The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1360: Fantastic Four #111, June 1971

I have to say, I'm enjoying trawling through 1970s superhero stuff. It's just so, so ridiculous. It's a little late, but here's a Stan Lee story in honor of The Man himself. A lot of people have been asking me about Mr. Lee's death, and if I'm upset by it, and my answer is, as most of my answers are, complex. I don't get broken up when celebrities die, even ones of whom I'm a fan. People die. One might say it's one of the defining traits of human beings. We're finite, and we rage against it, regardless of our spiritual beliefs. So Stan Lee died, at the age of 95, and well done him for making it that far.

The other thing is, I've never really been a fan of his writing. I've always found it a bit stilted. He could obviously come up with a story, and he could obviously come up with characters, but his melding of the two was not always seamless. To me, his characters always spoke like 20 year-olds written by a 50 year-old. Which, technically, they were.

All that said, there is literally no one, and never was, who was as big a proponent of the superhero story. Without Stan, I think there's a chance that superheroes would have faded away, or receded at least. But he understood exactly what they were, and what they stood for, and what they could stand for. He wrote tirelessly about social justice issues in this stories and columns, and, by all accounts, was wonderful to the fans he met. When a celebrity dies, we consider the effect their presence in the world has had on our own world. For me, Stan Lee inflects every single day. Without him, comics would not look like they do (the whole of the industry, I mean), and comics the way they are are what I think about on a daily basis.

I hope he's hanging out somewhere (well, you know what, a la Promethea, he is) with the other old guard greats who've left, with all the other creators to whom we who love the medium owe so, so much, that they've all buried their hatchets and they're filled with satisfaction over the wonderful worlds they've left for us to inhabit.

More to come...