This past weekend was Halloween, and in worship of such a high holy day I fashioned myself a Nick Fury costume. In addition to puffing on stogies and locating my good eye patch, I started reading up on the exploits of Marvel’s most decorated military mogul. Just like everything good in Marvel Comics, Nick Fury saw his genesis in the savage scripts of that incorrigible bobcat of a writer, Stan Lee. First in the pages of 1963 comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, Fury was introduced as a fearsome world war two hero, he soon moved on to the field of superheroicespionage first in Fantastic 4 #41 in 1963, then in Strange Tales #135, 1965, he took on the role of director of the Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-enforcement Division. And that’s where I jumped in head first. Drawn as always by the triumphant Jack Kirby, Nick Fury was set as the first story in the double feature comic against Doctor Strange, also written by Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko. This is perhaps everything I could ever ask for in a single comic book. Pure pulp adventure, bizarre and aggressive.

Sgt. Nick Fury is an unmistakable power player. He inhabits the upper echelon of dangerous individuals who really run shit in the Marvel Universe. Despite the “espionage” in his job description S.H.I.E.L.D.’s cyclopean director could never be described as subtle or anything resembling inconspicuous. He acts with a fearless bearing that makes Captain Kirk look downright soft. The government gives him something called the Infinity Formula which keeps him young and pretty despite the fact that he’s been kicking ass for around a century. So impressive is this character’s presence that robot clones, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Life Model Decoys, are enough to communicate his militaristic authority. This is a technique only pulled off by Fury, Doctor Doom, and Superman. Although robot Supermen don’t tend to do well in the long run.

As anyone who watched Who Wants To be A Superhero can valiantly attest, Stan Lee is to be considered nothing less than a gruff voiced madman. However such insanity is not without grim purpose. It is his unbridled sensationalism that defined so much of what makes comic books great. More than any one character or storyline, Stan Lee can be credited with constructing the remarkable infrastructure of the marvel universe. There is a clear community in the ranks of the marvel superheroes, and it works so well because it’s interwoven with the community of human society. In order to be heroes, the DC characters remove themselves from humanity to some degree, even to the point of basing the Justice League on a monolithic space station orbiting earth. They’re all fortresses of solitude and subterranean caves, islands of inexplicable warrior women and green space police. The Green Lantern Corps are the closest thing to a coherent organization they have, and they aren’t so much organized as they are wearing the same outfits and facing in the same direction. Cause that’s what passes for group dynamics in DC. Marvel teams are dynamic because they are groups of volatile individuals eternally facing different directions and forced to operate together. To be a superhero is to be extraordinary. Superhuman. Even the C and D listers have it. That holiness of the Super. To say that they are transcendent of humanity, yet still an expression of it. And then there are the sidekicks. The second generation of the superhuman. That forms teams of their own, these golden children of tomorrow. And yet they are confined to today. In stagnant time lines, sidekicks and new students of the superhero are trapped behind immortal mentors who can never be surpassed. Yet that line of thought leads inevitably to the recent death and succession of Batman. And those wounds are yet fresh.

What it comes down to is this. What DC is good at is the Super. What Marvel is good at is the Human. And it was Stan Lee that introduced and developed the human element. Comic shops on 616 street corners sell the adventures of Superman. All their heroes are struggling to overcome their humanity and be those superheroes. It is this struggle to be greater then ourselves that so resonates in their exploits that draws readers, that makes the fiction real.

From what volcanic thoughts could such ideas take shape but that of Mr. Stan Lee? I imagine Stan Lee’s writing process to be a rough, feral thing. It begins when Lee exits his place of business and merchandising, all gruff charisma and knowing winks, and jumps in to a waiting cab which wordlessly peels out down the Manhattan streets. Soon his seething belly will no longer permit stillness, and he clambers gamely on to the roof. When his transport crosses a bridge, he hurls himself over the edge, Gwen Stacy like, and plunges in to the cold polluted waters below. Once submerged, he tears the clothing from his body like a man in the throes of passionate lovemaking, and utilizing his walrus like physique, begins to swim.

He emerges, dripping and blind, before a circle of drunken tramps huddling around a garbage fire. He Drinks with them, oh how he drinks, and listens to their tales of woe and wrongdoing until he can conceive of a canonical time line in which they all are true; then entices the most tragic soul in this destitute rapport away from the circle with promises of candy and puppies and firecrackers and all the things that lost boys of any age are suckers for. The lonely vagrant is never seen by mortal eyes again, but the estranged family and friends that the bum had long forgot he had receive in the mail every month a generous check from Marvel Comics and never ask why.

Stan “The Man” Lee roams New York in a red haze, “EXCELSIOR!” bursting from his ragged purple lips in a howl that makes lovers turn from each other in bed and children grip their Spider-man plushies all the tighter. Mustache bristling from a curled upper lip in a warning to all other predators that no easy sustenance is to be found in this writhing spitting body, Stan marks his territory by peeling sheets of primitive paper from the standing trees, and inscribing his stories upon them in a viscous ink which is secreted in his tear ducts. The moon pauses above this horrid creature of pulp literature, until his now desperate cries reach escape velocity and startle it back in to it’s familiar lunar orbit. Sometimes, if the stars aren’t looking, it whispers a comforting “fly on true believer” back to him.

Wrapping his battered frame in a cloak of trash, Mr. Lee scales the walls of an alley to watch teenagers write in their diaries; and by baleful stare of his blackened eyes lets them know that they are special. Teeth gnash in the frothing mouth of this baleful visage, but there is no AtticusFinch readily on hand to put down the rabid dog which now flees the advancing rays of an implacably rising sun to disappear in to the rooftop entrance of his home.

The Journey is over, the city is safe. And now it falls to the capable hands of the artist to interpret the rough hewn, foam flecked scripts that Stan delivers unto them. May god have mercy on us all.