Stan Lee's heroes and their faults are part of the DNA of our culture

Lee, who died this week at the age of 95, was a pioneering, almost unparalleled presence in the comic book industry. As editor, publisher, and president of Marvel Comics, he created a pantheon of iconic characters and left a cultural legacy that was almost too vast to be understood.

Describing this legacy simply as one of the costumed heroes and their many shelves of derivative toys is an oversimplification. Lee's characters, their weaknesses, their ethical struggles and their victories over adversity are now embedded in the DNA of our culture.

In life, Lee leaves only one child, but in our culture, he also survives from a generation of heroes and complex heroines who have become, after decades of reinvention, the piece mistress of a billion dollar cartoon, television and film empire.

They are almost too numerous to be named, but they include the mighty Thor, the young Spider-Man, the troubled Hulk of "do not get angry, you do not love me when I'm angry", the celebrity , the sophisticated and strong Black Panther and the very strange X-Men.

As much as his own daughter J.C., they are also Stan Lee's children.

Lee's own story goes back almost a century, when the 17-year-old boy took a job in an publishing house called Timely Publications, which now belongs to Marvel Entertainment. It was in 1939.

In historical terms, 1939 was a great year in comics. It was the year of Superman's first comic book, Comics Action # 1, has been published. This is also the year Batman makes his first appearance in Detective Comics # 27.

In other titles of the same year: Carried away by the wind and The Wizard of Oz were released in cinemas and World War II broke out. A busy year every time.

It was only in 1961 that Lee's pantheon of comics was born, in collaboration with artist Jack Kirby; they included the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man and X-Men. (Lee also co-created Daredevil with Bill Everett and Doctor Strange and Spider-man with Steve Ditko.)

The most striking thing in Lee's creations does not lie in the similarities with the iconic DC Comics heroes of the time, but in the profound differences.

The heroes of DC had somehow become perfect princes of the great kingdoms: the indestructible Superman of planet Krypton, the half-goddess Wonder Woman of the Amazonian city of Themyscira, the brilliant Batman of Gotham City and Aquaman, the Heir to the kingdom of Atlantis. They were all born for greatness and, while their stories were sometimes tinged with tragedy, their stories were uniformly animated by a destiny to lead.

On the other hand, Lee's characters were human beings, but resolved to make tormented copies of them.

Lee was clearly fascinated by the mutations: the radiation that turned Peter Parker into Spider-man, the gamma rays that made Dr. Bruce Banner the Hulk, and even the cosmic rays that created the Fantastic Four.

Even when Lee's heroes came with a superpower, they did not sit, like the jaw-drenched Superman, in the center of the world where they lived, but were rather, like the misunderstood X-Men, impregnated with 39, otherness, a deviation from the norm that puts them on the margins of society.

Lee's characters were perfectly flawed: Iron Man's alter ego, Tony Stark, was fighting alcoholism, Spider-man's Peter Parker was tormented by teenage anguish and Dr. Banner, aka Hulk, had what could be the worst case of anger management in the history of the comic book.

Where DC's heroes were remarkable – Batman's tendency to violence aside – Marvel's heroes were shattered.

It is therefore hardly surprising that the heroes of the region who dominated film and television culture in the 1980s reflect the richness and refined excesses of that era.

In the decades that followed, as the real world became a darker and more hectic place to live, Lee's creations entered the heart of our cultural narrative, a dark mirror to a much more complex world.

In 2018, Lee's legacy is vast. Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, owner of the Marvel Empire, described Lee this week as a man as extraordinary as his comic creations. "A full-fledged superhero for Marvel fans around the world, Stan has the power to inspire, entertain and connect," said Iger. "The magnitude of his imagination has only been exceeded by the size of his heart."

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Even Marvel's old rival, DC Comics, issued a statement recognizing that Lee had fundamentally changed the way our culture envisioned the hero's journey. "Modern comics will always have an indelible mark," the company said in a statement. "Her infectious enthusiasm reminded us why we all fell in love with these stories."

And by lending a voice to the many actors who have inhabited these characters, Australian actor Hugh Jackman – who plays Wolverine, created by Roy Thomas, Lee's successor at Marvel – hinted that Lee had "made the world a better place." by the power of modern mythology ". and his love for "this disastrous case of being human".

In hindsight, it seems deeply ironic that Lee's career as a pioneer of comics and the legacy she left us have hardly taken place.

In the early 1960s, Lee would remember later, he had almost left the cartoon industry. He aspired to write characters stories with depth and complexity, but his publisher at Marvel simply wanted "a lot of action and a lot of fight scenes".

That's Joan, Lee's wife, who changed her mind when she suggested to her, "Why do not you write one as you want to write it? You're going to stop anyway, so he's firing you, who cares? out of your system. "

Whatever he wanted he eventually became The four fantastic, the comic book that served as a catalyst for the Marvel pantheon of modern times.

Lee's career will last several decades, and even after he stopped publishing weekly cartoons for the company, he kept his weekly column, Stan's Soapbox, in which he pontificated with wisdom and tenderness. The New York Times.

There were many chronicles, but none as durable as the one in which he had defied America's 1960s for his sectarianism and racism. It resonates with as much force in 2018 as it did five decades earlier in 1968.

"Sooner or later, we must learn to judge ourselves on our own merits," wrote Lee. "Sooner or later, if we want man to live up to his destiny, we must fill our hearts with tolerance.

"For then, and only then, will we truly be worthy of the concept that man was created in the image of God, a God who calls us all his children."