Happy 88th Birthday Stan Lee!

Stan the Man, the father of Marvel Comics, is 88 years young today-and still looking good. Without Stan, whatever his critics may say, the face of modern popular culture would be very different today-we'd have no Fantastic Four, no X-Men, no Spidey or Hulk or Silver Surfer, no Mighty Thor or Iron Man, not even (gasp) the Savage She-Hulk! So many happy returns, and thank you Stanley Martin Lieber for changing the world and making it that little bit brighter!

Nuff Said.

He's looking good for his age, too-turned up on TV over Christmastalking about Marvel's upcoming movie projects, and he doesn't look a day over sixty...

I love British Comics, but a huge part of my comic reading youth was taken up reading the wonderful world that Lee, Kirby and Ditko together helped create through the British Marvel reprints.

Excelsior!

Likewise-I basically learned to read from British comics, most notably Spider-Man Comics Weekly and Mighty World of Marvel! I discovered the US imports when I was about six or seven, and never looked back!

The first British Marvel that I read, or rather owned as I seem to remember my Mother actually reading some of the stuff to me, was MWOM #20, which introduced Daredevil . (Spidey went off to SMCW that week. I started a week late with that, with #2)

I remember getting the likes of Valliant and Smash and other stuff on occassions before that date, but one look at the first half of the reprint of the Lee/Everett DD#1 in that particular comic and I was hooked on the character. Still am.

Like a lot of British comics and their wonderful writers and artists, Stan Lee not only helped me to learn to read but let my imagination run wild with all these exciting adventures. And to this day, I don't really differentiate between the likes of 2000ad or the 'American superhero' stuff in terms of origin or quality. I find room for both.

Me, too-I read voraciously back then, and it didn't matter whether it was Battle, Beano (though I preferred Dandy), Mighty World of Marvel, DC's All-Star Comics and Freedom Fighters, Harvey's Hot Stuff or the Alan Class titles like Creepy Worlds. Alan Class, in fact, were often a great source of Lee/Ditko reprints, sometimes two or three per issue...