Growing-up, I wanted to be Peter Parker. What young boy wouldn’t?
Sure, being bitten by a radioactive spider had to hurt like hell initially, but you have to admit the resulting upside was pretty sweet: the ability to climb walls, sense incoming danger, shoot webs from his wrists, and catapult himself across rooftops during rush hour—what’s not to love about that? For most of us, our teenage years were a prolonged, stumbling, hairy mess, so a brief moment of subatomic agony would have been well worth the benefits it afforded in expediency alone. If you’re going to go through the dizzying arrival of puberty anyway, at least the transformation could be quick, dramatic, and awe-inspiring. Peter was one of the lucky ones. His metamorphosis happened in one brilliant, cataclysmic instant—instead of over a few brutal years of awkwardness, heartbreak, and bad skin. Unlike most of us, he received the payoff in a matter of breathtaking seconds. He didn’t have to wait to become amazing or hope he’d one day be super.
When I was a kid in a suburban small town in central New York, my father owned a shoe store, which was sandwiched between a dry cleaner’s and a dance studio. The pungent smell of the pant presses from the former and the staccato rhythms on the hardwood floor from the latter are both deeply embedded in me as sense memories. Behind the old brick building that housed all three businesses was an odd section of the earlier structure that was only about four feet off the ground but had the appearance of a finished rooftop—complete with shingles, exhaust vents, and ivy-covered walls with an attached steel fire escape. It was something straight out of a Technicolor Marvel monthly, just waiting for a hero to be drawn into.
This was my stage, the place I spent countless afternoons, picturing myself in blue and red spandex, swinging in from an adjacent building and laying a beatdown on Doctor Octopus, all the while delivering punchlines to no one in particular. In those moments I was no longer an ordinary, awkward fourth grader who hated broccoli, geometry, and my stiff church pants—I was a web-slinging, wall-crawling, wisecracking wonder, saving the day and rescuing the girl from the bad guys and the peril they generated. For a few moments after school (and several hours on the weekend) I stepped into the pages of a comic book and became the hero the planet needed. I temporarily transformed (if only in my mind) into the superhuman world-saver I wished I really was all the time. Having not yet been assaulted by an irradiated arachnid, I settled for the next best thing: I regularly pretended as if I had been.
Stan Lee gave me this place to daydream. Within his bold, vibrant pages and through the diverse, courageous, spandexed characters that graced them, he provided a portal to the colorful and expansive space inside my head where I could be and do more than I’d imagined. He made me believe there was something superlative in me and in everyone around me; a brave, beautiful hero, just waiting for their spectacular origin story. His hope-saturated protagonists (like the best of us mortals here in this place) were flawed, yet persistent—never letting the demons inside them or the villains around them to define them. All anyone needed in Stan’s universe, was one precise moment to discover their true identity and become the hero. I think we all want to live in that kind of world.
That’s why we all love to see superheroes being born in pages or on-screen. There’s something magical about those beginnings that moves us. Whether they’re bitten by a radioactive spider, injected with a secret government superserum, implanted with a steel skeleton, or overexposed to hulkifying gamma rays—every great hero has an amazing origin story, a precise moment when he or she is called upon by circumstance, fate, or providence to do something extraordinary, something meaningful, something altogether history-shifting. It’s thrilling to watch human beings mutating from nondescript, regular schlubs like you and me into the monumental stuff of legend, to see them struggle to comprehend the gravity of the moment, to recognize the responsibility of access to such great power—and ultimately to run, swing, or fly headlong into their destiny.
Over and over again we line up to breathe in these mythologies, because we love the idea of being thrust into stratospheric glory instead of being stuck here on the ground with the rest of the mere mortals and gawking bystanders, in daily lives that tend to feel decidedly non-super, a repetitive cycle of mundane tasks and soul-draining busy work made of laundry loads, traffic jams, and dental appointments. As we get older it becomes a lot easier to hope vicariously through someone else’s story than our own, and we gradually lose our ability to dream. We can’t afford to do that right how.
This world needs the superheroes.
More than ever, we need to keep looking for the spectacular people around us, and to find the one staring back at us every day in the mirror.
We need to keep believing in the power of goodness to overcome all that threatens us.
We need to find those willing to fight alongside us for the common good; pain and pushback be damned.
And we need to keep working for a glorious, full-color expression of humanity in times when the supervillains would erase so much of it with a snap of their fingers.
Stan Lee has finished his last memorable cameo here, but hopefully he’s hanging out somewhere in the Quantum Realm, and we’ll be able to bring him back here once everything is aligned properly. But if not, we’ll still have this place, and this day, and the chance to be the kind of heroes the world needs.
Grieve well true believers, and then—get on to the business of being amazing out there. That’s what you were made for.
‘Nuff said.
This piece includes sections of ‘HOPE AND OTHER SUPERPOWERS’, out now! Order it HERE!
