M. Flaherty is asking me…
I've read a lot of pieces about Stan Lee lately. Some of them say he was first hired at Marvel because he answered an ad in the newspaper. Some say he was hired by his uncle, Martin Goodman, who owned the company. Can you settle this?
Sure. Stanley Martin Lieber — later known as Stan Lee — got his job there through his uncle but it wasn't Martin Goodman. Stan's uncle was a man named Robert Solomon who was the brother of Stan's mother. He worked for Goodman's company and was married to Goodman's sister. You can figure out for yourself what relation Stan was to Goodman but it's somewhat more distant than nephew/uncle. The confusion though is highly understandable because Stan himself told it several different ways over the years.
Sometimes, he claimed he answered an ad in the newspaper, got hired by a stranger and then discovered that his uncle just happened to work there. Yeah, I don't believe that either, especially because he also sometimes said "Uncle Robbie" hired him or said that his uncle told him about an opening and gave him a recommendation to the person there who did the actual hiring. Joe Simon, who was the editor of the comic book division when Stan was hired, wrote that Solomon brought the young Stanley Lieber in one day and said, "Martin wants you to just keep him out of the way."
So you can take your pick of any of those versions…but the point is that the hiring was arranged somehow by Stan's Uncle Robbie, and Martin Goodman was not the uncle of Stan Lee and his brother, Larry Lieber.
And don't feel bad that you thought that. I'd say that a good two-thirds of the people I've met who worked at that company during its first three decades were under the impression that Goodman was Stan's uncle. Stan himself would sometimes jokingly refer to him as "Uncle Martin."
By the way: Though Stan seemed at times to be a tiny bit embarrassed at being hired via a family connection, that was pretty common at the time — in the comic book business and everywhere. After the Great Depression with its massive unemployment, it seemed like if you were fortunate enough to own a business, the least you could do was provide jobs for all your relatives. It was easier than "loaning" (that is to say, "giving") them money.
All the comic book publishing houses practiced nepotism, sometimes to excess. Goodman had plenty of other kinfolks, many of them closer than Stan, on the payroll. And Stan himself later hired his brother Larry. If he'd had other siblings and they needed jobs, he'd have hired them too.
