(Jewish Group) Farewell to Stan Lee

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Like all great spiritual teachers, Stan Lee, who left us this week at 95 for more astral planes, was the last person you’d expect to pick up the mantle of conveying to us mortals the goings-on in higher spheres.

A child of the Great Depression who took refuge in the movie theater and dreamed of being Errol Flynn, Lee got his start in comics at 17, fetching sandwiches and filling up inkpots. The company he worked for, Timely Comics, eventually changed its name to Marvel, and, under Lee’s leadership, it radically transformed American culture. The characters he created—Spider-Man and Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Doctor Strange, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four—occupy Hollywood’s imagination and production schedules, with $21 billion in ticket sales so far and a long list of sequels crowding every summer for the foreseeable future. Throw in the television shows, video games, digital applications, and all other imaginable forms of storytelling, and you can make a good case that, by any measure of significance at our disposal, few artists have had as much of an impact on American popular culture as Lee.

So entrenched is Lee’s legacy that he was credited, when receiving the National Medal of the Arts from President George W. Bush in 2008, for creating nothing short of a new American mythology, a universe rich not only with thrilling characters but also with timeless moral lessons. “His complex plots and humane super heroes,” read the medal’s citation, “celebrate courage, honesty, and the importance of helping the less fortunate, reflecting America’s inherent goodness.”

The citation’s religious overtones are not hyperbole. Having spent the last few years at work on a book about Lee, I’ve had the privilege of revisiting his sprawling canon. Considered not with the teen’s plot-hungry eye but with the melancholy of middle age and the necessary critical distance, Lee’s project emerges as what it clearly is: a new Great Awakening.

more...

Excelsior!