Stan Lee is a pop culture titan, with a career that spans eight decades, he's been around long enough to see characters he co-created become household names, a roster that includes Spider-Man, the X-man, the Hulk, and more.
His journey has been remarkable, but it might not be what you'd expect from the smiling spokesman for Marvel Comics.
Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania.
As a student, he worked odd jobs to help his family get through the tail end of the Great Depression, including delivering sandwiches in Manhattan, a far cry from his dreams of writing sci-fi novels.
Not long after graduating high school at 16, however, he got a job at a company run by one of his relatives, Martin Goodman. . . a little place called Timely Comics.
When he joined up with Timely Comics in 1939, Stan Lieber thought that his job as an errand boy would be a stepping stone to a career as a novelist.
Needless to say, things turned out a little differently.
In 1941, Stan was assigned to write a text-only story as filler for Captain America Comics #3.
For this story, Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge he used the pseudonym Stan Lee, intending to save his real name for his future career as a serious novelist.
Within months, the imaginative new kid was off creating superheroes of his own, with names like Jack Frost and Father Time.