Why It’s Lame to Bash Stan Lee
But we do it anyway
It’s a necessary evil, a sad inevitability when the time comes for critics and academics to deconstruct wonderful things. Somehow, they never seem to understand what made them wonderful in the first place and manage only to diminish them under their microscopes.
It’s the fact of “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey” that is important. Not how they were written.
If you want to understand “contemporary American culture” through comic books and movies, fine, there’s a lot to explore. But engage with the work and find out what it does for people. Don’t look under the rug of the creators or you risk losing the plot.
There’s a new book out that says Stan Lee was a dick. It’s a bigger, “more important” book than the previous books which have said that Stan Lee was a dick, or that he was a genius, or that he was something in between. It’s bigger because the fruits of the collaborations between writer/editor Stan Lee and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (and others) have jumped up exponentially to a level of global awareness and importance.
They have become mythology. Thor, the God of Thunder of 1,000 years ago has become Thor, the God of Thunder for our time. It’s amazing. It’s beautiful.
