Yesterday, I completed an on-line Java programming course and went to post an image of the certificate on social media. My message was a line that Iron Man uses in the "Marvel Battle Lines" mobile collectible card game. It wasn't until after I had posted the quote that I found out about the death of Stan Lee.
I have to say I was never a comic book geek, that required money I did not have as a child. So my exposure to the Marvel Universe came through television. In the early 1980's it was Spiderman and His Amazing Friends and the Incredible Hulk. In the early 1990s Spiderman and the X-Men were Saturday morning staples, even in college.
As I grew older and became more and more "woke", I realized that the Marvel Universe was also social commentary. They had heroes who were of color; Storm of the X-Men, Black Panther, and Falcon. Northstar and Iceman both came out as homosexual. The universe is pushing boundaries today; one version of Spiderman is Latino, Ms Marvel is Middle-Eastern, and Ironheart is female and African-American.
One of the more interesting social commentaries Marvel may be the X-Men. That universe may have been intended to be a commentary on the civil rights movement going on while it was being created. Charles Xavier and his X-Men representing the view of Martin Luther King, etc; that human and mutants can live side-by-side. Magneto and his allies, on the other hand, adopted the approach of Huey Newton or Malcolm X, advocating for separation.
Stan Lee, much like Gene Roddenberry, may not have just had an imagination. He may have had a vision.
