Today the world is full of tributes to Stan ‘The Man’ Lee and you can read all over the net about his life and works. There are also very many glowing tributes from those who knew and worked with him. All we can add is a personal perspective. As kids growing up in the 60s, all three of us here were primarily DC fans, but as the Marvel Age of Comics took hold, we became captivated with the universe Stan was creating, with the assistance of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and a handful of others. Stan’s heroes were people we could identify with, who had some of the same problems of normal life that we ourselves faced. 

The legacy of Stan’s work will of course live on in comics and in film; virtually all the big names you can think of in Marvel all stemmed from his pen in the 1960s. More than any other single comic creator, Stan is responsible for the success of the comics industry over close on 60 years and is the one household name everybody knows. Comic shops like ours would probably not be around without him. And, fitting that Stan should have a reputation as a nice guy — in an industry where the terms ‘legend’ and ‘icon’ are bandied about two-a-penny, no one is more deserving of those titles than The Man himself. He is a bigger legend than any of those he created, and his memory lives on every time you open a Marvel comic. 

‘Nuff Said, True Believers…