Stan Lee: the greatest storyteller in history?

Creator of a host of enduring superheroes, from Iron Man to the X-Men, his own powers have enabled him to see far into the future

A billionaire industrialist developing technologies that others believed impossible. A team of heroes using science to understand the universe. A secret government agency protecting its citizens from threats that may not even exist. No, these aren’t characters in a Stan Lee comic: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the heroic researchers at LIGO, and the secretive folks at the NSA and GCHQ are very real parts of a world – ours – that seems to become more like an extension of the Marvel universe every day.

Unless you’ve been in cryogenic deep freeze for the last decade, you’ve probably noticed the wave of Marvel film and television franchises breaking relentlessly across the entertainment landscape. What’s slightly less obvious is that almost all these stories were originally created by the same comic book writer. Deep breath: Spider-Man, the X-­Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, SHIELD, Daredevil: all of them were created by Stan Lee.

Related: Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir by Stan Lee, Peter Davis and Colleen Doran – review

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