True Believers

Stan Lee died yesterday.  He was 95, so I guess it isn't really a shock.  But it hit me much harder than I expected.  Someone passed that fact along to me at work yesterday.  My first reaction was, okay that make sense.  A little while later, I realized I was on the verge of tears.

Other people will write better obituaries, memories and tributes, so I won't try to do that.  But I will tell you what he meant to me.

Stan Lee rose through the ranks of what was then Atlas Comics.  In the early 60's they re-branded as Marvel Comics.  In, what I believe is an unprecedented burst of creativity, Lee (along with Jack Kirby and others) created some of the most iconic super heroes in popular fiction.  If you watch movies at all, you are familiar with them.  The Fantastic Four, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Daredevil and more were created during this time frame.  He modernized the WWII era hero Captain America as the man out of time that we all now know.  But most importantly, to me anyway, he created Spider-Man.

Spider-man embodies the theme that ran through almost all Marvel heroes.  He had incredible (one might say Amazing) powers, but at the same time struggled with school, money, friends and girls.  Unlike Golden Age heroes like Superman, he wasn't a god.  He was a kid.  And he had the same kinds of problems that the rest of us kids had.  He was amazing, but he was human.  We could relate to him.

So yeah, I'm a comic book nerd and Stan Lee created some of my favorite characters.  But the reason, I think, that his death hit me so hard is remembering the Saturday mornings of my childhood.

I feel bad for my son's generation.  They will never understand the magic of Saturday morning cartoons.  They had cartoons whenever they wanted.  But for me (us), there were Saturday mornings, the one time that had shows just for us.

NBC aired various versions of a Spider-man cartoon when I was young.  I remember Spider-man and his Amazing Friends followed by The Incredible Hulk.  And each week I was greeted by Stan Lee, who said, Welcome True Believers and then gave some perspective to the episodes we were about to watch.

Welcome True Believers.

That was permission to engage in the fantasy.  It was acknowledgement that loving these characters was a righteous pursuit.  It was being part of a club, full of people I didn't know, but we were all True Believers.

That's what hit me.  I've loved these super heroes for most of my life, but I learned to love them on Saturday mornings and Stan Lee greeted me each week.  And welcomed me to believe.  I still do.  But he is gone.  And with him, some part of my childhood died as well.

Excelsior Stan.  And thank you.