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CW: Suicidal Ideation, Homophobia, Bullying, Slurs
"Nuff said, true believer."
That's how I found out. At first, this out-of-context post from a friend in my Facebook feed made me wonder if there was some heated debate or controversial news about the comics industry or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As I contemplated a witty response about how the post hadn't "said 'Nuff," the dark thought of what he was saying dawned on me. One search later confirmed it: Stan Lee had died.
It took a few minutes. I had somewhere I had to drive at that moment and after I got to my destination, the floodgates started to open. I sat in my car in a parking lot, crying in grief with an intensity I didn't entirely understand at first. Stan Lee was never someone I'd met. I didn't have deep personal memories of him intimately involved with my life. And yet, hadn't he always been intimately involved with my life?
I remember my first coloring books. One was of The Fantastic Four (featuring H.E.R.B.I.E. not the Human Torch) fighting The Pink Fink. The other book, which was easily as tall as I was at the time, presented Captain America fighting the Red Skull in what I would find out later was a variant adaptation of the When Wakes the Sleeper story. After-school and Saturday morning cartoons included the tales of the Hulk, Fantastic Four, The Thing, Iron Man, and of course, Spider-Man. Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends may have been the first time I had heard Stan Lee's voice as he narrated the show. We didn't have anything to record video then but I would set up my cassette tape recorder next to the TV to capture the audio from the broadcast. I would listen to it many times over until the next week's episode, always reinforcing "Smiling Stan's" positive encouragement and guiding morality. It was this cartoon that eventually introduced me to the X-Men by way of Iceman's origin story and I started collecting their comics soon after in 1983. The Uncanny X-men #168 was my first X-men comic featuring the story titled, Professor Xavier Is A Jerk. It was about Kitty Pryde dealing with how Professor X had just demoted her to the New Mutants class, so immediately my next purchase was The New Mutants #2. I hunted for as many of these books as I could affordably get my hands on: back issues, origins, crossovers, posters, news, and more. Sure, I collected DC comics as well... Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes being the two most formative for me. But since 1983, there has never been a month in my life without new X-men comics being in some way a part of it.
At that time in my life I was a loner living in a sub-suburban town, outcast among most of my peers. I didn't have the same interests as the other neighborhood kids, most of which I found boring or unimaginative. I couldn't really bring myself to care about pellet guns, squirrel hunting, country music, or any of the other "cultural highlights" of back woods living no matter how desperately I craved attention, acceptance, or friendship. I was interested in things like comic books, new wave music, and role-playing games that I could never get anyone to play with me. Those interests, along with my then-insurmountable speech impediment and being diagnosed as hyperkinetic, made me the subject of near endless torment and bullying. It was not uncommon for those bullies to call me epithets like "freak, "geek," "weirdo," or others intended even more hatefully ("faggot," "sissy," "queer.") Excelling in school was no benefit either. In fact, I purposely failed one class just to be forced to go to summer session, hoping it would help me get bullied less. It didn't help.
But here were mutants. Different in ways beyond their control, doing what was right for right's sake despite how the rest of the world felt about them. They struggled with their differences and embraced them in ways that empowered them beyond just their superhuman abilities. I recognized something about myself in them. I learned from them. I didn't identify with most of how people saw me or the names they would call me, but there was a point after my introduction to these "Children of the Atom" that I absolutely embraced "weird." It came with its own array of hostile responses, some of it rending me occasionally into states of suicidal ideation, but in the end I didn't care. "Weird" was mine. It was my "mutation." No bully could take it from me. Being "weird" empowered me and gave me hope. The bullying didn't change. My ability to cope had.
The Marvel characters to whom I always seemed to gravitate were those of relatively thin builds in possession of superior agility and acrobatic skill: Spider-Man, Daredevil, and primarily, Nightcrawler. All of them had real world problems that easily paralleled my own. Peter Parker being harassed for his interests was not unlike the bullying I experienced. Matt Murdock's blindness was clearly more severe a disability than my own speech impediment but relatable nonetheless. Nightcrawler was altogether something beyond the norm with his blue fur, pointed ears, barbed tail, long prehensile toes, and powers of teleportation. He was so truly inescapably different from everyone else and yet still able to maintain his jovial optimism and heroic nature. He inspired and fascinated me in many ways.
