Stan Lee article

Stan Lee is a force of nature.

At 77 years old, Lee is busier than comics creators half his age, doing more now that most people did before they retired, which, if you're counting, would have been around 1988 for Lee when he was 65.

With his website garnering attention from Hollywood to Wall Street, Lee keeps cooking along, and has recently decided to take on one of his biggest challenges in a career that has spanned 60 years - reinvent the best-known characters of the DC Universe from the ground up in a 12-issue series called Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating…

Getting Lee over to DC was actually a move made by a comics outsider of sorts. "Michael Uslan who was the co-executive producer of the Batman movies was really responsible for getting the ball rolling," Lee says. "We'd been friends for years, just like I've been friends with most of the DC people and friends with most of the people in the business for years. Michael came to see me and asked if I'd like to write new origins of the main DC characters. I told him it was a pipe dream, and that he could find better things to do with his time."

Uslan persisted in bugging Lee about it, asking the man most closely identified with Marvel Comics if there was a chance that DC would allow it, would he do it?

"I told him there wasn't a chance in hell that DC would go for it," Lee says. "But that didn't stop him. I told him that an assignment like that was too intriguing to pass up, and I'd be interested in it if he could work it out. I saw him again a little while later and he told me he'd spoken with people at DC, and they'd love to have me give it a shot. So I was hooked."

And as for why a collaboration such as this hasn't happened until now, Lee had a simple reason: "Nobody asked me. I would never have thought to call DC and ask to do a different take on their major characters, and nobody at DC ever called and asked about someone coming over from DC to do it to the Marvel characters. It was Michael who dreamed it all up and got everyone talking. Before this, nobody had ever thought of it."

Stan the Man's DCU

As is the course with big projects such as this, misconceptions abound, and Lee himself has taken to shooting down rumors. "The thing I want to make very clear in this whole deal is that I haven't left Marvel or anything like that. This isn't a steady thing - I'm not becoming DC's newest writer, or will be looking for work once the series concludes. It's just for this one project that I found so intriguing that I couldn't say no. After all, who would pass up the chance to re-create DC's greatest heroes?"

Finding it easier to explain what the project isn't, Lee adds, "This isn't an effort to show that I can do these characters better, because I'm the biggest fan of Siegel and Shuster and Bob Kane and all the guys who created those great characters. I'm not going to take the characters the way they are and just rewrite them a little bit and say, 'This is the Stan Lee version - this is how they should've been done.'
"What I'm doing, just for fun, I'm writing them as if they'd never been written before. It's as if I'd said to myself, 'I want to create a new character who's the strongest guy and can do anything, and can do anything, and I'm going to call him Superman. Now where do I go from there?'"

And Lee's firm in his conviction that they'll be different from the beginning. "I won't be saying, Instead of my Superman's home planet being called Krypton, we'll call it Argon - I'm not looking to do a parody or homage to what's already been done, but just for fun, I'm creating whole new things that might amuse and entertain a reader. It's not going to be a series about one particular hero - I'm doing one of each of each main DC character. I'm quite excited about it, and I think they are at DC too."

But in utter honesty, Lee confessed that there's one problem he's already seeing in the project. "I hope I can do a good job," Lee says. "After a while, you can get nervous when you realize that there are tens of thousands of people waiting to see this, each with their own expectations of what it's going to be like when it comes out. Obviously, I can't afford to kid around, it has to be good from page one and still good in the reader's mind once they put the issue down."

Confirming what the Daily Buzz reported a couple of weeks back, Lee explained that he would be writing all 12 issues from start to finish, outline to dialogue and captions. Ever irascible, Lee also confirmed one stickling point - you're not about to teach this dog an old trick - he's writing the 12 issues in the traditional Marvel style, sending an outline to the artist, and then dialoguing the pages the artists produced based on his outline.

"I've just done the first half of Wonder Woman and sent it to Jim Lee," Lee said. "For that issue, I wrote the longest outline for a comic book that I've ever written in my life - 11 pages. I usually write a half a page, a page or at the most a page and a half for a single issue outline, but I wrote an 11 page outline and sent it over to Jim, and as soon as he finishes penciling it, he will send it back to me, and I will add the dialogue and the captions.

For Lee, the Marvel Method, originally implemented to both allow a greater collaboration between writer and artist as well as to cut down on the time it took to produce a comic book, is simply the only way for him to do things. "I much prefer to let the artist draw the story the way he envisions it. You get the best work that way, as long as the artist follows the story, which they always do. Then, it's so much easier for me to look at the illustrations and write the dialogue and captions that absolutely go perfectly with those illustrations, or at least as perfectly as I can make them go."

