American comic book writer, editor, publisher and former President of Marvel Comics Stan Lee died Monday at the age of 95.
Lee gave us over six decades of work like The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man - superheroes we could identify with, characters that allowed us to suspend our disbelief because they reacted to bizarre situations like you or I might.
In a 1998 interview, Lee told me, "Before Marvel started, any superhero might be walking down the street and see a 12-foot-tall monster coming toward him with purple skin and eight arms breathing fire, and the character would have said something like, 'Oh! There's a monster from another world; I better catch him before he destroys the city.' Now, if one of our Marvel characters saw the same monster, I'd like to think Spider-Man would say, 'Who's the nut in the Halloween get-up? I wonder what he's advertising?' "
