When Marvel editors Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left the company (years later, Kirby would return to team with Lee in the most fruitful comic collaboration in history), Lee suddenly found himself as lead editor before he was 18. A few years later, he went into the Army, but came back to the same job and has been with Marvel ever since. Before the `60s, Lee tried writing western comics, romances, war stories and humor essays. Then Marvel decided to concentrate on super heroes and Lee created or co-created characters such as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, the Iron Man, The Avengers, Silver Surfer (based on a Jack Kirby concept), and a host of others. This brought about good news and bad news. The good news was, Marvel's pedigree soared. The bad news was, it meant Lee and his Marvel teammates faced a virtual tidal wave of non-stop work. That's when he decided a new comic book production method was needed, and what is now referred to as "The Marvel Method" was born.

"What happened was, in those years, I was writing Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man, and a few other titles, and I simply couldn't keep up," Lee explains. "Up until then, the artists couldn't get started until I gave them a complete script, and I couldn't get scripts together for the various artists on the various books at the same time. So we sometimes had guys standing around, everything took longer and I was getting exhausted. So I came up with the idea of meeting with the artists and giving them the general story information in order to get them started before I had a script. In a half hour or so, I could tell them the plot, who the villain would be, what the problem the hero faces is, how he resolves it and how many pages it should be. Then I would ask them to draw it any way they saw fit. That not only kept the artists busy, but more important, it allowed them to contribute to the story in different ways. They might draw the scene with more depth than I envisioned it, and when they handed me the artwork, I could then fashion captions and dialogue that went along with that art. It ended up giving us greater continuity, and after a while, it became clear we were getting better stories. With this method, we used my story talent, the artists' visual talent, and then I could fit in appropriate dialogue and captions after the art was done. That became known as the Marvel style. I started doing it for expediency and ended up with better comic books. Now, virtually all of the comic book companies do their books this way."

A team of artists now create the art for comics like this recent issue of Iron Man published by Marvel.

Industry Woes
Marvel remains a comic power, despite its recent financial struggles. The advent of new technology and new avenues of entertainment have eaten into the comic book industry. Economic factors such as the growing cost of paper and ink have also made comics less affordable for youngsters. But Lee believes there is room for comic books, cartoons, CD-ROMs and the Internet to exist side-by-side. Creativity, he insists, remains the key. As a consequence, he is concerned about the increasing violent, adult content of comics and the movement away from good, old-fashioned story-telling with characters to which kids can relate. His philosophy is to create characters that, except for their super powers, are usually normal people with normal problems. For example, Spider-Man's alter ego, Peter Parker, is constantly worrying about how to make money and finish school. Lee feels these human elements are being dropped by many modern comic books. "Some of the new comics are good and some are bad, just like anything else," he says. "That's the way it was for us in the old days too. But the problem is the new type of books are a lot grittier, a lot darker, and more violent. The reason for that is understandable. That's the way movies are. It's the way television is. It's the way video games are and it's the way newspapers are. In that sense, comics are no different than any other form of entertainment: they reflect society. The world today seems darker and grittier and so do comics, but because of that, their appeal is more limited. They aren't always appropriate for younger readers and there aren't always characters that readers can relate to."