When I was 10 years old I had a paper route and delivered the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Twice a month I would go door to door collecting the subscription fees from my customers. Many would provide a young business kid with a tip. I would pocket those coins and head down to a neighborhood grocery store, these have gone the way of the dinosaurs, but Whites Market was a big piece of where I lived. There, at the front of the store was a wire rack and in its slots were comic books. I would peruse the week’s offerings, make my selections, part with some hard earned coins, jump on my Schwinn Sting-Ray bike and head home to lose myself in story.
I saw a skinny kid, whose dream was to serve his country only to be turned down because he was so weak he could hardly carry a rifle. He was just a kid, who readily volunteered for an experimental program that would, if successful, get him into the Army. Successful it was and Captain America was born.\
I saw a brilliant and rich engineer who had a piece of shrapnel so close to his heart that the slightest movement could have ended his life. He invented a device that would keep that piece of metal at bay and Iron Man was born. I saw a nerdy teenager bitten by a radioactive spider gain untold power but struggle with how to use it until his dying Uncle gave him a now worldly famous sentence of advice – “With great power comes great responsibility.” From those words, Spiderman was born.
An arrogant surgeon with a god-like ego gets into a car accident and his hands are damaged beyond repair. He lost the only thing that gave his life value. While searching for a way to regain his steady hands he stumbles into a Tibetan monastery where he learns that magic is real and trains to become the Sorcerer Supreme. Dr. Strange is born.
Stan Lee the father of Marvel Comics just passed away and though there is always some controversy around who created what, Stan Lee has always been my pusher and provided my weekly comic fix. The sheer volume of the character mythology he was involved in creating boggles the imaginative mind. Just to give you a small feel, let’s isolate the impact on movies:
- Stan Lee-related characters have appeared in approximately 44 different movies.
- The adjusted global box office take on those movies is $33,067,097,585.00!
Comics are a unique form of literature. They are sequential visual art and provide a rich canvas for storytelling. They captured my imagination and taught me the application of what I would later learn was the narrative arc. This might explain the soft spot in my movie-going heart for superhero genre flicks.
One of my favorite comic writers is the great Warren Ellis who recently described comics:
“Comics, at their best, have a purity of intent. There is no visual narrative form that has so few people between the creator and the audience. What you always get is what the creators wanted to say to you.”
I am a comic book fan and for over 50 years I have looked forward to Wednesdays, the traditional day of new comic book releases. Though my eyes have gone weak and I have to enjoy my comic reading via digital downloads, I remain a ten-year-old boy, every Wednesday.
Thanks, Stan. . . . EXCELSIOR.
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