Column: Stan Lee taught the world to geek out before it was cool
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Just over a week ago the world lost one of the most influential voices in pop culture. Stanley Lieber – better known as Stan Lee the primary creative leader for Marvel Comics – passed away on November 12.
The world has undoubtedly been moved by the loss.
Lee, who was 95 at the time of his passing, was familiar to most as the man who made cameos in every Marvel movie, but Stan Lee was so much more than that. To say that he was the driving force behind much of the aesthetic for fandom in 2018 would be an understatement. Lee created a shared multiverse of characters from the brains of various collaborators such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Lee is commemorated for helping create characters like the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, and Spider-Man in a career that spanned almost 80 years.
Now, not everyone is as affected by Lee’s work as his hardcore fans are, but most may also not realize in what ways Lee has shaped the culture that we all live in.
See, I am a nerd. I geek out over a variety of things which basically means that I freely spend an excessive amount of time and money devoted to worshipping other people’s creations. One of the things I geek out over is the influence of pop culture on society and because of this, I can assure readers that they have definitely felt the effects of Lee’s work in their lives.
Today it seems that everyone is geeky about something. You can be a math geek, or a sports geek, or you could be the type who has to binge-watch the newest season of Stranger Things on Netflix as soon as it is available. No matter what the interest is, we have become a society that is catered to with as much content as we could possibly want. We enjoy entertainment in a way that at some point would have been considered unnatural. It was once “weird” to be obsessed with anything that isn’t your job or family. However, now, people openly geek out. They run in the streets declaring themselves to love whatever it is they love, and that’s amazing, but before we could get to this point, our society had to go through a major face-lift which all started with World War 2.
Stan Lee came into his teenage years after the Great Depression and he started his work at Timely Comics when he was just 17. Being 90 years removed from this time period, Americans today probably don’t realize how these events shaped the people of that era. Lee was taught hard work and graduated high school at 16. There wasn’t much in way of entertainment at that time, but he noted his love for the newspaper “funny pages.”
While Lee was working as a “go-for,” that same year the second World War began. People needed hope and they needed entertainment that took their minds away from the war. This shaped Lee’s early work. By the time Lee was 19, he wrote filler for his first comic (Captain America #3) which infamously has Steve Rogers confronting Adolf Hitler. Lee dropped the name “Lieber” and created his pseudonym because writing comics was looked down upon and he didn’t want his actual name to be tainted. It wasn’t until after the war that comic book characters began to grow in popularity, as Detective Comics released their stories in the 50’s, but it was this formative time when people needed a hopeful message that Lee found himself having a voice.
Lee went on to write romance, horror, and westerns in the 50’s as his job wanted “stories that people would buy.” Lee grew tired of the machine of storytelling and wanted to appeal to more people by giving them something unique. By the beginning of the 60’s, Lee was looking towards superheroes, a genre meant for kids but one that Lee had a deep connection to, to tell meaningful stories. Lee wasn’t afraid to geek out about the things he loved. Lee remembered how revolutionary his Captain America was for audiences in a time when hope seemed futile. Now, with hippies running around and a new era of ideas coming to fruition, Lee took the chance to revolutionize the Superhero genre, by giving the characters human conditions. By telling stories that reflected the culture, society listened and began to show up for what was now known as Marvel Comics.
Sometimes I wonder what storytelling would be like if all of our characters remained herculean figures with supernatural weaknesses. Would fans have still been as engaged? The thing that fans relate to when it comes to Spider-Man is that he was a teenager struggling with poverty. Tony Stark was an alcoholic. Bruce Banner had anger issues and the X-Men, well they were persecuted just for being who they are. The characters of Marvel Comics didn’t belong in the 1960’s. They belonged in the 21st century, but nobody knew that yet because the art wasn’t imitating life. Life was going to eventually have to catch up.
It was the 60’s that was the most important time for American pop culture. People like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese got to witness the change in how stories were told. The art world really moved into modernism and Stan’s work started to inspire the biggest voices of the 70’s and 80’s. The movies became more human. There were television sets in every home. The stories from Marvel Comics became about politics, activism, race and representation, the same things that consumers were seeing on the nightly news. “Stan’s Soapbox” became a platform that addressed intolerance and discrimination. It was in the 70’s and early 80’s that Lee started to revolutionize pop culture. He took his characters to Hollywood with the belief that fans wanted to see stories in multiple mediums including books, TV, movies, and comics.
It’s ironic that Stan’s vision wouldn’t fully be realized until the 2000’s and more accurately, the 2010’s.
In the 80’s however, we saw major growth in pop culture. People gathered around TV sets to watch new shows like “Wonder Woman” and “The Incredible Hulk.” They began to talk about these shows at work or in school the next day. Merchandising became a game-changer, because suddenly there was a market for toys, clothing, and lunchboxes. Star Wars alone changed Hollywood by being the first literal block buster, making an insane amount of money from toys, and managing to create a sequel superior to the first film. Lee was right about getting his creations on TV and in film. Conventions became the norm where fans would meet their heroes. It wasn’t until fans grew up that the nostalgia factor kicked in. Everything nowadays seems so sped that the nostalgia factor has a much shorter turnaround, but for Marvel Comics, it took an entire generation for the kids playing with Spider-Man action figures to grow up and decide to make Spider-Man movies.
This process of turning comics to film, fans turned creators, and stories targeting general audiences instead of niche audiences, again changed pop culture. Now, we don’t have to say “oh, a comic book movie…that’s for nerds” because it isn’t. It’s for everyone. Suddenly every movie is for a wide audience. Every book or comic is accessible to 80-year-old men and 8-year-old girls. The notion that “no one is going to watch this film, or read this book, or like this song” is fading away because there is now an audience for everything.
Maybe you don’t want a Dr. Seuss “Grinch” movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch, but somebody does. Maybe you aren’t interested in a dark reimagining of Sabrina The Teenage Witch, but someone is. You may really be into 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody and not A Star Is Born but that doesn’t mean both films can’t be in theaters at the same time and both making crazy amounts of money. In fact, they are because there’s an audience for each of them.
TV and films today are embracing the long-form narrative. Creators are connecting with fans more than ever before.
Maybe the idea that the success of A Star is Born is somehow connected to a pop culture wave started in the 60’s is absurd but look at it this way: The stories that Stan Lee set out to tell were serialized narratives centered on characters with flaws. These characters were in a universe that was like our own and allowed for interaction across mediums. If a certain character wasn’t your favorite, it was likely that another one (also created by Lee) was and that you could spend your money on merchandise to show your love for that character.
Sound familiar? That’s because our entirety of pop culture is reflective of these ideas that were non-existent before the 60’s. Everything from Netflix to Disney to Harry Potter has been set up in a way that allows relatable characters to be featured in long-form narratives across mediums designed to make money on merchandise. Our entire culture has become reflective of the things we geek out about.
Stan Lee taught us how to geek out.
He put his passion into something and offered it up to the world. The way that we will honor his legacy is to continue to create and to continue to tell stories reflective of the world we live in.
Take time to obsess over the things you love. That’s what Stan Lee would have wanted.
— erickwood97@gmail.com
@GrahamWoodMedia