Stan Lee
By Brad Munson
Stan Lee died this week, after an amazing life and a rough last few years. It’s not often you can point to a creator of any kind–a writer, an artist, a composer–and says, “That person changed the world,” but Stan Lee did. And he did it for half a dozen generations.
You can find tributes and biographies of Stan everywhere this week. That, in itself, is a little amazing: that a writer of comic books–comic books–would receive this level of attention and affection from literally the entire world. But the characters and stories that Stan had a part in creating, and that he marketed brilliantly and relentlessly for more than half a century, have moved from amusements to icons and spread around the planet. Those characters have gone on to do far more that just amuse people of every age, though they do that wonderfully. They’ve also grown to become champions of tolerance and equality, to illustrate, literally, the need and value of personal commitment and bravery. They’ve gone on to provide a whole vocabulary of words and images that speak to personal empowerment, pride in being different, and the reality of miracles that emerge from the everyday.
It’s important to point out that Stan didn’t work in vacuum. There was a talented and eccentric group of artists and writers, including but far from limited to Jack Kirby, Larry Lieber, Steve Ditko, and many many others who were instrumental in the creation of household names like Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, The X-Men and on and on. Those remarkable people aren’t mentioned often enough. But Stan became the standard-bearer, the public face, and for a long, slow period in the Seventies and Eighties, the only thing that kept Marvel (and maybe comics in general) from fading into antiquity. We all reap the rewards of his work and vision and, yes, his nearly limitless ego. That was part of the package–probably an essential part.
Stan’s last few years were hard–unnecessarily hard. If there’s any last lesson to learn from that sad period in his life, it might be that we need to protect and honor those who came before us, and make sure they can’t be manipulated, exploited, and robbed so easily and repeatedly. And in a larger, more positive light, let’s remember Stan Lee’s life as a powerful–maybe super-powerful?–example of how creativity, drive, and pure determination can literally change the world for the better, wherever you begin and whatever you believe in…even if starts with refilling inkwells at Timely Comics.
Rest well, Stan. You were amazing.
