- I've told this story so often it might even be true.
I can't remember.
- [Scott] I grew up with a very nerdy dad
who got me into comics and superheroes from a young age.
I remember when the Spider-Man and X-Men
movies came out and I was immediately entranced
by the world of superheroes!
And I didn't know why, but my dad would chuckle
every time he saw a certain old man pop up
in those films.
It didn't matter because the powers, the costumes,
the exciting, fantastic adventures showcased
in these heroic tales were all so enchanting.
I would later learn that that seemingly random old man
co-created nearly every character that profoundly
influenced my life up to that point.
- I thought he'd be taller.
- Not just the heroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men,
but the villains too!
Gang, Mysterio of all characters legitimately
changed my life!
Seriously, but that is a story for another day,
the point is that, as I'm sure he was for countless others,
Stan Lee was directly responsible for my love
of superheroes, and I had to meet him.
Stan Lee was, in every sense of the word,
a capital C, Creator.
Alongside his frequent collaborators like Jack Kirby,
Steve Ditko, and many other talented
artists and writers, Stan's mind shaped worlds
that, in turn, shaped ours.
His writing has permanently carved
its way into our culture, whether through
the tiniest panel on a page or in the largest
silver screen productions ever attempted.
It's impossible to know just how many lives
Stan impacted through his work in comics,
and through his life as a genuine human being.
I gotta be honest with you, the news of Stan Lee's
passing still hasn't fully sunk in yet for me.
I haven't had the time to stop and reflect on it.
So that's what I wanna do here in this video.
Take the time to slow down and process
this mental hurricane of thoughts and emotions,
while also shining a spotlight on how Stan Lee wrote comics.
What made his brand of storytelling so unique?
So, here goes nothing.
1961.
The Fantastic Four was introduced.
Actually, can we go back a bit further?
It's important for context.
Thanks.
1938.
Action Comics #1 premiered featuring a funny-looking guy
in blue tights and a bright red cape.
The cultural reaction was--
- It's a bird! It's a plane!
It's Superman!
- Well, you know.
(majestic music)
Superhero comics quickly became the new thing
as artists and writers started churning out
colorful characters faster than readers could keep up with.
All publishers needed was for one or two to stick,
and sure enough, more than a few did.
It truly was the Golden Age of Comics.
But, a lot of these stories were a bit, emotionally simple.
Most of the popular superheroes at DC Comics,
for instance, were pretty one-dimensional.
Superman was the big blue boy scout,
Batman the dark, vengeful detective.
Don't get me wrong, these were great stories,
but the characters lacked that broad range of emotion
you and I experience every day.
Then, 1961.
The Fantastic Four was introduced to the world!
Famously, these were characters that Stan Lee
co-created as he was on the edge of leaving
the comics industry for good.
But then his wife Joan stepped in.
- And then when Stan was almost ready to quit
doing comics, he decided that that was enough,
that's when I said to him, do it your way,
sweetheart, do it exactly your way!
- [Scott] The result was a team of superheroes
with complex emotion.
They loved each other, they hated each other,
they supported, respected, and could not stand each other.
This was a team who fought with each other
and fought with each other.
The Fantastic Four earned the moniker of Marvel's
First Family because that's exactly what it
felt like reading their stories.
And this injection of emotion was brought
to other Marvel projects as well.
The Incredible Hulk wasn't just stories of an
angry, smash-tastic monster.
Bruce Banner was tormented by his
transformations into the green behemoth.
Even Hulk could be calm or curious depending
on the situation.
On any given day, the X-Men could struggle with
feeling either proud or ashamed of who they are,
resulting in difficult personal and political
questions regarding mutantkind's place in the world.
Then, of course, there's Spider-Man.
- I've told this story so often it might even be true.
- So I put it on my bucket list
to meet the comic book legend, Stan Lee.
Literally, I made a genuine bucket list
in high school with dozens of ridiculous personal
goals like mastering the art of the yo-yo?
Seriously?
Guess I got to get to work on that one.
(rock music)
Either way, right in the middle of the list
was this, Meet Stan Lee.
However, as the years kept passing,
I wasn't sure if I was ever going to shake the hand
of the man who influenced my life so much.
But I kept holding on.
Maybe, maybe some day.
There's a lot that made Spider-Man different than
the superheroes who came before him,
but arguably the most significant factor that
made the web-head standout was that
he was a teenage superhero.
Before Spider-Man superheroes were almost
exclusively adults, and if there was a teenager,
they'd be relegated to the role of sidekick.
Not only did introducing a full-fledged teenage
hero give readers a character that may have
been easier to relate to, I mean that's literally
the whole point of other heroes having sidekicks
to begin with, but it also allowed Stan Lee
the opportunity to infuse even more emotion into the story.
