So you would never have suspected anything of Stanley Leiber as he was growing up poor in Manhattan, with his father out of work, living on hot dogs and wandering the streets alone in summer while his friends were away at the camps his parents couldn’t afford. But he could feel that inner strength stirring! It came from words. He read and read and read. Adventure tales, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Zola, Dickens, Shakespeare. He loved the sound of words, the music of vowels and consonants jostling each other. Inside him, he really believed, lay the Great American Novel!

Yet he stumbled into comic-book writing instead, at Timely Comics, Marvel as it became. And wallowed in embarrassment! People scorned him for his silly trade. On the literary totem pole in New York Stanley Lieber was the lowest of the low. Yet they did not know—even he did not know!—that as soon as he had signed himself “Stan Lee” on his first bit of text-filler in 1941, hiding himself as he thought, he was putting on his superhero clothes! Once the bright beams of his new ideas had dazzled his boss at Marvel (it took a while), nothing stopped him! Pulse-pounding characters flowed from him all the time. He could write five books a week. Sales of Marvel’s titles rose from 18.7m in 1961 to 32m in 1965 until DC Comics, and Superman and Batman, were stunned and reeling! Stan Lee’s legions of fans and true believers were exhorted to march onwards, shouting his watchword “Excelsior!” To the highest!

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