Robert Downey Jr. Shares Heartfelt Image Of Him and Stan Lee On The Set Of 'Captain America: Civil War'

December 28 would have been the 98th birthday of Stan Lee, who died on November 12, 2018 at the age of nearly 96. Lee’s legacy is and forever will be linked to having helped shape up Marvel Comics to be one of the biggest and most recognizable brands in the world (although he also briefly switched to “the other side” – working for DC Comics and reimagining the likes of Superman and Batman, among others).

He joined Marvel Comics in 1941 as a gofer, but quickly moved up the ranks to become a writer, an editor, an editor-in-chief, and a publisher. He was even president of the entire company for a short period of time, but soon retired from this position, as the constant dealings with numbers and balance sheets stood in a stark contrast to his sense of creativity, and so he returned to his job as a publisher.

Stan Lee invented and shaped timeless Marvel characters, such as Thor, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and countless other heroes and villains (both big and small), and he also green-lit the production of the Star Wars comic series running from 1977 to 1986, after initially turning down the idea at the beginning of 1976, neither liking the title nor thinking that George Lucas’ little space opera was worth the effort. He changed his mind after learning that Sir Alec Guinness would be part of the cast.

But Stan Lee’s influence on the pop culture of past and present did not end at the drawing board or the editor’s desk. Notably, a younger audience, who probably has never even picked up a comic book, got to know the man’s name and his remarkable face (including the timeless mustache) through his cameos in all of Marvel’s MCU movies, starting with Iron Man in 2008 (where he simply played himself) and ending with 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. In his final MCU appearance, he plays a digitally de-aged car driver together with a digital re-creation of his wife Joan Boocock Lee. Between these two movies, Lee, for example, appeared as a World War II general (Captain America: The First Avenger, 2011), an astronaut telling (boring) stories to the Watchers (Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2, 2017), and a FedEx postman delivering a package from Steve Rogers to Tony Stark (or Stank) (Captain America: Civil War, 2016). As Lee’s astronaut in GOTG references his time as a postman, there are theories that all of his characters are actually one and the same (super)being, but this is a story for another time...

But Stan Lee’s acting “career” goes far beyond the MCU movies, as he also had small roles in several of the X-Men films (including Deadpool), all non-MCU Spider-Man movies of the modern age (including Into the Spider-Verse and Venom), as well as in some not-so-well-regarded Marvel movies such as Daredevil and Hulk (both 2003). Finally, Lee also graced the small screen with cameos in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Agent Carter, Jessica Jones, and Runaways, among others.

In remembrance of Lee’s birthday, Robert Downey Jr., who - as Tony Stark - put on the Iron Man suit (or you could also say the suit put on him) eleven times between 2008 and 2019, shared a photo of himself and a smiling Stan Lee on his Instagram account. The photo taken during the production of Civil War, as Lee wears his FedEx uniform, but holds up a strange thing that seems to be kind of an Iron Man razor. Downey himself presents an arc reactor in the picture, trying to prove once again that Tony Stark actually has a heart.

The caption under the picture reads, "Are you Tony Stank?" quoting Lee’s mispronunciation of Downey’s alter ego at the end of Civil War.

Downey’s post is just one of many that have come up around Stan Lee's birthday, in which colleagues and friends share their memories of meeting and working with the man.

Excelsior, Mr. Lee!

Written By Gerald Petschk

Syndicated From Culture Slate