History stan lee superhuman

I must have been about 3 years old when my older brother first let me read one of his comic books. I don’t remember the issue, or what it was about, or even the experience of reading it. The only thing I’m certain of is that it was a Marvel comic.

For ours was a Marvel household, and if my brother was going to introduce me to the beautiful wide world of four-colour adventures, he was damned sure that my first taste was going to be the very best of the genre.

And Marvel was the best. Still is, for my money. For in Spider-Man, and the X-Men, and the Avengers, and Daredevil, and the Hulk, and – well, just turn to Wikipedia’s list of Stan Lee creations – Lee, and his many brilliant co-creators, effectively invented the modern superhero. And he did so with one simple insight: Stan Lee’s characters were human. 

Which is to say: Marvel superheroes were the first to have flaws. The first to be “feared and hated by a world they have sworn to protect” (the X-Men). The first to be the ones who didn’t get the girl. Who weren’t, as Stan Lee put it in Amazing Spider-Man #5, “BMOC”, Big Man On Campus. Unlike their predecessors, those characters from the 1930s and 1940s like Batman and Superman and Captain America, Stan Lee’s heroes were not, or at least not entirely, square-jawed muscular white males with names like “Steve” and “Bruce”.

The Marvel era represented a profound shift in the way superhero stories were told, in what writers and artists expected of their readers, and in what they expected of their comics. In many ways, comic books got smart, or at least wise enough to know that readers wanted more than pure fantasy. Lee, and his all-too-often overlooked co-creators, gave us the tortured Jekyll/Hide soul of Bruce Banner/the Incredible Hulk, the eternally put-upon scrawny teenager Peter Parker/Spider-Man, and – especially – the civil rights analog X-

Stan Lee's Superhumans is a television series that debuted on August 5, 2010 on the History Channel (now called History). It is hosted by Stan Lee and follows contortionist Daniel Browning Smith, "the most flexible man in the world", as he searches the globe for real-life superhumans - people with extraordinary physical or mental abilities.

Episodes[]

Season one[]

• Electro Man: Daniel meets Rajmohan Nair of Kollam, India, who can withstand being shocked by electricity 30 times the amount that can kill an ordinary man; Scott Flansburg of San Diego, a "human calculator" who can perform complex arithmetic in his head; Juan Ruiz of Los Angeles, a blind man who can see the world around him bat-like echolocation; and Dennis Rogers of Houston; the "strongest man in the world."
• Killer Punch: Daniel meets Bob Munden of Las Vegas, the fastest and most accurate gunslinger alive; Finland's Timo Kaukonen, whose body can withstand near-boiling temperatures; Shi Yan Ming, a Shaolin monk who defected from China and who takes Bruce Lee's infamous "one-inch punch" to a new level; and Darren Taylor "Professor Splash" of Denver, who can survive a 35-foot belly flop into 1 foot of water.
• Hammer Head: Daniel meets Dean Karnazes of San Francisco, who can ignore extreme fatigue and ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50days; John Ferraro of Boston, whose thick skull can withstand the blow of a sledgehammer; Chris Robinson of Edinburgh, Scotland who believes his dreams can predict the future; and Kenny Muhammad of New York City, "The Human Orchestra", who can mimic complex beatbox rhythms with his mouth.
• Human Speed Bump: Daniel meets Zamora the Torture King (a.k.a. Tim Cridland) of New York City, who skewers himself without feeling any pain or shedding blood; Derek Paravicini of London, England, a blind autistic man who can accurately recreate any piano piece after hearing it once; Jyothi Raj of Chitradurga, India who can scale walls with in