Saturday, February 13, 2016

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He is 93 years old and still working hard for not so much money yet he has given the world a new dimension of entertainment that is more popular than ever now making billions of dollars for the company he works for. Marvel. He is Stan Lee the creator of our favorite action Hero’s. His inspiration was the old sword fights of Errol Flynn movies where he was tough, handsome, good, righteous and a great action hero with a sword.  Stan never became that hero but he created through his drawings all the heroic and bold dreams we all had reading his stories and seeing the colorful action drawings of the handsome muscular hero’s he drew all his life.  
Now he is as famous as the action heroes he created still going to comic book conventions and appearing in all the billion dollar movies being made of his characters. Call him the Arc hectic of 20th Century mythology. Spiderman, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, The  X Men, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four are all his creations. So why isn’t he rich? He is a company man. Old school. He was born poor during the depression in 1922 in Bronx, New York. In 1939 he got a job at a publishing house called Timely Comics. There he got caught up in good vs. evil stories being involved in characters like Destroyer, Father Time and Jack Frost that soon had Stan’s fingerprints on the drawing and story lines.
After Pearl Harbor, he joined the Army and soon was drawing posters for the Military with the slogan “VD, Not Me!” to warn the soldiers against sexually transmittable diseases. By 1960 Timely Comics became Marvel Comics. He realized that besides entertain that his comics could offer social commentary. He took on issues of his day like war and race relations, drug abuse. His super hero’s all had flaws and hang ups as well as unique super powers.  His most famous character of all was Spiderman. He made him a teenager with personal problems.  It was Spiderman that led the present Marvel revolution.  Despite all the success, he never really owned his characters. Marvel owns his characters. He is not angry about contractual stuff. He did sue in 1992 and settled for a mere six figures.
He vows to never retire and will still find super hero topics and simple people to own the skills to always keep us hopeful when it comes to good vs, evil.


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