My admiration for Spider-Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Iron Man, and the rest of the Marvel Universe is not quite as strong as my fanatic love for Star Trek. The death of Stan Lee thus does not hit me quite as hard as did the death three and a half years ago of Leonard Nimoy.
Yet his pop oeuvre is at least as influential as the fictional world Nimoy enlivened, as evidenced by, among other things, the cast of costumed characters who came to your door seeking candy a couple weeks ago.
Stan Lee said many things, all of them with enthusiasm. We can muse over the geopolitical implications of the great historical admonition that his work channeled into closing narration over a grieving Peter Parker: “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!”
But I’d like to highlight a different quote from Lee himself that resonates with me this morning:
Whatever you do, you should do what you most want to do, and what you’re best at. Too many people don’t really do what their heart’s desire is, but they try to do something else because they think it will be easier to get a job or make money. And if that happens, then when you’re doing it you feel like you’re working. But if you do what you really want to do, you feel like you’re playing. It’s easier to do [Stan Lee, interview, at end of cameo video in Julia Alexander, “All of the Stan lee Cameos from Marvel Movies, and Why We Love Them,” The Verge, 2018.11.12].
Stan Lee lived like that, embracing his unexpected career (he wanted to be a novelist) and seeming to enjoy every minute of his decades of creating fantasy for the masses.
I feel like that when I blog—no, not that I’m creating fantasy, or even that I’m reaching “the masses.” But blogging doesn’t feel like a job. It certainly doesn’t make the bulk of my money. Blogging feels like play—word play, number play, idea play… honest, joyful play directed toward the very serious business of understanding our state and our world.
Like Stan Lee, said, always with the exclamation points that arise when you’re having fun, Face front, true believers! Excelsior!
“But if you do what you really want to do, you feel like you’re playing.”
That’s my art, whether painting, creating resin objects or building concrete lamps. Creating is play, joyful play!
If more people just worked harder instead of sitting on their haunches reading comic books the world would have far fewer hungry comic book nerds and a couple more starving cartoon drawers. They used to sell these comic books down at a head shop where the dopers of the demon weed hung out, and they’d just read these comic books and toke. No good came of it all.
Comic books and graphic novels aren’t on my regular reading list. But I can’t begrudge a man who finds a way to make a living creating them… and creating stories that, far from the drag on culture and economy Grudz attempts to diss with his curmudgeon act, provide their readers with a mythology that can inform their values.
Little good comes from smoking dope (well, except maybe pain relief for cancer patients?), but Stan Lee’s art is a positive influence on society. Stan Lee did more good and less harm than Roger Hunt did.