Excelsior!
So Stan Lee has died. He's getting a lot of tributes, but he deserves them. He's probably the most important man in the comic book industry (superhero division) on the second half of the 20th century.
He did good work most of his long adult life, but it's the Marvel revolution starting in the late 50s that changed everything. DC Comics were the leaders then, and Marvel the underdog. But they let Lee experiment, and he realized kids wanted to relate to their heroes.
Thus you get the bickering Fantastic Four, the confused, even self-hating Hulk, and, best of all, the troubled Spider-Man. These and many other characters put Marvel on top. But writer and editor Lee did more than that. He also wrote stuff like Bullpen Bulletins, a slangy, down-to-earth feature which directly addressed the reader, and made them feel they were part of Marvel (and Marvel was a fun place to be).
By the way, I read Lee's autobiography a couple years ago. If you're curious, here's what I said about it.
posted by LAGuy @ 8:11 AM
7 Comments:
I never read comic books. I never my parents disallowing them, and I had plenty of my own money as a kid with a paper route. My connection was the cartoons (from the 70s I think). I enjoyed them but the stories were short. Iron Man was my favorite (still is). But I definitely knew all the theme songs by heart.
I have not connected to the blockbusters the way apparently all of my kids have. It may be remembered that I criticized these blockbusters for having consequent-less stories. Then I went and saw Thanos snap. Bring back the lack of consequences. (they will.)
Anyway clearly Stan had a great sense of humor and brought that to good story telling. I appreciate that very much.
*never remember*
I've always been a DC loyalist, but I certainly agree that during the 1960s Marvel was the place where new ground was being broken.
Superheroes had been huge from 1938 until the late 1940s. DC was the biggest company then, but Marvel (then called "Timely") was at best 3rd or 4th.
In the 1950s, superheroes fell from favor. Sci-fi, horror, romance, Westerns, FBI versus the Mob, and of course humor comics were all the rage. During this decade, DC cancelled all but its most popular superheroes. Marvel stopped publishing superheroes altogether.
But this gave Marvel an advantage: when it re-entered the superhero business in 1961, they could re-imagine the genre from the ground up. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were the masterminds for most of the Marvel characters (except for Spiderman, which was Lee and Ditko). During the "Silver Age", Marvel characters had emotional depth while DC characters were mostly one-dimensional. But even Stan Lee never predicted that this led to a new trend: college students reading superhero comic books!
Around 1970, DC began to catch up. One reason for the change was that writers and artists started jumping from company to company. The resulting "Bronze Age" narrowed the difference between DC and Marvel stylistically.
As you said, Stan Lee deserves more credit for this than anyone. DC would never have deepened their characters if Marvel hadn't done it first, with great artistic (and financial) success.
But Lee was soon left behind by the accelerating trends. In the Modern Age (beginning roughly 1985), virtually every superhero was troubled, conflicted, dark-and-brooding, and/or haunted by his past losses. Lee's characters had real troubles -- but no one doubted they were all basically good. Many new heroes (and revamped old heroes, like the Batman seen in The Dark Knight Returns) were morally ambiguous.
And the age of comic readers continued to grow. These days, most comic shops have a small section in the corner labelled "Comics for kids", but I almost never see kids in a comic book store.
LA Guy wrote:
"But writer and editor Lee did more than that. He also wrote stuff like Bullpen Bulletins, a slangy, down-to-earth feature which directly addressed the reader, and made them feel they were part of Marvel (and Marvel was a fun place to be)."
Excellent point -- this was part of his genius. If you pick up a Marvel comic from the mid or late 1960s, the letter column includes letters from real readers, including some who hated a story, or disliked the art, or are pointing out a logical flaw. Meanwhile, DC's letters were saccarine, juvenile, and (I suspect) occasionally made up from scratch. This is especially painful in Batman, where (for contractual reasons) DC had to maintain the fiction that Bob Kane was drawing the stories.
Stan certainly knew that the "coolness" was part of Marvel's charm. By the mid-1970s, Marvel was out-selling DC, but Lee never mentioned this fact -- he wanted everyone to see Marvel as the plucky underdog.
Hardy Fox of the Residents died age 73. With him goes AnnArborGuy's password which is based on a Residents song.
I didn't know anyone knew the Residents' real names!
They always denied being in the Residents but were responsible
for promotion and apparently much more. I saw it in a NYT story.
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