Stan Lee

Stan Lee grows up in New York City during the Depression and goes on to shape the American comic book. Bob Batchelor follows his life from those streets to the National Medal of Arts, tracing how one man's work reached millions of comic readers in the 1960s and later billions of moviegoers worldwide.

Lee becomes editor at Marvel Comics as a teenager, helped by natural talent and hard work. Then come decades of toil in the industry.

Eventually he takes a gamble and, with talented artists, co-creates the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, the X-Men and the Avengers in a burst of invention that reshapes the medium.

This is a biography, and it looks closely at the 1960s comics that lifted Marvel from a second-rate company to a legendary publisher. It covers the risks Lee took to bring his characters to life, and his long push to make comics and superheroes part of mainstream culture over more than fifty years.

Batchelor also follows the characters out into the wider world: comic collecting, early merchandising, action figures and the Spider-Man lunchbox. The book argues that superhero stories carry ideas central to the American experience. Lee himself wanted to write the Great American Novel, and the question the book turns on is how he ended up changing popular culture instead.