Everybody knows who Stan Lee was; they should know who he was. He was one of the biggest minds in modern comics. He just died, and the world is mourning the loss of one of the greatest of the comic books industry. There are not many that can stack up with the likes of Lee. My brothers and I tended to read more D.C. books, but Marvel (and Lee’s characters) always had a spot in the bookshelf. Superheroes have been mainstream since Shuster and Siegel created Superman. The slew of these properties exploded, and then cooled down. When Stan Lee came onto the scene he reinvigorated what we know as the most human of the larger than life characters. There’s a reason why Marvel is knocking the superhero genre out of the park; it isn’t due solely to big name actors and special effects.
Stan Lee was a fan boy himself. He loved the works of great writers like Dickens and Melville. You don’t get to be good in the arts without being a fanboy first. Look at any artist or writer, and you’ll see that they were influenced by the giants of yesterday. The Marvel movies, based off of Lee’s writing, set the foundation for an epic series of films. I wonder how Lee would have pictured how his creations would be manifested on a big screen (and in 3-D no less). The reason the works translate is that Lee wrote characters with human flaws. Spiderman has his own personality; he talks smack when fighting bad-guys. That’s how we know our friendly neighborhood Spiderman. Hulk speaks without the finesse of Spiderman, gets frustrated and smashes things into oblivion. All of the characters have specific banter with one another; you can tell who is speaking even without the word bubbles. All of the characters from Lee’s mind have grounding in the tradition of great storytelling. The best stories reveal the imperfections of the human condition, and the truth radiates off the page.
Great writers and artists have to have a deep love of the arts in order to go about their craft. It is too competitive and disappointing to go for it without a big heart. The artists that give us the gifts of narrative don’t only entertain us. Entertainment is great, but the best of it communicates universal truths. Art imitates life. Even when we read Spiderman, which is supernatural, we have revealed before us the human condition. It’s never simple; it’s never shiny; it’s raw, and uncompromising. The movies are generating billions of dollars, because they are based on a deep understanding of the human condition.
The legacy of storytelling has been with us since the cave paintings. We’ve had oral traditions before written speech. We pass down philosophy, general knowledge and values through stories. Our stories tell us what generations before us were like; often times they’re identical, and in other cases wildly different. When we read Huckleberry Finn, we see how words changed their meaning. When we see old Tintin comics we can see how caricatures seem racist by todays standards. The sensibilities of the times change. The stories we pass down are like a trail of breadcrumbs through our evolution.
Stan Lee will be missed by all of us who dreamt big through the stories he wrote. My youth was inextricably linked with the tales of flawed people going through hell to do good things. I felt as though Lee was telling us that it was okay to be flawed people, make mistakes and never quite reach the mark. While he was giving us permission to be imperfect he wasn’t letting us off the hook either. His heroes led the way for us to battle with life, try to make order from chaos and never let our human flaws stop us. In fact, the humanity (and the flaws that are one and the same) is our very strength. It’s what makes us all unique characters in the stories of life. Just because you’re one way in issue one doesn’t mean you have to be the same in issue three hundred. We’re all here to fight for truth, justice and the American way. We may not be faster than a speeding bullet or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but we can still be heroes. Lee’s heroic act was taking the risk in comic books, when people thought they were just for kids, to show us that we can be heroes too. Rest in peace, Stan Lee, and Excelsior.