A billionaire industrialist developing technologies that others believed impossible. A team of heroes using science to understand the universe. A secret government agency protecting its citizens from threats that may not even exist. No, these aren’t characters in a Stan Lee comic: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the heroic researchers at LIGO, and the secretive folks at the NSA and GCHQ are very real parts of a world – ours – that seems to become more like an extension of the Marvel universe every day.

Unless you’ve been in cryogenic deep freeze for the last decade, you’ve probably noticed the wave of Marvel film and television franchises breaking relentlessly across the entertainment landscape. What’s slightly less obvious is that almost all these stories were originally created by the same comic book writer. Deep breath: Spider-Man, the X-­Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, SHIELD, Daredevil: all of them were created by Stan Lee.

For the best part of two decades, through the 1960s and 70s, Lee conceived and scripted the pantheon of superheroes that has made Marvel arguably the most significant “shared universe” in today’s entertainment landscape. This period of near superhuman creativity is at the heart of Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvellous Memoir by Stan Lee, co­-authored with Peter David and featuring outstanding illustrations from Colleen Doran. It’s hard to read about Lee’s life story, or consider his career, without concluding that the master of the Marvel universe weighs in as one ofthe great storytellers of the post­war era – perhaps the greatest.

If that claim has you bellowing names like Vladimir Nabokov or Margaret Atwood at your screen, that might be because the culture that has raised Lee up to such grand status is not yours. “Geek” and “nerd” were still schoolyard insults when Stan Lee gave us an iconic one: Spider-Man. A young orphan of slight build, Peter Parker is the archetypal geek hiding in his bedroom. Even after a radioactive spider bite gives him great power, Parker meets the great responsibilities that they bring with the heart, soul and odd behavioural ticks of a true nerd.

To borrow the words of Mark “The Martian” Watney, Lee’s characters are never afraid to “science the shit” out of any problem they face. The Fantastic Four may be worse for wear after three cosmically awful film adaptations, but Lee’s first super­team remain his most charming creation. Faced with an attack of the Skrulls or the oversize threat of a rampaging Galactus, Reed Richards and crew turn first and foremost to science to solve the problem. It is science (galactic rays) that transformed the four into Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing, and it is science that exposed them to those rays.



Science is crucial in Lee’s greatest creations: like the villainous Doctor Doom, who wields super-science for evil, to billionaire inventor Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, who uses his mastery of science to fight for the good. Before Lee, heroes were all supermen, or strutting John Waynes, who triumphed through strength or ruthlessness. Lee’s heroes triumph through brains, invention, innovation and most of all, SCIENCE. It’s all oddly prescient of what geek culture would become 50 years later, with hackers and tech giants wielding enormous power for good and ill. Given the vast popularity of Marvel among geeks, it’s not inconceivable that Lee helped inspire a lot of those people who are reshaping our world today.

But Stan Lee’s stories are all just weird fantasy and make-believe! They’re not real. Yes, but as we move from what physicist Michio Kaku calls “the age of scientific discovery to the age of scientific mastery”, Lee’s super-science fantasies seem less preposterous and more prophetic. Like all great mythical worlds, the Marvel universe speaks to us in metaphors, symbols and other non-literal truths. And as the dreamer who brought these modern myths into reality, Stan Lee may well be remembered as one of literature’s greatest heroes.