R.I.P. Stan Lee

There was a door to which I found no key,
There was a veil through which I could not see,
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There seemed — and then no more of Thee and Me.

Stan Lee is dead.

Those four words have changed my life forever.

It's one of those occasions that you'll always remember where you were when you heard the news, like John F. Kennedy's assassination or the 9/11 terror attack.

I returned home from the cinema this evening. I was feeling under the weather, a light cold, so I lay down immediately to get some rest. When I woke up an hour later I looked at my computer. I'd left the BBC homepage open, and there I read the words:

Breaking news: Comics legend Stan Lee has died.

My world fell apart. It's something that was inevitable. After all, he was 95, and he hasn't been in good health for the last 17 months, ever since his beloved wife Joan died. Somehow I hoped he would live forever, or at least that he would outlive me.

That wasn't to be.

It took me a few minutes before I finally clicked on the link and read the BBC's news report. It wasn't an obituary; that came a few hours later. After that I sat in a daze at my computer. I read report after report on one news site after another. Frustratingly, many of them had identical text, copied and pasted from one another.

Soon I was crying so much that I couldn't carry on reading. I cried for at least 30 minutes. I didn't cry that much when I heard the news of my father's death. Nobody has shaped my life or my imagination more than Stan Lee.

What was the first Stan Lee comic I read? I can't be sure, because I was too young. I know I was already an avid reader of his comics when I lived in Little Aston, so I must have been younger than eight, probably only six. The first comic I read must have been an issue of the Fantastic Four or the Hulk. Those stand out in my mind. I clearly remember that my father bought me copies of Fantastic Four #5 (July 1962) and Hulk #1 (May 1962). The original Hulk series only had a short run, six issues, but I bought Fantastic Four comics for years. It's tragic that they were all thrown out with the rubbish. As a child I didn't know how valuable they were, and my parents knew even less.

When I lived in Little Aston my interest in Marvel Comics was a solitary affair. I read them alone in my room and dreamed about the characters. I didn't have any friends. When I moved to Walsall I made friends, and we discussed comics. Most of the boys I knew were Marvel fans, but a few preferred DC. There was a rivalry between the two companies that spread all the way across the Atlantic to English schoolchildren. We were either fans of Marvel or DC, but not both. Either we liked the Marvel style or the DC style.

The styles were poles apart. The difference between Marvel and DC is something today's newspaper reports have concentrated on. Maybe it's more accurate to say that it was Stan Lee's style, because he was a power house, single-handedly writing up to 14 comics a month throughout the 1960's.

DC Comics were the market leaders. Marvel's predecessor Timely Comics had abandoned superhero comics in the late 1940's, but DC Comics stuck with them and had several successful comics at the turn of the 1960's, including Superman, Batman and the Flash. Stan Lee had spent the last 10 years writing comics containing westerns, love stories and science fiction stories. He wanted to get back to superheroes, but it had to be something different. Superman was an almost invincible alien from a distant planet, Batman was a millionaire, and all of the other heroes were highly successful in their private lives. There was a DC Universe, i.e. the DC heroes lived in fictional cities like Metropolis and Gotham which existed in a different world. Stan Lee didn't want this. He wanted the heroes to exist in our world. He rejected the idea of a Marvel Universe, even though it became a common concept when other writers succeeded him.

Another difference is that the heroes he wrote about had personal lives. If you read the early Spider-Man comics you'll realise that Peter Parker's struggles at home and at school are more important than his battles with super-villains. He was an orphan, living with his Aunt, an outsider at school and always broke. As Spider-Man he was successful, but he was the victim of newspaper campaigns calling him a criminal.

If I went through a list of the superheroes created by Stan Lee you'd see that they all have imperfections in their characters and personal lives. The reader can identify with them because he can say, "Hey! That guy has super strength, but he has to struggle to pay the bills just like me".

Stan Lee's greatest creative period was in the years 1961 to 1972. The newspaper articles say that he created 350 characters in this time. That's possible. I never counted them. What I do know is that in 1972 he gave up writing and became the publisher of Marvel Comics. He stepped back and let younger men carry on with his legacy. Some were respectful and kept the spirit of Stan Lee's comics alive, while others tore everything down in order to make a new start. I shan't name any names, at least not here. That's a story for a different time and a different place.

Now, 50 years later, Marvel Comics have leapt onto the big screen. Apart from a few minor exceptions the films are about characters created by Stan Lee. A new generation has grown up that's never read comics written by Stan Lee, but they're thrilled by the adventures of Spider-Man, the Hulk and Thor. I enjoy the films – some are better than others – but for me the real brilliance lies in the printed page as created in the 1960's.

Where can you read his comics today? If you walk into a specialised comic store you can find reprints of many of Stan Lee's stories, but the easiest place to find them is online. Go to www.marvel.com and become an Unlimited member. I admit that the site is difficult to navigate, but if you have a little patience you'll find his comics. As you read them you'll be captivated by the imagination of this brilliant man.

Stan Lee
December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018