Superheroes, Super-Creators

Lee admitted that he didn't do the picking when it came to the 12 heroes and teams that he'll write about in the series. DC gave him the list. "I think it was a dream list of someone's to see what I'd do with certain characters, because you have the classic guys like Superman, Batman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, the Justice League, Aquaman, as well as a hero like Sandman," Lee said. "I think it will be the Simon and Kirby Sandman rather than the Vertigo Sandman. Right now, I'm focusing on the issues before that one, so I'll be sure to ask before I start writing."

While he may be the icon for the old school of comics professionals, Lee is very new school when it comes to just letting out snippets and teases of his look at DC's iconic characters. On second thought, it shouldn't come as a surprise - Lee was an old pro at writing the teases at the bottom of the last pages of the classic Marvel comics he wrote. For example, Lee's teaser at the end of Amazing #38 ("The Biggest Surprise of the Season Awaits You! 'Nuff Said!) foretold the unmasking of the Green Goblin in #39…

So what about Lee's version of Superman? "I'm going to change his personality a little bit," Lee said. "He'll be different than the Clark Kent version we have now. Actually, he may not even have a secret identity…"

And Wonder Woman? "She won't be a goddess," Lee said. "There won't be all the powers of all the other gods in her. I gave it a different take. Again, I'm not trying to show that I could have done it better, because I don't think anyone could have done them better than the creators who created them.

"These are very pure characters. Take Superman - the idea of a guy coming from another planet, landing here as a baby, growing up to be a powerful hero. You can't improve on that, it's a perfect little myth and formula that anyone and everyone can understand, and the same goes for the rest of the characters - a boy's parents are killed, so he wants to make sure it never happens to anyone again. I'm not trying to improve on the original ideas, but just for fun, and just to stimulate readers interest and just hopefully to bring about more interest in the comic book genre."

Joining Lee for the series are a select group of artists all handpicked for the assignment by DC. "They did a great job in putting together all the artists for the series," Lee said. "They're teaming me with some great guys from the current comics scene like Jim Lee while putting me back with some old friends like John Buscema. Really, they're some of the top guys in the business, and I'm very happy with all of them."

All in all, good or bad, the project has Lee revved up for a challenge, and he's ready for it - "It's like Elvis Presley interpreting Caruso."

What About Marvel?

Despite making headlines in nearly every major national newspaper with the announcement (sometimes spun to hint at something more sinister) that Marvel's Stan Lee was going over to the competition, Lee said his relationship with Marvel has never been better and shows no signs of being strained by the highly touted project.

"I've heard from a lot of the artists, writers and editors who say they think it's great and can't wait to see the issues come out," Lee said. "I'm the Chairman Emeritus of Marvel, and contractually, I have to spend ten per cent of my time working for Marvel. To accomplish that, I write the Spider-Man newspaper strip [lettered by Usagi Yojimbo's Stan Sakai, by the way], I do the Soapbox column and Marvel-related interviews. The rest of my time I spend on my website, StanLee.net."

As a result of being nearly as identifiable with Marvel as Spider-Man, Lee can sometimes find himself placed in a difficult position when it comes to working with former creators, many of whom have, since leaving Marvel, come out with some pretty horrendous stories about their treatment following their employment by Marvel.

On the one hand, Lee has always been a near and dear friend to many creators from all ages of comics, Golden through Modern, but on the other hand, Lee is still a corporate spokesman for Marvel. When asked his feelings about such creators as Joe Simon or Jim Steranko speaking out against Marvel's policies, or in Simon's case, trying to get the copyright to Captain America back, Lee gave both sides of the picture.

"As far as I'm concerned, more power to the creators," Lee said. "The more power they can get, the more power they deserve, and I'm happy for them. But, the only thing I disagree with is people who say they didn't know what they were getting into. In the days that these characters were created, including the ones that I created, we knew that the publishers owned them. We never gave it a second thought. That was the way the business was - you work for a publisher, and he owns what you created while you worked there. Now if you find out years later that you may have a claim to it, my sympathies are certainly with the creator, but it's not a case of malicious trickery. Nobody fooled anybody in those early days. There were different ground rules back then - that's all. We knew what we were doing and what, in some case, we were giving up by working for a publisher."

