The Nicholas Hammond Spider-man series may have been bad, but the Reb Brown Captain America movies were worse. The Peter Hooten Doctor Strange was . . . still bad, but kind of fun, if you are in a generous mood.
He lived to see his creations go from Saturday morning cartoons, badly animated even by 1960s standards, to shoddy low-budget TV movies, to big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, with A-list actors and state-of-the-art special effects.
I always loved explaining to people as he flashed on the screen who he was and how important he was. Now, it will just make me sad.
R.I.P.
'nuff said
//i\
Met him once. At Geppi’s Comics in Silver Spring, MD just north of DC. God, this must be 30-35 years ago. I was in high school.
He signed a copy of Silver Surfer Special #1 for me. When he walked in the entire place burst into applause. Even back then, he had us.
Aw, man, this hits me hard! I always revered him. So creative! One of the very best! I was hoping that he would live to at least 100. Sad…
I’ll bet you a dollar that in the Avengers 4 recap of Infinity War, Stan dissolves. It would be a perfect ending to the cameos.
I wouldn’t be w/o him.
Now he belongs to the ages.
Shalom, Stan
I figured when his wife Joan died last year that Stan would soon follow.
To be fair, the Bill-Bixby-and-Lou-Ferrigno Hulk was theatrical-release quality.
Actually, I take this back, considering there will probably be 8000 videos of Stan disintegrating, made with varying degrees of skill, by tomorrow morning.
It is sad that Stan Lee is dead, but those close to him in his final years abused and took advantage of him which, I suspect hastened his demise.
That’s really hard to say because if there weren’t some giants before him, he probably has little influence. If DC, and in particular Julius Schwartz, doesn’t restart the super-hero, Marvel may never move out of the Monster phase. If Siegel and Shuster don’t produce Superman, it may never get started.
Lee’s death along with Ditko’s earlier this year marks the end of an era not just in comics but of 20th century pop culture. Quite staggering how much Lee’s creations dominate the global box office and the popular imagination in 2018.
I hope he had a bunch of scenes pre-recorded for use in cameos.
Everyone has his own opinion. I’ll stick with mine.
A comics giant, and I always enjoyed his movie cameos. May he rest in peace.
Really? Hadn’t heard that before. How so?
Speaking of Avengers #4,that comic (not the movie) came into my life in the early 1960’s, and shortly thereafter I became Marvel obsessed. Every month I scraped together the money to buy every title they published (other than Millie the Model and other female oriented lines).
Mr. Lee’s fingerprints are all over my personality.
Goodbye, Stan the Man. Excelsior.
Sad to hear it, of course. I grew up with his work, just becoming literate when the Marvel Silver age started, a couple of years after DC’s. I got Fantastic Four #16 from the newsstand and was hooked. DC comics were more sci-fi and cerebral, but Lee’s Marvel comics went for the gut and emotion, and his heroes-with-flaws were a welcome change, along with the whole series of comments and asides in the stories, and the credits they gave to artists and writers.
Of course, plastering his name on everything was easy to poke fun at. DC’s Angel and the Ape featured a boastful comics editor named Stan Bragg who insisted on credits for himself at the expense of the other creators, parodying Lee himself. On a more somber note, it’s been argued that Lee’s hogging the credit (and also for philosophical disagreements) is what caused the rift between him and Jack Kirby and resulted in Kirby leaving Marvel for DC. (The “Marvel Process of Creation” actually had Kirby basically creating the story and Lee coming up with the dialogue. Although I love Kirby’s art to death, I’ve never been impressed when he wrote the dialogue).
On the other hand, when they worked together the results were sublime. Kirby both drew and wrote a “What If…?” comic in which the members of the Fantastic Four were really their real-life creators from the Marvel Bullpen. Mister Fantastic was Stan Lee, and Kirby, naturally, was The Thing, chomping on his omnipresent stogie. It looked believable. Although the dialogue sucked.
I think he mellowed in later years, and he was definitely a good ambassador for the MCU. He continued to push the Marvel brand, pretty successfully.
He’s survived by his younger brother, Larry Leiber, who didn’t change the family name. Larry was an artist, writer, and editor, too. He co-created several central Marvel characters and scripted their origins. Maybe he can get some cameos now