His life was as “extraordinary as the characters he created”, said Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger, paying tribute to Lee after he died this week at the age of 95.
Lee was born in 1922 in New York City to Romanian-born Jewish immigrants.
His father was a dress cutter and the family struggled in the Great Depression.
They lived in an apartment in which his parents slept in the living room while he shared a room with his brother.
He was originally called Stan Lieber, he changed his surname name to "Lee" at the start of his career.
Lee developed a love for fantasy from an early age, reading adventure novels and watching the swashbuckling films of Errol Flynn – as well as the works of William Shakespeare.
After graduating from high school he had dreams of becoming a serious novelist.
But he began on the path that won him global fame and adulation when a relative, Martin Goodman, offered him a job his Timely Comics publication.
His first day on the job happened to be the same day as the first issue of “Captain America”.
Lee started out as earning $8 a week fetching coffee and keeping ink wells topped up for the staff but within two years he was named editor.
In 1942, with his career unfolding before him, Lee answered the call to become a real-life hero and enlisted in the US Army just weeks after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.
He briefly worked as a lineman in the Signal Corps before the army put his writing skills to work.
Lee joined the Signal Corps Training Film Division and was given the job title “playwright” one of only nine people in the army in that role.
He was immensely proud of his army service and said: “I wrote training films, I wrote film scripts, I did posters, I wrote instructional manuals. I was one of the great teachers of our time!”
When Lee returned from war service, he resumed his position as editor.
He had to battle a decline in the demand for jingoistic superheroes such as Captain America after the war and the US senate blaming comics for juvenile delinquency.
Timely Comics dwindled, and Lee was one of a handful of employees relegated to a far-flung corner of the Empire State Building, where the publisher kept its offices.
But his fortunes changed 1961 when Timely changed its name to Marvel and devised its first hit The Fantastic Four.
The mix of down-to-earth characters with out-of-this-world powers proved a winning combination that Lee would revisit in nearly all the heroes he helped craft.
While DC Comics’ Superman lived in the fictional Metropolis, Lee’s creations lived in New York City.
Peter Parker, for instance, went to high school in Queens.
Other successes soon followed including Iron Man, the X-Men, Dr. Strange and the Avengers.
Under his leadership, the company embraced the so-called “Marvel Method,” whereby Lee gave broad story outlines to artists, who would then return fully drawn pages for Lee to fill in with text.
Lee is remembered for working to advance various social justice causes through his medium.
He created Black Panther, the first mainstream black superhero, and the X-Men, which tackled issues of diversity and inclusivity, in the 1960s.
Spider-Man comics in that decade referenced the Vietnam War, student protests against that war, other forms of political corruption and activism, and other contemporary controversial topics.
His success continued through the 1970s and by the 1980s Marvel characters such as the Incredible Hulk began appearing on TV before Hollywood used them as inspiration in the 1990s.
Lee was married to his British-born wife Joan for 70 years and the couple had one child Joan Cecilia, known as J.C.
After his wife died in 2017, Lee’s life was thrown in to turmoil amid reports about battles for control of his estimate £54 million fortune.
In May this year sued Pow! Entertainment, a company he co-founded for $1bn, claiming he was made to sign over his name and image rights though he later withdrew the case.
The following month he won a restraining order against his carer Keya Morgan, following allegations of abuse.
It was alleged Mr Morgan, 41, "inserted himself into Mr Lee's life" and controlled access to Mr Lee, including by hiring security guards, and moved him from his family home.
Lee's daughter was also accused by Bradley J. Herman, his former business manager, of verbally abusing her parents.
He also alleged that on at least one occasion she physically abused them.
Herman told The Hollywood Reporter that he saw Joan push her mother before grabbing her famous father by the neck and shoving his head back against his wheelchair.
Joan Celia and her Stan Lee both strongly denied the accusations.
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