Losing a personal icon

Today we lost Stan Lee.
I'm not usually one to tear up at a celebrity's death (I'm sad for their families, but I don't know them. There's too much disconnect from their life to mine for mourning as some seem to do), but sometimes one does hit me.
Stan Lee is one such.
His creations touched a part of me that I can ill define.
Their deeper meanings informed my own thoughts.  Often mirroring how I felt about people, places and concepts not in my own realm of experience.
The characters he created with Jack Kirby  were ones I could identify with.
Particularly the Incredible Hulk.
The alienation Bruce Banner underwent because of the Hulk persona spoke to me.  As did his issues with mental health.  Though that was many years before I understood why.
I identified with the abuse Banner underwent as a child, the abuse that spawned the rage machine that is the Hulk.
I identified with the loneliness of both Banner and Hulk.
Banner longed for human companionship, but felt unable to because of the monster inside him.
The Hulk longed for peace...peace from other humans.  Peace from the rage inside him, even as that rage gave him physical substance.
Lee has said that the X-Men's Charles Xavier and Magneto were not based on Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, but as a kid...I drew those parallels.
MLKjr was another hero of mine growing up, so I guess seeing him in Xavier was natural. Though, by the time I started reading comics in the 80s, he'd shifted to a slightly darker figure, with a tendency to manipulate those around him.
But as a kid...I didn't see those qualities.
Stan Lee himself was an inspiration as well, as his views on equality and people's rights aligned fairly well with my own.
I didn't know much about the man behind my favorite comic books until I was about 12 or 13.
I knew the name from the credits in the books and the voice from the Marvel Saturday Morning Cartoons I watched.
But I started finding out about him in my early teens...them the internet happened when I was in high school and BLAMMO, suddenly finding out about him was easier.
He had his ups and downs (Kirby basically left Marvel because he didn't feel he was getting enough credit as a creator of these characters.  Which he really didn't...not until later).
Anyways, Stan the Man wanted these characters relatable.  He wanted them flawed.  He wanted them complex.
And he wanted to strike at past, current and future issues in society while also telling compelling stories.  He set the newly minted Marvel on it's course for the next 50 odd years.
The fact that Marvel stayed branded Marvel when it's predecessor Timely Comics had become Atlus, which then became Marvel over the course of roughly two decades says a lot about Lee as an editor and writer.
The universe he created with Jack Kirby is still going strong and being added to all the time.
From the start Lee wanted diversity.
But he was also smart.  The society he and Kirby birthed their creations into was a volatile one.  He couched racism and ethnic oppression in neutral terms.
Using "mutant" as a substitute for whatever ethnicity you wanted them to be, while showing minorities as equals within the books themselves.
Seriously, Forge is the first modern Native American I saw portrayed as intelligent and capable in really any medium at the time.
He also used Fantastic Four as a vehicle to show that family is not always blood, and even if it's dysfunctional sometimes, it doesn't mean you aren't family.
So, good sir.  I thank you for the world's of wonder you brought me in my youth when I needed it, and I can still enjoy as an adult.
I thank you for showing us the darkness while highlighting the good.
Until next time, True Believers...