Cries In Excelsior: Remembering the Legend Stan Lee

Stan Lee, born Stanley Lieber in 1922, has died earlier this week at the age of 95. The creator of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Hulk…you know all of his characters by heart. Here are our remembrances of this complicated, crafty, cartoonist, and ultimate showman.

Frantz As a native New Yorker, born in The Heights and raised in The Bronx, I see everything through the lens of the advent of Hip-Hop. A whole culture predicated on the disenfranchisement of the citizens of New York City. The cultural phenomenon that preceded it: Stan Lee’s imagination and Marvel Comics. This man is partly responsible for my love of storytelling in form and function. Hip-Hop was considered a fad, a flash in the pan, something invalid that would never last. People had that same feeling for comics. No one thought they’d become the worldwide cultures of the oppressed and marginalized. Or, that they could run strong for years, let alone decades. The legacies of Hip-Hop and Stan Lee both highlight of the flaws in the status quo. Before Lee, villains and heroes were perfect archetypes: villains bent on destruction, no aim but ‘to watch the world burn’. Heroes with…No problems whatsoever. Readers were used to the campy, unquestioning, and saccharine. Then, boom! Here comes Lee with Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and Bill Everett looking like NWA on the cover of Straight Outta Compton! Bringing the realness of humanity to the medium of comic books! That realness. The same envelope-pushing realness th…