Over eight decades as an entertainment and media impresario – whose work has spanned comics, movies, TV shows and more – the imagination of Stan Lee has produced characters able to surmount or manipulate almost any limitation of the physical world. Think Spider-Man (Lee’s favorite creation), The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four and a host of other multibillion-dollar properties Lee helped dream up and on which the content colossus of Marvel Entertainment now rests.
Yet the man who has done more than most to bring comics to the mainstream says there is one power that hasn’t got much attention in the superhero canon – luck. “It’s really the one superpower left that hasn’t been written about,” says Lee. “I thought it would be fun to have a character who has a great amount of luck – some good, some bad – and go with that and see where it takes us.”
The result is Lucky Man, a 10-part TV drama starring James Nesbitt which was commissioned by Sky and is being made with Downton Abbey production company Carnival Films. It tells the story of DI Harry Clayton, a cop from central London’s murder squad who’s given a charm that seems to imbue the wearer with the ability to control luck. Clayton is played by Nesbitt, best known for TV series including Cold Feet and The Missing. It is due for release on Sky 1 next year – Lee says he “can’t wait till it’s out”.
A great deal of luck is also on display in Amazing Fantastic Incredible – A Marvelous Memoir, the life story that he wrote and published this month in comic book form that presents an illustrated Lee on the cover, arms outstretched, standing tall and confident like many of the titans he’s imagined into existence.
Born in New York City to Romanian immigrants, Lee escaped the hardscrabble life of a Depression-era childhood that saw his father frequently out of work partly by throwing himself into books. A lucky break eventually let him parlay that love of reading into work as an assistant at Timely Comics.
“I’d never really thought of doing comics for a living,” Lee says. “I read other things – novels, plays, everything. One day I heard about an opening in a publishing company. I found out the company, among other things, published comics, and that’s where the opening was. So I sort of fell into it. Comics were just another form of entertainment to me, but it got to be more and more interesting every day.”
His lucky break with the publisher quickly turned into a string of opportunities for the wide-eyed writer. One of his first assignments was a two-page story that carried a typically breathless title for comics of the period, Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge.
It was the first time Lee – born Stanley Lieber – used his pen name (later his legal name) and marked a jumping-off point for his career as a purveyor of pop culture which has earned him millions of dollars and throngs of fans who swarm him at conventions. He can’t help but get recognised thanks in part to the trademark glasses, familiar moustache and impish yet avuncular grin. His many cameos in Marvel blockbusters also keep him in front of fans.
He insists he still shows up to work at the Santa Monica offices of Pow! armed with loads of ideas to bounce off his co-founder and chief executive Gill Champion. Because while he can’t do much about the white hair or the fact he doesn’t hear too well any more, Lee’s superpower is the fertile imagination he still relies on to find sparkle in stories he can shepherd onto new media platforms that let him reach new audiences and fans who might never touch a comic book.
“We’re doing movies, we’re doing television, a line of children’s books, we’re working on a live action show,” Lee says, before turning to Champion. “Am I allowed to mention that? ... We’re so busy. I feel like I just shuffle paper.
“Things haven’t changed much, really, from when I started out. My only job, if you can call it that, is to come up with things people will enjoy reading or seeing on a screen. It boils down to the same thing – story. If I can come up with good story, good characters, Gill decides on whether it should be a comic book or movie or something to try to do as a TV series.”
Not that the public is exactly deprived when it comes to concepts, characters and stories Lee has had a hand in. In addition to Lucky Man, 2016 will see the release of season two of Daredevil, the live-action series built by Netflix (which debuted earlier this year) around a Marvel character that Lee co-created.
Other projects keeping him busy include the annual Stan Lee Comikaze convention in Los Angeles, last held a few weeks ago. Lee and Pow! also have their World of Heroes YouTube channel, and Lee helped F84 Games launch mobile game Stan Lee’s Hero Command earlier this year.
“Very often Gill will say to me, ‘I think somebody will be interested in this kind of movie.’ He usually doesn’t like the first 100 things I come up with. But the 101st? That’s the winner! I’m only kidding,” says Lee.
“My first thought is always ‘what can I do that hasn’t been done, story-wise? What will this character’s objective be, his motivation, his weakness, how can I make an audience care about this guy?’ That’s where the fun comes in.”
Lee’s approach to his characters has sometimes caused controversy. When Sony Pictures licensing agreements
stipulating that Spiderman could only be depicted on the big screen as white and heterosexual emerged, Lee backed the restriction, saying that while he had no problem with new characters being more diverse he saw no reason to change those already established.
More recently on Radio 4’s Today programme he was a
sked how he felt about a character in another of his creations, the X-Men, being gay. He professed to be unaware of the development, but seemed unconcerned, saying: “I don’t care what happens as long as they tell good stories, and they do.”
It matters whether or not that stance puts him in tune with his audience, as Lee uses himself more often than not as a proxy for his fans.
“I learned early on that I’m not that different from most other people,” Lee says. “So if I can come up with a character I think is exciting and there’s a compulsion on my part to learn more about this character, I figure a lot of people maybe will have the same taste I do. As far as what the ‘rules’ are or what a character needs to be successful – A, I don’t know how to put it into words, and B, even if I did, why should I tell other people how to do it?”
Curriculum vitae
Age 92
Education De Witt Clinton High School, Bronx, New York
Career 1939 joins Timely Comics (later renamed Atlas, then Marvel)
1942 military service
1945 rejoins Timely
1961 debut of the Fantastic Four
1962 the Hulk, Thor, Spider-Man
1963 Iron Man, X-Men
1964 writes Daredevil (pictured)
1972 stops doing monthly comics
1994 inducted Will Eisner Hall of Fame
2001 sets up Pow! Entertainment with Gill Champion, Arthur Lieberman
Posted by Andy Meek
