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Comics trailblazer and Marvel Chairman Emeritus Stan Lee is developing an hour-long drama at Showtime about the life of a gay teenage superhero. The series is based on a 2007 novel by Perry Moore called Hero. Moore is a screenwriter and film director, but is best known as the producer of the Chronicles of Narnia movies. He is writing the pilot for the Showtime series.

In Hero, high schooler Thom Creed finds his superpowers manifesting just as he's beginning to realize his own sexual orientation. Fearing shame and backlash from his homophobic hometown, he struggles to keep both his powers and homosexuality a secret.

Talk about your on-the-nose metaphors. The teen lit novel was a pretty light read despite its subject matter, but on a network like Showtime, it's likely that the series would expand and creep into more adult social topics. Maybe this can replace Heroes as the primetime superhero show to watch (at this point, it wouldn't take much).

Moore, who is gay, has been a champion of the representation of LGBT characters in comics, and wrote Hero as a response to their poor treatment—more specifically, it was when Marvel killed X-Man Northstar in 2005 that got him motivated.

Stan Lee himself is a pioneer in using superheroes to discuss social issues, creating many beloved characters in the 60s as a way to talk about civil rights, most notably in X-Men's struggle against mutant bigotry, which Bryan Singer—who's also openly gay—treated as a metaphor for homosexuality in the movies.

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