A belated shout-out to Marvel Comics Everything Stan Lee who was awarded the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal at the White House a few days ago.

I met the man once, back in the mid-1970s, when he was promoting Sons of Origins of Marvel Comics, and my father, a journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune, interviewed him for what was then called the “Variety” section of the paper. The interview took place at a fancy restaurant in downtown Minneapolis and my brother and I were allowed to leave class early (I was 12) to attend the back-end of it.

I think I was disappointed when I first saw him. He wore dark glasses in a dark restaurant and he had a moustache and a loud and brash manner. He seemed like a villain on a cop show. Not sure what I thought he'd look like. Reed Richards? Peter Parker? Me?

But he turned out to be about the nicest famous person I've ever met. First, he let us sit in on the interview. Then when the interview was over, he didn’t turn off. I don’t know if he had an “off.” He invited my brother and I over and brought us out. He drew a cartoonish Captain America holding a banner up to his nose —like Kilroy — and on the banner he wrote: “To Chris and Erik. Excelsior! Stan & Cap.” Below it he added, in that great mix of irony and braggadaccio he had: “Another practically priceless Stan Lee original!” He signed our books. He gave us nicknames in the Mighty Marvel Manner. “To Charismatic Chris,” he wrote in Chris’ Sons of Origins of Marvel Comics. “To Erudite Erik” he wrote in my copy of The Origins of Marvel Comics. The first thing I did when I got home was look up “Erudite” in the dictionary.

I stopped collecting comics in the late '70s and I don't know what happened to my autographed Origins of Marvel Comics, but I still have the Cap drawing.

My father's article on Stan Lee, by the way, wound up on the back page of the “Variety” section, where they put the unimportant stuff. That's how comics were viewed back then. Now, though actual sales are way down, the presence of comic books is everywhere. As you know.