Long post alert...
Generally celebrity deaths don't impact me much, even those I admire. Not this time. I was tweeting through tears about Stan Lee. I was a high school nerd who did well at math, played Dungeons & Dragons, and was awkward with girls. And through that time, it was high school nerd Peter Parker that I connected with. What I loved so much about Peter is that while he spent his nights as the Amazing Spider-Man, it was Peter who interested me. The kid who struggled to meet deadlines for his part-time job. The awkward young man who constantly got in over his head with girls out of his league. The loyal nephew who never wanted to let his Aunt May down.
Peter made mistakes, he faced tough decisions, but through it all he always tried to make the right choice. Tried to live up to Uncle Ben's iconic "With great power comes great responsibility". No matter what I've done in my life, inside I'm still that high school nerd, just trying to do the right thing. Trying to be the good guy. Often coming up short, but that just means an opportunity to be better. When we're at our worst is when we get the opportunity to reflect on what we should be at our best.
It wasn't just Peter. It was reading T'Challa, the Black Panther, taking on The Supremacists that helped me better understand racism in a community where I can count the number of black students I attended school with through eighth grade on zero fingers and the number of minorities on one hand. It was the X-Men, hated by society but still trying to save it, who showed me that it's important to try not to demonize people you disagree with, no matter how difficult that may be. It was Matt Murdock, who turned a disability into a strength but was at his best not when he was using his super-powers but rather his skills of debate in the courtroom.
I understand the troubled history associated with Stan. The creative differences that drove him and Jack Kirby apart, the characters he largely appropriated from other creators, and the number of other artists that helped sculpt stories from the clay he gave them, but at the end of the day, he brought a world of creativity to those of us that needed to see the heroes in nerds like Peter Parker so we could believe in the heroes within ourselves. I'm not sure I'd have chosen my profession if not for a lifetime of reading comic books. If not for seeing Peter and realizing that what made him a hero was not his powers, but the humanity with which he wielded them.
I've had some moments in my life where I've been able to make a positive difference in someone else's, and part of the inspiration for those moments came from that high school nerd that I still am having spent time reading about that other high school nerd that tried to do the same. I'm grateful for Stan Lee for the man I am today. He certainly wasn't the only inspiration in my life, but he was a big one. He's a big part of why I care about justice, equality, and doing good.
It's been posted other places today, but I'll leave it with this Stan's Soapbox from 1968. It's just as relevant today as it was then:
