Or at least, that was what most knew him for.
That, or being a credit hog who played the comics industry to his advantage for decades.
Born Stanley Martin Lieber, he co-created a couple of characters for Marvel Comics under a pen name he used since 1941.
Lee helped to create memorable characters like the menacing Mole Man, or the sinister Stilt-Man, the benevolent Black Bolt and the ferocious Fin Fang Foom.
He also co-created Spider-Man, as well as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Doctor Strange, Daredevil and the Avengers.
Not created, but co-created.
Despite the larger-than-life list of legendary leads, Lee made it clear his greatest characters were not a solo venture, which was by design.
During the ‘60s, Marvel’s method for making magazines was different from what their distinguished competition DC Comics distributed.
Instead of completely scripting out a book’s dialogue, Lee would give a synopsis of the plot, leaving the artist to draw the comic based on his initial idea.
Then, once the artwork was done, Lee went in and add dialogue, further fleshing out the personalities of the characters. This way, Lee wrote for multiple books at the same time without wasting too much time on scripting.
However, this also meant that artists had as much to do with plotting as Lee, as their artwork that determined the specific story beats in a book.
As such, the credit for many of his most celebrated creations is shared with Lee’s most frequent collaborator Jacob Kurtzberg, better known by his pen name Jack Kirby.
Kirby illustrated the first issues of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, and X-Men, with Spider-Man and Doctor Strange being drawn by Steve Ditko.
Kirby and Ditko were not as widely known as Lee, and despite their invaluable input, they felt they did not get as much credit for their contributions as Lee, especially Kirby.
In the case of Lee’s first big success, “The Fantastic Four,” Lee’s wife Joan was interviewed in 2002 during the filming of “Stan Lee’s Mutants, Monsters & Marvels,” a documentary detailing Stan Lee’s career at Marvel.
After Lee told Joan he hoped to quit the comic industry in 1961, Joan encouraged Lee to write one last comic.
Instead of appealing to younger children, Joan encouraged Lee to write it his way, with all the humanity and heart he felt was missing from generic comics of the time.
Best case scenario, Lee writes a comic anyone can enjoy. Worst case scenario, Lee would be fired, which didn’t matter if he wanted out anyway.
So Lee wrote a sci-fi story about a group of adventurers who got superpowers from cosmic rays, while retaining the flaws of a dysfunctional family.
After the first issue of “The Fantastic Four” was released however, the unexpected praise and fan mail the book received convinced Lee to stay at Marvel.
However, this completely contradicts Kirby’s side of the story.
“When people began talking about the bomb and its possible effect on human beings, they began talking about mutations because that’s a distinct possibility… That’s how the Fantastic Four began,” Jack Kirby said in a 1990 interview with Gary Groth in Comics Journal No. 34.
And that’s the problem. The Marvel method made it unclear who created what, as well as how much each person contributed to a comic.
“It’s just his word against Stan’s,” Roz Kirby said in the Comics Journal interview.
Despite this war of words over credit, Lee attempted to reconcile with his former collaborator.
“I offered a job to Jack Kirby (when) I was the art director at the time,” Lee said in a 2014 Playboy interview with David Hochman.
“I said, ‘You be the art director. I’ll just be the editor and head writer, and you’ll have that security.’ He wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to.”
Even then, Lee still made sure to give credit where it was due.
“There was never a time when it just said ‘by Stan Lee.’ It was always ‘by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’ or ‘by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,’” Lee said.
“I made sure their names were always as big as mine.”
Nevertheless, Lee’s cheery personality won over the hearts of readers and movie-goers alike just as much as his writing credits.
He did not try to bury his collaborators’ achievements, and he certainly never tried to rewrite history to make himself Marvel’s sole creative force.
