{"id":5081,"date":"2018-11-16T09:49:17","date_gmt":"2018-11-16T16:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/?p=5081"},"modified":"2018-11-16T09:51:13","modified_gmt":"2018-11-16T16:51:13","slug":"farewell-to-a-marvel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/2018\/11\/16\/farewell-to-a-marvel\/","title":{"rendered":"Farewell to a Marvel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unless you have been hiding in a cave somewhere… or down with the Mole Man in the bowels of the Earth… by now you will have read that Stan Lee has died, at the age of 95.<\/p>\n

A good age, that.\u00a0\u00a0 Stan Lee lived a long life, and leaves a grand and glorious legacy behind him.\u00a0\u00a0 He has been part of my world for so long that it seems impossible that he is gone.<\/p>\n

Not that I can claim to have been a friend.\u00a0\u00a0 I never had that honor.\u00a0 Oh, yes, I met Stan a dozen times or so, at various San Diego Comic-Cons over the years.\u00a0\u00a0 Every time I did, it was like meeting him for the first time; he never remembered our previous meetings, and I don’t think he had any idea who I was.\u00a0\u00a0 It made no matter.\u00a0\u00a0 He was always genial and generous to me, as he was to all the fanboys who surrounded him at those cons.\u00a0 And when I was in Stan’s presence, that’s just what I was: a fanboy, slightly tongue-tied and more than a little in awe.<\/p>\n

I owe so much to Stan Lee. \u00a0 He was, in a sense, my first publisher, my first editor. \u00a0 “Dear Stan and Jack.”\u00a0 Those were the first words of mine ever to see print.\u00a0 In the letter column of FANTASTIC FOUR #20, as it happens. \u00a0 My first published loc, a commentary on FF#17, compared Stan to… ah… Shakespeare.\u00a0 A little overblown, you say?\u00a0 Well, okay.\u00a0 I was thirteen…<\/p>\n

And yet, and yet… the comparison, when you think about it, is not entirely without merit. \u00a0 There were plays before Shakespeare, but the Bard’s work revolutionized the theatre, left it profoundly different from what it had been before. \u00a0 And Stan Lee did the same for comic books.\u00a0 I had been reading comics all through my childhood, but by the late 50s I had started to drift away from them. \u00a0 I was buying fewer and fewer “funny books” (as we called them back then), and more SF and fantasy paperbacks. \u00a0 The DC comics that dominated the racks had become so formulaic and tired, they were no longer holding my interest as they had when I was younger. \u00a0 I was “outgrowing” comics.<\/p>\n

And then Stan Lee came along, and pulled me back in. \u00a0 The first issue of FANTASTIC FOUR that I chanced on (#4, it was, the one where the FF met Prince Namor) caught my interest as nothing had for years.\u00a0 A short while later, along came Spider-Man.\u00a0\u00a0 And then the rest, one by one, in an astonishingly short period of time.\u00a0\u00a0 The Hulk.\u00a0 Thor.\u00a0 Iron Man.\u00a0\u00a0 Ant-Man (and the Wonderful Wasp).\u00a0 The X-Men.\u00a0 The Avengers.\u00a0\u00a0 Wonder Man (who died in the same issue he was introduced).\u00a0 Black Panther.\u00a0\u00a0 The Inhumans.\u00a0 Galactus and the Silver Surfer.\u00a0\u00a0 And the villains… Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, the Vulture, the Sandman, Mysterio, Loki… and on and on.\u00a0\u00a0 (We will not talk about Paste-Pot Pete.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a tribute).<\/p>\n

These characters had personalities<\/em><\/strong>. \u00a0\u00a0 Quirks, flaws, tempers.\u00a0 The heroes were not all good, the villains were not all bad.\u00a0 The stories had twists and turns, I could not tell where they were going.\u00a0 Sometimes good guys fought other good guys. \u00a0 The characters grew and changed… over at DC, Superman and Lois Lane had been locked into the same relationship for decades, but Peter Parker went through girlfriends like a real teenager, he graduated high school and went to college, people could and did die.<\/p>\n

You had to be there to understand how revolutionary all this was.\u00a0 Comics as we know them today would not exist except for Stan Lee.\u00a0\u00a0 They might not exist at all, if truth be told.<\/p>\n

No, of course, he did not do it all\u00a0 alone.\u00a0\u00a0 The genius of Marvel’s artists, especially Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, should never be minimized.\u00a0\u00a0 They were a huge part of Marvel as well.\u00a0\u00a0 But Lee was at the center of it all.<\/p>\n

That letter in FF#20 was only the first of many I sent to Stan and Jack, and Stan and Steve, and Stan and… whoever the artist was on the book I was writing to.\u00a0 A number were published, with my full address attached.\u00a0\u00a0 Other comics fans around the country saw the letters, and began sending me fanzines and letters of their own.\u00a0 My friendship with Howard Waldrop began thanks to those letters… him in Texas, me in Jersey.\u00a0\u00a0 And after reading some of those early ditto’d fanzines, I began to write for them as well.\u00a0 My first published stories.\u00a0 Heroes of my own creation.\u00a0 Manta Ray.\u00a0 Garizan the Mechanical Warrior.\u00a0 The White Raider (who, like Wonder Man, died in his first story).\u00a0 And, then, a little later, heroes created for STAR-STUDDED COMICS by my friends from the Texas Trio, Powerman and Dr. Weird. \u00a0 I could not draw so I wrote “text stories,” superhero stories in prose. \u00a0 Which people liked. \u00a0 Which encouraged me to keep writing. \u00a0 And as I wrote, I did my best to write like Stan Lee.<\/p>\n

These days, in interviews, I am often asked which writers influenced me most when I started out. \u00a0 There were a lot of them. \u00a0 For SF there were Heinlein and Andre Norton and Eric Frank Russell, for fantasy Robert E. Howard and JRRT and Fritz Leiber, for horror the inimitable H.P Lovecraft. \u00a0 Later on, when I was older, there was Jack Vance and Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany and Alfred Bester, and later still William Goldman and F. Scott Fitzgerald.<\/p>\n

But the greatest influences are the earliest influences, I think, and at the beginning there was only Stan Lee.<\/p>\n

Comics have had a lot of great writers in the half century since the Marvel Age began. \u00a0 Neil Gaiman, Len Wein, Alan Moore, and more and more and more… the list goes on and on. \u00a0 But if not for Stan Lee and the worlds and characters and style he created, their own careers and accomplishments would have been very different, if not impossible.<\/p>\n

Let me close with one last letter of comment.<\/p>\n

Dear Stan,<\/p>\n

You did good work.\u00a0\u00a0 As long as people still read comic books and believe in heroes, your characters will be remembered.\u00a0 Thanks so much.\u00a0\u00a0 Make Mine Marvel.<\/p>\n

George R. Martin
\n35 East First Street
\nBayonne, New Jersey<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unless you have been hiding in a cave somewhere… or down with the Mole Man in the bowels of the Earth… by now you will have read that Stan Lee has died, at the age of 95. A good age, that.\u00a0\u00a0 Stan Lee lived a long life, and leaves a grand and glorious legacy behind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[218],"tags":[67,58],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5081"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5081"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5091,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5081\/revisions\/5091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}