Speaking of Marvel and the business side of things, Lee has recently been rumored to be looking for a means to buy Marvel, a rumor that has found enormous grass roots support in the fan community that, by and large, longs for the days then Smilin' Stan was calling the shots at Marvel. According to Lee however, that rumor will have to remain a dream for now - albeit an interesting one that may some day be acted upon.

"Honestly, buying Marvel is something that I never thought of on a conscious level," Lee explained. "It would be a wonderful dream, sure, why wouldn't I want to own Marvel and have control of those characters, especially since I co-created so many of them?"

"As I recall it, somebody asked me about buying Marvel once, and I said sure, if it were possible. It was just a casual thing. Then my partner at StanLee.net, Peter Paul gave a whole speech about how I should own Marvel and wouldn't it be great if I did. It kept going around and getting repeated and repeated in wider circles, so now all of a sudden people will call us and offer help if I want to buy Marvel. I don't know what's going on with it right now or how close it is to actual reality. Peter handles the business end of things, but it's nothing that I'm actively working on or doing. I just have too much work to do right here."

Lee also likes the rumor that he would be teaming with Michael Jackson to buyout Marvel lock stock and barrel - but confirmed that the Jackson rumor has basis in fact. "Michael and I had become friends a few years ago, and at that time, he wanted to buy Marvel," Lee said. "I told him good luck - anybody who wants to buy Marvel, go buy Marvel, I've got nothing to do with it."

"Michael came up to see me the other day, I'm not even sure why. I thought it was just a visit, so I showed him around the studio, and that was that. As far as I know, we're not doing anything, so it's not a case of Michael and I are looking to buy Marvel anytime soon. I haven't heard from him since he left. He's a funny guy. I see him every so often, and then he disappears and calls me months or years later and we get together and he disappears again. Who knows, he may call back with some plan, he may have decided against it a long time ago."

The Web of Stan Lee

Okay, we've held back from talking about StanLee.net until now - not an easy task, mind you, as the Smilin' one inserts a reference to it as often as possible in a reply to most every question. But Lee's enthusiasm for his much-hyped web endeavor doesn't come from a huckster perspective, and there's not a sales pitch to buy the stock underneath it all. While the 77 year-old Lee acts and sounds no older than 40, ask him about StanLee.net, and he drops another ten years, and is literally bubbling over with excitement and energy.

"StanLee.net is the most fun I've ever had in my life," Lee explained. "I'm creating all new things and we're animating them - it's like we're doing mini-movies. Besides the webisodes, we have so many other features that we're working on that we're going to hit the users with very shortly - games and contests and do-it-yourself things, and communication things and interactive stuff and surprises and novelties. They tell me that the Web can hold an unlimited amount of information and data, and we're sure gonna be pushing those boundaries!"

Part of Lee's enthusiasm for the website comes from a sense of familiarity to something he thought he'd given up years ago. "I've got a whole crew working with me, so all I have to do is say, 'Why don't we try something like…' and two or three guys run off and have a working model back to me in a couple of days. It's like the old days in the Marvel Bullpen, when it was just a few guys and anything we could dream up, we would do. There's almost a creative energy here that you can touch."

One of the most gratifying things for Lee about StanLee.net is that fact that, in large part, it's him. Sure, there are a bunch of other creators working on it, but for Lee, the realization that people are excited about the website and it's properties because they're created by Stan Lee. This time around, it's not Stan Lee's Spider-Man, Fantastic Four or X-Men that's getting the attention, it's Stan Lee getting the attention all by himself.

"It's very gratifying," Lee said. "I'm very grateful to the fans, and all of us are trying to give the fans' their money's worth. We want to make this website offer the most enjoyment and entertainment that any website ever could. The nice thing about it, we're being contacted every day by celebrities in the music business, the entertainment business, actors, writers, producers who all want to do things with us. That's the most gratifying thing of all - that these people are looking to work with us based on what they believe we're capable of. It's gratifying an humbling."

"We have so many projects in the works that nobody would ever expect with people that no one would ever expect us to be working with. In the next few months, it will all become apparent."

Comics vs. Webisodes

StanLee.net's premier outing is The 7th Portal, a serialized adventure featuring teens that have only met online who have to come together in a vast, online, virtual-reality world to save the world from Mongorr the Merciful and other threats. Animated through the use of Shockwave, it's currently the site's most popular attraction, with new webisodes available for download.

The website also features Scuzzle, a secret club for fans that hearkens back to the Lee's Merry Marvel Marching Society, a 'create your own comic' feature, a virtual online community and much more.