I can only speak for myself here, of course,
but I remember my hormonal teenage years
feeling like my brain was continuously flooded
with every feeling all the time always.
Swinging between emotional extremes like,
well, like Spider-Man.
I mean, just take a look at Amazing Fantasy #15.
Held within a single page of Spidey's first tale,
we see Peter Parker's love for his Aunt May
and Uncle Ben, the pride he takes in his studies,
the rejection and humiliation he faces at the hands
of his classmates, and seeds of his vengeful ego.
After acquiring his spider powers,
that self-serving mindset stuck around as Peter
let a thief pass him by.
Why bother?
Now that he has powers, he only needs
to look out for himself.
What a ridiculous, frustrating prick of a superhero.
And this is the brilliance behind Stan's writing here.
He sets Peter up like this to fall hard.
You know the story.
One night as he's headed home, Peter notices
a police car parked in front of his house.
And once again, we observe the medley
of emotions that Peter experiences.
He's stunned and heartbroken to learn that
Uncle Ben has been murdered by a burglar.
His grief turns rapidly into anger as he demands
to know who the killer is and where they are hiding.
Spider-Man is fuming with rage when he confronts
the man who murdered his uncle.
But upon the revelation that the criminal is
the same thief that Peter let slip by earlier,
his rage morphs into shock, guilt, and shame.
This sweeping range of emotion was dealt out
through just 11 pages.
In Stan's essay from the book, What Is A Superhero,
he outlines why creating characters with realistically
complex emotions and relationships was vital
to his entrancing superhero tales.
- [Narrator] I try to make the characters seem
as believable and realistic as possible.
In order to do that, I have to place them in
the real world, or, if the story is set in an
imaginary world, I have to try to make that
imaginary world as realistic-seeming
as possible, so the character doesn't exist in a vacuum.
He has to have friends, enemies,
people he's in love with, people he doesn't
love, just like any human being.
The contrast between him and his power and
the normal world is one of the things that makes
the stories colorful and believable and interesting.
- As time moved on, I was beginning to accept that
it just wasn't in the stars for me to meet Stan.
It's not a big deal.
It's not.
But then, for literally no reason I can think of,
I was invited to the premiere of Captain America Civil War.
Why was I there?
I'm nobody!
It doesn't make sense!
Either way, it was a surreal experience to say the least
and my life has only gone downhill since that day.
But while in the carpet in the distance,
I could see Stan Lee rapidly approaching.
Or, as rapidly as a man in his 90s could approach.
This was my moment.
This was my likely one and only chance to meet
the man whose work changed my life,
look him in the eyes, and give him my humble thanks.
(heart beats)
And I missed it.
It's not just the emotion that made Stan's writing
stand out in the comic world.
I mentioned this before in my video about
supervillain monologues, but Stan Lee loved
to somewhat pretentiously show off his rich
vocabulary through excessive dialogue and
captions he'd pen in the pages of superhero stories.
In this pretty uncomfortable interview
on Alan Thicke's short-lived late-night
talk show Thicke of the Night...
- [Alan] So this is something that
our children are reading, Stan.
- Well you're making me feel incredibly comfortable.
- [Scott] Stan revealed his reasoning
behind his verbosity.
- Without trying to be overly dramatic, which I
love to try to be, comic books basically are
probably the last bastion, the last defense
against the creeping illiteracy
occasioned by television, because, as you know,
most kids will spend as much time as possible
in front of a TV set.
You can't get him to read.
But, you take a Marvel comic book and put it
on the coffee table between the youngster
and the TV set, and slowly, but surely he will grab
that book and pick it up and look at those ridiculous
pictures and be fascinated by it.
Now, in order to know what's happening,
he's gotta read the words.
And even though he doesn't want to read particularly,
before he knows it he's enjoying the story.
I might add, also, and I don't want to get too
sticky about this, we're still talking about comic
books, but we use college-level vocabulary.
If we wanna use words like proselytize,
misanthropic, we go ahead and we do it!
And we don't worry about the young kids.
And we find that they enjoy the stories as much
as the older ones, but we've encouraged an
entire older audience to read comics too.
- Stan understood that, yeah, kids might read comics,
but that's no excuse to dumb down the vocabulary.
You look at a book like Lee and Kirby's Avengers run,
and you have Iron Man talking about
transistors and other electronics,
Ant-Man and Wasp researching chemicals and
isotopes, Captain America reflecting on his painful
memories of the war, not to mention Thor who
speaks in a sort of old english, Shakespearean tongue.
