Stan Lee died today. His wasn’t exactly an untimely death, but it can’t not affect a person like me. Lee was the earliest and largest of my gods. The other two, from the start, were Stanley Kubrick and Roger Ebert. That probably sounds strange, but there it is; no denying that they were the first three to really open my interest in the capacities of the imagination. I owe a lot to him and his work. That’s not to downplay the importance of his best artistic collaborators (Schuster, Ditko) or the writers who took the baton from him and did better things (Claremont, Miller, Gerry Conway, Peter David). But the originating power lies with him. Continue reading →