New Pittsburgh Courier: Stan Lee was a seminal part of Miya Crummell’s childhood. As a young, Black girl and self-professed pop culture geek, she saw Lee was ahead of his time.
“At the time, he wrote ‘Black Panther’ when segregation was still heavy,” said the 27-year-old New Yorker who is a graphic designer and independent comic book artist. “It was kind of unheard of to have a Black lead character, let alone a title character and not just a secondary sidekick kind of thing.”
3 comments:
Stan Lee, as a person has gotten things wrong, but has also gotten a lot of things right. His creation of Black Panther in the early 60's was incredibly significant. The comics industry often struggles to break free of their classic superhero molds (white, buff), but considering that Marvel is one of the two biggest mainstream comic creators in the world, I have to give it a lot of credit (with Lee pretty far at the helm) for what it has decided to do with its platform over the years. In more recent years it has also introduced more diverse characters such as Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), Silk (Cindy Moon) and Moon Girl (Lunella Lafayette). While Stan Lee himself didn't create these characters, his leadership of the company and push to increase diversity from an earlier stage, I believe, helped increase the need and execution of these characters. It is true that sometimes the inclusion of a POC, leads to heavy stereotypes, and the company needs to address that. However, sometimes you need to make a mistake to move past it. I'm not trying to say that this tokenization and stereotyping is in anyway okay, but I do believe as such a huge company it's important that Marvel makes public mistakes and learns from its diverse audience, and then adapts until they can do it right.
Black Panther is my FAVOIRTE movie and superhero of all time and I thank Stan Lee every day for creating such an icon. When I first watched the new movie Black Panther, I was shaken by how amazingly progressive it was compared to other Marvel movies, and then I realized the characters were created back in the 60s and I was in shock. Lee did have problematic moments, but he was sO far ahead of his time when it came to the Black Panther and Luke Cage that it makes me even sadder to think about his passing. I am so thankful for the amazing stories he brought into this universe because representation is so important. BY making characters like T’Chall and Shuri, he was able to teach young children of color that not only can they be the main superheroes, but that they also are the leaders of a super-secret much more developed part of the world, the even the Americans can’t handle. I think that’s AMAZING.
I didn’t get involved with the superhero world up until marvel’s comeback in the past 10 years. I’m not a huge super hero fan right now, I enjoy the movies and love discussing them with my friends, but I don’t necessarily follow their comic stories. I love to see how Stan Lee brought together tons of different people with his comics and later on with his movies. I loved to read about how he used his tools to help our society move towards a more diverse mindset. But also, From this article I really appreciate how they mentioned that Stan Lee didn’t always get things right. How sometimes he would make characters that could contribute to stereotypes and how he owned up to that. A couple of years ago, when Marvel was gaining its current power, I read about his life story, and how at times he had nothing, he still didn’t give up his art. He ended up being a great influencer and an amazing world maker.
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