In getting rid of all the stuff I’ve accumulated over the years, I came across this advert a couple of days ago in a British Planet Of The Apes weekly comic from 1975 – Stan Lee, live at the Camden Roundhouse.
He presented a slide-show, with tickets priced at 60p. I absolutely would love to see Stan Lee – I think as a writer, he’s one of the most influential brains of the twentieth century. So many household names flowed out of his head in such a short span of time (about four years in the mid-60s, many of them in collaboration with the artists Jacky Kirby and Steve Ditko) - Spiderman, The Hulk, Thor, The X-Men, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, Doctor Octopus (surely one of the greatest villain names ever?), Dr Doom, The Avengers, Daredevil, Dr Strange; the list just goes on and on.
It was about this time that the first comic shops started opening in London (one of the very first was Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, which moved around Soho throughout the seventies), and it’s sad to see how many of them have closed in the last few years. It’s a combination of the industry destroying itself in the 1990s by pandering to speculators and taking their eye off of stories, the growth of a few professionally-run shops (the Forbidden Planet was always number one, even when it was in a dusty, wooden-floored Denmark Street shop), and the fact that kids these days have more exciting things to do that open comics. They can play Fallout 3 for God’s sake, and given the choice, who can blame them?
I went and saw the quite brilliant Chris Ware do a Q&A at the ICA, but he’s a naturally shy and reticient chap, and I’ve seen Alan Moore do some bits and bobs, but Stan Lee is the comics business.
That position is cemented by his hucksterish, carnival, completely open persona. He speaks like his characters do in the comics of the 1960s, and he’s as enthusiastic as an over-excited young teenager. The more you read about him, the better he becomes: he used his monthly column Stan’s Soapbox in the comics all the way through the 1960s and 1970s to not only flog his other titles, but to address issues like prejudice, bigotry and intolerance.
And he claimed he used a famously flowery, sophisticated writing style in the hope that he could make kids learn something - “if a kid has to go to a dictionary, that’s not the worst thing that could happen.” He’s now 86, and he’s still working.
I think Stan Lee might be the one single author whose work I’ve spent the longest time reading. He seems like a completely untortured, friendly, unpretentious genius, who’s had more of an effect on global culture than pretty much anyone else in the last fifty years, and in an entirely positive way. I’d happily pay a lot more than 60p to see him do a slide show today. Hey, I’d pay more than 60p just to have him shout ‘Excelsior!’ right into my face.
