“Stan Lee.”
Two words I thought I’d always be happy to see… until I saw them on the LA Times quick links section, where too many people only appear as obituaries.
Just seven letters. That’s way too few, for someone who wrote more than a hundred Spider-Man comics, another hundred Fantastic Four, a hunded Thor, and created all them plus Iron Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, and practically every other Marvel superhero who’s running the world today. All during the same few dizzying years.
Another short set of words to conjure with are:
“Why don’t you tell the story the way you always wanted? If you don’t like it, you can quit.”
That’s the advice Stan’s wife gave him, that convinced him to give the tired old superhero genre one last try, and put four very real people on a rocket ride.
“The story the way you always wanted”
Stan Lee and his Marvel comics pushed superheroes out of grade school.
There are whole layers of truth in the quip that “Marvel is where humans pretend to be gods. DC is where gods pretend to be human.” But “pretending” is all too accurate for what comics were before the Fantastic Four, and it’s what Stan’s heroes tried to move beyond.
- Superman and his imitators said there might be a legend hiding under Clark Kent’s fedora.
- Spider-Man said the person who’d gotten a legend’s power still was Peter Parker.
And Peter lived in a world with money problems, a newspaper that called him a menace, and everything a fifteen-year-old should feel about how impossible his life had just become. A kid could dream of being Superman, but Spidey showed us what courage was.
So how much of that was Stan Lee’s work?
Yes, it’s gotten fashionable to argue over how much of those comics were the work of magnificent artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, or say that “With great power comes great responsibility” is just a rephrasing of Franklin Roosevelt or the Bible. Sure, Stan was a master collaborator. But he was the one at the center of those hundreds of comics.
When the Fantastic Four discovered (and got “clobbered” by) the Black Panther, or faced a simply biblical apocalypse in Galactus, that was Stan. When the Green Goblin was revealed as the father of Peter’s best friend Harry, and the memory of his evil self broke free while learning Harry had become a drug addict, that was Stan. (And when the story published even though the Comics Code was afraid to let stories even talk about drugs, that was definitely Stan Lee.)
Stan Lee made it all happen. He created, he wrote, and he guided the essentials of it all. Even the next steps of comic evolution came out of the Marvel shop he led: Frank Miller made Daredevil famous before moving on to The Dark Knight Returns, and Chris Claremont was essentially the next-generation Stan in how his X-Men were a game-changing volume of superhero excitement that added even deeper levels. (Those two and Britain’s Alan Moore at DC would be the key influences in bringing comics from adolescence to their adulthood.) And it was sheer faith in that work that made Marvel, even on the edge of bankruptcy, dare to form its own movie studio and interest the world in some “B-team” hero in an iron suit.
But Stan was always more than his stories to us.
“If you don’t like it, you can quit”
To pick up a Marvel comic was to shake hands with Stan himself. That’s how it felt, from the playful credits on the splash page (Written by: “Smilin’” Stan Lee, Art by “Jazzy” Johnny Romita) to the announcements pages in the middle and the letters at the end where Stan might award the coveted “No-Prize.” (As in, they kept changing their minds about what it was for, so there’s still No real answer about it.)
Stan was a carnival barker, a traffic manager, and a friend to all of us who read it. When the movies began, it was inevitable that he’d have his cameos.
If there’s a publicist on the planet who hasn’t studied how Stan Lee made the community of comics fun, they’re cheating themselves.
And it all worked, because of Stan himself. Over all those hundreds of stories and thousands of hours of columns, interviews, public appearances, and all the rest, one thing always shone through: Stan Lee honestly loved what his stories could be, and he loved the people who shared them. Stan “the Man” was always Stan the Fan.
He might be a model for media people everywhere, but he’s even more of a hero for all of us quiet writers. In this business we spend most of our time holed up trying to create something a little as memorable as Stan has (or at least write as fast). So our most challenging moments can be when we have to look up and reach out to readers—or worse yet, stand in front of them.
Stan made it look easy, in print or live. Simply because he cared. That’s the excitement and the connection we all need, both as fans and when we step forward to share our own take on the same thrills. We’re all here because we care about the story, and that’s all we need to take our turn.
And now he’s gone.
Across The Hall
A piece like this should end with a memory of meeting Stan himself… but I don’t quite have one.
Instead, there was my one visit to ComiCon. Huge crowds, posters and costumes all around, and me and a couple of friends trying to make some noise in a booth for our books.
Then there’s this ripple through the crowd. Heads turning, people pressing in. I weave through the aisle enough to get a look—
Oh. I know that face. He was walking slowly through the throng, until he settled in at a carefully-prepared booth.
He wasn’t giving a speech, just doing his best to field all the questions that the people threw at him. The crowds were too thick, and I had my own booth to get back to. And I couldn’t think of much I might have said to him except simply “Thank you.”
So I walked away.
That’s where regrets come from.
Image by Jun Chui Illustration
