Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-4651179-20181113132311/@comment-61022-20181113195218

His passing doesn't come as a shock to me. He was 95 years old. He lived a long life. So some of the grief expressed above is histrionic in my opinion. Also, unlike most, his passing doesn't fill me with sadness.

For myself, I enjoy some of the stories he wrote. However, they didn't speak to anything I couldn't already figure out on my own since by the time I read them they were already 30 years old and the world had moved on. I also don't mourn his loss. As I said before, he was 95, this should be a surprise to nobody. I also don't mourn his loss because he wasn't a very good person.

Credit where credit is due: He changed the game. But let's not look at history with rose-colored glasses here. Stan, like the characters he wrote, was a flawed person and not everything he did was great.

First of all: The person you're all mourning as Stan Lee was only a character, created and marketed. The Stan Lee you read in Stan's Soapbox or saw in cameos in Marvel movies, or any other public appearance was not the real guy. It was a character. Stan Lee was as much a trademark as Spider-Man (especially since he sold his likeness to Marvel). While the Stan Lee of the 60s was probably more genuine, the one that everyone here grew up with (in one capacity or another) was just a marketed image. It's funny how most people won't address him by his actual name in these eulogies. It was Stan Lieber. Stan Lieber was the man behind the name. Unlike Stan Lee, Stan Lieber was not always the praiseworthy person you all paint him to be.

He screwed people over on creators rights -- especially his closest friends and collaborators, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko among the biggest of them. If it weren't for those people, Stan wouldn't be the icon he is today.

If you need more proof, this Wiki is falling over itself over Stan's passing, yet when Steve Ditko passed away back in June, the only real mention was someone put his death date in the profile. Ditko deserves more credit for his work than Stan, without a doubt. The fact that nobody made a thing about Steve's passing is disgusting in my mind, and everyone above should be a little ashamed of themselves for that fact.

Steve (and Jack, and everyone who drew for Stan) were an integral part of the characters they co-created. This is because Stan could only write two types of characters: the brooding loner and the team that argues a lot but ultimately works together. Even then, of all the comics he wrote, I'd say that there are only 100 worth reading (and trust me, I've read them all). Even then less than 20 are what I would call legendary, brilliant, or even ahead of the times. His ideas were borrowed or outright stolen from other sources (the Fantastic Four were a rip off of the Challenger of the Unknown and Carl Burgo's Human Torch; the X-Men were a rip off of the Doom Patrol; Ant-Man was in response to the Atom; etc. etc.) I'm not saying this out of partisanship between one company or another. All of his creations were financially motivated. The Fantastic Four was pushed into publication because DC Comics was making a mint off of Justice League. However, what prevented these characters from being knock-offs and made them icons were the artists who brought them to life on the page.

Sure, Stan said some things that needed to be said at the time they needed saying. He also breathed life into an industry that was still walking funny after being neutered by the Comics Authority Code. When it came to social issues he was quite vocal. However, as a businessman, he took all of the credit for everything while his co-creators languished in poverty, or died before they got their proper recognition. As a writer, he was derivative, especially of his own material.

He was a guy who was in the right place at the right time. There's a reason why nobody thinks fondly of anything Stan created prior to 1961 and after 1968 -- because all the ideas were ranging from "meh" to "awful". If you don't believe me, look up Father Time, Stripperella, and "Just Imagine". He had a brief moment of positively received creativity and that was it. Why we choose to remember him in this way (As opposed to Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Archie Goodwin, Gene Colan, Herb Trimpe, Dave Cockrum, or any of the countless others who have died) is because Stan marketed and sold his own persona. He wasn't a person anymore, he made himself a product that could charge top dollar.

I'm sorrynotsorry if this tramples on anyone's grief, but that's the reality of the guy. He wasn't perfect. He was an asshole and a crook sometimes. He said some really good things here and there and wrote a few good stories, but mourning him makes me feel sick because of who he became as a businessman and a person.