STANLEY LIEBER

All superheroes require a secret origin. That's the first rule of the long-underwear league. Whether your powers are of the pyrotechnic variety or you merely possess superstrength, you need a story that explains how you came to acquire your awesome gifts and why you're using them to battle crime instead of, say, exploiting them for profit. In his long career as a comics writer, Stan Lee has dashed off hundreds of origin stories. To the Hulk, he gave a gamma-ray bomb, to Spider-Man, a murdered uncle. Daredevil gained supernatural senses from a radioactive spill, and the Silver Surfer sacrificed himself to save his planet. The only secret origin Stan Lee has had trouble keeping straight is his own. He readily admits that he has a bad memory. It's no surprise, then, that in personal interviews, in media profiles, and even in his autobiography, many of the details of his life vary. Some are shaded by the passage of time, possibly embellished to fit a neater version of the past. Others are unverifiable, with no public records or living witnesses to back them up. Yet somewhere in this hazy morass of recollection is the true story of how Stanley Lieber became Stan Lee.

Stanley Martin Lieber was born on December 28, 1922, over a decade before the dawn of the American comic book. He would miss out on the medium's formative years but arrive in time to help steer it through puberty. Like many of the second-generation immigrant kids who grew up to form comics' pioneering vanguard, including his future collaborator Jack Kirby, Stanley's early life was marked by grinding poverty.

His parents, Jack and Celia Lieber, were Jewish-Romanian immigrants who lived in New York City, near the corner of 98th Street and West End Avenue. Jack Lieber worked as a dress cutter in the city's garment district until the Great Depression left him jobless. Celia tended the home. To save money, the Liebers moved to a tiny apartment in the Bronx, an ethnically diverse borough with a large Jewish population. Stanley slept in the living room. Much to his dismay, the new Lieber household stared onto the side of another building, making it impossible to see the neighborhood kids at play. "My dream was to one day be rich enough to have an apartment that faced the street," he recalls.

When Stanley was eight years old, his brother, Larry, was born. Because of their age gap, the Lieber boys weren't very close, but later in life they would work together on comic books and the "Spider -Man" newspaper comic strip. Money was scarce in the Lieber home, and the family often accepted financial help from Celia's sisters, who were better off. Stanley's parents quarreled constantly. Jack was intelligent, but difficult and demanding, recalls Jean Goodman, a close relative. "He was exacting with his boys — brush your teeth a certain way, wash your tongue, and so on." Celia, on the other hand, was warm and nurturing to the point of self-sacrifice. "The demanding father and the persecuted mother, that made the atmosphere difficult," Goodman says.

Stanley sought refuge in pulp novels and the books of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Mark Twain. He frequented the movies as often as he could afford the 25¢ admission, wrapping himself in the celluloid adventures of Charlie Chan, Roy Rogers, Errol Flynn, and other swashbucklers of the day. He took particular interest in the works of William Shakespeare, which he started reading before the age of ten. "I didn't understand a lot of it in those days," he later recalled, "but I loved the words. I loved the rhythms of the words." His passion for Shakespeare would resurface in his 1960s work at Marvel Comics, from the ponderous philosophical pronouncements of the Silver Surfer to the exaggerated Elizabethan dialogue of the Mighty Thor.

Stanley also read newspaper comic strips, although not with the dedicated interest of someone who hoped to one day write them. Among his favorites were George Herriman's surrealist comic drama "Krazy Kat" and Jimmy Hatlo's quirky one-panel feature "They'll Do It Every Time." He was a voracious reader of books, magazines, pulps, cereal boxes — whatever he could lay his hands on. Comic strips were just something else to read. One of his early role models was animator Walt Disney. "I admired him so when I was a kid," Lee says. "I probably created many more characters, but he created an empire. I'm not an empire creator."

Sunday night at the Lieber home was family night. For dinner, Celia would serve hot dogs and beans, and on the rare occasions when money was flowing, a helping of sauerkraut. The family gathered around the radio set to listen to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy, comedians Fred Allen and Jack Benny, and other stars of the early broadcast era. "All the chairs were arranged in a semicircle facing the radio, and we would sit and watch the radio as if it were a television set," Lee told an interviewer on National Public Radio.

The Liebers were Jewish, and so were most of their neighbors and friends. At Jack's insistence, Stanley had a bar mitzvah when he turned thirteen. ("There were about two people in the temple at the time," he quips. "We were very poor.") But Judaism didn't leave much of an impression on Stanley, and it faded from his life when he reached adulthood. "I never believed in religion. I don't mean the Jewish religion — I mean in religion," he says. "To me, faith is the opposite of intelligence, because faith means believing something blindly. I don't know why God — if there is a God — gave us these brains if we're going to believe things blindly."

Jack's chronic unemployment persisted through Stanley's teens. Demand for dress cutters was low, and Jack spent most of his time reading the want ads or trolling the city for jobs, trying to earn enough money to keep his family nourished and off the streets. "I always felt tremendous pity for him, because it must be a terrible feeling to be a man and to not be bringing in the money that's needed for your family," Lee said in the NPR interview. In high school, Stanley pitched in by taking on a number of part-time jobs. He delivered sandwiches to office workers and ushered at the Rivoli...