Stan Lee taught me how to read. Not personally. He didn’t come to the house with a hornbook or anything. But he wrote “With great power comes great responsibility,” and “Petey, eat your wheatcakes,” and “UNCLE BEN! NOOOOOOO!” and that was my very first education. Spider-Man comics. Alexander the Great had Aristotle as a tutor, but I had Peter Parker stashed in milk crates under my bed. My mother deciphered the squiggles for me, or maybe just underlined the words with her finger as she read them to me. The precisities of my mother’s pedagogical methods are not known to historians. Then Stan took over. He had words, oh such words. Zounds and forsooth and uncanny and hero and villain and neighborhood. Super fucking words, True Believer.
He wasn’t perfect–he was a vain, gullible, credit-stealing, gloryhound–but neither are you and you didn’t create the Fantastic Four. Or name the Hulk. And you certainly didn’t teach me to read. ‘Nuff said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: That’s Stan the Man in the monitor in the above page; this is from 1978’s Marvel Team-Up #74 and Spidey is “teaming up” with the Not Ready For Prime-Time Players while Stan hosts the show. I swear.
Marvel Team-Up, hereafter known as MTU, was Spidey’s second book. Until Wolverine showed up, Spidey was the most popular of the Marvel characters, and so he got two titles. Marvel used MTU to introduce new heroes or reintroduce forgotten ones, and workshop new bad guys. The guests varied wildly: sometimes Peter would run into Thor or the Black Panther, and other times he would fight Frankenstein’s Monster. I swear.
I need you to stop doubting me when I tell you that comic books are dumb. I feel like I offer you a piece of evidence, and you refuse it, even though I’ve proven myself correct time and time again while speaking on this particular subject. You must not take my word on medicine, or politics, or business, or love, but I am a goddamned expert in the subject of “How dumb superhero comics are.” Please stop resisting me on this. LISTEN TO ME, FUCKERS.
That escalated. Stop it immediately.
I can’t help it, man. I’m all about consent. And I want the Enthusiasts to consent to me. I need them to, really. How do I make them consent?
We’re going to have another HR meeting if you keep this up.
CONSENT TO ME, FUCKERS.
Just show the nice people what kind of pickle our friendly neighborhood wallcrawler has gotten himself into.
Okay.
They always left Spider-Man’s mask on when they shackled him to the spagmoidinizer.
I wasn’t kidding. Look at these scrubs Spidey has to deal with:
Points for “Tatterdemalion,” Marvel. That is a good word and an even better bad guy name. Points off for literally everything else. For God’s sake, the man has been an Avenger, and now he’s gotta hang out with poorly-drawn werewolfs in a sewer? Oh, and that character’s name isn’t “Werewolf,” it’s “Werewolf By Night,” which you shouldn’t think about too much, or at all. That’s not water. It’s effluvia. Spidey made out with Kirsten Dunst and Emma Stone, but now he’s up to his spider-balls in shit soup. It’s not right to do to a man.
At least that’s the last time Peter will have to deal with werewolfs.
I should have been more specific.
(Oh, the Man-Wolf? That’s J. Jonah Jameson’s son, John. John was an astronaut, and he went to the moon. While there, he saw a glowing rock and picked it up. The rock, naturally, turned him into a Man-Wolf. How many times do I have to tell you that comics are dumb?)
Anyway, back to the dead guy. Peter and Mary Jane Watson score tickets to Saturday Night Live, hosted by Stan Lee because Marvel Comics exists within Marvel comics. In the fictional universe that the heroes punch one another in, there is a company called Marvel that publishes comic books starring the heroes from that reality. There’s a Captain America comic book in the reality where Captain America’s real. In fact, Captain America once drew his own comic book. Don’t think about that.
Stan Lee does a monologue–he is drawn as elaborately coiffed, lean, and dapper–and makes several jokes about meeting with The Thing. It is at this point that one could begin pointing out logical inconsistencies like that tiresome fellow on YouTube who notices errors in films, but one could also remember that this is a story in which John Belushi sword-fights with a 7-foot samurai.
The issue’s not been reprinted since, due to rights bullshit, but I remember every panel. The hero was ineffectual and wouldn’t shut up, and the bad guy mostly paid the hero no mind anyway, and everyone learned a valuable lesson in the end, though no one could agree what it was. It was my kind of story. Thank you for writing it, Stan Lee.
He didn’t. Chris Claremont wrote it, Bob Hall did the pencils, and Marie Severin inked.
Excelsior!
You’re an asshole.
Recent Comments