A very happy birthday to the man who is Marvel Comics

[thatcrazycajun]

En route home from N'awlins by way of a Books-A-Million in Mobile, and with thanks to filkertom for the heads-up: today is the 86th birthday of the man who made Marvel Comics (and its attendant multi-media entertainment empire, which now includes a full-fledged movie studio) what it is today: Stanley Martin Lieber, better known by his nom de plume, Stan "The Man" Lee.

If you're reading this, chances are you don't need me to tell you why ol' Stan's successfully completing yet one more trip around Sol is of such importance to me and my friends. If by some outlandish chance you do, read Wikipedia's page on him. Suffice to say he co-created, wrote and edited many of the characters that are Marvel's bread and butter today...including and especially this guy. He changed the face of comic books forever in much the same way an earlier Golden Age of comics creators had, and ushered in the succeeding Silver Age. Sure, he had help from master artists like the late Jack "King" Kirby and Steve Ditko...but while the images may have been theirs, the words and ideas were mostly his.

And when he finished revolutionizing four-color newsprint storytelling, he turned around and did the same thing to televised and filmed entertainment by shepherding the merry Marvel stable of superheroes onto screens both large and small. He even helped real people from all walks of life find their inner hero with a Sci Fi reality series, Who Wants to Be A Superhero?

What's Stan done that you love most? I'd have to go with his and Kirby's creating the original X-Men...and then, with help from a then-unknown British writer named Chris Claremont, doing it all over again with the "all-new, all-different" (well, mostly...) team of the 1970s. A very happy birthday to you, Mr. L., and thank you from at least three generations of comics readers.

Comments

[singingpatient.livejournal.com]

i love Stan.
i love the spiderman movies, i loved ironman, and i love that he brought back superhero movies after the batman franchise killed the whole genre off.
i thought the 1st season of who wants to be a superhero was inspired and heartwarming. and i love that he does an cameo in every movie. so no one particular favorite, but i also have to add that i love that he served as surrogate father for many boys whose fathers were absent in one way or another.

[singingpatient.livejournal.com]

i also love that he lived long enough to see the movie technology catch up with his imagination, and for his spiderman to become a blockbuster all over the world.
and i love that his heroes are 3-dimension real people from this planet.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

The first thing he did was have characters talk and act like actual people. Their needs, their wants, their agendas were all easily identifiable and understandable.

Oh, you mean characters and storylines? Well, hell, basically the first eighty issues or so of Fantastic Four, the notion of Thor and The Hulk, Spider-man of course, the Silver Surfer solo comic with Juhn Buscema on the art... I could go on for days.