By Nicolás Amarelle - CEO & Founder of CodigoDelSur
Like any good "Generation X" geek, I spent my childhood reading Comic magazines over and over again during endless afternoons. Grandma Esther’s house was right next to mine and was Alexandria’s library of comics! I never knew exactly why but she had taken the time of collecting and carefully binding hundreds of comics magazines in big books which looked more like old big dictionaries rather than comic ones.
For many years, my routine as a child was giving my grandma a kiss and going straight to her library, to evaluate which one of them I’d be using to have imagination soaring that afternoon. Just me and those adventures in my grandma's enormous super comfy couch.
Little did I know fate would give me the honor I'm about to tell you about. Obviously, Marvel Universe Comics, created by the great Stan Lee were a big part of those adventures.
Jumping alongside Spiderman all across a fantastic and distant New York, waiting for Dr. Robert Bruce Banner to get angry and turn into the Hulk and give “the bad guys” what they deserved, or being partners in crime with the peevish Tony Stark and his impudence.
There's no doubt those adventures planted in me the seeds of justice, imagination one, and science, all of which I value as pillars of the person I’m today.
30 years later, unfortunately, my grandma is no longer here, nor are the big comic books. But, the path of life (and the geek inside me), took me to lead a software development company in Uruguay, my country, a very small one, in the south of South America. And the path of life led us to work on a project named Weev, a social network for a California-based customer. You can imagine my surprise when I learned one of the investors and project leads was no there that Stan Lee himself!
As most startup projects, in the end it didn't work out, in this case, I think it was (once again) ahead of his time, but that’s not relevant for this story.
For us, and for me personally, working alongside with Stan Lee for over 2 years, the person that inspired me and my imagination during those adventurous afternoons was something that not even in my best science fiction comics I could ever have imagined while laying in my grandma’s couch. I wanted to share with you some of the videos created by himself in Weev. Click here and here!
Like my grandma Esther, today Stan Lee is gone, but I have no doubt that his legacy will live for generations all over the world, that legacy of justice, imagination, and science. I know that today, most of the posts, tweets, and comments in the geek world with end with the same expression, the expression that Stan Lee made his own signature. And I know that by repeating it, it will end up not being creative nor original, but I think that for repeating too, it will show the magnitude of who Stan Lee was.
Excelsior!
