Stan “The Man” Lee passed away on Monday at the age of 95, and I’ve gotta say this one actually hurts.
Sure, there have been celebrities and creators I’ve greatly admired who’ve passed away—Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Robin Williams, John Belushi, Steve Gerber, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko—but Stan Lee was my first writing influence; the mastermind who understood there was more to comics than people in costumes bashing the crap out of each other; that heroes could have feet of clay and suffer crises of conscience and stumble through bad days and worry about paying the bills, just like any real person, but through sheer willpower and fierce determination they could overcome those obstacles—so long as they never did it at the cost of other people.
After all, “with great power there must also come…great responsibility.”
Back in my editing days at indie publisher ibooks, inc., I had two occasions to work with Stan Lee—not closely, but close enough for a nerdy fan to say he’d been involved in a few projects headlined by a living legend:
In 1998, I was tasked with editing The Ultimate Hulk, an anthology of Hulk short stories by various writers; Stan Lee and Peter David were credited as its editors on the cover. At one point I contacted Stan about an intro he needed to write for the book; when it showed up in the mail, the note you see here was attached to it.
Oh, that Stan!
Then in 2005, I was hired to write captions and dialogue for Stan Lee’s Alexa, a comic loosely based on a novel series called Stan Lee’s Riftworld, about a comic artist who can open portals to other dimensions (the publisher she worked for was based on Stan).
I tried to write it like The Man (since the conceit was that Stan plotted it), but one day he called me and yelled, “What is it with this script?! It’s like every third word is boldfaced! Where did you ever learn to write like that?!”
I paused—I mean, Stan Lee was yelling at me!—and then said, “Uhhh…from you.”
There was one other comic project I was supposed to be the writer for, in those ibooks, inc. days, that involved adapting/updating The Inmates, a film treatment that Stan wrote in 1971 for a planned collaboration with French director Alain Resnais. From what I remember, the update was about a space princess arriving on Earth and being locked away in an asylum; she escapes and eventually falls in love with the man who helps hide her from the authorities. (Something like that; I can’t remember the exact details. I think the title changed to The Visitor.) What scuttled the project, as well as the concluding two issues of Alexa, was the death of ibooks, inc. publisher Byron Preiss in 2005, shortly after Alexa #1 came out.
Stan Lee—Stanley Martin Lieber—always wanted to be a literary icon; to write The Great American Novel. In a way, he accomplished both goals—it just took hundreds of characters and thousands of pages and a ton of illustrations to tell the story. And we’ll never get tired of re-reading it.
Thanks, Mr. Lee, for everything.