I aspired to be as nimble and limber as them but had no real means to pursue the goal until attending a very liberal boarding school. After a classmate helped me overcome my speech impediment, I leapt at the opportunity when the school offered new courses to study dance. Finally I had a way to train my body to attain the grace and agility of my heroes, even if I started behind my classmates. With Nightcrawler inspiring me, I pushed myself to be one of the top students in that class. I adopted a dancer's alias, really just a single syllable version of my own name. Using that name I even wrote out a personal "character entry" for myself in the style of the encyclopedic Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
Later, I was accepted into my college's modern dance company before even being fully enrolled, but once again I was the outsider, this time for being the only male-bodied member. (And yes, being a male dancer with this new group came with its own array of homophobic derisiveness.) One day on the way to rehearsals I spotted a flyer on the bulletin board outside the dance studio. "SUPERHERO STUNT SHOW," it read. "Dancers and Gymnasts needed for Haunted House Adventure!" I auditioned, which is a fancy way of saying I showed up interested, and was in the cast! Our ranks included Spider-Man, Hobgoblin, and The Punisher. I was encouraged to take the role of Daredevil. The costume was ridiculous to work in but we made it through one Halloween season of amazingly fun, if poorly-choreographed, stage show mayhem. Afterward I let them know, Daredevil was cool, but my heart was set on Nightcrawler. At first, they didn't think it could be done. It took some work, and we didn't have the most sophisticated costuming supplies, but we achieved my first cosplay of Nightcrawler, a costume I've upgraded many times over the years (last seen just a few years ago in the company of my wife, who I convinced to cosplay as Scarlet Witch!) Our stunt show group did a fundraising walk and an appearance in costume at a New Years Eve event. I'd get together with the team in-between costume building and events to run them through some Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game adventures.
My dance career took a few abrupt turns and became less of my focus. Sometime during the end of the five-season run of the X-Men cartoon series, I was working my first professional job in broadcast radio as a "foil" character on the weekday morning show. We decided that I would get my first tattoo live on air as part of a sponsorship deal with a local parlor. I was pretty nervous about the whole idea, but if I was going to commit to having anything marking my body for life, it could only be one thing: the "X" symbol worn by the X-men. It's small, hides easily on the inside of my ankle and frankly could've been done better (which might have something to do with the fact I passed out while the tattooing was in progress, but that's another story.) Regardless, it had given me an indelible and constant physical representation of my heroes that made me feel I had a place in this world no matter what anyone thought of me.
Eventually my career as a DJ in radio evolved into nightclub work around the same time I took on a new identity: Xero. The name was based in part on a lesser known X-men character, Zero, an android teleporter. I replaced the "Z" with the signature "X" of my favorite band of merry mutants. It was an ironic representation of my self-image, one that recognized a life of often feeling like I was nothing but knowing I was more than the name implied.
Over the years I've had many hardships and heartbreaks and managed to recover from most, ranging from things as common as debt to as personal as physical injury. Along the way, many of the stories from the House of Ideas got me through. As I have been writing this in self-reflection I keep finding myself remembering yet another detail of my life story that is inexorably linked in some way to the universe Stan Lee fostered.
No one needs me to be the one to recount Stan Lee's history or the vast array of industry talents who have been inspired by him. And no one needs to tell me that most of the stories and characters I love best weren't actually written or created by him. But he set it all in motion and he was ever present, the principle guiding force behind a universe of legends that taught the lessons I learned, inspired the hopes that motivated me, demonstrated the values I internalized, broadened my imagination, and made me the person I have been and am still becoming.
Recently, I've been exploring another side of myself, another "mutation" if you will. It's a side I'm not particularly ready to share openly yet even as that sense of "mutant solidarity" emboldens me to pursue it. In that exploration, I found myself taking a risk to cosplay publicly a self-made mutant character inspired in part by one of the first X-men Stan Lee created. A sort of "What If?" character that would be familiar to most X-men fans but also uniquely mine.
How did it go?
Not only did I "survive the experience," I embraced it and had one of the single most memorable nights of my life, filled with dance, music, friends, and uncanny adventure!
[edit] 11/12/19: I've since come out about the "mutation" I was being vague about here - I'm a trans woman. It's also what I was talking about with my followup and retrospective of 2018 found here. Below I've added a picture from that night at EXhuman's November '18 STRVNGERS show.[/edit]
So I think, in the end, I really do understand why I mourn the death of Stan Lee the way I do.
I'll never meet him. I'll never be able to thank him.
But I'll always remember what he's done for me. I'll always be grateful.
For all that makes my story unique, I imagine it's really not that different than that of many others who feel as I do.
With them I share in our common aphorism: Excelsior, True Believers!
