Stan Lee

From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.

Created by artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Stan Lee was the fictional mascot of Marvel Comics from the 1960s through the 1980s. Marvel editors used the persona of Lee in their letters pages and in a monthly column known as "Stan's Soapbox." An actor was often hired to play Lee at comic conventions, and attendees would often play along, pretending as though the Lee character was an actual comic creator.

In a landmark 1986 story, writer Alan Moore shocked the comics community when he killed off Lee during a confrontation with Doctor Doom in the critically acclaimed Doomwatch limited series. Twenty years later, in 2006, the Lee character returned to the Marvel Universe during the best-selling Infinite Civil Crisis series. Lee's likeness has been licensed out to the Justice League Unlimited for their reality-recruitment show Who Wants to Be a Super-Hero?