In 2018, Stan Lee died at age 95. His greatest work was accomplished throughout the mid-20th century in the halls of Marvel Comics, but Lee was never better known than during the post-2000s boom of superhero movies. Co-creating the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and Iron Man made him a legend, but countless big-screen cameos made him a mainstream icon.
Lee’s final Marvel movie cameo was, fittingly, in Avengers: Endgame, in a throwback to his 1970s-era self. His visage has popped up here and there in the subsequent years — did you catch him in the fake Stanley Steemer ad in Deadpool & Wolverine? — but in Fantastic Four: First Steps, an ode to the Silver Age comics era when Lee was king, Marvel goes a step further, reviving the live-action Stan Lee cameo with a twist.
During a heated battle partway through the movie, citizens of retrofuture New York City gasp as the Fantastic Four swoop into action. Most of the cutaway shots to regular folks’ reactions involve background actors in era-appropriate clothes, but one sticks out: two middle-aged men with their sleeves rolled up, mildly distracted from their work at a drafting board, where they’re working on a comic that’s clearly Jack Kirby’s art. The two actors are the splitting images of Kirby and Lee.
Kirby and Lee co-created The Fantastic Four in 1961, and First Steps plucks directly from their early days in forging the legacy of Marvel’s first family. In the film, we see Mister Fantastic beating up on one of the hyper-intelligent ape soldiers commanded by Red Ghost, an early adversary, while director Matt Shakman recreates Kirby’s iconic art from The Fantastic Four #1 in a brief moment of the team fighting a slobbering monster in the streets. First Steps deviates from those early comics in essential ways (mostly by bucking 1950s misogyny and treating Sue Storm as an actual human person with dimension), but from beginning to end, Shakman’s film is spliced together with the DNA of those early Kirby/Lee tales.
The added fun of the cameos is that they’re also a nod to the comics themselves, not just the MCU’s habit of parading Stan Lee around. Lee and Kirby — and many of their collaborators — appeared in-universe on the regular. Vanity? More like the duo never missed a chance to rib themselves.
The relationship and creative ownership split between Lee and Kirby is incredibly contentious. Exacerbating the issue is the fact that Disney and Marvel have, in the years post-acquisition, mostly canonized Lee. A 2023 documentary about Lee rightfully provoked anger from Kirby’s family, who are constantly fighting to remind people of the illustrator’s contributions. So while Shakman finding a way to nod to Lee’s legacy in the movies is fitting, making Kirby, who passed away in 1994, his cameo equal is a rightful correction after 20 years of MCU mythmaking. At the very least, no matter who really did what, the magic of Marvel emerged with them both in the room.