When I was 11 years old, I met Stan Lee at Dragon Con in Atlanta. All day I had worked up the nerve to tell him that I wanted to be a writer and that I asked myself what he would write before I put pen to paper. I was too scared to do it when the moment came, and so my father told him instead. Lee looked at me and said, “Oh, bless your heart. I hope you become a famous writer one day.” Since then, there has never been a question in my mind: I would be a writer, because Stan the Man hoped I would.

I remember his voice this way, through the speakers in my childhood bedroom. I have heard it hundreds of times before, and I will hear hit hundreds of times again: “Effortlessly he glides between the tallest buildings in mammoth New York City… There are many mysterious forces at work as he silently views the city from a perch high atop a skyscraper… What is Spider-Man really thinking?”

Then, a voice begins to croon, “Would somebody call me Peter Parker before I go insane? You see, this other guy that I’ve been lately forgot he had a name.” “Spiderman: Rock Reflections of a Superhero” was a concept album and rock opera released in 1975 that tells the origin of the Amazing Spiderman, performed by an anonymous assortment of musicians who the back of the record claims are the Marvel Superheroes, gathered  by Parker to help him mourn the death of his girlfriend Gwen Stacy through song.

Between tracks, Lee gives us exposition, snatches of gloriously joyous moments and terrible lows in the life of the hero called Spiderman. It is a perfect piece of Marvel Comics storytelling, and Lee’s voice gives it authority. It is like hearing an old friend; his rhythms and intonations are perfectly melodramatic in their transfer from page to vinyl.

Despite being generations removed from the first comics of the Mighty Marvel Era, reading “Fantastic Four” and “Amazing Spider-Man,” “The Avengers,” “The X-Men,” “The Incredible Hulk” and “Journey into Mystery” made you feel like you were part of some grand story. I was lucky enough to be led into comics by my father with bedtime readings that started at the beginning of their runs, from the early 1960s.  For me, Lee defined the Marvel Age from the get go, despite the impracticalities of time and space.

I too was a member of the Mighty Marvel Marching Society, nervously hanging on Lee’s every word. And it was Lee’s words that defined those books. The art – the glorious Steve Ditko pencils and the boundless energy of Jack Kirby – made the comics what they were. Ditko and Kirby and the rest of the Marvel bullpen were formidable and enduring influences on my young mind, but it was Lee’s words that wove it all together and kept that Marvel feel between titles and across stories. It was Lee, whose voice I can still hear despite only reading his words on the page, who reminded me that with great power comes great responsibility and inspired me when the Avengers answered the call to assemble. It was Lee’s soapbox, his editorial column in the letters pages, that made the grand story of Marvel Comics feel like a community, like I was part of something much larger than myself. It always ended with his trademark sign-off, “Excelsior!”

I was eight years old when “Iron Man” and “The Incredible Hulk” films came out, opening the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I had seen other Marvel films before, of course, but that summer stays in my memory, because into my adolescence I told time by it. It seemed, and still does, as if time was divided into two categories: my life before “Iron Man,” and my life after. Lee was still there, in every movie, as it seemed he had always been, narrating my music and telling the stories in my comics, his name emblazoned on every title page. “Stan Lee Presents…” the great tragedies and victories of my life, the defining stories, the heroes who inspire me today. Stan Lee is Marvel Comics, and Marvel Comics are stories about people like you and me, flawed people doing their best for the people they care about. Marvel Comics is Peter Parker, who stays behind as Spider-Man goes, and who sits perched on a skyscraper. What is Spider-Man really thinking, we ask? Lee knows, and he is going to tell us, and it will be a good story.           

As Lee said himself, in his final narration on “Rock Reflection,” “He’s a hero…who walks in step with tragedy and death, but still he perseveres.” Excelsior, Mr. Lee, and thank you.