But there will never be 'Nuff Said.
"Nuff said, true believer."
That's how I found out. At first, this out-of-context post from a friend in my Facebook feed made me wonder if there was some heated debate or controversial news about the comics industry or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As I contemplated a witty response about how the post hadn't "said 'Nuff," the dark thought of what he was saying dawned on me. One search later confirmed it: Stan Lee had died.
It took a few minutes. I had somewhere I had to drive at that moment and after I got to my destination, the floodgates started to open. I sat in my car in a parking lot, crying in grief with an intensity I didn't entirely understand at first. Stan Lee was never someone I'd met. I didn't have deep personal memories of him intimately involved with my life. And yet, hadn't he always been intimately involved with my life?
I remember my first coloring books. One was of The Fantastic Four (featuring H.E.R.B.I.E. not the Human Torch) fighting The Pink Fink. The other book, which was easily as tall as I was at the time, presented Captain America fighting the Red Skull in what I would find out later was a variant adaptation of the When Wakes the Sleeper story. After-school and Saturday morning cartoons included the tales of the Hulk, Fantastic Four, The Thing, Iron Man, and of course, Spider-Man. Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends may have been the first time I had heard Stan Lee's voice as he narrated the show. We didn't have anything to record video then but I would set up my cassette tape recorder next to the TV to capture the audio from the broadcast. I would listen to it many times over until the next week's episode, always reinforcing "Smiling Stan's" positive encouragement and guiding morality. It was this cartoon that eventually introduced me to the X-Men by way of Iceman's origin story and I started collecting their comics soon after in 1983. The Uncanny X-men #168 was my first X-men comic featuring the story titled, Professor Xavier Is A Jerk. It was about Kitty Pryde dealing with how Professor X had just demoted her to the New Mutants class, so immediately my next purchase was The New Mutants #2. I hunted for as many of these books as I could affordably get my hands on: back issues, origins, crossovers, posters, news, and more. Sure, I collected DC comics as well... Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes being the two most formative for me. But since 1983, there has never been a month in my life without new X-men comics being in some way a part of it.
At that time in my life I was a loner living in a sub-suburban town, outcast among most of my peers. I didn't have the same interests as the other neighborhood kids, most of which I found boring or unimaginative. I couldn't really bring myself to care about pellet guns, squirrel hunting, country music, or any of the other "cultural highlights" of back woods living no matter how desperately I craved attention, acceptance, or friendship. I was interested in things like comic books, new wave music, and role-playing games that I could never get anyone to play with me. Those interests, along with my then-insurmountable speech impediment and being diagnosed as hyperkinetic, made me the subject of near endless torment and bullying. It was not uncommon for those bullies to call me epithets like "freak, "geek," "weirdo," or others intended even more hatefully ("faggot," "sissy," "queer.") Excelling in school was no benefit either. In fact, I purposely failed one class just to be forced to go to summer session, hoping it would help me get bullied less. It didn't help.
But here were mutants. Different in ways beyond their control, doing what was right for right's sake despite how the rest of the world felt about them. They struggled with their differences and embraced them in ways that empowered them beyond just their superhuman abilities. I recognized something about myself in them. I learned from them. I didn't identify with most of how people saw me or the names they would call me, but there was a point after my introduction to these "Children of the Atom" that I absolutely embraced "weird." It came with its own array of hostile responses, some of it rending me occasionally into states of suicidal ideation, but in the end I didn't care. "Weird" was mine. It was my "mutation." No bully could take it from me. Being "weird" empowered me and gave me hope. The bullying didn't change. My ability to cope had.
The Marvel characters to whom I always seemed to gravitate were those of relatively thin builds in possession of superior agility and acrobatic skill: Spider-Man, Daredevil, and primarily, Nightcrawler. All of them had real world problems that easily paralleled my own. Peter Parker being harassed for his interests was not unlike the bullying I experienced. Matt Murdock's blindness was clearly more severe a disability than my own speech impediment but relatable nonetheless. Nightcrawler was altogether something beyond the norm with his blue fur, pointed ears, barbed tail, long prehensile toes, and powers of teleportation. He was so truly inescapably different from everyone else and yet still able to maintain his jovial optimism and heroic nature. He inspired and fascinated me in many ways.
