When Stan Lee Had Nothing to Lose

“We are trying (perhaps vainly?) to reach a slightly older, more sophisticated group,” Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee wrote in a private letter in 1961. The first issue of The Fantastic Four had just come out; prior to that, Lee spent 20 years as an editor at Marvel, previously known as Timely, a publisher of pulp of all stripes. By the early ’60s, comic-book sales were in a slump, and Marvel’s random assortment of unrelated monster and romance titles couldn’t compete with the industry titan, DC Comics, home of Superman and Batman. The launch of The Fantastic Four was a Hail Mary; with nothing to lose, Lee enlisted his creative partner, artist Jack Kirby, and turned the superhero genre on its head. Although far from being as sophisticated as Lee might have imagined at the time, FF portrayed a superhero team unlike anything seen before: bickering, angst-ridden, and at times even morally ambiguous.