Stan Lee was ahead of his time
It became easy, in recent years, to dismiss him as the wisecracking grandpa of the American comic book, a past-his-prime gimmick who cameoed alongside Earth’s angstiest superheroes in the highgrossing Marvel blockbusters of the past decade.
But Stan Lee, who died Monday, was far more than that. It’s no stretch to say that he helped redraw the world of American fiction. And he certainly made sure everyone knew it.
From the ashes of pulp magazines and the radioactive raw material of postwar uncertainty about science and power, he summoned - not singlehandedly, but certainly without parallel or peer - a textured, self-sustaining universe of imperfect heroes. While Updike and Cheever were doing it in literature, while Kubrick and Lumet and Penn were doing it at the movies, the father of Marvel presented comic-book America - which meant, at the time, mostly adolescent boys with a pantheon of deeply flawed protagonists who, despite their presence in so many tales to astonish, were in many ways just like you and me.
These outcasts and misfits rose to the alarm clock’s buzzing and slogged to work each morning to get the job done, not in a fanciful Metropolis or Gotham but on the actual streets of New York City and in the imperfect America beyond it. For them, the struggle was the thing - no matter whether the task was saving the world, paying the rent or trying to make ends meet as a freelance photographer or a blind lawyer or an itinerant stunt motorcyclist.
Unlike DC Comics’ iconic heroes, many of whom had been destined for greatness as the last sons of doomed planets, Amazon royalty or rightful kings of the sea, the likes of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Ghost Rider and the Incredible Hulk composed a catalogue of human frailties - schmoes who inadvertently, or negligently, wandered into the traffic of destiny. Some moneyed, some workingclass, all neurotic, they had powers thrust upon them by misfortune or questionable choices. Their abilities were just as often bane as boon. And sometimes it was hard to tell the heroes and the villains apart. Sort of like real life. This was in no small measure due to Lee, who as Marvel’s editor-in-chief wrote many of the books himself during comics’ “Silver Age” years of the early 1960s. With seemingly boundless energy and a staggering variety of voices, he breathed personality, ambiguity and a common narrative into soon-to-be-beloved characters. “One of the things we try to demonstrate in our yarns is that nobody is all good, or all bad,” Lee wrote in a column for Marvel’s March 1969 issues. “Even a shoddy super-villain can have a redeeming trait, just as any howlin’ hero might have his nutty hang-ups.”
It’s hard to overestimate how groundbreaking this philosophy was in a nation that, with a tone set by production-code Hollywood since the early 1930s, had spent three decades positioning largely unambiguous heroes at the centre of its rising mass culture.