EPISODE 341: EXCELSIOR

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Stan Lee died this week. And I know I should have a lot to say about that, but if you’ve been reading this for very long, you’ve already heard a lot of my shtick about the joys and beauty of both comic bookery in general and some of the characters Lee created in particular -- Spider-Man; the Avengers; the Hulk.

Here’s the thing everyone always says about Lee’s work and about Marvel Comics in general – he’s the guy who realized the best stories are the ones that look like our lives – with characters who have struggles we can relate to, living in places that look familiar. Even when he was writing about gods (aka Thor), Lee was always writing about situations we can relate to – controlling dads dangling the family business over our heads, the perils of too much partying and too little impulse control and little brothers who just want to ruin everything.

The thing that hit me this week is that description of his special talent, while true, is not quite specific enough. Lee didn’t write about just any ordinary people; he wrote about the ones society generally discarded – nerds and orphans, monsters and relics; the conceited, the villainous and the handicapped. And where polite society said there is no place for any of them, either because they make us uncomfortable or we judge them unworthy, Lee and his co-creators gave them center stage and made them the heroes.

And it seems like some of those characters have only become more relevant and resonant today. I’ve been watching this British show Butterfly this week. It hasn’t made it to the States yet; it’s a three part mini-series about a family with a pre-teen son who has always felt that he’s actually supposed to be a girl. The series is about her struggle and her family’s to let her be herself. It’s very moving, and also very honest about the different kinds of struggles each of the family members goes through on this journey.

Lee’s first big super hero comic was the Fantastic Four – the family of scientists who go into outer space and are bombarded with cosmic radiation that changes their biology. And I was reading this week that one of the things that really made that story leap off the page was Ben Grimm, who post-irradiation was trapped in this body made of rock, with no way to return to flesh and blood. Today he’s generally written as having made peace with his situation, but in the beginning he was written as living in this nightmare. They called him “The Thing”, for God’s sake. The horror he endured, his fight to be himself gave the Fantastic Four stories pathos and legitimacy.

(Many, many times in the comics Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, aka the Big Brain, says he’s going to fix this problem for Ben. And not only does he never succeed, most of the time he doesn’t really seem to be working on the problem at all.

You always have to watch out for the super smart super heroes. They’re usually actually kind of villain-y.)

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I used to see Stan at Comic-Cons. He have big bodyguards around him as he walked down the aisles, which frankly he needed because people would just mob him. I never approached him myself, but I’d watch some of those scenes unfold. And I was always impressed by his effect on people. Just being around him really melted people; it was like they were kids getting to meet Santa. His presence just in and of itself made people really happy.

My friend Tom Brennan, who used to work at Marvel Comics, wrote a great piece for the New York Post about meeting Stan. And as we were writing back and forth I realized what I witnessed happening around Stan is a lot like what I saw a couple years ago when I went to Rome and saw the Pope interacting with people at St. Peter’s. There is just something about being around him, something in the air that makes you grateful and child-like. He and Stan Lee both, they’re like the human versions of going to Disneyland.

Stan Lee’s story is complicated. He gets all the credit for Marvel Comics and maybe for a time tried to sell people on that version of the company, when in fact there’s some other really central people, particularly artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had the chance to listen to an interview with him; they’re kind of nightmarish, just a long series of quips and stories that he has clearly told so many times every drop of spontaneity and humanity has been sucked dry from them.

(In his defense, he's 95. At this point, every question you could ever think to ask him he's already been asked like a million times.)

But still I guess the thing I find myself taking away from his death is that I don’t want to forget what it was like to watch people see him for the first time. The wonder on their faces and the happiness that seemed to fill every space he was in. People talk about Heaven as some place over there that some day we hopefully get to go to, but I don’t know, I think God gives us tastes of it every now and then. You know, just to keep us interested. :)

Sometimes they’re nice and long, a week’s vacation on the beaches of Hawaii; and sometimes it’s just a random glimpse of an old man being led through a crowd of adoring fans, smiling at them from behind his sunglasses and saying “Excelsior!”

