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Farewell to the man who knew that heartbreak makes a hero stronger.
While fans around the world are mourning the death of Stan Lee, who died Monday at the age of 95, I was reminded to meet him for the first time many years ago. hear the astounding and truthful story of Marvel's most powerful heroes in "Stan the Man" himself.
It was April 2002 and we were sitting in the offices of his new company POW in Santa Monica! Entertainment – except that Lee was not really sitting. He was angry, raising his hand in the Spider-Man posture and telling the war stories of a battle with Green Goblin. Even at 79, he practically crawled himself on the walls.
Tobs Maguire's first film on the webslinger was set to debut in a few weeks and hopes for success were at the height of Empire-State-Building-After in 2000. X Men proved to the studios that comic books were maybe a little something that the audience was eager to see.
Remember, it was six years before Iron Man and the launch of Marvel Cinematic Universe. The films were not yet interconnected, not that there was a lot to do next. Stan Lee's cameos were not a phenomenon yet. He had played a hot dog vendor near the beach in the X Men movie. That was it. ("Did you miss me?" He teased, "I was like the main role of the movie!")
A crowd scene in Sam Raimi Spider Man It would only be his second appearance with Stan Lee, but when I interviewed him for The Associated Press, he was a little concerned because he had already seen a rough montage of the film and his footage had been greatly shortened. .
"The [original] The idea was that I was selling sunglasses in Times Square and I was talking to this little girl by showing her a pair of glasses as Peter Parker passed by, "Lee said in his hoarse, nasal voice. "So I contact Peter Parker to say," Do you want a pair? They are the kind of sunglasses that they wore in X Men! & # 39; "
He clapped his hands and swayed in his chair, a big smile spreading beneath his peppermint mustache. "That would have made you laugh more loudly! But they stopped everything because the film was a bit long.
He shrugged. He always made the final cut and Raimi included one of the changes suggested by Lee. After creating so many heroes, Lee wanted to play one himself. "The Green Goblin launches a bomb and we all ran," Lee said. "After firing, I said. "Sam, that's not good. I should not leave this poor little girl and go running to save my life. I will carry it with me. "
REED SAXON / AP / REX / Shutterstock
A HERO … STUMBLES
At the next shoot, Raimi gave him the green light. But there was another problem: she was maybe only a small child, but he was a lean old man. "I tried to lift it and I tried to lift it and I could not!" Lee shouted. "It was only a little girl, but she had to weigh 500 pounds."
He ends up taking her hand and taking her to the square. (In Spider-Man 2he approached to perform a task similar to that of a man who pulls a woman away from a falling piece of concrete.)
"Ang Lee is doing the Hulk," he said. "There is a scene for me, so I will go to San Francisco and ridicule myself again. Another guy is doing a Daredevil movie. "
Lee sighed. He folded his arms in his mustard cardigan and shrugged. How long would this superhero movie last? He did not know. He was happy to be with him for the ride. Glad to see the old characters that he helped to create and make them appear on the screen.
We started talking about the origin of Spider-Man, born in 1962 after a series of other successes have made Stan Lee a powerful scribe of Marvel Comics.
He had started working there at the age of 17. At the time, Marvel Comics was known as Timely Comics, and it was called Stanley Lieber, son of Romanian Jewish immigrants from the Bronx. His dream was to become a writer. A novelist, perhaps.
But before that happens, he made money by doing a series of small jobs. As a theater instructor, his first celebrity claim was a fall and a fall as he showed Eleanor Roosevelt at his seat. ("Are you all right, young man?" She asked.) He also delivered sandwiches for a deli and became an office assistant at, according to his words, "the world's second largest manufacturer of trousers."
His writing career began with obituaries. Many of them involved famous people, and he was obliged to prepare them in advance so that the newspapers could press them to print on the death of the celebrity. "I was depressed when I wrote about living people in the past," Lee said.
