are indeed is the individual who becomes a corporate symbol, growing so closely identified with a company that he or she is that company. Through a mixture of talent, force of will and good luck, some creators have an inextricable link in the public's mind with the fruits of their labor, in a way that your run-of-the-mill CEO does not. For example, Bill Gates is more than just a computer guru, he is Microsoft. In the magazine world, the same can be said of Helen Gurley Brown and Cosmopolitan or Hugh Hefner and Playboy. And Walt Disney, even though he's no longer with us, is the Walt Disney Company. (Sorry, Michael Eisner.)
Rare as well are those lucky few who get to work side by side with such an empire builder. For several years, I was one such witness, because I worked at Marvel Comics in the days before Stan Lee went Hollywood, when that spiritual father of the modern superhero still strode through the Madison Avenue offices each day. And as all True Believers know (and as most of the rest of the civilized world knows as well), Stan Lee is Marvel Comics.
Since I grew up as a comic-book fan, watching Stan in his natural environment was akin to a biologist being given the chance to work with Darwin, or a physicist with Einstein or a writer with Homer. For modern-day toilers in those fields of endeavor, however, such situations are impossible—mere dreams. Their icons died long ago. Only in a relatively recent art form such as comic books, one in which the moments of creation are still within view, can such a delicious anomaly occur.
Stan is still the Man
It's been many decades since Stan dubbed me "Sparkling" Scott Edelman (all members of the Bullpen had to have nicknames, you see), and yet I've found that I still have a lot of reasons to think about Stan. After all, his name has been appearing on the screen quite a bit. This year alone, Daredevil swung across the screen, X2 brought his mutant creations alive and—just this weekend—the Hulk gave vent to some cinematic rage.
I understand that I am not the typical audience for these movies; obviously, Hollywood needs the seats filled by more than just comic-book fans if it is to recoup its multimillion-dollar budgets. On the other hand, my childhood molded me into a very special sort of target audience. So as I watched these films, I felt as if the movies had been made for a narrowly focused audience of one.
There's no way I can be unbiased about characters I've known for 40 years. Watching Cyclops, the Hulk and others, I was able to feel a joy that most other filmgoers could not—after all, these were my childhood dreams projected up on the screen, given flesh for all to see. Whether the films were made well or made poorly was almost beside the point. What mattered to my inner child was that they had been made, period—made real, made three-dimensional, made from myth into movies—and that tugged at my heart.
Unfortunately, reading about Stan Lee in the papers these days also means reading about whether he took too much responsibility for those creations, and whether he gave Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and the other Marvel artists too little credit for their shared accomplishments. That is one of the downsides of becoming the public face of an industry. It seems at times as if this questioning is being done by those who don't have a love of the subject matter, but just the love of a good, juicy scandal, and so delve into comic books with a Behind the Music attitude.
And you know what? We'll never really know and it doesn't really matter. None of these men was ever really as good with any other partner as they were with each other. The characters we've come to love were born only because of a perfect marriage of editor, writer and artist, and thus their collaborations cannot be severed, weighed and measured.
Regardless of whether Stan Lee deserves more or less credit than his comrades, he remains the ringleader—the catalyst for the Marvel universe. So I guess that in addition to being Darwin and Einstein and Homer, he was also Moses most of all, leading every True Believer into the promised land.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His short stories can be found in the recent anthologies Angel Body and other Magic for the Soul and The Book of Final Flesh.
