Stan Lee was an American comic book writer, editor, publisher and producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business called Timely Comics which would later become Marvel Comics. He was Marvel's primary creative leader for two decades, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics and film industries.

Timely Comics is the common name for the group of corporations that was the earliest comic book arm of American publisher Martin Goodman, and the entity that would evolve by the 1960s to become Marvel Comics.