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It was sometime in the winter of 1966 and I needed a haircut, so I took the bus downtown after school and walked into Bob Nelson’s barber shop in the Medical Arts building in downtown Duluth, Minn.
All the chairs were occupied, so I flipped through a stack of magazines and comic books and pulled out an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. I was fourteen years old and had never read a Spider-Man comic book.
At fourteen, you think you’re too old for comics.
Turns out, I wasn’t.
When a chair opened, I brought the comic with me, and instead of the usual good-natured chit-chat with Bob, I remained utterly absorbed in the comic book. I don’t recall if Spider-Man’s enemy of the month was the Rhino, or the Lizard, or Doctor Octopus, or the Vulture. I vividly recall thinking, however, that this was not like any comic book I’d ever read.
The superheroes I’d been familiar with included Batman, a boring rich guy in a gloomy mansion, and Superman, a humorless, unbeatable mensch.
But Spidey was different. Spidey had money problems, girl problems, school problems—and yet his mid-battle banter was often hilarious. His alter ego, Peter Parker, had a relatable youthful personality—shy, bookish, yet immensely brave and witty once he donned his red-and-blue costume (which ripped now and then, forcing him to mend it himself).
He protected his secret identity from his frail Aunt May because the shock of knowing he was swinging from building to building would almost surely kill her. He had trouble befriending the other guys at Empire State College, who thought he was a nerd and a coward because he always disappeared whenever Spidey showed up for a battle.
The colorful credits on the title page informed me that the writer of this deeply intriguing character was a man named Stan Lee. I had no idea Lee was 45 years old at the time; all I knew was that Spider-Man was a new and very different kind of comic book hero.
A universe of superheroes
Those who did not grow up during Stan Lee’s creative peak may now think of him as that doddering old ham with the mustache who made Alfred Hitchcock-like cameo appearances in many Marvel films, and played himself on The Big Bang Theory
But make no mistake: in one decade of non-stop writing, he gave birth to more durable, bankable characters than any writer in our lifetime. You might have to go back to Shakespeare to find his equal.
Spider-Man led me to other Marvel Comics superheroes, including the Fantastic Four, and Daredevil, and Iron Man and Thor and the X-Men and the Avengers and the Hulk, and I soon realized that all of these characters sprang from the unique mind of Stan Lee.
He wrote prolifically, introducing a dazzling new era of serial-style storytelling to what had been a moribund industry. His plotlines included civil rights struggles, Vietnam protests, generational conflict, drug use, and up-to-date references to current music, movies and television.
He created black superheroes, including the Black Panther and the Falcon. He introduced women characters that seemed real and multi-dimensional.
The Hulk and King Lear?
Will Spider-Man be remembered as long as Hamlet? Will future generations recall the Hulk or Iron Man as long as we have remembered King Lear or Othello? I’m not sure I’d bet against it.
Stan Lee’s greatest gift was the ability to make you want to buy the next month’s issue, and he did it with character after character, title after title, for a decade, before giving up scripting for the role of publisher. Fifty years on, his characters have sold billions of dollars’ worth of movie tickets. That kind of cultural impact can truly be called Shakespearean.
I was actually studying Shakespeare in college when Amazing Spider-Man #121 came out in the spring of 1973. I walked two miles to a drugstore in Jersey City to buy the issue in which Peter Parker’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy was killed by the Green Goblin.
I remember reading it while I walked back to my room, so absorbed in the story that I barely noticed a woman swing her purse at me because I didn’t have a cigarette to give her.
Was it Romeo and Juliet? No, of course not. To me, at the time, it was far more tragic.
Truth be told, Stan Lee did not write that issue. He’d given up monthly scripting of Spider-Man a year earlier, and his successor, Gerry Conway, has always been blamed by fans for killing Gwen Stacy.
But we now know that Lee signed off on that plotline, even as his role as an executive pulled him farther from the creative process. I, along with many others, gradually stopped buying Marvel comics when Stan Lee no longer wrote them. But the initial life he breathed into his creations will long outlive us all.
