“I think you never outgrow your love of these stories of giants, ogre and witches, superheroes’ comics give you that for older people.” – Stan Lee
The word ‘hero’ conjures up an image in Stan Lee’s mind of a knight in shining armour on a white steed looking for good deeds to do, for figurative dragons to slay. When he was a young man, he loved the movies, and Errol Flynn was his knight in shining armour, his hero, because of the roles he played.
Every writer Stan had ever read, from Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, Franklin W. Dixon who wrote the Hardy Boys, to Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shakespeare inspired his own writing.
He said his love of the language in Shakespeare’s work influenced a lot of the dialogue and phraseology in the books he wrote, such as Thor, God of Thunder and Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. He loved making up his own expressions like, “By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, so let it be.”
He had lots of advice for children who want to write. “Read! Read as much as you can! Read everything you can! Don’t limit your reading to comic books or mystery stories or science fiction stories or romance stories or any particular genre.” He believes the more children read, the more the phraseology stays with them, the more the rhythm of the words sinks in, and the more their imaginations are stimulated. And he advises them to not only read but to write and to care about what they write, to say to themselves.
”We had the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, Father Time, Hurricane. The most important thing in those days was the cover. All these books were on the newsstand, and you had to hope your cover would compel somebody to buy the book. And everything depended on the name. A character like Hurricane was a guy who ran very fast. Later on, when I was looking for new superheroes, it occurred to me that somebody crawling on walls would be interesting. I thought, Mosquito Man? It didn’t sound very glamorous. Fly Man? I went down the list and came to Spider-Man. That was it.”
To the man that gave us the best defenders and made us believe in superheroes; the man whose cameos in movies resulted in loud cheers in the theatres, Thank You.
Thank you for making me believe in being a good person, and that with great power comes great responsibility. Thank you for making the Marvel Cinematic Universe a different world. Thank you for giving us the best.
We hope to see you in future films as the theatre rejoices.
Once a legend,
Always a legend.
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