So there's another lifelong dream accomplished, although I probably should've combed my hair first.

The basement of the Times Square Virgin Megastore was packed last night with comic book fans (and more than a few pros) who came to pay tribute to the legendary Stan Lee, who received the New York Comics Legend Award on the eve of the third annual New York Comic Con. Lee had already been working in comics for about two decades when he (in collaboration with artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) revolutionized the field by injecting psychological (and geographical) realism into Marvel Comics titles like Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man in the early 1960s. At the same time, as current Marvel head Joe Quesada observed during his remarks, he created the persona of "Stan Lee," a.k.a "Stan the Man." That was a crucial step in making the creators of comics stand out in the imaginations of young fans as the characters, not to mention how pretty much my entire generation, through constant Saturday morning repetition, learned to recognize the phrase "This is STAN LEE."

"The reason you're getting this award is that you're old," Quesada joked. "You're really old... John McCain brags that he learned to read from your comics." (It could even be true!) Peter David told a hilarious story about how knowing Lee helped him win a bitter custody battle, and observed that everybody who has a Stan Lee story winds up doing an impression: "It's easy. You just have to pretend you're John Wayne doing Maxwell Smart." After which a comics shop owner and a former Marvel writer were cracking each other up in the back of the audience, doing Lee recounting the company's history as something akin to that Monty Python skit where everybody argues about who grew up in the poorest conditions.

When the man himself took the microphone, he joked about how small the award was, and how he'd have to explain to his wife that he'd flown 3,000 miles for the weekend to receive this tiny thing, and then joked some more about he was all set to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame until he found out you have to pay for them. He also made sure to plug his latest book, Election Daze. As he explains in this video for the book, "Nothing for me is more fun than taking photos of famous people and putting word balloons over their heads which shows what I imagine they really might have been thinking while they were talking, or not talking as the case may be."

And then with a hearty "Excelsior!" he left the stage, and we all clamored to have our photos taken with him while a beleaguered handler tried to escort him across the room.