Of Stan Lee

[smokingboot]

In the small town where I grew up, there was one place you could buy comics, and almost nowhere you could find decent super heroines. Wonder Woman was gorgeous but a bit naff, with her invisible plane and her creator's obsession with bondage, Supergirl was inevitably in love with the villain, Black Canary had big flappy boots and basically hung around, and Batgirl had a great costume and no plotlines. I lamented this early state of deprivation recently to friends who bought me a Batgirl pez dispenser to make up for it.

Marvel comics wasn't that much better at first; Sue Storm and Jean Grey were reasonable beautiful young women who were adored as part of a group, but Marvel had few female headliners. What they did have was flawed heroes, heroes for whom everything wasn't easy. Peter Parker was a geeky kid who had these powers, but was also constantly in trouble because of them. Johnny Storm and Ben Grim spent their days fighting each other when they weren't beating up the bad guys. Heroes argued and made mistakes. Though the front covers became a mass sprawl of conversation bubbles, at least they felt alive. Female characters developed beyond token beauty and powers; Electra was what Natasha Romanov should have been, Storm really was primal goddess-like, Jean Grey became the focus of one of Marvel's most successful plotlines ever. Dream worlds grew long after I found other things to interest me. But for a while those creations were friends to a kid trapped in a world far more dull.

So for a lot of fun, thank you Stan Lee. Hope you're having a brand new adventure x