He did not want to write about death. He wanted to write about things bigger than life.
THE BIRTH OF SPIDEY
Lee was very successful when his cousin Martin Goodman hired him to work for Timely, westerns, love stories and cartoons.
"When I started doing comics, nobody, nobody respected them," he said. "Even most people on the ground were embarrassed. It was not a job for an adult man, to make those stupid comic books that others were looking under the nose. "
That's why he created a pseudonym by cutting his name in half. Decades later, he described this as his biggest regret.
"I called Stanley Martin Leiber," he said, his outstretched hand marking the syllables in the air. "A true legitimate name – with a cadence! I used to write it all the time when I was a kid and think about how good it would look to have a statement of interest. ;independence. I've always thought that I would be a very good writer one day. "
Superheroes were not part of the funnybook mood at that time, though DC Comics Batman and Superman changed that. Goodman came to "Stan Lee" and asked for ideas that Marvel could pursue.
Instead of the lone hero, Lee proposed a family of heroes – and the Fantastic 4 was born. Then he thought he would take a nasty character – a monster – and would this the hero. The Incredible Hulk has pioneered a path in the history of pop culture.
"When you try to create a new superhero, you must continue to create a different superpower," he said. "With Hulk, I had the most powerful human being. I thought, "What's left?" While I was thinking, I saw a fly crawling on the wall and I thought, & # 39; This that would be cool! … Then I needed a name. Crawl-Man? Nah, that did not happen. Man-insect? I went through the list. Mosquito-Man, Coleoptera, Fly-Man. Then I started … Spider man. "
With these words, Lee's hands shone in the air. His eyebrows rose.
"It was sort of a dramatic feeling, a scary feeling," he said. "I thought, that's all! And here, a legend is born.
CREDIT WHERE DUE
One of the controversies surrounding Lee was the credit he really deserved. A large number of "his" characters were designed in concert with artists such as artist Jack Kirby, who would follow Lee's concept and follow him.
Whether Lee got more credit than he deserved or simply attracted attention through his natural showmanship as an extrovert within a team of introverts, I have never found too generous in praising his artists. When we spoke, Lee himself did his best to congratulate his main Spider-Man collaborator, Steve Ditko, who died last June at the age of 90.
"I try to share responsibility," Lee said. "Steve is the guy who designed Spider-Man and gave Spider-Man so much about that strange feeling of atrophy. Later, he helped with the plots and realized the plots. Lee smiled again: "If there are consequences, Steve must share the blame as well as me.
The key to Spider-Man, he revealed, was a failure. Peter Parker was a weak, a teenager, and he was not on a revenge mission. He was fed with regret because he already had his power and had not succeeded in curbing the thug who was going to kill his uncle Ben.
"Great power implies great responsibility" was a lesson that haunted him because he had learned too late.
"The most important thing is to make sure the reader takes care of their character and understands it," Lee said. "The more problems a person has, the more unhappy and confused he is, the more human he looks. [the readers.]"
EVEN MORE FAILURE
Spider-Man is perhaps Lee's best-known creation. That's why it's ironic that no one initially liked it for the kid who becomes a surfer after being bitten by a radioactive spider.
"The guy who was then my editor told me, chapter and verse – that it was the worst idea he had ever heard," Lee said. "People hate spiders! You can not call a Spider-Man hero! "Stan, do not you understand that teenagers can only be acolytes? "
Lee had fallen into the idea of representation – young readers of comics might like to see a hero who looks alike. It would be a lesson that led him later to co-create the first black superhero – the warrior king Wakandan Black Panther – as well as the first African-American hero, the fierce New York protector Falcon.
After absorbing all the criticisms of Spider-Man, Lee announced more bad news to Goodman.
"When I told him that I wanted Peter Parker to have a lot of problems and worries and he was not sure about himself, he said," Ugh! It's obvious that you have no idea what a hero really is! "
What saved Spider-Man's life is the death of one of the marks. "We were killing this magazine, although I like it a lot," Lee said. "We tried to do Amazing Adult Fantasy as The twilight zone. "But that did not succeed.
