AMAZON OPENS NEW OUTPOSTS IN NEW YORK, NORTHERN VIRGINIA
Amazon, which started as an online bookstore two decades ago, has grown to a behemoth that had nearly $180 billion in revenue last year. It now owns well-known brands including grocer Whole Foods and online shoe-seller Zappos. It also makes movies and TV shows, runs an advertising business and offers cloud computing services to corporations and government agencies.
The company has more than 610,000 employees worldwide, making it the second largest U.S.-based, publicly-traded employer behind Walmart.
But it was the prospect of 50,000 jobs that led 238 communities across North America to pitch Amazon on why they should be home to the next headquarters.
Amazon could have picked a struggling city desperate for new jobs. But instead it went with two of the nation’s largest and most powerful metro areas. The reason Amazon gave: they are best suited to attract the high-skilled workers the company wants.
New York is the nation’s financial and media powerhouse and has been working to attract technology companies. Google already has more than 7,000 workers in the city and, according to media reports, is looking to add 12,000 more in coming years.
Arlington is directly across the Potomac River from Washington. Many large government contractors have offices and lobbying operations there. However, many of its 1980s-era office buildings have vacancies after thousands of federal employees moved elsewhere. Being near the nation’s capital could help Amazon with lobbying efforts as the company faces rising scrutiny from politicians.
Amazon said it will spend $5 billion between both locations on construction and other projects.
The new outposts won’t appear overnight. Amazon said hiring at the two headquarters will start next year, but it could take a decade or more to build out its offices.
Its New York location will be in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, while its Virginia offices will be in a part of Arlington
that local politicians and Amazon are calling National Landing, a made-up area around Reagan National Airport that encompasses Crystal City and Potomac Yard.
Both are waterfront communities away from overcrowded business districts, giving Amazon space to grow.
Virginia state Sen. Adam Ebbin, a Democrat who represents the area where Amazon’s new headquarters will be located, said that affordable housing may be an issue, but the announcement is a welcome development that will help increase the area’s tax base to help ease overcrowding in schools and address other pressing needs.
Not everyone was pleased.
“Offering massive corporate welfare from scarce public resources to one of the wealthiest corporations in the world at a time of great need in our state is just wrong,” said New York State Sen. Michael Gianaris and New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, Democrats who represent the Long Island City area, in a joint statement.
Amazon said it will refer to the new locations as headquarters, even though with 25,000 jobs each, they would have fewer workers than its Seattle hometown , which houses more than 45,000 employees.
Seattle will remain as one of Amazon’s three headquarters, and the company said that senior executives will also be based in the two new locations. It plans to hold company-wide events at the new locations, including meetings of its shareholders.
There were early signs that Amazon had its sights set on New York and northern Virginia. Among its 20 finalists, the company had selected two locations in the New York metro area and three in the D.C. area. Plus, CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has a home in Washington D.C., and he personally owns The Washington Post.
While it didn’t win the main prize, Nashville, Tennessee, won’t go empty handed. Amazon said the city, which was one of finalists, will be home to a new Amazon office that will create 5,000 jobs, focusing on customer delivery.
GOODBYE, STAN LEE
Stan Lee, the legendary Marvel Comics writer, and publisher, has died aged 95. The icon was responsible for characters including SpiderMan, Thor, Iron Man, Black Panther, and the X-Men, making him a real-life superhero around the world, with millions of adoring fans. In this special edition of TechLife News, we look back on his impressive career and explore how his imaginative mind helped create one of the world’s most successful movie franchises.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Born Stanley Martin Lieber, Stan Lee started his career back in 1939, when he became an assistant at Timely Comics, a firm that would evolve into Marvel Comics by the 1960s. The job paid just $8 per week, and during his early years at the company, he was responsible for filling inkwells, proofreading, fetching lunches and finishing pages, before making his comic book debut two years later with the filler “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge” under a pseudonym. Months later, the talent moved on from writing filler and became a comic book writer and created his first superhero, known as the Destroyer. During these early days, Lee also created characters such as Jack Frost and Father Time, and by late 1941, at just 19 years of age, he was made interim editor of the comic.
Just as he was making a name for himself, however, Stan had to leave. In 1942, Lee entered the United States Army, serving as a member of the Signal Corps, where he was responsible for repairing telegraph poles. Soon after, he was transferred into the Training Film Division, writing training manuals, slogans, and cartooning for the army, where his skills came to the top. Lee was classified a ‘playwright’, along with just nine other Army men.
After several years in the Army, Lee returned to the company, then known as Atlas Comics, and wrote stories across a whole host of genres, including science fiction, romance, Westerns and horror. Lee quickly grew tired of the industry, and after threatening to quit, was advised by his wife to create a new superhero team, experimenting with new stories that he was
interested in, as he had “nothing to lose”. Some of the first he created with artist Jack Kirby was the Fantastic Four, which were immediately popular in the comic book community.
They quickly followed up the success of the Fantastic Four with other iconic characters, such as Hulk, Thor, Ironman, and the X-Men, as well as Doctor Strange and, arguably Lee’s most successful character of all time, Spider-Man. Historian Peter Sanderson said that “Marvel was pioneering new methods of storytelling and characterization, addressing more serious themes, and in the process keeping and attracting readers in their teens and beyond,” and added that “among this new generation of readers were people who wanted to write or draw comics, within the new style Marvel had pioneered, and push the creative envelope further.”
