felt comics were a dead-end career. But his wife urged him to give it one more shot and create the complex characters he wanted to, even if it led to his firing.

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.

"As iconic as Superman may be, he's considered a Boy Scout. He doesn't have any real flaws," Rhoades said. "Whereas you take a Spider-Man, kids identify with him because he had his problems like they did. He suffered from great angst."

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.

He described his creative process to Reuters in outlining how he came up with his character Thor, the god of thunder borrowed from Norse mythology.

"I was trying to think of something that would be totally different," he said. "What could be bigger and even more powerful than the Hulk? And I figured why not a legendary god?"

To give Thor more rhetorical punch, Lee gave him dialogue styled after the Bible and Shakespeare.

As for Tony Stark-Iron Man, he was based on industrialist Howard Hughes, Lee told interviewers.