While we all celebrate the life of one of the most notable comic book creators in the history of the medium, I figured I'd start a tag for my posts about Stan Lee's comic book legacy, so you can follow the other articles as they come out. The tag is The Life and Times of Stan Lee.

Our first article has to do with the way that Stan Lee made a certain realism and humanity in its characters a centerpiece of the Marvel Universe in a way that it was not present present in comic book superheroes before the Marvel Age of Comics.

RELATED: Stan Lee, Legendary Comics Creator, Passes Away

As you likely have heard by now, after Marvel publisher Martin Goodman found out that DC Comics had a hit on their hand with their new superhero team book, Justice League of America (how Goodman found out is still the stuff of legend, but suffice it to say that he somehow found out) and Goodman told Lee to do a new superhero team book to cash in on the success of the Justice League.

By almost all accounts, Lee wavered on the idea. He had now been working in comics for roughly two decades and the late 1950s were particularly tough times for Marvel (or whatever it was called at the time - Goodman was never much of a fan of company names until Marvel became an iconic brand name, so Marvel went through a few quasi-official names in the 1950s, with Atlas being the most commonly used) financially, so Lee was probably ready to move on to another career. As Lee himself told the story, “I told my wife Joanie, ‘ I’m going to quit.’ But she said: “‘Why not write it the way you want to write it? If it doesn’t work, the worst that’s going to happen is that they’ll fire you. And you want to quit anyway.’”

We don't know for sure that that actually happened, but what we do know is that what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby came up together with on the Fantastic Four was a superhero series quite unlike the superheroes that DC Comics was producing at the time.

The clear focus of the initial series was that these were superheroes that acted like "real" people, meaning that they did not necessarily get along with each other.

The Fantastic Four is, essentially, a riff on Jack Kirby's earlier DC Comics creation, the Challengers of the Unknown. A disparate group of adventurers survive a crash and decide to band together as a team of adventurers.

However, look at the Challengers in their first appearance in Showcase #6, with dialogue by Dick Wood...

Great Kirby concept, but Wood was providing a standard script of the era.

Compare that, then, to the first appearance of the Fantastic Four, with Lee dialogue...

It's like night and day. This new approach to superheroes was revolutionary. Superheroes simply didn't bicker with each other like this. There was an unpredictability in their interactions that just felt so darn natural. Heck, by the end of the Fantastic Four's third issue, the Human Torch actually quits the team!!

While the ideas for the characters were, at best, originating through discussions between Lee and Jack Kirby or Lee and Steve Ditko, the approach to how the characters would be depicted in their stories was something that Lee soon began to feel was an important facet of the new Marvel approach.

Thus, even when Lee did not script the comic itself, like with the introduction of Iron Man and Thor, he was involved in the plotting stages to give his brother, Larry Lieber, a basic direction of the pathos that he wanted out of the series.

With Steve Ditko, Lee perhaps co-created one of the most relatable superheroes of all time.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='With Great Power...']

Spider-Man's introduction in Amazing Fantasy #15 achieved two notable goals. One, it took the idea of Reed Richards' cosmic ray screw-up leading to the creation of the Fantastic Four to a whole other level, as now Peter Parker's selfishness almost directly led to the death of his beloved Uncle Ben, giving Spider-Man a painful reminder why he has to be a superhero and two, it took a teen hero and had him not as a sidekick or a younger version of an older hero, but as THE hero.

Both aspects were unusual for the time and it really made Spider-Man stand out. However, more than anything, Lee clearly loved how Spider-Man could screw up.

RELATED: Roy Thomas Reflects on Stan Lee's Final Days

Lee clearly loved the feet of clay that the new Marvel heroes had. Take Doctor Strange, for instance. He was wholly a Steve Ditko creation, but when he was introduced, he was a straightforward mystic...

And when Lee got more involved in the character, he suddenly had an origin just like Spider-Man's...

One of the most famous Fantastic Four stories (#3 on our recent reader poll of the greatest "done in one" stories of all-time) was "This Man, This Monster," which showed how the Thing, despite appearing like a monster, was such a great human that a villain who had taken over the Thing's body sacrificed himself to save Mister Fantastic.

Yes, even a monster could act like a man.

What's interesting, then, is that one of Lee's comics that looked into the humanity of the world the most happened to star not a man, but an alien! The Silver Surfer was introduced into the Fantastic Four's Galactus Saga by Jack Kirby, who believed that a being who travels the world eating planets should have a herald. The Surfer was quickly integrated into the plot of the series, as he is convinced by Alicia Masters that the Earth is worth saving. At the end of the story, though, Galactus traps Surfer on Earth.

Lee loved the idea of an alien being interacting with humanity and seeing mankind from another perspective and so he insisted that he be the writer on the Surfer's ongoing series in the late 1960s. The Surfer would travel the planet he was now trapped on and learn lessons about humanity. One of the most famous ones was in Silver Surfer #5 (by Lee and John Buscema), where one of the few African-American characters in comics, Alvin Harper, is a friend to the Surfer when everyone else is a jerk to the being that they don't understand and Harper even helps the Surfer track down a deadly bomb planted by the Stranger. While the Surfer battles the Stranger directly, Al has to handle the bomb himself...

Stan Lee believed in his characters having feet of clay, but in the end, he also wanted comic book stories about true heroes and he managed to achieve both during his career at Marvel. These were comics down "his way."

I'm sure you all have a lot of things that you'd like to see me cover regarding Stan Lee (a number of you have already e-mailed me some stuff that you want to see addressed), but if you have any other ideas, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com