A 12-year-old from Atoka, Tennessee, who lives with autism and ADHD is in the running to become an illustrated superhero, sitting in fourth place in his age group as a nationwide public vote barrels toward its next cutoff. Isaac McMorries has already climbed into the top ten of his bracket in Stan Lee's Super Kid competition, a contest drawing hundreds of entrants from across the United States and Canada, with voting in his current round closing Thursday.
A Nationwide Contest With a Local Face
As WREG first reported, McMorries grew up watching Marvel cartoons before recently moving on to the films, and he says Iron Man is his favorite character precisely because Tony Stark was not born with powers. According to the station, Isaac said Iron Man instead built his abilities over time through his suit, and that idea has stuck with him; he designs his own builds and studies the engineering behind the Marvel movies, down to knowing the people credited in them. He told the station that seeing his own face on a comic book page would mean a great deal to him.
The contest Isaac has entered carries the name of Stan Lee, who spent two decades as Marvel's primary creative leader and helped expand the company from a small publishing-house division into a multimedia corporation before his death in 2018 at age 95, per the station's reporting. The grand-prize winner will receive a superhero identity and a starring role in a limited-edition comic book, a $25,000 prize, and VIP passes to the 2027 LA Comic Con, WREG notes. Isaac and his mother, Maggie McMorries, have called a trip to Comic-Con a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
How the Bracket Works, and Who Is Behind It
Reaching that grand prize means surviving a gauntlet. Entrants advance from group top-10 brackets in October through wildcard, quarterfinal, and semifinal rounds before final public voting closes on November 19, according to 980 CJME, which reported that thousands of entries are broken into small randomized groups across North America. Per WREG, the winner will be announced on December 17, and the Stan Lee Universe creative team will also hand-select a second child, separate from the public-vote winner, to appear as an illustrated character in the comic book.
Behind the celebrity branding sits a corporate fundraising operation. Colossal Management LLC, a registered professional fundraising firm, launched registration for the competition in August on behalf of charitable grantmaker DTCare, with proceeds ultimately slated for the Stan Lee Foundation, according to a PR Newswire release. Official contest disclosures released in July state that DTCare deducts up to 50% from voter donations — a 36.5% competition fee plus up to 13.5% in variable expenses — before the remaining funds reach the Stan Lee Foundation, per Stan Lee's Super Kid's own posted rules. Money raised is intended to help the foundation promote youth literacy and the narrative arts, WREG reports. The 2026 effort has also drawn celebrity ambassadors including Ming-Na Wen, Kevin Smith, and LeVar Burton, the PR Newswire release states.
A Contest Platform for Kids Facing Challenges
Isaac is far from the only entrant using the competition as a stage for a harder story. This year's field has also featured a 10-year-old autistic boy from Antioch, California, who publicly promotes autism as his superpower, and a 5-year-old Idaho boy battling severe epilepsy, according to the Antioch Herald. Families entering the contest often do so to build confidence and raise awareness for childhood health conditions, the outlet notes. A separate Hoodline report recently covered a Kentucky boy, 12, fighting cancer who is competing in the very same contest.
Isaac's diagnosis places him within a broader national pattern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in an April 2025 report that 1 in 31 U.S. 8-year-olds, or 3.2%, had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2022, up from 1 in 36 in 2020. CDC surveillance data from the same report found boys are 3.4 times more likely than girls to receive an autism diagnosis, affecting 4.9% of 8-year-old boys compared with 1.4% of girls.
Giving Back Close to Home
Away from the national spotlight, Isaac already runs his own small charitable operation. He operates a lemonade stand and donates the proceeds to St. Jude and the Tipton County Animal Shelter, telling WREG that he wants to give children at St. Jude and animals at the shelter better lives. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital sits in Memphis, serving pediatric patients referred locally and from around the world, not far from Isaac's home in Atoka, the most populous municipality in Tipton County with a Census-estimated population of 10,645 located roughly 30 miles north of downtown Memphis.
For now, Isaac's fate rests with voters as his current bracket round closes Thursday. Whether or not he advances through the wildcard, quarterfinal, and semifinal rounds ahead, organizers have left open the possibility that the Stan Lee Universe creative team could still select him for comic book inclusion independent of the public tally, evaluating entrants' personal stories alongside their vote totals.
