A Brief Encounter

I saw Dr. Strange a few months ago. I'm was never that into Marvel Comics as a kid - somewhat, I'd read them - but I liked Little Lulu and Scrooge McDuck, the great horror comics like Tales of the Crypt, and above all Mad. These days not into big budget super hero stuff which tends to bore me after a while. But I'd just completed a lot of work, Katrinka was in the US, so I watched Dr. Strange. I enjoyed it and thought it was imaginative and fun. And I thought yeah - the guy who wrote this and some of those others, like I think Spiderman, did give us other places to go that left the zone of consensus reality. Couldn't remember his name but I thought I'd see it in the credits and go Oh yeah. At one point in the film Dr. Strange and his fellow good guys were in New York City running down the street from the bad guys, the main villain of which was folding space-time and hurling devastating power rays and so forth, when bang! a bus drove in front of their exit route and with a viewpoint from inside the bus we see them come to an abrupt stop outside a window where a man is sitting reading a book. The action hesitates for a second, the bus moves on, and they're off running from the bad guys again. Movies, especially big budget films, typically don't have any shot that doesn't serve a purpose. It was the brief lingering bit in the bus that made me curious. I thus paused the film, went back a little to watch that scene again and paused it on the reading man. Hmm. I could make out some letters on the book cover and yes - got it - The Doors of Perception, He was reading Aldous Huxley's classic on mind expansion. At the end of the film as the credits rolled, I watched and there it was! Man on bus .... Stan Lee. Oh yeah.

Farewell Stan Lee who just died at 95. And thanks for the trips!