Like Thor uses the word stygian here which just
means extremely dark, but it's also funny
because the term itself comes from the Styx river
of Greek mythology.
This is a sequence between two Norse gods
casually dropping references from
a completely different mythology.
Calm down, Stan!
Stan jumped at any opportunity to write
extravagant dialogue, never fearing that large
or unfamiliar words would scare away young readers.
He didn't write for children.
He wrote for everyone.
Filling stories with powerful emotion
and the colorful language necessary to communicate it.
I was way too nervous and Stan just walked on by.
I tried to play it off like it was no big deal,
you know because it wasn't, it wasn't.
Yeah I kicked myself for that one.
But, thankfully I wasn't there alone.
My friends, who were also there with me
saw how much it meant to me and started
rallying people to get Stan to come back around
and take a photo with me.
The interaction was brief, but I got to tell him
thanks for everything and that was enough.
- I've told this story so often it might even be true.
I can't remember.
- That's my favorite quote from Stan Lee.
It's a line that he said often when recounting stories
from his past, and I think it's precisely the right
mindset to have when approaching one's own history.
Here, he said it while explaining how he
co-created Spider-Man, a story that he's presented
in almost the exact same wording every time he told
the tale, which is a tad suspicious.
In fact, if you go through interviews and books,
you can see that nearly every story Stan Lee told
about his time in the comics industry
is written in the same identical language,
like he's reciting one of his comic book scripts.
As someone who cares about historical accuracy,
this is a pretty frustrating quality about Stan Lee,
but he was a storyteller through and through.
Never really caring about the boundary between
fact and fiction so long as the audience was captivated.
And on some level, I get that.
Did my story about meeting Stan Lee happen
exactly the way that I presented it?
I honestly don't know.
I've told that story so often, it might even be true.
I can't remember.
Honestly, I didn't want to make this video.
And I'm still worried about uploading it.
I don't want it to seem like I'm putting this guy
up on a pedestal like he's some sort of faultless being.
But we're all just trying to put more good out into
the world than harm and I think Stan Lee
is far ahead on that score.
Through his boundless creativity,
unshakable positivity, and endless love
for misfits and outcasts through which he was able
to explore the depths of humanity,
Stan Lee left this world in better condition
than how he found it, in my opinion.
He wielded great power and understood
the responsibility that came with it.
And although that iconic closing line
of Spider-Man's first story will unquestionably
be the quote that Stan is remembered for the most,
I think what he wrote directly after that
is even more meaningful when we look back
at the legacy of Stan Lee.
- [Narrator] And so a legend is born and a new name
is added to the roster of those who make the world
of fantasy the most exciting realm of all!
- [Scott] Thanks for watching.
I know this was kind of a different video
than what I normally do, but I just wanted to get
all my thoughts out there.
If you're wondering who voiced that line at
the end just then, it was Geoff from Mother's Basement
who also released his own video very recently
about how Stan Lee impacted the world of anime.
It's absolutely fascinating and definitely worth a watch.
Link in the description,
Geoff was also the person who convinced to make this video
so if you liked it, if you like whatever this was,
maybe go over to his video and leave a nice comment.
And as always with these kinds of videos,
I won't be putting ads on them so the only
reason I was able to make this was because
of the support that we get over on Patreon.
And so for the last time this year, I would like to thank
Cristoffer Lange, Lori Thames, Everett Parrott,
John Duffy, Jonathan and Megan Pierson,
Jonathan Lonowski, Sonali Manka, Amanda Trisdale,
Ariella Kelley, Dave Weston, Devin Gosselin,
Elisabeth Diamond, Felix Otto Hoeller, Jonat Campos,
KayleeKez, Luis Orozco, Matias Tironi, Michael Lipinski,
Shawn Griffin, Ali K, Aragix Spel, Bart Labeda,
Bjarki Steinn Petursson, Chris Osborne, David H Adler,
David Holley, Denny Sandberg, Dr Trace Belcher,
Jamie Price, Jeff Dumas, Jenny Huapaya,
Matt Valentin, Matthew Jeanos, Matthew Pruitt,
Natalie Englund, Nathaniel Naranjo, Stephen Temple,
Tim Shannon, Will Padilla, Zach Van Stanley, Zachary Bahar,
and the rest of the wonderful nerds who support these
videos over on Patreon.com/NerdSync.
Your support means the world to me.
Once again, I highly encourage you to check out
Geoff's video about Stan Lee and his impact
on the world of anime, it's super interesting.
Or you can watch this playlist of videos
about other parts of Stan Lee's history.
And if you're new here, consider subscribing.
My name is Scott, reminding you to read between
the panels and grow smarter through comics.
Excelsior!