Tripwire At 25: Stan Lee

♦February 2017 marks the 25th anniversary of Tripwire, which began as a print magazine back in 1992. So every day this month, we shall be representing a classic interview or feature from our long history. Back in Tripwire Annual 2009, published in July of that year, we gave our LA-based correspondent Pat McGreal the job of chatting to Marvel legend Stan Lee about seven decades in comics. So we thought we would represent that as today’s classic interview or feature…

It’s A Marvelous Life

Comic geeks like me often pride themselves as being fans of the work of Stan Lee from way ‘back in the day’.  But… which ‘day’?  The early 1960’s, when he unleashed an explosion of superheroes that revolutionized comics?  The 1950’s, when he shrewdly treaded water in a sea of publishing uncertainty?  Or the 1940’s, when he presided over a Golden Age of iconic characters who whomped on the Axis and stirred the hearts of red-blooded American children? The truth is, Stan Lee is a man of many a ‘day’.  He was there almost from the beginning.  And he’s still going. I arrive at POW Entertainment, located in the poshest part of Beverly Hills, on a cloudy June morning.  A guy named Mike escorts me through the suite of offices and into its inner sanctum.  The Man himself greets me with a smile that seems to dispel inclement weather.  No matter how you look at it, Stan Lee is Stan Lee, upbeat and unshakably positive…

TRIPWIRE: It’s great of you to agree to talk with us.

STAN LEE: Yes, it is, rather.

TW: Can you tell me what were you doing to make a living immediately before you came to Timely Comics?

SL: Well, I had a couple of jobs. I was an office boy for the second largest trouser manufacturer in America.  It was called H. Lissner & Sons. And I was the office boy… there were two office boys.  And in those days they didn’t have ballpoint pens, they had pens that you dipped in ink or fountain pens and there were salesmen that sat in the place.  They each had a little cubicle and when their pen ran out of ink, they’d yell: “Boy!”  They never bothered to learn our names.  And whichever one of the two office boys was the closest had to come running: “Yes, sir!”  “Fill my inkwell!” or “Sharpen my pencils!”  That was the type of thing I did.  And I also got the mail.  I had to go to the post office on 34th Street and 9th Avenue, get a load of mail and bring it.  I walked eight blocks to the office with that big, heavy sack of mail every morning.  Before nine!  I only got paid from nine to five but I had to be at the post office at a quarter to eight to get the mail.  But it was a job.
And then… a better job… I was an usher at a big theater in New York called the Rivoli on Times Square.

TW: A movie palace?

SL: It was a movie palace. And being an usher was like being a West Pointer. Every morning the manager, he’d line us up and he’d check our uniforms and we were standing sort of at attention. Everything had to look just so.  There were six of us, six aisles, one at each aisle.  And when someone would come in, each usher tried to get the person to come down their aisle.  If somebody was heading toward you, you had to go… (Gestures grandly) … “This way!”  It was so hard to learn that gesture. The first few days I hit myself in the chin.  You had to go… (Gestures with a flourish under his chin) … like that, right under the chin.  So the first day, I did this…  (Hits himself in the chin)  But after a while I learned.  I’m very good at it.  (Stands up and gestures with a flourish)  “This way, