The Specialists

Last week, I discussed cherished childhood entertainments that lose their luster in the harsh light of adulthood. I listed a bunch of old cartoons, movies, and music that just didn’t stand the test of time. Now I must add a new entry to that list, though it may be geek heresy to do so: Stan Lee.

Okay, first things first: I will always respect Stan Lee for his role in creating some of the most iconic superheroes ever. Lee helped create The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, X-Men, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, The Hulk, Daredevil, and of course, Spider-Man, to name just a few. He was instrumental in defining the modern comics landscape, and I love him for that, and now I wish he would just stop. In fact, I wish he had retired about twenty years ago.

Stan was a prominent presence in my early comic-reading years. He wrote “Stan’s Soapbox” in the back of Marvel comics and he narrated Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. I’m sure that every geek of my generation is familiar with his signatures, “Greetings, true believers!” and “Excelsior!” He was like a really cool uncle. We loved him, but now Stan’s shtick has grown stale.

Stan hasn’t been active in comics for many years, but that hasn’t stopped him from churning out one superhero property after another. In the late 1990s, he formed Stan Lee Media, which produced a number of cheesy Flash-animated online superhero series before an embezzlement scheme forced it into bankruptcy (Stan was not the embezzler). Among these was The Backstreet Project, which is exactly what the name implies. These web series featured animation that was considered cheap-looking even by the standards of the time, ridiculous plots, cliched characters, and stilted, stiffly-delivered dialogue.

Later, Stan produced Stripperella, a cartoon based on Pamela Anderson about a stripper-turned-superhero. He was also apparently working on a project based on Ringo Starr (Eggman, perhaps?), which never came to fruition. Then there was the reality show, Who Wants to be a Superhero, which was basically Nerd Apprentice, with Stan in the Donald Trump role. Then more web series and direct-to-DVD animated projects, and most recently, “The Guardian Project,” which casts all 30 NHL hockey team mascots as superheroes.

All of these projects share the same dated style, with over-the-top heroes, mustache-twirling villains, and eye-rollingly bad dialogue, often delivered right in the middle of a battle. That was all par for the course in the campy days of the 60s, but now it’s simply embarrassing. It’s not just that I’ve grown up, but that comics as a medium has — for better or worse — moved on. Not that modern comics are all literary masterpieces, but the whole concept of of superheroes has matured since Stan’s heyday, as silly as that sounds.

I don’t mean to denigrate a man with such a large and important body of work. I’m happy to have him make appearances in geek-friendly movies like Mallrats and have cameos in all of the Marvel movies. It’s completely appropriate to honor him as a geek icon. But I just can’t help but think that his heart’s not really in it any more. The character’s he’s created in the last ten years sound like the result of a mad/lib. What’s worse, they seem more like products than characters. They’re works for hire instead of ideas.

Maybe I shouldn’t blame Stan. Maybe he’s just the guy that people come to when they want to capitalize on the recent popularity of superhero movies. If the NHL decides that they want to bring in more kids, or more geeks, and they decide that the best way to do that is to create a bunch of superheroes, naturally they’ll call Stan. And naturally, he’ll accept. Unfortunately, every time he takes on another of these mercenary projects, comics lose a bit more of the little dignity they have left. And Stan loses a little more of his credibility.