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If you’re looking for more on Stan, the New York Times did a very fine obit on him, the Guardian posted some great reader comments about how he impacted their lives. Maybe my favorite piece after Tom’s, though, is probably this piece at CityLab, which looks at the impact of Lee’s choice to set his comics not in some fictional town like Metropolis, but in our very own New York City.

Two great quotes from writer @KristonCapps:

If there is one facet of the Marvel mythos that might belong to Lee alone, it’s that familiar, heyyy-I’m-walkin’-herecharacter of the city that Lee brought to life through his dialog. Spider-Man works as a talkative hero because New York talks back....

If superhero stories could happen all around us, in regular places, then maybe regular people could be heroes. And if heroes would fight to protect their neighborhoods, maybe the rest of us could, too. Stan Lee raised the stakes with his excelsior stories of gods and monsters—by telling them on the block.

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And here’s a quote from Stan himself.

For many years we’ve been trying, in our own bumbling way, to illustrate that love is a far greater force, a far greater power than hate. Now we don’t mean you’re expected to go around like a pirouetting Pollyanna, tossing posies at everyone who passes by, but we do want to make a point. Let’s consider three men: Buddha, Christ, and Moses ... men of peace, whose thoughts and deeds have influenced countless millions throughout the ages -- and whose presence still is felt in every corner of the earth. Buddha, Christ, and Moses ... men of good will, men of tolerance, and especially men of love. Now, consider the practitioners of hate who have sullied the pages of history. Who still venerates their words? Where is homage still paid to their memory? What banners still are raised to their cause? The power of love - and the power of hate. Which is most truly enduring? When you tend to despair ... let the answer sustain you.

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A week ago today I came home from seeing this great new movie, If Beale Street Could Talk, the guy who did Moonlight adapting the James Baldwin novel of the same name; really tremendous. And as I pull into the parking lot, I see these people standing on the bluff staring out into the dark.

Following their gaze I saw fires flickering up and down the Santa Monica Mountains. On the other side of all that, unseen by us, Malibu was burning.

I don't know if this is the Malibu fire or one of the others, but definitely California.

The next day the flames were gone, but you couldn’t see the mountains at all for the smoke. And even though we’re twenty miles away from all that, still you could smell the burning.

Saw this online yesterday; it's a photo of Malibu as it is now.

Meanwhile on campus over the weekend apparently a kid was trying to scare his sleeping roommate and shouted “Active Shooter!” And someone else in another room was on the phone with their parents, who heard that shouting and called the police. Which led to kids thinking and posting online that there was an active shooter situation when there wasn’t. Which was scary.

So yeah...strange, strange days.

(ICYMI, Life Lesson: Never Shout "Active Shooter.")

If they've been weird for you, too, and/or you're Theresa May -- Terry, how you holdin' up? -- here’s a couple things I found this week that are specially curated for joy.

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Two Words: Nun Rave. (h/t Laura Olin, whom you should definitely read)

Three Words: The Calm Place.

Four Words: Child wants to be Batman in Nativity play, tells mom I hate Baby Jesus.

(It probably will not surprise you to read that if I were the pastor of that parish I would absolutely let that kid be Batman at the Nativity. I’d even let him use a batarang on the angels a little. And you know what, I bet something really special would come of it.)

(Not the batarangs, come on now. The Batman.)

Five Words: Bat Kid is Cancer Free.
(Seriously, we all need to keep this article close and go back to it any time we’re having a bad day. I could barely get past the headline without choking up.)

And lastly, One Word: Dance.
This is the last scene of the film End of the Tour, the true story of the Rolling Stone reporter who spent a weekend trying to get a scoop on David Foster Wallace. I don’t know if it’ll have the same impact if you haven’t seen the film, but the final moments of Wallace dancing really get to me.

I've just stopped to watch that scene five more times. To see someone filled with joy like that, it's like discovering the door to the prison cell you've been living in was open all along, and everyone you ever loved has just been waiting for you to get up the nerve to join them outside for the greatest party of your life.

We're all here. We've got the good music playing. Come and see.