Stan Lee
1922 – 2018 · United States
Known for: Co-creator of Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Marvel universe
“With great power there must also come great responsibility.”
Biography
He was ready to quit comics as a lowbrow dead-end, then, in a burst of creativity in the early 1960s, Stan Lee and his collaborators invented Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four and Black Panther, and changed popular mythology forever. His revolution was simple: give superheroes real problems, money, loneliness, self-doubt, so readers could see themselves inside the mask.
For decades he was comics' greatest showman, signing off every column with "Excelsior!" He lived long enough to see his characters become the biggest films in history and to cameo in nearly all of them, the grinning grandfather of a universe that now belongs to the whole world.