Stan Lee Secretly Created Marvel’s Ultimate Horror Hero, And No One Noticed For 55 Years

Published Oct 27, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT

Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor.

Just in time for Halloween, it is the perfect opportunity to revisit the origin story of Marvel's scariest hero. No, not his origin on the page, but rather the behind-the-scenes back-and-forth that led to the character's debut, and how Marvel maven Stan Lee was involved.

Marvel has a long history with horror comics. In fact, the entire industry does. There was a time when it wasn't a sure thing superheroes would be successful at all, let alone in perpetuity, and comic companies started pumping out stories in other genres. Westerns. Crime capers. And terrifying tales full of ghosts, ghouls, and monsters. That led to trouble with the U.S. government, and the rise of the Comics Code, the industry's own internal organ of censorship, in the mid-1950s.

The Code subsequently reigned for fifty years, until Marvel stopped submitting to it at the turn of the 21st century. Thirty years before that, though, in 1971, the Code had its first major revision. Its grip was loosened enough to allow for some horror content, including the introduction of a powerful new monster to the Marvel Universe: Man-Thing.

The debut story starring Man-Thing is credited to writers Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, two Marvel legends almost on Stan Lee's level in their own right, along with artist Gray Morrow, who gave the character his distinct look. Yet what most people don't know is that the character was created on a direct order from Stan, who was in charge of Marvel at the time.

Man-Thing Was One Of Stan Lee's Last Great Marvel Creations

"Man-Thing." That's the name Marvel Editor-in-Chief Stan Lee gave his subordinates Thomas, Conway, and Morrow to work with, along with a few loose ideas about a man becoming a monster. This was familiar territory for Stan, who had created the Hulk a decade earlier, a well as the similarly named Thing from the Fantastic Four. (The writers reportedly pointed out the potential for confusion this might cause, but Stan dismissed their concerns.)

This was a point in Stan Lee's career where he was taking a step back from day-to-day creative work at Marvel, and probably starting to regret it. Stan still had ideas, and Man-Thing was one of them. This creative process started around late 1970, interestingly suggesting that Marvel was aware of upcoming changes to the Comics Code Authority. Those updates were finalized in January 1971, and just a few months later in May, Man-Thing was one of the stories that anchored the debut of a new Savage Tales.

Savage Tales failed to get off the ground initially. Though it returned a few years later, 1971's Savage Tales turned out to be a one-off. But before that became apparent, Stan Lee already had another Man-Thing story in the works, this time from author Len Wein and artist Neil Adams, which would inadvertently give birth to one of comic history's most curious cases: the parallel developments of Marvel's Man-Thing and DC's Swamp Thing.

Yes, Man-Thing Predated Swamp Thing As An Influential Heroic Monster

In 1971, after having penned the second-ever Man-Thing story, Len Wein jumped ship from Marvel to DC and immediately helped create Swamp Thing. Years after the debuts of Man-Thing and Swamp Thing, Roy Thomas interviewed his former boss and mentor, Stan Lee, for Comic Book Artist magazine. Even Stan misremembered the story as Man-Thing being a Marvel rip-off of Swamp Thing. But he was actually the one who originated the idea. The "Man-Thing" name even popped up in a few of Stan's late '60s stories attached to unrelated characters.

In the 50 years and change since, Man-Thing has established himself as one of Marvel's foremost horror-coded heroes, and Swamp Thing has done the same at DC. Curiously, while both characters could have wound up as villains, they went the opposite route. At Marvel, that was because of Stan Lee's vision for the character, in which he pictured Man-Thing as more than just a monstrous mascot to trot out around Halloween.