Adam Rogers, Wired; Stan Lee Unleashed the Heroic Power of the Outcast
"From the fantasy-pulp midden, Lee had excavated a gem of a truth: These
tales about men and women in garish tights hitting each other were also
about more. Superheroes had incredible abilities, yes, but they were
also often the victims of prejudice themselves, or trapped in moral webs
stronger than anything Spider-Man ever thwipped. So the comics
appealed to people who felt the same, even before Lee and the other
Marvel creators published the first African American heroes, the first
popular Asian American heroes, and strong, leading-character women in
numbers large enough to populate a dozen summer crossovers...
His death encouraged people to tell stories of Lee’s kindness and
enthusiasm. But for every story that circulated after Lee’s death about
how wonderful and caring he was, comics professionals tell other tales
in which Lee is … not.
Every bit as complicated as the characters
he helped bring into the world, Lee taught generations of nerds the
concepts of responsibility, morality, and love. He waged a sometimes
ham-fisted battle against prejudice, misunderstanding, and evil. This is
what makes some of nerd-dom’s recent tack toward intolerance so
painful; otherishness is engineered into comics’ radioactive, mutated
DNA. Even if Lee wasn’t a super human, he was superhuman, empowering
colleagues to leap creative obstacles and to give readers a sense of
their own secret strengths."
Issues and developments related to ethics, information, and technologies, examined in the ethics and intellectual property graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" will be published in Summer 2025. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Showing posts with label readers outcasts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label readers outcasts. Show all posts
Friday, December 21, 2018
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