If you haven’t spent your life reading comic books, they can seem weird. Like any medium, like movies or books or podcasts, comics have their own informational syntax. The pairing of static images with cartoon indicators of motion, typographically distinct onomatopoeic sound effects, enbubbled words for dialog—you have to learn to digest all that.

After the basic architecture come more subtle cues. Time doesn’t always move at the same speed within a frame, or in the gutters between frames, as comics creator Scott McCloud has written. A single frame can last an hour or a nanosecond, and in that time the Flash can run across a county. A 3⁄16-inch gutter can separate frames by instants or millennia. Superheroes wear primary colors; villains wear secondaries or tertiaries. Splatters of black dots mean crackling energy. Words in round bubbles with pointers are speech; words in cloudlike bubbles connected by circles are thoughts. As in video, an image can convey a meaning opposite to the words spoken in it. As in text, words can evoke emotions and sensations that an image, by itself, wouldn’t. We comics readers internalize all that and a million other rules, truths, and tropes because some creator taught us how to read them, page by page, while we were engrossed in a narrative.

The person who first understood the real power of that medium, Stan Lee, died in November at the age of 95. He intuited early what it was for, what it was best at, how to shape that visceral power into a new kind of story. He also figured out how to industrialize the process. In late life, Lee was an avuncular spokesperson for super­hero comics and a go-to cameo joke in blockbuster movies about characters he helped invent. But to the extent that joke landed, it was because Lee’s influence on the modern cultural landscape, as the longtime writer, editor, and publisher of Marvel Comics, was cosmic.

As one of his characters might say: “Stan Lee—dead! No! No, it can’t be!” The man who understood that with great power there must come great responsibility? The man who created or cocreated basically half of comic book super­herodom? The Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Spider-­Man, Iron Man, Black Panther, Thor … I could go on! Lee, a florid—nay, dramatic!—master of bangs and em-dashes, an aggressive activator of alliteration, certainly would have.

Not a dream. Not a what-if. Stan Lee—no more.

It’s controversial whether Lee was the father of the modern superhero or more of a midwife. You could trace the concept of a human hero with godlike powers back to—well, gods, I suppose, or demigods. Detectives and adventurers have been challenging mad scientists, criminals, and monsters since the dime novels of the 19th century, with a lineage that goes back even further. Lee didn’t invent the comic book superhero; that’s usually credited to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a couple of Jewish kids from Cleveland who alchemized religious imagery, science fiction, and urban crime-busting into a hero who, rocketed to Earth as an infant, gained powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men to fight a never-ending battle for truth and justice.

That was Superman, of course, who came first in 1938. Then, the next year, came Batman. And then: the deluge. The books, cheap magazines that took advantage of bulk postage rates, crummy paper stock, and lousy four-color printing technologies, sold by the millions.

A Spider-­Man cover from 2000. JHPhoto / Alamy Stock Photo

In fact, “Stan Lee” had his own secret identity—he started out as Stanley Lieber, a child of a Romanian immigrant father and New York–born mother, keenly aware of how scarce jobs, money, and fantasy were in the waning years of the Depression. Lee was just out of high school when a nepotistic connection scored him a gig as a gofer at Timely Comics in either 1939 or 1940 (his own accounts differed), in the art deco McGraw-Hill Building in Manhattan. Comics were “the absolute bottom of the cultural totem pole,” as Lee told IGN in 2000, and Timely wasn’t even publishing characters as popular as Superman and Batman. Lee’s job was to fill inkwells and fetch coffee for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. It would be those two guys who gave Timely a real smash hit in the form of Captain America, who debuted in late 1940. As a career choice, comics was still a risky bet, but having grown up on a steady diet of Shakespeare, detective stories, and pulp, Lee had ambitions to write. His first story for Timely, a two-page text-only filler, was “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge,” which feels like a lot of words. (I’m indebted here to a vast canon of comics history, especially Sean Howe’s thorough Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.)