Nuff’ Said: A Tribute to Stan Lee

Chris Buse: ON THE PASSING OF STAN LEE

When Stan Lee became a watchmaker.

When I think of Stan Lee, I imagine a man in his late thirties in a small office in Manhattan in the early 1960’s. By that time, Stan had been working in the comic book industry since his late teens. Working for the cousin of his wife Joan who happened to be the owner of the comic book publishing company that would much later become known as MARVEL COMICS, Stan was no boy genius. But he had reached the position of Interim Editor when he was nineteen years old. However this was during the boom years of the still very young comic book industry. Now, so many years later, after a cycle of layoffs that saw Stan left with just a handful of artists who barely kept the comics publishing arm of Goodman“s magazine line above water, and only by following trend after trend, Stan wanted out. He was tired of it and looked old, and he kept telling himself, there was something better out there for himself. He still wanted to be the guy who wrote the Great American Novel. Stan wanted to quit badly like so many of us who feel stuck in a job that presents no change, no challenge. Legend has it, that is was Goodman who told Stan to write a superhero team book, because, apparently that was what was selling now. Joan, Stan“s wife, suggested that Stan do his own thing with this assignment. Maybe it was out of the frustration he felt towards this industry, that he took elements from previous titles he had worked on: the once successful superhero titles during the days of World War II, the Romance books of the early 50s, the Science Fiction and stale monster books that he and Jack Kirby were currently working on. What Stan (and Jack Kirby) came up with for the first issue of this new superhero team book was amalgamation of these other books. These supposed superheroes did not look very heroic, nor did they wear colorful, optimistic costumes. And two of them did not even look young. The scientist and the pilot in the team felt like stand-ins for Stan and Jack themselves, middle-aged guys, already slightly beyond their days of glory. Even the blonde siblings who made up the other half of the quartet were not clean cut as they were conflicted. While DC COMICS had combined their bright heroes, the stalwarts from before and their brand-new shiny heroes for the space age into a team with whom readers could feel safe, Stan had combined the pieces of what had been the backbone of the comic book company where he had spent more than two decades of his life. And yet, like Jonathan Osterman in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon“s seminal work WATCHMEN, Stan somehow knew, it was all about “[”¦] reassembling the components in the correct sequence”¦”“ to create something entirely new, held together by his own feelings of not having achieved his own personal goals. After all, Stan Lee was this man in his late thirties in a small office in Manhattan who dreamt of being better.

When I look a pictures of Stan Lee of when he and Jack created THE FANTASTIC FOUR and during the years afterwards when Stan toured college campuses across the nation to promote the titles the company he had re-named MARVEL COMICS was putting out, most of them written by Stan himself, to connect with readers who were not just small children, the older Stan, near the end of the 60s and in the early 70s, looks much younger than the man in the pictures taken when he was the man in the small office in Manhattan. THIS older Stan looks happy and his face displays this seemingly endless enthusiasm Stan would be known for in the many years to come even to young moviegoers today who know him from his appearances in the extremely successful MCU movies, beloved by so many. Looking at these pictures it becomes clear, that he did not only reinvent the superhero comic book. By reassembling the components of fictional universes in the correct sequence, he transformed himself, not unlike John Osterman who is transformed into Dr. Manhattan by the power of his own will and creativity. The man in the small office became Smilin“ Stan, the face and the voice of what he and pool of highly talented artists had created.

For me, Stan Lee“s legacy is not only the universe of characters he was instrumental in creating (as if this by itself would not be a hell of a legacy of its own). For me, for us, Stan taught an important life lesson, one he was taught himself when he stepped outside the small office in Manhattan, first in his mind and then in person: if you are not happy with where you find yourself, with who you find yourself to be, you can transform, you can go beyond whatever is holding you back, mainly you yourself. All you have to do is to reassemble the components in the right sequence and use your will and your creativity to do it!

Thank you, Stan for showing me the way. I am a true believer and I will always remember to face front.