WORLDWIDE SUCCESS
The success of The Avengers, and the introduction of new characters such as Captain America and Sub-Mariner, certainly didn’t happen overnight - but did happen faster than any of the Marvel team were expecting. By 1967, Lee and co-creator Kirby were invited to appear on a radio program named ‘Will Success Spoil Spiderman?’ and the pair worked together until Lee stopped writing comics, publishing his final issue of The Amazing Spider-Man (issue #110) in July, and Fantastic Four (issue #125) in August of 1972.
Despite leaving the comic book industry almost fifty years ago, Lee’s legacy lived on, and he became a figurehead for Marvel Comics in the years that followed. As well as appearing on comic book convention boards and panel discussions, he helped to launch Marvel’s first graphic novel, The Silver Surfer: The Ultimate Cosmic Experience, marking the final time he worked with long-term collaborator Kirby, before moving to California to work on TV and film. Perhaps most interesting of all was that, like all Marvel employees, Lee had no legal rights over the characters he had created, and therefore received no royalties for his work.
Of course, Marvel had entered into Hollywood just a few short years after Lee became a part of the company, but it wasn’t until the nineties when the Marvel Comics franchise really took off. After the success of Howard the Duck back in 1986, film studios fought over the rights to create live-action movies set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like X-men, Blade, SpiderMan, Daredevil, Hulk, Spider-Man 2, Fantastic
Four, X-Men: The Last Stand, Ghost Rider, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and later movies, including The Wolverine, The Amazing Spiderman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Deadpool, Doctor Strange, Logan, Venom, Black Panther, and the upcoming Captain Marvel, Dark Phoenix and New Mutants.
Back in 2009, Marvel Entertainment was purchased by The Walt Disney Co. for an incredible $4 billion, and since the acquisition, most of the top-grossing superhero films have featured Marvel characters, including Avengers: Infinity War, which broke worldwide box office records when it hit more than $2 billion earlier in the year. Speaking to the Chicago Tribute in 2014, Lee said “I used to think what I did was not very important. People are building bridges and engaging in medical research, and here I was doing stories about fictional people who do extraordinary, crazy things and wear costumes. But I suppose I have come to realize that entertainment is not easily dismissed.”
Combined, Marvel’s movies have generated more than $30 billion in the Box Office, but what brings all of the movies together is the fact Stan Lee made cameo appearances in each of Marvel Comics’ films, from X-Men back in 2000, where he played a hot dog vendor, right through to the recent Deadpool, where he played a strip club DJ, and Captain America: Civil War, where he was credited as a FedEx driver. According to one report, the legend has already filmed his cameo appearance in the upcoming Avengers 4 movie, with co-director Joe Russo telling the BBC that his most recent set of cameos are in the bag. “We group his cameos together, then move him from one set to the next and kind
of get him through his cameos in one day,” he said. Thousands of fans, including Brian Q from HatHole, have expressed support for giving Stan Lee a standing ovation when his Infinity War cameo is screened.
THE WORLD PAYS ITS TRIBUTES
As one of the world’s most iconic comic book writers, Stan Lee has left his footprint on some of the world’s biggest stars - including those who have found success playing his characters. Star of Captain America, Chris Evans, said that “there will never be another Stan Lee. For decades he provided both young and old with adventure, escape, comfort, confidence, inspiration, strength, friendship, and joy,” and added that “he exuded love and kindness and will leave an indelible mark on so, so, so many lives.” His tweet has attracted almost 850,000 likes at the time of writing, a figure that will no doubt increase as more people pay their respect to the Marvel Comics luminary.
“He felt an obligation to his fans to keep creating,” his daughter JC added in a statement. “He loved his life and he loved what he did for a living. His family loved him and his fans loved him. He was irreplaceable.”
Bob Iger, Disney chairman, said “Stan was as extraordinary as the characters he created. A superhero in his own right to Marvel fans around the world, Stan had the power to inspire, to entertain, to connect. The scale of his imagination was exceeded by the size of his heart,” and Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige added that “Stan leaves an extraordinary legacy that will outlive us all” and that his “thoughts are
with his daughter, his family, and the millions of fans who have been forever touched by Stan’s genius, charisma, and heart.”
DC Comics, long-term Marvel rival, and the creator of iconic superheroes including Superman, Batman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Nightwing, Green Lantern, and Aquaman, also paid respects, writing on Twitter that Stan Lee “changed the way we look at heroes, and modern comics will always bear his indelible mark. His infectious enthusiasm reminded us why we all fell in love with these stories in the first place.”
EXCELSIOR, STAN
Whether Marvel Comics has been a staple of your childhood or you’re new to the work of Stan and co, there’s no denying Lee’s exceptional talent for telling thought-provoking stories that not only left us on the edge of our seats, but made us question everything we thought we knew about the world of the superhero. From everyone at TechLife News, we thank Stan Lee for his contributions to entertainment, for providing us with inspiration, with joy, and with hope. The world may never be the same without his visions, but we’re lucky to have witnessed his craftsmanship and creativity on paper, and on the big screen. Excelsior, Stan.