All Hail Stan Lee, The Man Whose Work Gave Life To The Decade Of The Superheroes

As the 2010s come to an end, so will have the decade of the superheroes.

Sure, there were superheroes movies in the last decade and the decades before that, but it was only in the 2010s, these characters truly became household names, with the right mixture of technology and a society that allowed the telling of complex stories.

But none of this would have been possible without the man widely considered to be the Godfather of superhero comics.

Sure, many others like Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and later Frank Miller made Marvel Comics what it has become today, but it was Stan Lee who became the face everyone knew and rightfully loved.

It is quite poetic that in the last decade of his life, he witnessed his greatest creations come to life.

But also sad that the man who has been in every Marvel movie ever made passed just months before the biggest spectacle in the history of cinema took place.

Afterall, Endgame was his legacy, If not all, then most of it.

Everyone you saw on screen in those 3 hours, had their inception in one of those pages that he helped put colour on.

He helped establish an entire shared universe of heroes and villains and mutants and aliens.

Sure, it had been done before in comics, but never with such care and reverence. Lee designed these stories in such a way that the actions of one character may spill over to another story.

He also made sure that these characters lived in the universe we did, share the scent of the cities we lived in.

This concept of a shared universe that Lee created was the foundation for billion-dollar movie franchises like the MCU and the X-Men.

Stan Lee helped create these heroes, these ordinary men and women doing extraordinary things and extraordinary beings struggling with ordinary problems.

My point being, us nerds have had a great decade. Everything we had imagined while reading those comics as kids, has come true. We don’t have to imagine it anymore, it’s right there on our screens. The stories, we grew up with, aren’t just our stories anymore, we share them with billions.