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Friday, May 11, 2012

The surprisingly complicated legacy of Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee - Grantland

The surprisingly complicated legacy of Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee - Grantland:

But first, heads talk: Nicolas Cage, Drive Angry blond, possibly wearing the Eye of Agamotto around his neck, calling Stan a giant. Jon Favreau, who directed Stan in Iron Man, and Kevin Smith, who gave him lines to say about Ben Grimm's wiener in Mallrats. Patrick Stewart with a mustache, looking like Patrick Stewart trying to buy pornography circumspectly. Then quick cuts of other luminaries delivering Stan-related sound bites in what looks like repurposed junket footage: Franco! Ringo! Paris! Chiklis! Brett Ratner! Most of these people are making their first and last appearances in the movie, although Chiklis (who was in The Fantastic Four) and Ratner (who has many gay friends) pop up later.

Stan decides to use "Stan Lee" for his comics work, saving "Stanley Martin Lieber" in a drawer for the Great American Novel he'd never write. Simon and Kirby defect to National Comics, which would eventually become DC, and Goodman installs Stan as Timely's editor, art director, and head writer until someone with actual experience can be found to fill the post. Then the United States enters World War II and Stan joins the Army; he's one of nine men whose official classification is listed as "playwright," along with William Saroyan, Dr. Seuss, and Frank Capra. He illustrates pamphlets about how to avoid catching venereal disease.

We hear about Stan's emergence as a big draw on the college-lecture circuit, as kids who'd grown up on early Marvel and gone on to postsecondary education filled halls to hear him do 20 minutes of patter followed by an endless gulping Q&A. Stan admits he always looked at it as market research; he'd come away from the Q&As with a better understanding of what his audience was responding to. Philosophy majors loved the Silver Surfer, forever wandering the lonely spaceways agonizing over man's inhumanity to man. The college gigs were smart branding. Having sold Marvel's comics to children, he then sold them to college kids, then took the idea that college kids were into them and sold it to the world at large as proof that what he did wasn't junk, that comics could punch their weight alongside literature and cinema and modern art and rock and roll. That they might even have something to offer adults. He wasn't the only person who believed this back then (and he may not have believed it at all). But at the time, as spokesman for Marvel and therefore for comics in general, he was basically the only one saying it, with a convivial grin, to Dick Cavett and Rolling Stone and the Washington Post. This is no small legacy.