Godspeed, Stan Lee.
I realize it's not very cool to mitigate the obvious facts -- Lee took a lot of credit (and money) for the hard work of visual craftsmen like Jack Kirby. (I highly recommend this Kirby biography / coffee table book). But if Lee was rapacious, he was also a brilliant promoter who managed to bring some incredibly weird-ass shit into the pop culture imagination. (Let's not forget, superhero and horror comics used to be much less popular than Westerns and Romance ones -- Lee pretty much blew that dynamic out of the water.)
The issues of authorship in comics, the tension between writer and artist, remain fascinating, especially now that they've become staples of mainstream Hollywood film.
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