copperbadge:

I kept wondering if I should post this but fuck it, I’ve read enough about him to know Stan would have loved it. 

The story goes that there was a magazine that wanted to do a story about Marvel Comics, and the reporter showed up with a photographer to shoot some images to use in the article. Someone cracked a joke about doing nude photos, and one of the other artists couldn’t even finish jokingly refusing before Stan Lee was taking his pants off. 

He was very saddened that Marvel put the kibosh on the magazine using this photo of him naked with a giant-sized Batman Vs. Hulk comic preserving his dignity. I like to think this is how he’d like to be remembered. Especially the sunglasses. 

Stan Lee was a marketing genius, a showman, a storyteller, he was flashy and he made a lot of really…strange business decisions, he made one VERY strange musical album, and he worked for Marvel Comics in one incarnation or another for over seventy-five years. He held some opinions I wouldn’t agree with, but he did a lot of good, too. 

He never thought of comics as respectable but he did think of them as important and that’s how I think of him: a flashy weirdo, but an important flashy weirdo. 

He chose Stan Lee as an alter ego, like many of his creations. He was saving his name, Stanley Lieber, for the career as a novelist he never quite got around to having, and in the end he said he was proud of Stan Lee. 

May your name be a blessing, Stan.