Marvel Entertainment are not nice people. They like having an avuncular mascot to trot out and reassure people that these entertainment products are made by the same kind of people who hand-crafted the original comics, but that’s a lie. It’s not about people at all. It’s about a company with a seventy-five year track record of scorched-earth business tactics doing everything they can to maximize their leverage on largest scale possible, the kind of scale not even Lee himself could ever have imagined.

You can’t root for Marvel anymore. It’s like rooting for McDonalds. Once upon a time Stan Lee believed himself to be Ray Kroc, but for a while now he’s been Ronald McDonald.