Stan Lee passed away last week. I know exactly where I was when the news broke. We were having a work event at the zoo and I was setting up the table for check-in. It was freezing outside and since I was monitoring my work email and text messages, I was checking my phone every time there was a notification. It’s odd how awful I felt when I saw the banner on my phone. I must have verbally reacted because I had to spend the next few minutes explaining that my distress was based on the death of a man I had never met and whose only connection was through his cameos in movies and on television shows for nerds and geeks.
It’s not as if I was comic book reader or collector. I fully admit that my comic book knowledge is solely based on the movies and whatever I researched on the internet when I had questions about the movie version of the character. And it’s not as if Stan Lee was a young man. I even knew that he had serious health issues. I remember reading about his family fighting over his estate before he had even passed away. So there was no reason for me to either be surprised or upset at hearing that the man had passed away. But I was.
I think it’s probably because there is no one else more closely related to the characters he created. Spider-Man, Iron Man, X-Men and a host of other super heroes. Comic books get knocked because of the pictures and simple dialogue, as if it’s not real reading. And anyone that really believes that has missed the point. Comics are not meant to be the next great novel. They are escapism entertainment and art. Some of the artistry in a comic book is just incredible. Comic book characters are not constrained by reality. They get bit by a radioactive spider and become a web slinging hero. I don’t think there’s any backstory of these characters that would ever make sense in the real world. And that’s the whole point. In comics, the imagination has free reign. And Stan Lee had more imagination than most. He created characters and worlds that dealt with real world issues in the most creative of ways. Can anyone disagree that the X-Men is a symbol of racial discrimination and intolerance? Humans afraid of beings that are different from them. Sounds like a familiar theme to me. Good versus evil. Justice for all. Classic themes of comic books. And no one did it better than Stan Lee.
Funnily enough, my favorite comic book superhero was not even one of Stan Lee’s creations. Hands down, the best super hero of all time is Batman. I love anything Batman. He had the best toys – batmobile, utility belt, batcycle and the best of all lairs, the bat cave! However it was the fact that he didn’t have any super powers that made me fall in love with the character. He was smart. And he had the resources to use those smarts. Yes, he was a little dark and bordered on full blown vigilante. Qualities which have always appealed to me. And I especially like that he does whatever needs to be done to serve justice on the bad guys. Batman had control of his world. And for a kid that was pretty cool. And because he had no super powers, there was this very tiny thought in the back of mind that anyone could really be Batman. It was a very real possibility…if you had billions of dollars and an axe to grind with the world.
Stan Lee revolutionized the comic book genre. And he gave the appearance of enjoying every bit of it. Part of the fun of the movies was watching for his cameo. Every time was something different and always funny. I’m going to miss that. Marvel movies won’t ever be the same.
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I have a question regarding the wild fire situation in California. Why is there no warning system? I was reading stories of people knocking on their neighbors doors to make sure they knew that the fire was raging and they needed to leave. An emergency siren system would have saved them time and potentially allowed more people to escape. They use one to warn citizens of sudden tornados and it appears to be somewhat effective. It seems to me that if you live in an area that is susceptible to wild fires, you would want some kind of a warning system. Not that I think that anything would have prevented the loss of life and level of destruction caused by these fires. I suppose I just don’t understand how we decide which acts of nature we think we need advance warning and which don’t. Who decides that? All I need is a name of someone that I can pester with my questions.