"When you publish the latest issue of a magazine you are about to kill, no one really cares about what you put in it. So I thought I'd get Spider-Man out of my system. Lee and Ditko worked together on the story. Kirby created the dramatic image of Spidey swaying in the streets of Manhattan with a crook at his side.
"We put it on the blanket and forgot it," Lee said. "Then a few months later, when the sales figures arrived, the publisher came to me and said," Stan, do you remember that character we both loved? "Stan Lee's smile once again took that mustache. "This Spider-Man to you …? Why do not we do a show with him?"
Finding humanity in mutants
After about 100 numbers of The amazing spider-manLee said he had handed the writing to Roy Thomas. At this point, he had too many characters to juggle without a big team. "It was difficult of course, but I gave up all the characters at the same time: there was Hulk, Doctor Strange, The Avengers, Iron Man, Daredevil, the X-Men. After that, I got used to it a bit, "Lee said.
One of his proudest collaborations was the X-Men, which is partly explained by the fact that Lee had exhausted all possible excuses for how a human being could develop superpowers.
Weary of radioactive insects, toxic spills and gamma-ray bursts, he found a shortcut: they were only mutants, born this way.
He gave the X Men a surprising power in the real world as a metaphor for civil rights of all kinds.
"To stay realistic, I knew that most people did not like and trust people who were different from them," Lee said. "I thought we might even have a little moral lesson on this subject. Here, there are people who are good, who try to help humanity, and the very ones that they are trying to help are chasing them, harassing them and harass them. "
Lee's own superpower was not only his imagination, but also his ability to create things that others could use and create. His characters endure because, like Reed Richards of Fantastic 4, they can be stretched and modified to fit new storytellers and changing times.
Lee has become the face of Marvel, the stealthy "Stan the Man" who speaks to children in their own language ("says Nuff") without speaking to them. In his column "Stan's Soapbox", he has often advocated fairness and kindness to all – an adult message conveyed through amusing journals.
Strangely enough, Lee said that he would present himself as the opposite of all this in his imagination, making a comparison with the cynical and uncompromising newspaper editor, J. Jonah Jameson. "I am very frustrated by the fact that by the time they made the film, I was too old to play the role," Lee said. "I modeled it after me. He was mute, loud-mouthed, and had opinions. he was me!"
Of all the characters that he helped create, Peter Parker remained his favorite.
A favorite son
"In a way, Spider-Man is more special than the others," he said. "People seem to identify me with Spider-Man, a bit like Walt Disney is reminiscent of Mickey Mouse."
What made him favorite of Lee? "Nothing is ever going for Peter. I think for most people in the world, nothing is ever right. He has his share of mistakes and his share of problems during his life. "
Peter Parker never gives up either, trait that he shares with his author.
"People always ask me," Why do not you retire? "When you retire, what are you doing, you say," I can finally do everything I've always wanted to do. "But I'm already do the things I've always wanted to do! Lee said.
He had a toddler and an adult daughter, an artist, with his wife Joan, who died last year, who also died at the age of 95. In 2002, he had said that she was his pleasure. "When I go home, I like to be with my wife. I like to watch TV. I love to sit in front of the computer and suggest what I propose. Hobby is my job. "
Even after leaving Marvel and pursuing various businesses, Lee remained the public face of the comic book company – as iconic as one of their heroes – and his presence as Marvel's ambassador and king of cameo was a reminder of larger-than-life heroes Love is simply a representation of the ideals of a clumsy human (or human team).
He savored his new fame as a star. "I'm one of the best cameo players," he said. "If you do not blink, you will see me running with fear for my life."
In addition to having changed his name so long ago and never having written this American novel, Lee had only one regret:
"I wish there is a cameo category in the Oscars."
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