The character was originally created for a syndicated daily comic strip by writer Stan Lee and artist Dan DeCarlo.

I liked that idea very much, so when Harold Anderson, the head of Publishers Syndicate, asked me to do a strip, I came up with Barney's Beat, which was about a New York City cop and all the characters on his patrol who he'd meet every day and there would be a gag.

[4] Lee and artist Jack Kirby then introduced their comic book version of Willie Lumpkin in Fantastic Four #11 (Feb.

[citation needed] In his first comic book appearance, Lumpkin is represented as having befriended the Fantastic Four, to whom he makes regular fan mail deliveries at their Baxter Building headquarters in New York City.

In Marvel Comics, Willie Lumpkin serves as the mail carrier whose Manhattan route includes the joint home and office of the superhero group the Fantastic Four.

Examples include a story in which he is forced to spend Christmas Eve locked in a closet while the Fantastic Four fight the Super-Skrull,[volume & issue needed] or when he helped to save the team from the Mad Thinker.

This incident involved Reed's trust in Lumpkin; he had hired the mailman to manipulate the machinery as part of a safety routine.

[volume & issue needed] Willie Lumpkin was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past who couldn't find the address to J. Jonah Jameson.

He was freed by the possession by Agent Anti-Venom who advised him and the person his Zombiote appearance had cornered to take shelter inside a building.