Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics godfather who helped create Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man and so many more “feet of clay” superheroes, characters that both reinvented the comic genre and formed the basis for the now-dominant motion-picture form, died Monday. He was 95.

In 2018, as the latest Marvel movie, Black Panther, was winning over audiences and critics, Lee canceled public appearances due to an irregular heartbeat and pneumonia. While he returned to the convention circuit a couple of months later, longtime friends and admirers, such as filmmaker/podcaster Kevin Smith, said they were no longer able to communicate with the comic legend, and a report said a battle over the control of Lee’s estate was underway.

Stan Lee at the premiere of Avengers: Infinity War on April 23 in Hollywood. (Photo: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic) More

Lee, Marvel’s longtime editor and publisher, was credited as an executive producer on nearly 150 films and TV shows based on Marvel titles, including the billion-dollar-grossing X-Men, Spider-Man, Avengers, and Iron Man franchises. Other productions bearing Lee’s name include the Wolverine, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor and Doctor Strange films, as well as the Jessica Jones and Luke Cage series.

As of 2017, four of the world’s top 20 all-time box-office hits were based on characters co-created by Lee: The Avengers; Avengers: Age of Ultron; Iron Man 3 and Captain America: Civil War. Many more Marvel movies bearing Lee’s name, if not featuring one of Lee’s signature onscreen appearances, are in the pipeline. In 2018 alone, Lee appeared in Black Panther; Ant-Man and the Wasp; Avengers: Infinity War; and Venom. He will also appear in the untitled Avengers movie, due out in 2019.

“Stan’s impact on popular culture is immeasurable,” Tobey Maguire, star of the 2000s’ Spider-Man movies, once said at a Comic-Con event honoring Lee.

Hard as it was to sum up what Lee meant to what we watch, read and consume, the world kept trying. Lee was presented with the Producers Guild’s Vanguard Award, the National Medal of the Arts and a Disney Legends Award. At age 91, he was placed among Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas on Forbes’ annual ranking of the most influential celebrities.

Lee had an aw-shucks take on his career and legacy: “I’m just a guy who wrote comic books,” he would say.

Lee’s own origin story went like this: He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in New York City. In 1939, when he was 17, Martin Goodman, his cousin Jean’s husband, launched Timely Comics, the forerunner to Marvel. Goodman hired the young Lee to refill inkwells for Timely’s editing team, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, both already renowned for having created the star-spangled Captain America.

When Kirby and Simon left Marvel in 1941, Lee was transformed like Peter Parker was from nerdy high-schooler to Spider-Man: The former gofer was tapped to be Timely’s lead writer, art director and editor-in-chief. The latter title was something Lee, outside a break to serve in the Army during World War II, would hold until the 1970s.

In the 1950s, Timely, which morphed to Atlas, which morphed to Marvel, churned out monster, mystery and cowboy tales. Superheroes surfaced only occasionally. Marvel was on the ropes, and Lee was bored.

“Around 1960, I told my wife, ‘I can’t stand this anymore,'” Lee said. “My wife said, ‘If you want to quit anyway, before you leave why not do a comic or two the way you want.'”

Around the same time, Lee would recall, Goodman told his editor he wanted a superhero team-up title, à la Justice League of America, a then-hot, new hit for rival DC Comics.

A year later, in 1961, the first issue of The Fantastic Four, co-created by Lee and Kirby, who’d returned to the Marvel fold, was published. The title was unlike anything comic-book fans had seen.