SCI FI PI

Stan Lee is the one of the greatest, most prolific storytellers of all time. He is quite literally, the most famous comic book writer in history. It is without a doubt that the creator of Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Dr Strange, Thor and Daredevil (to name just SOME of his superheroes) is a living legend.

And we got to speak with him, face to face.

Stan was in Los Angeles to discuss his life, his loves, his company, POW! entertainment, and of course, the recent Marvel Movie explosion, including The Incredible Hulk and the surprising success of Iron Man.

He's a man of a certain age where many of his classmates would be swapping teeth and pills, rather than entertaining stories, but it is his indefatigable energy (and delight in publicity!) that keep him dynamic, amusing - and clear as a bell.

Ladies and Gentleman, Mr Stan Lee.






What's your opinion on the explosion of the superhero movies?
After movies like Superman came out and Spiderman came out, you didn't need a house to fall on you to realise we're on to something. And I think the reason is is because they're different. It's not your usual gangster movie, cops and robbers, western, teenage comedy. The public always loves something that's different. As long as it's well made! I think that when people go to these so called superhero movies, they don't know what to expect. There's that excitement of 'what am I gonna see'. the special effects too - they love that sort of thing! I'm actually surprised when a superhero movie doesn't do well.


It took a while though!
Yeah. Going back ten years or more, the previous management at Marvel didn't want to do movies or TV. We had a character called Black Widow, and in those days Bo Derek was a big star, the most beautiful woman in the world - the archetypal '10', and she had agreed to do Black Widow. ABC or CBS were excited to do it, but the person who was running Marvel at the time said "no, if the series turns out bad, it'll be bad for the character". But if you think that way, you never do anything! But I wasn't the fellow running the show. We had the same problem with Daredevil. Luckily we had new management who realised the importance of TV and movies, especially movies.


With the success of movies, there's still plenty of room and scope for superheroes on TV - do you have any plans?
Strangely enough, almost any of our characters would work on TV. It just depends on how it is written, directed and acted. If they're done the right way!

Strangely enough, when I first did Spider-man, my publisher didn't want to publish to Spider-man, he said it was the worst idea for a character. I wanted Spider-man to be a teenager with a million problems. He says "First of all, people hate spiders. Secondly, teenagers can only be sidekicks. And then you say he has to have problems - don't you know what a super hero is!" But then I found the right artist, and we found the right mix and the character took off.

You look at Heroes - it works, because its well done. Whether it's a superheros, a romantic comedy or whatever, you've got to care about the characters. If the characters are interesting , you're half way home.





How do you keep things fresh when you are writing so many stories?
You do your best. You have a character, you know the character, the story works and it's a great one. But you then have to do another story. That's the problem. You've got to make it different from the first one, to keep people interested, but you've got to be true to the first one, because you already know what your audience likes. It's a balancing act that you play. It's difficult.

I don't know if there's a formula, you've got to think it out every time. That's the reason why I don't have as big a head of hair as I used to! Having to do Spider-man and The Hulk and the X-Men and Fantastic Four and you had to do a new one every month! The problem was - how do I make each one different, but the same? If you're lucky, you can think of a story every time, if you're not lucky you just bang your head against the wall a couple of times.


There don't seem to be as many new superheroes in general pop culture these days. Have you seen any new superheroes?
Hellboy, he was new. V for Vendetta. There are a few new ones. When it comes to movies, if a movie company is going to invest 50-100 million in a movie, they'd rather take something that already has an audience. I really don't follow comics these days, but looking at covers, it seems they are making new characters. There are so many artists and writers who are continually trying to create new characters that will be the next Batman.

The thing is you have to wait for the public to get tired of Superman and Batman and the X-men before there's room for these new characters on the big screen.





What to you think of having 'The Shared Universe' of superheroes in the movies as the same as comics?
It seems the most natural thing in the world. If you have characters that exist in the same world, wouldn't it be fun to put a couple of them or more in the same movie. The difficult thing is at Marvel is that some of the characters are under contract to different studios. Spider-man at Sony, Iron Man is at Paramount. You've got to take characters you can control, so to speak.

In the comics, it happened accidentally. Of course I wrote the books separately, but I thought, if they all lived in New York, why wouldn't they meet? So I put them together in the same story and that's how it happened.


Why are Marvel Movies Getting Better?
Money. The first Captain America, for example, was a very low budget movie. It cost 98 cents. The director was competent enough. When you have a script that doesn't cost very much... all these big movies, the script is re-written time after time after time until you get it just right.

There wasn't enough money to get the top actors or actresses, had a limited shooting time, also the person doing the movie wasn't a big fan of the character. Move forward twenty years, you come to Spider-man. Sam Raimi was a BIG Spider-man fan, and a great director. He was given an enormous bduget, the best actors, and a great script.

By the time we got to the present ones, the studios had seen the succes of Superman and Batman, and so there was enough money, luckily enough for Marvel, they had money for these films.

Brian Singer wasn't a big comic book guy, but he read every X -Men book ever published and really got into it.

Iron Man - no one expected it to do as well as it did. I always though it was one of Marvel's top characters, even though others didn't.

Iron Man got more fan mail from females than any other Marvel character - he was a playboy, rich, doebonair, macho - and he had a weak heart and needed to be mothered. Of course I didn't think of this when I created him, it just happened to work out that way!





Your partners, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Kirby is now sadly dead, and Ditko does no interviews. Is it weird not to share this success with them?
Jack Kirby, I think would've enjoyed this immensely, although he would've been grousing about not making enough money! Steve worked with me on Spider-man and Dr Strange. Steve is a very strange individual -he doesn't want an publicity.

He won't give interviews, and I understand that someone found the original artwork for the original Spider-man. And it was worth, I dunno, maybe a million dollars, and they offered it up to Steve, but he didn't want it. So they gave it to the Library of Congress and made a big thing out of it, and they're gonna have it on display. Steve felt that all the artwork should have been given back to all the artists all the time. And he's probably right.

But nobody ever thought of it. And frankly, in those days, the artists never thought of it. The offices of Marvel was in a tiny space. I had an office that was barely big enough to sit and talk with someone if the walked in. Whenever the book was published, the printer would send back all the original art work, and it was a stack 'like that' because the sheets were quite thick, they were BIG! And we had no place to put em! So someone would come and deliver some lunch or something, and we'd say 'hey Charlie, you want to take some of these pages with you?"

We did the same with all the old comic books too. We never thought to save any of these things.


You're starting to rack up quite the cameo count in movies and TV - which ones are your favourite?
I was disappointed by the one I had in the Iron Man movie - because I had a line that they cut out! I'm standing there with my arms around three attractive blonds, which wasn't too difficult. They wanted me to look a little like Hugh Hefner, they even gave me a pipe. Tony Stark taps me on the back, thinking I'm Hef, but then I turn around and he says something like 'sorry, though you were somebody else." I was supposed to say "that's okay, I get that all the time!"

The weird thing was that I had the pipe in my mouth and I had to take it out, and I hit the blond girl on my right smack in the face. Needless to say we did another take!

This is Part One of Two Part Interview. End of Part One.


The Incredible Hulk is out Oct 23 and Iron Man is out Oct 9 on DVD and Blu-ray.