vintagegeekculture: I’ve had years to prepare for this, but it is still stunning to me that St
vintagegeekculture: I’ve had years to prepare for this, but it is still stunning to me that Stan Lee and his boundless energy are no longer with us. His incredible story shows two things: 1) it is possible your great achievements can come late in life, 2) never write off the stuff you do “in between” what you actually want to do, because the “in between stuff” is what defines your life. Stan Lee, for instance, wanted to be a novelist, but could only get work in his uncle Martin’s comic book company. The very definition of a late bloomer who’s greatest achievements were later in life, in 1961, approaching age 40, he felt well over the hill, and believed he was a failure and wanted to quit his uncle’s comics sweatshop. But then, his wife Joan told him…“Stan, if you’re going to quit anyway, why don’t you at least do one comic your way?” Stan Lee decided to write one book “his way” as a farewell to the comics field he’d worked in for almost 20 years at that point. That comic was Fantastic Four, which changed comics history as the first to have realistic characterization, warmth, humor, and humanity. The Fantastic Four argued among themselves and talked like real people, lost their temper. It started the entire Marvel approach to characters, based on grounding the comics in character and human emotion. For a while, it really was “the world’s greatest comic magazine.“ A lot of people, like the Comics Reader and Gary Groth, tried to present Stan Lee as a spacey, absent boss who was barely involved in his greatest successes. It’s become common wisdom among a certain set to say that Stan Lee was coasting on the creative power of his collaborators, to whom he delegated all the actual work. And while Marvel would have failed without Lee teaming up and surrounding himself with some absolute geniuses, simply put, nothing could be further from the truth. Like Walt Disney, while he was known to the public as an avuncular pitchman, in the offices, he was a firm and demanding boss who was a borderline-micromanager. He perpetually asked his collaborators to "draw it over and over until they got it right.” In fact, to this day, much of the advice around the Marvel offices about the common wisdom of how to do comics (like never use a neutral color like green as a background, show an entire location with space around it, never “tilt the horizon” in drawing except for deliberate effect) were things that Lee said as general advice that became gospel around the Marvel offices. The key elements that define Marvel - the emphasis on characterization even in “action” stories, a grounding of the fantastic with a single foot in the everyday, ordinary life of a big city, and a cornball sense of grandiosity that was pricked and deflated by a wiseass, fast New York pitter-patter sense of humor where characters quip snappy one liners - all were “through lines” in the identity of every Marvel book that came from Stan himself no matter who he worked with. -- source link