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Stan Lee was an essential part of Miya Crummell's childhood. A self-proclaimed black girl and geek of pop culture, she saw that Lee was ahead of his time.
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"At the time, he was writing 'Black Panther' while segregation was still strong," said the 27-year-old New Yorker, who credits Lee for becoming a graphic designer and band designer. "It was a bit unheard of to have a black main character, let alone a main character and not just a type of secondary partner."
Lee, the creator and creator of Marvel's greatest superheroes, died Monday at the age of 95. While fans are celebrating his contributions to the canon of pop culture, some have also revisited the way the Marvel magician felt that with great comics, a great responsibility came back. When blacks risked their lives in the 1960s to protest discrimination where they lived and worked, Lee set up integration with the first traditional black superhero. Black Panther, with the X-Men and Luke Cage, are now heroes on the screen. But at the time, they were the soldiers in Lee's battle against the real enemies of racism and xenophobia.
Under Lee's leadership, Marvel Comics presented a generation of comic readers to the African prince who governs a mythically and technologically advanced realm, the ex-black prisoner whose brown skin repels bullets and X-Men, a group of heroes whose superpu different according to their cultural background.
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The works and ideas of Lee and the artists behind T'Challa, the black panther; Luke Cage, hero for rent; and the band of happy mutants of Professor Xavier – revolutionary in the 1960s and 1970s – became a cultural force removing barriers to inclusion.
Lee had his fingers in everything Marvel had produced, but some of the characters and intrigues "were inspired by artists inspired by what was happening in the '60s," said freelance writer Alex Simmons.
Nevertheless, distributors of white comics have reacted somewhat to heroes and black characters. Some lots of Marvel Comics were fired because some distributors were unprepared for the Black Panther and Wakanda Kingdom developed by artist and co-creator Jack Kirby.
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"Stan had to take those risks," said Simmons. "There was a liberation movement, and I think Marvel became the voice of the people, linked to this rebel energy and accompanied it."
Lee also spoke directly to readers about the irrationality of hate. In 1968, a tumultuous year of Martin Luther King's assassination, Lee wrote one of his most virulent columns, "Stan's Soapbox," calling for bigotry and racism "the deadliest social plagues that assail the world today ".
"But unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can not be stopped with a punch in the mouth, or a zap of a ray gun," Lee wrote.
According to Mikhail Lyubansky, professor of race and ethnicity psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Marvel's characters have always been at the forefront of the fight against racial discrimination and others. With the X-Men, many readers saw in the mutants, ostracized for their powers, a commentary on how Americans treated blacks and whoever was perceived as "the other."
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"The original X-Men were less focused on race and more on cultural differences," Lyubansky said. "Black Panther and some of the movies (Marvel) have taken over and have addressed the racial problem in a way that I think was not Stan's intention. But they have been a great vehicle for that. "
Some of the efforts to get out the minority characters have not aged well. Marvel characters like the evil Fu Manchu-esque The Mandarin and American sports hero Wyatt Wingfoot were considered innovative in the 60s and 70s, but they may seem outdated and too stereotypical in the 21st century.
"It's interesting – Stan Lee takes some sort of merit and blame, depending on the character," said William Foster III, who helped create the Black Age Convention's cartoon on East Coast and is an English teacher at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, Connecticut.
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Foster, who began reading Marvel Comics in the 1960s, said that even doing something as minor as including people of color in the background was monumental.
"Stan Lee had the attitude of" We are in New York. How can we not have blacks in New York? Said Foster.
Blacks began to assume the roles of heroes and villains. Foster said that some characters may have been perceived as "symbolic symbolism," but sometimes that's where progress must begin.
In 10 years, Marvel Cinematic Universe films have earned more than $ 17.6 billion in global revenue. The movie "Black Panther" raised more than $ 200 million during its first weekend earlier this year. Next year, actress Brie Larson will take flight under the name "Captain Marvel". An animated film centered on Miles Morales, a teenager both black and half Puerto Rican who inherits the Spider-Man costume, will disappear next month. And Kamala Khan and Marvel, the first Muslim superhero, continue to spark interest.
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"I've had a lot of white friends growing up," said freelance writer Simmons, who is black. "We watched Batman and we also watched" The Mod Squad ". My personal belief is that if you put the material in front of people and they connect, they will connect to it.
For many fans and consumers, this is the product, not the color of the skin or the sexual orientation of the character, he added.
Crummell, the comic book designer, said she thought the representation of minorities and women in comics was improving.
"I think now they see everyone reading comics. This is not a specific group now, "Crummell said. "It's not just the Afro-American people, it's the women, the Asians, the Hispanic characters now. I would say that Stan Lee managed to break the barrier.
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