Lee was quick to point out the differences and differences between writing an issue of a regular comic and say, a webisode of The 7th Portal. "It's easier to write a comic because you have 20 or so pages to tell your story," Lee said. "Within those pages, you can really go many different directions and work on certain story parts without too much concern for your final page count. Actually, in the writing, it's pretty much the same except for having to condense things. We still have heroes and villains, action and suspense and you try to end with a cliffhanger - the usual kinds of stories people have come to expect in comics."

"But right now with the webisodes, we've only got thee and a half minutes per episode," Lee explains. "Any longer, and people who don't have DSL lines will end up taking too long to download the episode, and we don't want to lose them.

"By keeping the episodes short and not having too much dialogue or music, you can log on more quickly. That's a little frustrating right now. I'd like each webisode to be a half hour - I'd like these to be epics. But, we're limited by technology at this point, so there's only so much story we can tell. As technology gets more powerful and bandwidth increases for the average user, which will be happening sooner rather than later, we will be making the webisodes longer and having even more in them. That's not to say what we're producing now isn't good - they're great episodes of The 7th Portal with actors doing voiceovers, original music, and what I hope is a compelling story that makes our viewers want to come back for more."

With more and more comic creators shedding paper for web-based comics with each passing month, Lee walks the line between the two camps; one saying web-based comics will kill printed comics, the other predicting that web-based comics will save print comics. In Lee's version of the future, there's room for both, and both will benefit from each other's presence.

"I'm not a prophet, but I'm guessing that if we're successful, and all the other web-companies are successful, it would bring about a greater interest in comics and comic books," Lee said. "What we're doing essentially are superhero and fantasy stories. If we can create a new audience for things of this sort, once you're a fan of a certain genre, then you try to find entertainment in that genre wherever you can find it. If people like our webisodes, then they would probably want to read comics with similar types of stories. They'll want to go to movies and watch television shows with similar types of stories.

"This will be good for comics, because it will have people talking about it - we're using artists and writers from comics. People will get to know the names, and while we're not ourselves comic book publishers, we're still so closely aligned to comic books that if we're successful, I'm sure it's going to rub off on the comic book business. Likewise, comic fans will probably see our and other folks' ads and check out the websites like ours that feature original content geared toward comic book fans. It's a big enough world that both can exist comfortably."

Given his Chairman Emeritus standing with Marvel, Stan Lee is no longer involved in the day-to-day running of the company or managing the properties, so his reaction to the X-Men film is roughly the same as that of any other fan. "All of the X-Men that I've seen is the same as what everyone else has see, the two trailers," Lee says. "They look great to me, and they worked their particular magic - I'd love to see the movie. I've got my fingers crossed."

Something that separates Lee from his latter day comic-creator colleagues is that where the majority of today's creators are thinking of the hot actress who can play the lead female role in their new comic once the option gets picked up, he never thought of The X-Men (or Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four for that matter) as movies while he was working on them.

"I was too busy writing the comics and editing the comics and going out lecturing about the comics than to start playing the casting game of who would make a good Professor Xavier and Magneto," Lee says. "It was only in these past few years that we started getting active in movies, and at that point I knew sooner or later, they were all going to become movies, because that's how everything is going these days."

Lee's insider belief that X-Men will rule the box office this summer comes from his friendship with the film's director Bryan Singer. "I met Bryan about a year and a half to two years ago when the X-Men ball was starting to roll," Lee says. "There were a bunch of us sitting in a room talking about recent movies that we liked. Bryan was there, and I said that my favorite movie that had recently come out on video was The Usual Suspects. At that time, I had no idea that Bryan had directed it - I never pay attention to that, I just watch the movie."

When Singer later mentioned to Lee that he had directed The Usual Suspects, the comics legend was floored. "I just couldn't believe it, that this young guy had directed one of my favorite movies," Lee says. "Bryan said, 'Wait a minute Stan, you didn't know?' He thought that I was just saying nice things to build him up about directing the X-Men, and that was why I mentioned The Usual Suspects. I told him that wasn't it at all, and I was so surprised that he was the director."

The revelations weren't over. "Bryan told me he had another surprise for me. He whipped out a photograph of him and me from when he was about 18-years-old," Lee says. "I said 'Where the hell did you get this?' I had lectured at his college some years ago, and he had asked if we could take a picture together, and we did. I was so impressed that he had kept that photo all that time, and we've become quite friendly over the past couple of years. I'm very fond of the guy. He's brilliant and a hell of a nice guy and a fine director."

