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#1227664 2018-11-12 6:13 PM
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LLance Offline OP
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Stan Lee dead at 95! Rushed To the hospital yesterday morning.


-----once over and twice twisted---------
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Officially "too old for this shit"
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Excelsior, true believer

\:\(

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brother from another mother
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Up up and away,Stan.


"My friends have always been the best of me." -Doctor Who

"Well,whenever I'm confused,I just check my underwear. It holds most answers to life's questions." Abe Simpson

I can tell by the position of the sun in the sky, that is time for us to go. Until next time, I am Lothar of the Hill People!
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brother from another mother
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Good. Glad he's dead. Always hated that guy.


"My friends have always been the best of me." -Doctor Who

"Well,whenever I'm confused,I just check my underwear. It holds most answers to life's questions." Abe Simpson

I can tell by the position of the sun in the sky, that is time for us to go. Until next time, I am Lothar of the Hill People!
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Stan taught a lot of us to read and to dream.

Most people should have such a legacy.

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Stan Lee was 95, but he had his hand in so many upcoming projects, I thought he'd live another 20 years!

I have to admit, for a long time I was resistant to Stan Lee's work and Marvel in general, just because he has always been so absurdly ridiculously praised in such an overblown way. The bombastic hucksterish alliteration and self-promotion definitely was an acquired taste for me

But hey, he earned the praise. Even if you take away the credit he stole from Ditko and Kirby, he still did an enormous amount in the creation of Marvel, and in maintaining its continuity. Lee was the guiding force. And the thing is still leading the industry, based on what Stan Lee solidly built 50 years ago.

Much of my favorite Stan Lee stuff are the pre-Marvel monster stories from 1958-1963 in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY, STRANGE TALES, TALES OF SUSPENSE and TALES TO ASTONISH and shorter runs like AMAZING FANTASY and WORLD OF FANTASY. Warmly told stories about regular people put in wild situations, with wonderful twist endings, humor, and commentary on the human condition, that transferred over into the superhero runs in Marvel's series that took over those anthology books. When you consider the limited distribution box that Marvel was in, where they could only publish 9 or 10 titles a month, it's even more imressive the way Stan Lee built the Marvel empire in those first 10 years.

Some of my favorite stories scripted by Stan Lee beyond the monster stories are "This Man, This Monster" in FF 51, a re-telling of Thor's origin in THOR 159, introduction of the Kree and the Sentry in FF 64-65 (with Ronan the Accuser in cold scientific terms describing the 20th century human condition).
And SILVER SURFER: PARABLE that Stan Lee wrote in collaboration with Moebius.

I'm hard pressed to say whether the FF, Spider-man, Thor, Doctor Strange, X-men, the Hulk, Avengers, or the Silver Surfer were Lee's signature character. And that's not even including the other titles Lee was scripting, like SGT FURY, DAREDEVIL, Sub-Mariner, Nick Fury Agent of Shield, Ant-man/Giant-man, and the Inhumans! There's a lot of creators who struggle to produce one title a month! Or even struggle to create one memorable series in their entire career.
I'd go with either Spider-man or Silver Surfer as Lee's signature character.

So yeah, credit where it is due. Stan Lee created an enormous pantheon of characters, and built an empire. More than that, Lee created characters that others could continue after his departure, and would remain popular even in new hands. (Compare with JON SABLE and AMERICAN FLAGG at First Comics, where the characters lost all appeal in hands other than those that created them. ) There's a business sense to Marvel's creation, beyond the concept and storytelling.
Lee also got to live long enough to see his comics empire become a movie empire. And his cameos in so many movies might be seen as his last enduring words.


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Fair Play!
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Sad to hear but glad he was able to keep doing Marvel stuff pretty much to the end.


Fair play!
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My favorite Stan Lee cameo, from Mallrats






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A good video about The earliest 1930's beginnings of Marvel Comics under Martin Goodman, and how Stan Lee started working there in 1939. And more so about how Stan Lee began as an understudy of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, then took over when they were fired.



Simon and Kirby's departure from Marvel to DC was a bit more involved than I thought. They were secretly working for DC in advance. I thought they quit and went to DC, but in fact they were fired because they were already producing more for DC. And Kirby's later hostility toward Stan Lee is because he thought Lee was the one who finked on him to Goodman and got Kirby fired. That explains a lot about the hostility Kirby had for Lee in the 1960's era. It came from previous untrustworthiness on Lee's part, from Kirby's POV. Swiping all the credit and changing characters that Kirby created in directions Kirby didn't want them to go didn't help.

But this video covers a lot of often-neglected territory from 1942-1961 where Stan Lee was in charge at Marvel and steered the ship through the lean years, that made Lee a grandmaster after FANTASTIC FOUR # 1 and the rest of the Marvel pantheon emerged after 1961. Some pretty enlightening behind-the-scenes.

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Another Stan Lee biography video that covers the same ground from a slightly different perspective:




It goes more into the artistic differences/feud between Lee and Ditko, and between Lee and Kirby, and less on the pre-Marvel early years of Lee himelf.

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One more video, What Made Stan Lee a Legend (Tribute)




I especially liked the last 3 minutes, dealing with Stan Lee's dealings with Kirby and Ditko, that kind of explains Lee's taking the lion's shaare of the credit, but because the credit was offered to him, but that Lee was still a nice guy who loved people.





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COMIC READER 179, April 1980.
April Fool's Day cover announcing Stan Lee is dead.


Sadly true now.


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