"It wasn’t until later in life, when I started studying and teaching about comics instead of just reading them, that I learned that none of this was a fluke. Stan Lee was an activist artist, a Jewish guy born to Romanian immigrants parents in New York who hated bigotry. He was explicit about it in both his Stan’s Soapbox editorials that ran across all Marvel Comics. He called bigots 'Low IQ Yo-Yos,' he said that anybody who generalized about blacks, women, Italians or whoever hadn’t truly evolved as a person.
He was doing this in comic pages when mainstream newspaper editorials were still deciding if black folks should be able to live where they wanted. When Marvel Comics were afraid that the Black Panther character would be associated with the Black Panther political movement, Stan Lee pushed for T’Challa to keep his name (at one point they wanted to call him Coal Tiger). All of this at a time when even having a black person in a comic was still considered controversial. Just last October, Lee posted a spontaneous video on the Marvel’s YouTube page stating the foundation of Marvel Comics was to fight for equality and battle against bigotry and injustice."As mentioned, without Stan Lee's talent at self-promotion comic books would remain the marginal bits of niche culture they once were, not today's drivers of Hollywood.
It's no surprise that Lee and Kirby's creations were the original Social Justice Warriors which is to say, heroes.
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