My dad once told me that if you were to cut out an entire storyline of the newspaper comic strip "The Amazing Spider-Man," the only Spider-Man serial still written by co-creator Stan Lee, and read all of the strips in succession, they would be absolutely unreadable.
Nonsense, I thought to myself; this is Stan Lee we're talking about! The man whose imagination gave birth to an entire universe of colorful characters! .
Yesterday, I bought a copy of The Last Fantastic Four story, the latest thing Lee's written for Marvel Comics, and holy crap, my dad was right.
In a nutshell, it's about a virtually omnipotent race of beings that decides the human race's time is up because of all of humanity's evil, and how the Fantastic Four figures out how to stop them. That's pretty much it. It doesn't merit much of a review, because in truth, with the exception of John Romita Jr.'s sterling art, it's one of the worst comic books I've had the misfortune of ever reading. From the plot to the dialogue to the ultimate resolution of the story, the whole thing is a disaster.
The painful part is that Lee's old writing still holds up pretty well, dated dialogue aside. Having re-read the tattered 1966 issue of Fantastic Four I inherited from my uncle, I can say for sure that back then, Lee knew how to tell a story with some flair. The dialogue isn't even that distracting.
The problem between then and now is that Lee has become something of an icon; he used to write because he wanted to tell a story. In this particular comic book he seems to be playing to the crowd, writing hamfisted heroics and Shatner-esque dialogue ("Bolts of fire! Melting our weapons!") because he figures that's what people have come to expect from him. There no longer seems to be any inspiration in his writing.
Between this and the painfully terrible "Who Wants to Be a Superhero," I'm now convinced that Stan should just limit himself to cameos in the movies based on his characters, and stick to non-speaking roles.
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