Excelsior! Stan Lee Turns 90

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It has been an eventful week for Marvel Comics. First, they killed Peter Parker. Then, they made Doctor Octopus take over as Spider-Man.

And today, Marvel’s Chairman Emeritus, Stan Lee, has turned 90 years old.

Now, if I were 90 years old, I would either be spending my days farting into my La-Z-Boy while simultaneously watching The Price Is Right and screeching at that bitch of a hospice nurse to ladle some Jack Daniels into my IV, or else busily being dead having found a situation I couldn’t shoot my way out of. But Stan is still going strong; he was recently here in Massachusetts for the Supermegafest, and I haven’t been to a San Diego Comic-Con where the guy wasn’t running around like he’d just done his last bump of Merry Marvel Marching Powder and was hunting down his next score.

And the dude is still going strong… at least strong enough to give Dan Slott shit over his most recent Spider-Man stories:

@danslott what a gift, some guys give a nice cigar, a watch, but no not you, I get a dead #PeterParker Thanks for the bday wishes my friend!

— stan lee (@TheRealStanLee) December 27, 2012

@danslott at lest you’ll have a good price of writing in your house. Ha. Keep up the amazingly spectacular work you always do!

— stan lee (@TheRealStanLee) December 27, 2012

And while there have been a lot of stories over the years about how Stan maybe grabbed more credit for the creations of Marvel’s heyday – read Sean Howe’s excellent book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story if you want as many of the gory allegations that you can stomach – there’s simply no doubt that the man is the most well-known ambassador for comics in the Western World… provided he’s with the right people.

I’ve never met Stan, but I came close once, and well… it wasn’t pretty. Here’s what I wrote a couple of hours after the encounter at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con:

Dear Stan:

Hi. My name’s Rob, and we almost met on 6th Avenue here in San Diego, outside that trendy, hotspot eatery that you were leaving and I was just getting ready to, well, pass on my way to a shitty Irish bar to drink my dinner. I was the guy with the “Beer” t-shirt and the ponytail who looked you in the eye, got visibly excited and pulled my camera out, remember?

I just wanted to let you know that, if your unfuckable cunt of a personal assistant would let you stand there for twenty fucking seconds with the only person in a hundred yards who recognized you and wanted a single fucking picture, people might stop calling you a senile Kirby-boning opportunist on the Intertrons.

Your pal,

Rob

P.S.: The whole Stan Lee thing isn’t a humorous story… I did run into him on my way to dinner tonight, and his assistant did take one look at me and haul the poor old bastard out to his car. The awful hosebag took one whiff of my breath and apparently decided I was a security risk. So at least when Stan gets tired of picturing her while trying to futilely beat off and eventually fires her, she’ll have a bright future at the TSA.

Clearly, I was not pleased. But Stan wasn’t the guy dragging himself into a limo to go to whatever commitment he had to make that day, and to be fair, his assistant wasn’t the person who poured Sam Adams down my throat before I wrote that five and a half years ago.

Whether you love the guy or despise him, or whether you think he’s a genius or that he’s taken more credit than he’s due, there’s no denying that without Stan Lee, modern comics simply aren’t what they are today… and frankly, they might not exist at all. So let’s raise a glass to Stan The Man, give him a hearty “Excelsior!”, and agree that, regardless of who created Spider-Man and who got the credit and who should have made what money, today Stan Lee is giving us the excuse we need to start drinking at lunch.