For all the years that I’d attended Dragon*Con, I always said that I needed to just bite the bullet and pay for a meet and greet with Stan Lee. I’d shared elevators with him, and once was next to him while we, and a bunch of other onlookers watched as Marriott security tackled a drunk guy dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow as he was trying to elude them; he made a wisecrack about how he must’ve had too much rum, before walking off.
But I still wanted to get an actual good picture and a few seconds to meet one of the true godfathers of the comic book industry, a man that is unquestionably on the Rushmore of Comics. And as a fan that favored Marvel over all others, there was really no greater name in the existence of comic books other than Stan Lee.
Over the last few years, as the passage of time aged Stan into his 90s, I proclaimed more often about the closing window of how I should do the meet and greet. And then when Stan’s wife Joan passed in 2017, a little bit of urgency crept in. Every nerd and/or comic fan on the planet knew that Stan Lee was not going to live forever, but considering he himself was in his 90s and that his wife had passed, that window was closing just a little bit more quickly than we’d all hoped.
Then there was the health scare not long afterward, and then the formal announcement that after the year, he would no longer be doing any more conventions or shows in general, and we all as fans definitively knew that the window was closing, and fast. I knew immediately that Dragon*Con 2017 was my absolute last chance to try to meet the legend.
Thankfully, this is not a story of regret where I failed to stick to my convictions and I missed the opportunity to meet Stan Lee before he passed. It may have cost $144, and Stan himself barely moved a muscle, but I did get to meet the godfather of comic books, tell him that I was a fan of all of his work and get a picture together that I’ll always cherish. He did softly say “thanks” to my words as I walked off after meeting one of the prominent influences of my youth.
When looking through history in the future, November 12, 2018 will hold tremendous weight as the date in which Stan Lee passed away. Everyone knew this was inevitable, and it can hardly be called a tragedy, when a man lived to 95, achieved multiple and numerous amounts of successes, and was revered by just about all who knew of his existence. He can be reunited with his wife in whatever afterlife we choose to believe in, and he leaves behind the insurmountable legacy of being one of the most imaginative and influential minds in existence that created countless properties, universes and stories that will able to be enjoyed until the end of time.
I am personally honored and privileged to have been able to have met The Man, and what few Marvel comic books that I still have, because they’re important to me, just became a little bit more important and even bigger treasures. But make no mistake, the world just became a little bit more worse of a place with the departure of Stan Lee, because he really was just that good at making the world around him a better place, just by being who he was.