I aspired to be as nimble and limber as them but had no real means to pursue the goal until attending a very liberal boarding school. After a classmate helped me overcome my speech impediment, I leapt at the opportunity when the school offered new courses to study dance. Finally I had a way to train my body to attain the grace and agility of my heroes, even if I started behind my classmates. With Nightcrawler inspiring me, I pushed myself to be one of the top students in that class. I adopted a dancer's alias, really just a single syllable version of my own name. Using that name I even wrote out a personal "character entry" for myself in the style of the encyclopedic Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
Later, I was accepted into my college's modern dance company before even being fully enrolled, but once again I was the outsider, this time for being the only male-bodied member. (And yes, being a male dancer with this new group came with its own array of homophobic derisiveness.) One day on the way to rehearsals I spotted a flyer on the bulletin board outside the dance studio. "SUPERHERO STUNT SHOW," it read. "Dancers and Gymnasts needed for Haunted House Adventure!" I auditioned, which is a fancy way of saying I showed up interested, and was in the cast! Our ranks included Spider-Man, Hobgoblin, and The Punisher. I was encouraged to take the role of Daredevil. The costume was ridiculous to work in but we made it through one Halloween season of amazingly fun, if poorly-choreographed, stage show mayhem. Afterward I let them know, Daredevil was cool, but my heart was set on Nightcrawler. At first, they didn't think it could be done. It took some work, and we didn't have the most sophisticated costuming supplies, but we achieved my first cosplay of Nightcrawler, a costume I've upgraded many times over the years (last seen just a few years ago in the company of my wife, who I convinced to cosplay as Scarlet Witch!) Our stunt show group did a fundraising walk and an appearance in costume at a New Years Eve event. I'd get together with the team in-between costume building and events to run them through some Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game adventures.
My dance career took a few abrupt turns and became less of my focus. Sometime during the end of the five-season run of the X-Men cartoon series, I was working my first professional job in broadcast radio as a "foil" character on the weekday morning show. We decided that I would get my first tattoo live on air as part of a sponsorship deal with a local parlor. I was pretty nervous about the whole idea, but if I was going to commit to having anything marking my body for life, it could only be one thing: the "X" symbol worn by the X-men. It's small, hides easily on the inside of my ankle and frankly could've been done better (which might have something to do with the fact I passed out while the tattooing was in progress, but that's another story.) Regardless, it had given me an indelible and constant physical representation of my heroes that made me feel I had a place in this world no matter what anyone thought of me.
Eventually my career as a DJ in radio evolved into nightclub work around the same time I took on a new identity: Xero. The name was based in part on a lesser known X-men character, Zero, an android teleporter. I replaced the "Z" with the signature "X" of my favorite band of merry mutants. It was an ironic representation of my self-image, one that recognized a life of often feeling like I was nothing but knowing I was more than the name implied.
Over the years I've had many hardships and heartbreaks and managed to recover from most, ranging from things as common as debt to as personal as physical injury. Along the way, many of the stories from the House of Ideas got me through. As I have been writing this in self-reflection I keep finding myself remembering yet another detail of my life story that is inexorably linked in some way to the universe Stan Lee fostered.
No one needs me to be the one to recount Stan Lee's history or the vast array of industry talents who have been inspired by him. And no one needs to tell me that most of the stories and characters I love best weren't actually written or created by him. But he set it all in motion and he was ever present, the principle guiding force behind a universe of legends that taught the lessons I learned, inspired the hopes that motivated me, demonstrated the values I internalized, broadened my imagination, and made me the person I have been and am still becoming.
Recently, I've been exploring another side of myself, another "mutation" if you will. It's a side I'm not particularly ready to share openly yet even as that sense of "mutant solidarity" emboldens me to pursue it. In that exploration, I found myself taking a risk to cosplay publicly a self-made mutant character inspired in part by one of the first X-men Stan Lee created. A sort of "What If?" character that would be familiar to most X-men fans but also uniquely mine.
How did it go?
Not only did I "survive the experience," I embraced it and had one of the single most memorable nights of my life, filled with dance, music, friends, and uncanny adventure!
[edit] 11/12/19: I've since come out about the "mutation" I was being vague about here - I'm a trans woman. It's also what I was talking about with my followup and retrospective of 2018 found here. Below I've added a picture from that night at EXhuman's November '18 STRVNGERS show.[/edit]
So I think, in the end, I really do understand why I mourn the death of Stan Lee the way I do.
I'll never meet him. I'll never be able to thank him.
But I'll always remember what he's done for me. I'll always be grateful.
For all that makes my story unique, I imagine it's really not that different than that of many others who feel as I do.
With them I share in our common aphorism: Excelsior, True Believers!
But there will never be 'Nuff Said.
