LIFE IS STRANGE

Not Even Stan Lee Expected Things to Get This F*cked Up

Nobody in the comic book business expected real life to outdo their fictional storylines

Marlon Weems
LEVEL
Published in
6 min readDec 1, 2021

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Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

Long before superheroes transitioned to the big screen, I was a huge comic book nerd. My comic book habit was so out of control that whenever my mom sent me to the grocery store, I’d steal her change to feed my habit. Since I’m a boomer, when I was a kid, the latest Spider-man was only 15 cents, which means my thievery — and my addiction went under my parent’s radar.

Believe it or not, the source of my habit was Fulton Feed & Seed, a mom-and-pop hardware store that, for reasons unknown, sold comic books in addition to hammers, nails, and the baby chicks under heat lamps displayed in the store window. By my senior year in high school, I had a huge comic book collection that I kept in a black trunk positioned at the foot of my bed. My collection met its demise one summer while I was away working for my cousin.

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Marlon Weems
LEVEL
Writer for

Storyteller. I write about American culture and growing up Black in the South.