Death is one of those eternally mysterious aspects of life that I find fascinating. They say you die twice, once when you give up your mortal coil, and the last time a human remembers you.  With the rise of the Internet, the latter has started to lose it's meaning. Few "celebrity" deaths have made me feel emotional, in my life there have been three that stopped me in my tracks and forced me to look at the world differently. The first was video games journalist Ryan Davis, who lives on in hours of online video and podcasts. The second was another video games journalist John Bain (better known as "Totalbiscuit"), again who lives on in all the video content he created. The third was comic book legend Stan Lee. Now, at 95, it's fair to say that he had good innings but the level of impact he's had on society is immeasurable. The man made Gods. He created an entire new lexicon of deities for us mere mortals to tell stories about, to use as our emotional metaphors, to express aspects of our personality that we struggle to engage with. And that's what I want to talk about today. Let's celebrate a man that wrote about people saving the world, and ironically, may have saved us from ourselves. # What makes a God? If we think about mythology, the "Gods" in each pantheon are cyphers for traits that exist in us. Each pantheon has a god assigned to dealing with factors of life that the people of their time experienced. Take "War" for example. Something that has, sadly, been present throughout history. For the Greeks and Romans we've got Aries/Mars, for the Egyptians we've got Anhur, for the Norse we've got a whole bunch of them. This pattern repeats itself for other universal ideas; Love, fertility, farming, fun, beauty, hell the Roman's loved drinking so much they invented a god for that too! (Bachuss for those of you looking for a new deity to pray to) When we read the old tales of the gods, they are used as "props" to explore aspects of human life and often to teach us a parable. Take the story of King Midas as an example. Given the "gift" of turning everything he touches into gold, he soon learns that greed is his downfall. So King Midas has a special power that turns out to be both a blessing and a curse, sound familiar? How about the Bhagavad Gita, a tale told on the battlefield in which our heroes have to discover an ideal morality on life and ethics? Or how about the countless tales in which our hero has to overcome numerous tests to prove greatness to themselves (Thor, Hercules, or the Celtic hero Cuchulainn)? All have been revisited in comic books. The references to the old mythology also maintain their lore in the comic books that Stan Lee and other modern day writers include in their works. King Midas's tale could easily be the B-plot of an X-men book. The Bhagavad Gita was basically a religious version of Marvel's huge crossover event, Civil War.   When it comes down to it, all the old Gods were designed to do is explore facets of human life that we struggle with…so let's talk about our new gods. # The Marvel Way As crazy as it seems now, Stan Lee's Spider-Man was initially rejected by his publisher. Stan wanted to write about a hero that had spider powers ("Everyone hates spiders" his publisher told him) that was a teenager ("Who wants to read about a teenager?") that had to deal with his personal issues ("That's not what heroes are for"). Stan had to wait to tell this story. Written in the back pages in the final issue of a book (Amazing Fantasy #15) he debuted Spider-Man...and unlike every other final issue of a comic book, this was a sell-out. This spawned a new trend in comic books. Heroes whose villains were just as much personal issues as intergalactic monsters wielding the power of the cosmos. Let's get nerdy and look at Amazing Spider-Man Annual #01, in which the Sinister Six are first revealed. A super team of Spidey villains hell-bent on destroying our friendly neighbourhood web-slinger! To add insult to injury Spider-Man loses his powers, not due to some nefarious device built by Dr. Octopus, nor an illusion created by Mysterio, but due to his deep seated guilt of letting his dear Uncle Ben die. The X-Men, the Hulk, or Dr Strange, all characters co-created by Stan Lee, featured storylines in which our "Heroes" faced crippling personal issues.  Hell! One the major recurring themes of, at the time, Marvel's biggest franchise The Fantastic Four was the divide between Susan Storm (The Invisible Woman) and Reed Richards (Mr Fantastic, he stretches) a couple that struggled with balancing time together and work. Stan Lee ushered in an age of heroes whose major villains were the ones we were dealing with. Suddenly, instead of solving the problem by punching something really, really hard, our heroes had to take some time to look inward and deal with their issues. And so ushered in a new age of gods. Instead of gods of war, gods of fertility, and gods of harvest, Stan gave us gods of guilt, gods of insecurity, gods of domestic troubles. These new gods (NERD ALERT: I'm not talking about the actual "New Gods" Jack Kirby's psychedelic DC creations) explored modern facets of life that we struggle with.  As I write this I feel myself getting depressed at the modern day woes that we're struggling with. These flawed heroes are our new gods?! # The Post-Modern Age As depressing as having our deified-reflections struggle with emotional issues seems, in many ways it’s a positive. You see, the old gods were used as a way of explaining or describing elements of life that felt mystical. For example, what do you think would make more sense to someone living 2,000 years ago; - The Sun is dragged along by a God and his chariot and that’s why it moves across the sky - The “Sun” is an unimaginable distance away and despite that we can still see it and feel the heat from it (which to be honest I still find pretty unbelievable) The point is that things we used to need gods for, we have replaced with science (fertility, agriculture, seasons). We don’t need to pray to the gods to grant us a good harvest as much as we need to ensure that the soil has enough nutrients and we’ve protected the crops from pests (maybe a bad example as I know very little about farming). We simply can’t relate to many of the old symbols in the way we used to, either what they represented aren’t important any more or new symbols have replaced them. However what still holds mystery for us? What still feels mystical? What feels out of our control and at the whims of randomness? These are the new arenas for Stan Lee’s Gods. The X-men started as an exploration of racism and has also evolved to work as a proxy for the unknowable process of puberty. The Fantastic Four work the mystery of how to have a satisfying romantic relationship and work you can dedicate yourself to. The Hulk plumbs the depths of what it’s like to suddenly fly into a bout of uncontrollable rage. Few gods represent one thing, they’re subjective cyphers. Most of us have a favourite superhero. If we ask ourselves “why” they are our favourite it’s because they are a symbol of a higher ideal that we respect in ourselves or wish to emulate. Take modern incarnation of The Avengers (again, nerds, I’m referring to the MCU rather than the comic books) as an example:  - Captain America: The God of determination, changing your fate through sheer force of will, starting weak and finishing strong - The Hulk: The God of man’s hubris, controlling your inner demons, channelling the extremity of emotions into something positive - Iron Man: The God of technology, man’s ingenuity, overcoming obstacles with brains over brawn What is a t-shirt bearing a symbol of our favourite hero other than an endorsement of that hero’s world view, philosophy, and personality? And how is that any different from an ancient Japanese warrior carving symbols of their chosen Gods to protect them in battle? Mankind has always told stories to express themselves, to explore morality, and understand the world around them. Comic books are no different. Stan Lee made Gods, and now the entire world worships at their alter. June [[2020]]