"Bryan is a very intelligent guy who does very intelligent moves, and I have to believe that if he's going to put his name on it, he's going to give X-Men a certain credibility and intelligence which any movie of this type needs to get beyond just having a bunch of young kids liking it, and telling their friends. I think we couldn't have picked a better director, and I'm hoping for the best."

Marvel and Hollywood

But don't get him wrong - Lee's memory isn't selective regarding Marvel movie projects. He remembers the whole list of Marvel characters that have made it to the big and small screen, as well as the results, warts and all.

"It's a little nerve wracking in Hollywood to be talking about the next Marvel Comics movie," Lee says. Blade helped our reputation a lot, but still we all want X-Men to be good and not be a bomb. One Howard the Duck is enough for us. Heck, one Howard the Duck is enough for anybody. I used to always get a big laugh when I'd lecture at colleges around the country by saying that DC was okay - they had Superman and those movies which did well, but we had Howard the Duck!"

Lee bases his belief that X-Men won't bomb on the fact that as soon as he landed the job, Singer took to anything and everything X-Men like a mouse takes to cheese. Singer's resources for learning about the X-Men began with what was inside Lee's noggin and went from there.

"We spoke a lot about the X-Men," Lee says. "We talked about their motivations and reason for remaining together as well as some of the early history. He was very interested in getting all the information he could about the team, the concepts, and the history. I know he read every book, and saw every X-Men cartoon. He really put a lot of work into it. Bryan wasn't a big comic book fan to begin with, but he did his homework, and with the trailers, we're starting to see that it paid off."

Something that Lee is extremely happy with about the movie is that it comes at an opportune time with an important message about relations between minorities and majorities. After all, what is X-Men aside from an allegorical story about racial, sexual, religious or other minorities working towards a society where all are accepted for who they are rather than what they look like or believe?

"That's what I had in mind when Jack and I created The X-Men - hate and fear of minorities will always result in turmoil with no one group ever feeling safe, accepted or free," Lee says. "From what Bryan tells me, that's still a very important part of the movie's theme. The fact that he's speaking to a larger issue beyond the special effects, costumes and cinematic stuff is going to be very important to the movie, and hopefully, elevate it above just another fantasy action movie. If everything works out, it'll be a movie with a very important message that will get people thinking, and more importantly, get people talking about the issues at its heart, and I'm really happy about that."

Moving On

With X-Men in the final weeks of post-production, Lee is beginning to turn his attention to another Marvel film, the ages-delayed film version of Spider-Man. So far, Lee is still waiting in the wings to see how the project develops, but he's already hinted that he wouldn't mind it at all if director Sam Raimi saw fit to give him a cameo role in the film.

"It started as a joke, but hey, I'd love to see it happen," Lee says. "It would be a nice way to be included. If it does happen, it actually may be my second cameo in a Marvel film - Bryan said he'd get me one in X-Men, but he was shooting in Toronto, and I couldn't get there during the main filming. He's back on the West Coast now, and may do some final scenes here in L.A, in which case, I'll probably have a quick, little, blink-and-you-missed it walk on appearance. I'd love that."

As for Spider-Man, Lee chuckles at the suggestion that's he'd make a fine Uncle Ben for the Spider-Man film - after all, Peter Parker's Uncle Ben was responsible for him becoming Spider-Man…

"You be sure you get everyone talking about that and telling Raimi how you feel," Lee says, chuckling. "Actually, when I was a little younger, I wanted to be Jonah Jameson if Spider-Man every made it to the movies. I would've been great, because I'm naturally nasty and rascal anyway."

It wouldn't have been his first time playing Peter Parker's blowhard boss. "I did a television appearance years ago in England - it was a show like the Tonight Show where they did wacky things, and the guys had written a Spider-Man skit and had me play Jonah. It was great."

As the questions wrap up, and the voices in the background become more persistent, insisting for Lee's time and input, the definite feeling comes across that Lee's just getting warmed up for another run at making comics history, somehow. At 77, ("I'm an early model '77," Lee says with a laugh) Lee is still one of the brightest-burning creative fires in the comics industry. What in the world keeps him going, when most 77 year-olds are comfortably enjoying their condos in Florida, golfing on the weekdays or playing with grandkids?

"Fear," Lee says laughing. "It's like Mel Brooks' 2000 Year Old Man routine - fear, greed, and hunger propel me. Seriously though, it's simple. I enjoy what I do. Maybe other creators my age don't enjoy what they're doing as much, or maybe they wanted a change. But for me, I'm working with the greatest guys in the world, once again working with the most talented artists, writers, directors. I'm having a ball creating all new stuff. Who'd want to stop?"