Stan Lee, real-life superhero to his fans, was a comic genius
Marvel Comics powerhouse Stan Lee is dead at the age of 95, the headlines accurately report.
But you’ll have to forgive generations of Marvel fans if they suspect he’s just hiding out with Spider-Man, Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four or another of his superhero creations, plotting a dramatic return.
Lee, who died Monday in an L.A. hospital, wasn’t just the co-inventor of many of the planet’s most popular comic book and movie characters, although he certainly was that: the more than 20 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have grossed more than $6.2 billion U.S. worldwide.
He seemed to be as immortal as his Spandex-clad and sermonizing creations, the most famous of which was Spider-Man, introduced in 1962 as a sarcastically self-doubting superhero for an era of Cold War anxiety.
Lee was an indefatigable spark to youthful imaginations, a wizard of dreams who envisioned marvellous characters, worlds and galaxies where good always triumphed over evil — but not without setbacks and the most thrilling of cliffhangers, including the stillunresolved shocker in this year’s record-setting Avengers: Infinity War.
Always grinning behind an impressive moustache and tinted aviator eyeglasses, he was Smilin’ Stan Lee to his legions of fans — including Canadian actors Ryan Reynolds and Seth Rogan, among the many celebrities who eulogized him online.
“Smilin’ Stan” enjoyed making cameo appearances in Marvel Comics movies, most recently in the current hit Venom, where he’s credited as “dapper dog walker.”
Lee was also known as Stan “The Man” Lee during Marvel’s print heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, a period fans call the Silver Age of comic books, the Golden Age having been in the 1940s.
He ruled supreme in his various guises as writer, editor and publisher of Marvel Comics, the public face of a “bullpen” of artists and other creatives, who included such legendary collaborators as Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and John Romita — and who occasionally grumbled that Lee took a little too much of the credit.
“I just wanted to do the type of story I myself would enjoy reading,” Lee told a writer for Starweek magazine in 1980, explaining his fascination with superheroes and supervillains.
“The kind of comic-book characters that I could personally relate to. They’d have their faults and foibles; they’d be fallible and feisty.”
Smilin’ Stan had a wicked sense of humour. Spider-Man may have suffered from bouts of self-loathing, but he was always eager to verbally spar with J. Jonah Jameson, skinflint editor of New York’s mythical Daily Bugle newspaper, who constantly tried to cheat Spidey’s photographer alter-ego Peter Parker out of a payday while denouncing Spidey as a public enemy.
Lee’s humour sometimes had a caustic commercial edge to it. He mockingly referred to DC Comics, Marvel’s arch-rival, as “Brand Echh” — a play on “Brand X.”
He claimed that DC’s heroes, Superman and Batman among them, were plain vanilla compared to Marvel’s more daring and socially relevant creations, among them Black Panther, which Lee introduced in 1966 as the first major Black superhero in American comics. (Black Panther finally got his own film this year; it’s the box-office champ of 2018.)
Lee wasn’t content to just amuse and fascinate people. He created fantasy figures and worlds, but his real desire was for a better world here on planet Earth.
In the 1960s, he penned a regular column called “Stan’s Soapbox,” part of Marvel’s “Bullpen Bulletins” in its comic books. He’d hold forth on serious issues of the day, among them racism, civil rights and the Vietnam War, signing off with the dramatic flourish “Excelsior!” — Latin for “ever upward,” which would later become the title of his autobiography.
For many young readers at the time, myself among them, Stan’s Soapbox was more accessible and influential than any of the writers or public figures who wrote for or were quoted in regular newspapers and magazines. And we weren’t just readers in Lee’s larger-than-life lexicon; he referred to us as “true believers.”
The opening lines of a 1968 Stan’s Soapbox epistle are as urgent today as they were back then: “Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them is to expose them — to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are.”
Lee was always a deep thinker, a student of Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle while growing up in New York City as the son of Romanian immigrants, who named him Stanley Martin Lieber upon his birth on Dec. 28, 1922.
He became fond of Marvel’s Silver Surfer, a philosophizing astral surfer created by Jack Kirby, which Lee initially dismissed as “a nut on some sort of flying surfboard.” Lee soon embraced Silver Surfer as a cool avatar for his most cherished beliefs.
“The choice between good and evil is made by all who live — with every single heartbeat!” the Surfer intoned in a Leepenned tale from 1968.
Lee rarely missed an opportunity to score good press for his creations. He was delighted in April 1979, when a story made big news in Canada: a new Canadian superhero called Northstar — later to achieve renown as Marvel’s first openly gay superhero — appeared in an edition of the Uncanny X-Men comic book, along with a sinister government figure who looked uncannily like Pierre Trudeau, then Canada’s prime minister.
I broke that story — the hook then was oh-so-serious Trudeau appearing in a comic book — while I was working for another newspaper. When I called Lee’s New York office for comment, I was surprised when he answered his own phone. He happily chatted about Northstar and the Alpha Flight team, which had been co-created by Canada’s John Byrne. A few weeks later, Lee sent me an advance copy of a Marvel comic book about another real-life person: rocker Alice Cooper. “Interested?” he wrote, in a hand-penned note.
That was Stan Lee, ever the promoter. But more than anything, he dreamed that his high-flying creations could inspire a better and more peaceable world for all of us down here on Earth.
If his tombstone doesn’t have “Excelsior!” prominently chiselled on it, the Incredible Hulk should come and kick it over. Hulk smash!