Many years later, Stan Lee told an interviewer that he had been, “The ultimate hack. I was probably the hackiest hack that ever lived. I wrote whatever they told me to write the way they told me to write it. It didn’t matter: War stories, crime, Westerns, horror, humor; I wrote everything.” The “they” for whom he was writing everything was Atlas Comics (previously Timely Publications). He grew fed up and vowed to quit.

His wife Joan suggested that if he was going to quit, why not go out on his own terms and write a comic that he could be proud of. He and artist Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, superheroes that retained the “human” part of “superhuman.” He did not quit Atlas Comics, not was he fired. The company eventually changed its name to Marvel Comics, and Lee continued to create characters and story lines that are now a deep part of our culture.

He is even a big enough star in his own right that there are one-sixth scale action figures of Stan Lee available (see in the photo at top).

Stan Lee is 94 today. That is sufficient reason to share this video from 2012 of Mr. Lee reading “Twas the Night Before Christmas” (after the jump):
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Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, a play by J. M. Barrie, made its theater debut on this date in 1904 at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London.

It introduced audiences to Neverland, Peter Pan, Wendy Darling and her brothers, Captain Hook, the Lost Boys, and Tinker Bell. (A playbill from the first production is at top.)
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The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, ceased to exist at midnight on this date in 1991. The constituent republics became independent nations. The Soviet Union existed for almost 69 years when it dissolved, an event that did not seem possible even a few months earlier. The moment ended the decades-long Cold War not with an exclamation point but a question mark.

The Cold War: Us versus them. On both sides, it was served with our breakfast cereal, our school lunches, and the nightly news watched during dinner. The Cold War was a fact, a background noise, a tinnitus-like hum heard 24/7, sometimes from far away and sometimes next door. Its removal seemed to make us aware that it had always been there, how loud it was, and that it had been driving us all insane.

As it ended (video after the jump):
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