MARVEL COMICS OWN SUPERHERO, STAN LEE, DIES AGED 95

Stan Lee, Marvel Comics co-creator, has died at the age of 95.

It all started way back in 1961 when Stan Leen and Jack Kirby founded Marvel Comics. They began with The Fantastic Four before going on to create legends like Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk.

After the death of his wife, Joan in 2017, he is survived by his daughter, JC Lee, who told the website TMZ that her father was "the greatest, most decent man".

According to Variety magazine, Lee passed away on Monday at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after a medical emergency. It has been reported in the past few years that Lee had suffered from various illnesses, including pneumonia.

In 2009, the Walt Disney Company purchased Marvel Comics for $4bn (£2.5bn). Their chairman, Bob Iger, released a statement in which he called Lee "a superhero in his own right. The scale of his imagination was only exceeded by the size of his heart."

Although Lee left Marvel in 1972, he remained chairman emeritus and made cameos in every Marvel film that he had a hand in creating. The realisations of his imagination resulted in some of Hollywood's highest grossing films, such as Iron Man and Captain America. Most recently, Marvel's Infinity War earned more than $1.5bn (£1.1bn).

Born in 1922 to working-class Jewish immigrants from Romania, Lee was known in the army during World War Two as Playwright, sharing a Facebook post on Veteran's Day, just hours before his passing, of a photograph of himself during his service.

His first job was in the comics section of a company called Timely Publications, which would eventually become Marvel Comics with him as the editor at age 18.

In his early years, Lee focussed on comics for the youth based on crime stories, horrors and westerns. It wasn't until he chose to give up on comics at age 40 before, on the proposal from his wife, that he focussed on creating the characters he always wanted to write about.

In 1961, he created the Fantastic Four and, as we all know, the rest is history.

Learn more about this story in the TMZ video below.