The lad’s name was Stanley, and he was looking for a job. Any job. Exactly who hired Stanley Lieber depends on whom you ask. Stan Lee remembers applying directly to [the editor of Timely comics, where his uncle Martin Goodman was publisher] Joe Simon. Simon’s new assistant threw himself into his work with gusto.

According to Stan, as Simon’s assistant he “did a little of everything. I went down and got people their lunches and I filled the inkwells and I did some proofreading and I did some copywriting.” Joe Simon’s take on Stanley’s gofer days: “Mostly we had Stan erasing the pencils off the inked artwork and going out for coffee. He followed us around, we took him to lunch, and he tried to be friends with us. When he didn’t have anything to do, he would sit in a corner of the art department and play his little flute or piccolo, whatever it was, driving Kirby nuts. Jack would yell at him to shut up.” Simon and Kirby let him hang out with them when they played billiards or went bowling. Oh, and just for the record: The musical instrument in question was technically an ocarina.

Stan Lee on his bicycle, which was, in Lee's mind, a “two-wheeled spaceship” that flew him across the universe that was New York City, ca. 1930s. © Courtesy Stan Lee

Simon said that, after just one week on the job, Stanley came to him and asked for a promotion. The first editor of Timely Comics quotes his young assistant’s reasoning: He said he deserved the promotion because “I know everything.”

This may well have been the occasion on which, as Simon described it decades later: “One day I made his life.” He invited the teenager to try his hand at writing one of the two-page “text stories” that were a fixture in virtually all comicbooks in those days. (They had to be. The U.S. Postal Service, in its infinite wisdom, had decreed that any magazine mailed out second class, as comicbook subscription copies were, had to contain at least two pages of text . . . actual typeset prose. Words hand-lettered in dialogue balloons didn’t count.) All the pros knew that no one actually read those stories. But that didn’t stop Stanley from giving those text pages his all. “To Stan,” Simon wrote, “they were the Great American Novel.”

Stan Lee in a promotional photo, ca. 1968. Lee is surrounded by some of the most popular Marvel comics. The first half of 1968 saw the company expand to an astonishing 19 ongoing titles. Marvel was no longer a comics publisher “on the move”... it had arrived. © TM & © 2018 Marvel Entertainment, LLC

Stanley quickly produced a short prose tale with the ungainly title Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge. It featured a byline: “by Stan Lee.” As Simon recalled the ensuing exchange:

“Who’s Stan Lee?” I asked.

“I’m changing my name,” the former Stanley Lieber announced, “for journalistic reasons.”

“It would be better for a laundry.”

“I hadn’t considered that,” said Stanley. He paused in deep thought. “I wonder what the comicbook prospects are in China.”

The above exchange may be apocryphal, but that text story was printed in Captain America Comics No. 3 (cover-dated May 1941, but on sale no later than March). It marked the official writing debut of “Stan Lee,” a pseudonym that would one day become Stanley Lieber’s legal name and would eventually be known to many people who wouldn’t have recognized the names of other prominent comics creators, not even “Siegel and Shuster” or Bob Kane — or “Simon and Kirby.” “I changed it,” Stan has said, “because I felt someday I’d be writing the Great American Novel and I didn’t want to use my real name on these silly little comics.” (Again with the Great American Novel thing!) Stan soon got the go-ahead from Simon to script actual comics tales.

Stan Lee Meets the Amazing Spider-Man No. 1, November 2006. Back when Lee wrote Amazing Fantasy No. 15 and Fantastic Four No. 1, little could he have realized that these books would commit him to the field for life — and the images would become two of the most famous in all of popular culture. Tributes to the immense contribution of both men are legion, but few express it graphically like the array of homages those covers have inspired. © TM & © 2018 Marvel Entertainment, LLC

Stan had precious little contact with his esteemed publisher Martin Goodman in the early days. As he recalls it: “My first day on the job at Timely, Martin seemed surprised to see me. He sounded puzzled as he asked me, ‘What are you doing here?’” Stan admits, though, that “maybe it was Martin’s way of kidding.”

He found his boss “somewhat aloof,” but he believes there was no reason a publisher should pal around with a lowly assistant. Stan remembers him as playing a lot of golf and napping on his office couch most afternoons.

Even so, Goodman kept close tabs on what was going on in comics, both on the newsstands and in the office. And one of the things he soon noticed was that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were preparing to leave his small but successful company — and jump to the industry leader, DC Comics!

Lee was a man in demand, appearing on TV shows (Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, The Dick Cavett Show, and To Tell the Truth, among others), college campuses, and many radio programs. He had achieved celebrity alongside his creations, and it seemed to agree with him! © Courtesy Stan Lee and 1821 Media/Paris Kasidokostas Latsis and Terry Dougas

Naturally, Simon and Kirby remembered events a wee bit differently. Sure, they had been doing a bit of moonlighting after their staff jobs, just little things like turning out covers for other publishers — and, okay, producing the entire premiere issue of Fawcett Publications’ Captain Marvel Adventures, starring a recently created super hero destined, at least for a while, to have his title outsell not only Captain America, but even Superman. But Simon didn’t feel that was any of Goodman’s business, as long as he and Jack produced good work for Timely from 9 to 5.

No, what brought things to a head between the creative team and publisher was — surprise, surprise — money. Simon and Kirby had a profit-sharing contract with Goodman on Captain America Comics, and they noticed that they weren’t getting checks nearly as big as they’d expected. Tipped off by a Timely accountant that Goodman was pulling time-honored bookkeeping tricks, such as charging all the company overhead he could to Captain America so there’d be fewer profits to share with Cap’s creators, Simon and Kirby decided to approach National/DC co-publisher Jack S. Liebowitz about coming to work for that company, then the largest in the business. They were offered a sweet deal, and made secret preparations to leave Timely . . . but only when they were good and ready.

Martin Goodman, however, found out about their plans . . . and fired them. Or one of his brothers fired them. Or they quit, before they could be fired. Accounts vary.

Stan and Joan Lee take a ride with the top down. Things at Marvel were looking ever more secure and the future looked inviting out on the horizon. © Courtesy Stan Lee and 1821 Media

Unexpectedly, young Stan Lee found himself in the middle of all this. Since he’d often tagged along with Simon and Kirby like a tall, lanky shadow, they had finally apprised him of their plans to quit Timely — and had sworn him to secrecy. So when, shortly afterward, the two artists suddenly found themselves accused of working for DC, they naturally assumed Stan had told the publisher what they were up to. By Simon’s account, Kirby “never gave up on that idea, and hated him for the rest of his life — to the day he died.” Stan himself has always denied that he ratted on the team. Even Simon admitted that any number of people at DC knew about their deal and could’ve blown their cover: “So I’m not so sure it was Stan after all.”

Simon and Kirby were pressured to finish up the 10th issue of Captain America Comics — and then, circa fall of ’41, they were history at Timely, and Martin Goodman found himself in need of a new editor.

He turned to his young cousin-in-law, Stanley Martin Lieber, aka Stan Lee.

In later years, Stan turned his early battlefield promotion into one of his best anecdotes. He would relate how the publisher asked him to be editor only until he could find someone else to take over the job on a regular basis. Since he’d go on to hold the job for the next 30 years but was never told the appointment was permanent, Stan would say he figured Goodman was still looking.

The Stan Lee Story by Roy Thomas is out now (Taschen, £1,100). Taschen.com