A universe of flawed heroes: Stan Lee was ahead of his time
It became easy, in recent years, to dismiss him as the wisecracking grandpa of the American comic book, a past-his-prime gimmick who cameoed alongside Earth’s angstiest superheroes in the high-grossing Marvel blockbusters of the past decade.
But Stan Lee, who died Monday, was far more than that. It’s no stretch to say that he helped redraw the world of American fiction. And he certainly made sure everyone knew it.
From the ashes of pulp magazines and the radioactive raw material of postwar uncertainty about science and power, he summoned — not singlehandedly, but certainly without parallel or peer — a textured, self-sustaining universe of imperfect heroes.
While Updike and Cheever were doing it in literature, while Kubrick and Lumet and Penn were doing it at the movies, the father of Marvel presented comic-book America — which meant, at the time, mostly adolescent boys — with a pantheon of deeply flawed protagonists who, despite their presence in so many tales to astonish, were in many ways just like you and me.