If there’s any such thing as comic book heros, they don’t wear capes and fight crime per se; they’re the men and women who created comics as we know them the middle part of the 20th century. These people — like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — invented many of the motifs and themes we all not recognize as cannonical comic elements. Lee created or co-created characters like Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and (perhaps most notably) the wildly successful X-Men. Instead of artificial heros in made-up cities, Lee and Kirby gave us real people with unreal abilities who lived in real places and dealt with the rent, pain-in-the-ass bosses, and in general exhibited a level of humanity not seen before in the medium.

Lee, though, never really saw the kind of money you’d think appropriate for someone with his resume. For all his years at Marvel, he was an employee — by his own description, a well compensated employee, but an employee nevertheless. With the rise of the Internet, he saw an opportunity to work his magic again, but with a new medium — and as an owner. A pretty gutsy move for a guy in his seventies, but after all, substantially less robust business plans appeared work, right?

The Standard is running a feature about the sad collapse of Stan Lee Media – done in not so much by the now-infamous dot-com bubble, but by unsavory partners and a lack of business savvy. It’s a damn shame. Excelsior anyway, Stan.