Stan Lee

Stanley Lieber started at Timely Comics as a young writer and climbed through a family business that would become Marvel. In the 1960s, working with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he co-created Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Thor, the X-Men, Black Panther, and more—characters written with neuroses, rent problems, and recognizable inner lives, a break from the square-jawed norm. A decade later he took on the Comics Code Authority's censorship rules and helped crack them open. The 1980s saw him push Marvel into film and TV with uneven results; the 1990s brought retirement, though he stayed on as t…