THERE it goes. Another bit of childhood. The news that Stan Lee had died this week took me back to Northern Ireland in the early 1970s and my first true love, Marvel comics.

In March 1973, my mum brought home a copy of Spider-Man Comics Weekly. In it Spider-Man fought Mysterio. By the end of the story I was hooked. The next few years of my life were sketched out by that flimsy bit of newsprint. Soon I’d be one of Stan’s “true believers”, a cult member in all but name.

Long ago and far away. Here in 2018 it’s possible to take a more nuanced look at Marvel’s most canny creation, Lee himself.

He was in many ways a contentious figure, one who claimed more responsibility for Marvel’s success and ideas than some – mainly artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko – felt he deserved.

Indeed, when Marvel filed a suit against the Kirby family in 2009, Lee got up in court and said he was sole creator of Marvel’s heroes as the company attempt to argued that Kirby’s contribution was “work for hire”.

And yet this was the same man who once admitted that: “Jack is a storyteller in pictures. After a while I only had to give him a couple of words on what I thought the plot would be and he would do the whole thing.”

This approach was standard practice at Marvel. It even had a name: “The Marvel Method.” And Lee used it with most of the artists he worked with. It was why he was able to “write” so many comics every month Eventually his name would be attached to every Marvel comic published whether he had anything to do with its contents or not.

There is no way to fully tease out who was responsible for what in the early days of Marvel. What is clear though is that Lee, Kirby and Ditko (and others) all contributed to the superhero big bang that took place in Marvel’s offices in early 1960s.

The concept of the superhero might have been born in the 1930s (hello Superman) and nurtured at Marvel’s rival, DC Comics. But Marvel reinvented and reinvigorated the concept. So much so that those early Marvel comics are the foundation stone for the multi-billion-dollar film franchises that make up the Marvel universe.

Lee’s added ingredient, as well as a wise-cracking sense of humour, was to set the stories in a world recognisably like our own, with heroes who weren’t perfect or unbeatable. The Marvel formula of “heroes with problems” was the key to the comic company’s success.

Peter Parker might have been bitten by a radioactive spider and given super powers, but he was still bullied at school, still worried about the health of his ageing Aunt May and usually desperate for money. In short, he was a reflection of the boys (and it was mostly boys) who were reading the comic.

Lee was also willing to push the envelope. When the Comic Code Authority refused to endorse a drug addiction storyline in Spider-Man, Lee published the story anyway.

But the real key to Lee’s genius could be seen in his creation of the Marvel universe. Not so much what happened in the stories but what happened around them. Writing bullpen bulletins and self-referential credits, Lee built up the idea that he was talking to his audience, that we the readers were all part of this exciting, innovative thing called Marvel comics.

There’s an element of hucksterism about this, of course, a sense that he was cultivating brand loyalty. And all that is true.

But it also gave readers a sense of belonging. A sense that we – the spotty boys we were then – mattered.

That helped sell more comics, sure. But in the end that’s a reductive dismissal of the sense of community that the comics could offer.

The Black British critic Ekow Eshun once wrote about the country he grew up in back in the 1970s. A place where Love Thy Neighbour and The Black and White Minstrels were on prime-time TV, where National Front signs could be found on street corners and he had to run a gamut of skinhead abuse most days.

Eshun found an escape route through early electro music and X-Men comics. “I preferred the world of infinite possibilities I created myself to the constrictions of reality.”

Marvel comics offered a glimpse of those infinite possibilities. The X-Men, outsiders one and all, also offered a glimpse of a multi-racial, multi-cultural team; another way of living, another world.

Marvel was on the side of sixties liberalism. Lee was outspokenly anti-racist. Twitter this week has been reposting an editorial – Stan’s Soapbox – he published back in the 1960s: “Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today.”

That message was carried through – sometimes clumsily, sometimes problematically – into the stories. Sometimes presciently too. Black Panther’s technologically superior homeland Wakanda was Afrofuturism before the idea was common currency.

And in turn all of this fed into the readers. And here’s where it comes back to the personal again. If I’m honest Marvel comics did more to shape my own nascent political outlook than any other thing I can think of.

By the 1970s Marvel comics were being written by more sophisticated writers than Lee and by the 1980s I was beginning to realise that comic books could do more than just superheroes.

But I’m still reading comics because of Stan Lee.

Excelsior!