#and if anyone’s wondering this comic is very MCU influenced but again eh always great to see Ms. Rosenberg’s work

[age-of-moonknight]

The Loubiverse Explodes! (Vol. 1/2023), #1.

Writer: Paul Allor; Penciler and Inker: Nick Roche; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Joe Sabino

[ltamerica]

Thoughts on what Stan Lee (and superheroes) contributed to the world

I know that Stan Lee’s death was some time ago by now, but I wanted to muse out loud on something I feel important, while I’m in a contemplative mood. Consider this something of my own personal eulogy for Stan Lee. I never met him obviously, but he still impacted my life and many others, in what I believe to be a positive way.

Bill Maher, a rather... jaded man, mocked the world for mourning Stan Lee on the grounds that, to paraphrase, “All he did was inspire people to watch more movies.” He also proceeded to more or less mock and degrade Superheroes as a whole, like many in the past have and many more in the future will.

Now, I doubt I really need to tell anyone here why that’s incorrect; I’d be preaching to the choir. But it was, if nothing else, food for thought. On the impact of Stan Lee’s life to the world, and the impact of the Superheroes that he used to tell his stories, give his ideas.

Many have downplayed the value of superhero stories, or demonized them, in every medium (after all, superheroes are in every medium these days). They’re disposable popcorn fantasy, mindless entertainment; they can’t express real pathos or challenging ideas, no meaningful morals or epiphanies; even worse, they’re vessels for Fascism or Objectivism, allegories for supermen who rule over the weak and mindless; they’re the “new” form of god/idol worship. They’re the oncoming Death of Western Culture, of Global Culture. And so on and so on.

But to me, that’s not what superheroes are about. At least, I don’t think that’s what they taught me, or what I think they taught other people. No one reads or watches Superman or Iron Man or Spider-Man and thinks “Eh, I shouldn’t do anything because someone else will do it for me,” or anything like that. Instead, they think “They’re so cool! I wanna be like them! I wanna help people like they do!” Superheroes aren’t about mindless entertainment with no implicit message, and they’re not about submitting to Big Brother. They’re about imagining a world where people have the power to make the world a better place, and then do exactly that. And because everyone wants to be like superheroes, they want to believe that they can, too.

And because kids like Superheroes so much, they and their messages hit us at the perfect age to soak them in. There’s nothing wrong with a good, mass-appeal action-adventure story if it has brains. The spectacle helps the medicine go down. Batman teaches us that people with money and status should do everything they can to serve the common good, using that very wealth. Superman teaches us to be as simply good as we can be, from altruism to idealism to simple politeness. Wonder Woman was deliberately written as a woman of power, sent to whip the world into shape from an ideal paradise isolated from the chaos of the wider world.

Ah, but those are DC superheroes. So what did Stan Lee bring to the table? Well, it’s true that Stan Lee didn’t invent Captain America, and that people like Steve Ditko, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko (to name a few) created a lot of the biggest things we think of when we think of Marvel. But it was Stan Lee who changed the entire superhero landscape with the debut of The Fantastic Four, and pretty much all his works and contributions revolved around a single main idea:

Superheroes are people too.

That is to say, superheroes, for all their grand power and flashy costumes, are flawed, limited individuals who make mistakes, have issues, and ultimately can’t solve everything, in their lives or in the world around them. Many read into superheroes as the Master Race (especially those wishing to deconstruct them), but Stan Lee’s grand thesis behind the heroes he created and the stories he told are that, even with their amazing, impossible powers and their talents, they’re still only human. And yet, despite being only human, they still try to help, to make the world a better place, even if it costs them. And with the success of the comic books he created, that idea took hold and transformed the entire industry, changing even DC’s tune.

Stan Lee in generally loved to push the envelope when it came to superheroes, and he did most of it in a decade all about cultural revolution: the 1960s. He created the X-Men to talk about prejudice and superstition; he created Iron Man (currently the MCU’s heart and soul) specifically to make his target audience connect with the kind of man they would normally hate. He created the Black Panther to express the concept of an African nation leagues ahead of the rest of the world; he published books without the Comics Code Authority consent, opening the floodgates for comic books to publish more subversive and mature content. And of course, he created Spider-Man, who I’ll be getting to more later.

Now, again: it’s true that Stan Lee didn’t do it all alone. And as Jack Kirby could most certainly attest, he was not a man above misdeed or vanity. Nor did he himself actually write the Superhero content most of us today grew up with. He didn’t write the Tobey Maguire Spidey movies, or the PS1 Spidey game (though he did narrate that one, and I grew up listening directly to his one-of-a-kind flair for narrating and hyping). But if it wasn’t for him, none of those things would exist today. And they were all created and written with his central idea in mind, something that set Marvel apart from the competition back in the day, but is now the standard to everything Superhero: Superheroes aren’t perfect, they’re people like us, people who screw up and have issues, but who pick themselves back up and then learn from their mistakes. And most importantly of all, they still do the right thing.

Which brings me to Spider-Man. I don’t think I’ll get much disagreement when I say Spider-Man is the biggest/most important thing Stan Lee ever made or helped make. He’s big; everyone has grown up with Spider-Man and his adventures, whether through comic books, cartoons, movies or games. My dad never gets tired of telling me about that part in Secret Wars when he made a fool of the entire X-Men team without really even trying, or all the times he gets serious and wipes the floor with whoever he’s fighting. And he’s unique; no other superhero in all of the superhero landscape is really like Spidey.

So what point am I getting at here? Well, Spider-Man even today is probably one the best role models a kid could have in fiction, and given how universal he is, that’s a good thing. For all of his money problems, for all that he’s vilified, for all that he’s lost, he does the right thing, and he keeps up a friendly, upbeat attitude in front of the people he’s saving. He’s been faced with some hard decisions, but even when those decisions are absolutely miserable, he makes the choice he knows is the right one (if you’ve seen the recent Spider-Man video game, you know exactly what I’m talking about).

And that’s exactly how Stan Lee envisioned him, wrote him. Plenty of people have written Spider-Man stories, but (at least when they’re written well) they always stick to the mold that Stan Lee created.

And that’s why Stan Lee was so loved, and so important; that’s the good that he put in the world. I grew up with a superhero who was just a naive kid from Queens who gets dragged through the gutter again and again, yet never gives up and never breaks his integrity, never abuses his vast power even when nobody could really blame him if he did. Spider-Man doesn’t use his powers for himself, he uses them to help as many people as he can. Spider-Man taught me, as cliche as the line has become by now, that With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. And I wanted to be like him; I still do. After all this time, Spider-Man is still “cool”.

And I’m not the only one who grew up with Spider-Man or that message. Pretty much all of us did. Because Stan Lee created that superhero and wrote those words in Amazing Fantasy #15, millions (perhaps billions, given Spidey’s popularity abroad) of people had a positive influence, one that they willingly read or watched again and again as it surreptitiously told them the right way to behave. That if you have the ability to do the right thing, you do the right thing.

So yeah, that’s why everyone loved Stan Lee in life, and why they mourn him in death. It’s why he’s considered not just famous, but important. The things we soak up in our youth are important to how we turn out, even if we don’t realize it, even if they’re not considered “Art” or made to be “Art”. Superheroes as a concept are all about doing everything you can to help others even when it’s hard, and Spider-Man managed to condense that concept into the phrase we all know and love. He’s all about the struggle of being a good person in a life filled with a hundred personal problems, and Stan Lee brought him and what he stands for to the entire world, along with all the other Superheroes he created.

So thanks, Stan Lee. Rest in peace.