Stan Lee Awarded Nation's Highest Artistic Honor

Marvel Comics genius Stan Lee was honored at the White House as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts award. There were nine recipients in all, each of whom had the award bestowed on him or her by President Bush."I wonder what took so long," said Stan the Man in an interview conducted last Sunday. "Say 'He said it with a laugh' or I'll shoot you." This isn't just some penny ante certificate they give you late in life; they're the highest arts awards presented by the U.S. government, so to get one, whether you wrote Spider-Man or if you're legendary actress Olivia DeHaviland, is quite an important achievement. "I feel very honored, very surprised," Lee said. "When I first got the phone call, I thought it was a gag. I'd heard of it but didn't know much about it. I'd heard of the NEA. But it was just a name." At 85, Lee continues to work. The current flock of Marvel comic book adaptations would be all but lost without his creations and contributions, and it was announced last week that Stan will work with Showtime to develop an hour-long series based on the novel Hero, which features a gay superhero.

Comments

[Saje Williams]

Congratulations to Stan Lee! He deserves this honor as much as anyone ever has, if only for how much he's influenced the work of authors such as myself. I can't imagine how much less bright the world would have been without Stan Lee and Marvel's humanizing of the superhero, bringing them down to where the average person could identify with them and understand that for all their power, they were just ordinary folks with ordinary problems as well as potentially world-shattering secrets and implacable enemies.

I'm proud to count him as one of my influences, along with more pedestrian SF and Fantasy authors.

Long live the Mighty Marvel and Stan the Man.

'Nuff said.