Greetings Culture Lovers!

Seizing the opportunity for mischief, Stanley...inscribed four fateful words
on the ceiling—“Stan Lee is God.” That was the first known use of his famous pseudonym.

-- Raphael & Spurgeon,
    Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book (2003)

Hard not to admire it
When it comes at you so nakedly,
This craft of trumpeting oneself, of
Horn-tooting, branding, memyselfandaye --

Dig his antic, capering Self, smiling larger than life,
Giving up a bit of his boundless whatever to
Jolt us into faith:

Taskmaster, impresario, front-facer,
Imprimatur for thousands of pencil-and-paper dreams,
He who reined in comets, shaping,
Captioning, grounding so many zero-gee fantasies

(so much skywriting! born of so many
down-to-earth drawing boards,
this in itself a marvel,
month to month and
paycheck to paycheck,
far in fact from his fraternal mythic Bullpen),

and packaging, barnumizing, glossing all,

Over years the public face
Of imagination unleashed, original energy, and all that --

Lo, he doth bestride the four-color earth like a living colossus,
Higher, higher still, perennially young,
Long retired, never-retiring
   (playing extra in his own world),
Years on from doing anything, really, but

Still, as ever, giving us, ourselves,
         back to ourselves, in small packages.

Ringmaster, totem, smiling one,
Rallying the happy few,

we band of readers, initiates, ingrates and fans,

some miffed, maybe, to have been so long entranced,

But all of us, just the same,

All of us pilgrims.

...

Comments

[Andrei]

Ok, dammit, you're forcing my hand to admit it! You're not the only comics scholar who writes poetry: http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=316&Itemid=1