R.I.P. Stan Lee

It should be immediately obvious to anyone reading this that without Stan Lee’s contributions to superhero comics this site and podcast would look markedly different.  “X-Men,” “Avengers,” “Spider-Man,” “The Fantastic Four,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Iron Man,” “Daredevil,” and the list goes on. The characters Stan Lee co-created with artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby have proved time and time again to be enduring as they’ve adapted to changing times and tastes and he co-created so many of them!  That all came down to the fact that he had a genius formula for creating superheroes: make them relatable and fallible, human in other words. With his only real competition at the time being DC, Lee and his artistic collaborators were in the right place at the right time in order for their approach to go over like gangbusters and eventually earn them pop-culture immortality.

Yet for all of his genius when it came to creating characters and giving us some memorable stories along the way, Lee’s writing hasn’t aged nearly as well over the intervening decades.  Though he wrote so many comics over the years, his writing style was very much a product of its time and one that was pitched directly to its audience (kids) as well. Stories like the origin of “Spider-Man” and “The Coming of Galactus” may be considered classics, but reading through his dialogue today is more of a chore than anything else.  Did he get better as years went on? No, not really. Which was probably for the best since his latter-day projects at least had value in showcasing his writing as kind of a living time capsule of a specific style, for better and for worse.

That said, Lee himself was a great example of how to age gracefully in the public eye.  Even when he stopped writing comics regularly for Marvel, he was always the public figurehead of the company with his grinning, winning huckster persona.  It was an act that could’ve become wearying after a while, but there was always a wink to how Stan did it. To let us know that even though he was fully committed to his persona, he was also aware of how ridiculous it could come off as.  Lee won over comics fans and everyone else along the way and became as synonymous with Marvel as the characters he co-created.

That last bit was probably his smartest move as he didn’t have an ownership stake in any of the characters he co-created, which would go on to earn Marvel billions.   Yet by becoming Marvel’s public face, he was able to get some compensation for co-creating all these characters when he filed a lawsuit to that effect several years ago only to have it quickly settled.  Marvel smartly realized that having a suit like this would be the worst kind of PR. After all, who would all of us root for in the case of Lee v. Marvel?

I only saw Lee in public once, and that was at a Comic-Con panel with Grant Morrison.  The two got along as great as you’d expect, with Morrison gushing to Lee about how he loved working with all of the different themes — teenage rebellion is something I specifically remember — that Lee put into the series.  Lee just shrugged it off and remarked about how amazed he was that Morrison could see something like that in what he wrote over forty years ago. It’s just one more example of how adaptable Lee’s co-creations have been over the years.  For that, along with everything else, his is a legacy that deserves to be celebrated.