Marvel's Stan Lee hated teenage sidekicks so much, he gleefully killed them whenever he got the chance. Though the "kid sidekick" is a staple of the superhero comic genre ever since Robin's debut in 1940 and a great many classic heroes have had famous sidekicks of their own, Lee loathed the idea, and very famously never introduced a teenage sidekick for any one of his multitude of creations. His reasoning was simple - and just to prove a point, he would make sure that any character that already had a sidekick would soon find themselves working without.
After Robin made his appearance alongside Batman in Detective Comics #38, comic publishers noticed the issue's success and went wild with more and more sidekicks. Kid Flash, Jimmy Olsen, Bucky Barnes and others ran alongside the Flash, Superman, and Captain America respectively as they fought their battles throughout the '4os and '50s. As the Silver Age of Comics began, even more sidekicks were created, especially in series belonging to DC Comics. However, the Marvel Universe was almost completely devoid of teen sidekicks...and thanks to Stan Lee, the ones it did have were not long for this world.
Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch (no relation to Johnny Storm) once charged into battle alongside his kid sidekick Toro, who could also burst into flame. Stan Lee, upon taking charge of the book, subsequently killed him in Sub-Mariner Vol. 1 #14. Perhaps the sidekick Stan Lee loathed the most is Bucky Barnes, kid sidekick of Captain America. He was always cognizant of what Captain America would think if he was forced into the situation. "I always figured if I were a superhero," Lee said in a 2005 interview with Evan Jacobs of Movieweb.com, "there's no way on God's earth that I'm gonna pal around with some teenager." Stan Lee ultimately decided to kill Bucky in 1964's Avengers #4 in a flashback sequence from Captain America's memory: Bucky fails to deactivate a bomb and is killed in the ensuing explosion.
Lee's hatred of sidekicks is one of the reasons behind the creation of Spider-Man, perhaps his most enduring creation and the closest character Marvel Comics has to an official mascot. "I hated teenagers in comics because they were always sidekicks...but I thought it might be interesting to make the teenager the hero. What would happen if a teenage kid got a power?" Upon pitching the idea, his publisher reprimanded Lee, saying that teenagers could only be sidekicks. He was proven wrong in a tremendous way when Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man's debut issue, sold incredibly well and paved the way for Spider-Man to become a comics icon.
Stan Lee was a famously stubborn man who rarely took no for an answer, especially from his editors and superiors. The traditions and conventions of the times clearly called for sidekicks in comic books (and for Spider-Man to be one of them), but Lee stuck to his guns and eventually wrote one of the most popular superheroes in recent memory. As for Lee's penchant for killing already-existing sidekicks such as Bucky Barnes and Toro, other writers have since brought them both back from the dead - but no longer in the sidekick role. Stan Lee, as always, won out.
Source: Movieweb.com