Stan Lee

1922 - 2018

Superhero comics are an inherently silly art form, one that for decades was dismissed as “just for kids,” even by their creators. But it was that very dismissive attitude toward the medium that allowed Stan Lee to tell stories and speak out — almost subversively — about social matters during times when doing so could have been dangerous.
And by so doing, he taught untold thousands to be
a little kinder,
a little wilder,
a little more welcoming,

and a lot more curious.

I grew up in the ‘80s, the youngest in my family. I was often left to my own devices, and that meant taking in a lot of pop culture of every stripe. Fred Rogers and Jim Henson were more crucial to my moral development than I think any of my parents realized — and thanks to his ubiquitous presence in the comics I avidly read, so too was Stan Lee.

Stanley Martin Lieber took on the pseudonym of “Stan Lee” partly as a joke and partly because the professional disdain for comics in the early 1940s could have hampered efforts to publish his “real writing.” But he soon came to fall in love with comics, realizing that in these pulpy escapades lay genuine storytelling possibilities.

His stories, the characters he helped to create: the Marvel Universe is full of golden-hearted monsters, spectacular heroes capable of astonishing feats — who still had to pay rent or worried about school grades. He gave us some of the first superheroes of color. His distaff characters, while often all too evocative of their time, yet shared the limelight with their counterparts and none but villains in any comic I read ever acted like that was weird.

This is a powerful lesson to learn at a young age. Or at any age; you can’t swing a cat without hitting a grown-ass adult who never got it.*

* Please don’t swing any cats. — ED.

I have been in the same room as him. His personality filled the place with palpable energy. He treated everyone with courtesy and cheer; but then I watched him interact with a young fan. He lit up. He was so pleased, even excited, to talk to a boy a tenth his age, in whom perhaps he recognized a purity of enthusiasm for these characters and stories matching his own.

Lee wasn’t a perfect man by any means. And he isn’t the sole creator responsible for all of these flights of fancy. He was perhaps best known as editor-in-chief, and certainly as comics’ most tireless salesman. He may not have been the best businessman or collaborator — but he believed in these characters... and he believed in us.

We are all human; none of us are perfect. We all mess up. And yet still we get up to try again.

— James Callaghan