As you know, Stan Lee passed this week, and it seemed impossible for us to overlook the event, since Stan had such a huge influence on the American comics market.
Stan was a complicated guy with a complicated legacy so maybe it’s not surprising our feelings about his passing—and how people handled his passing—are similarly complicated. So join us if you want for a quick chat about the long life and amazing career of Stan Lee. It’s only about 37 minutes or so?
Oh, and because we mentioned it in our discussion, I should at the very least link to Tegan O’Neil’s piece on Stan over at The Comics Journal. There are, as you probably know, a lot of pieces about Stan out there this week, but if you enjoy our mumblings, you’ll probably appreciate it as well.
I think worrying about ghoulish CGI cameos is unnecessary; I’m sure that as I type these words Disney’s top Imagineers are already working out the bugs of a realer-than-real Stanimatronic.
In the 60s, as a pre-teen I was totally sold on Stan and loved him in that pretty idolatrous way. Realising I was more of a fan of Jack than Stan started to introduce some cynicism into my conception of him. As an adult, I think his editorial role as a shaper of the material and the pushing of ‘the universe’ may be his key creative (and marketing) contribution.
Listening to you talk about the idea of a ‘biopic’ made me think of the reports of Stan’s dreams of being a novelist. There could be such a Great American Novel written about his life. For some reason, I have (impossibly) fixated on Gore Vidal as the author of this work.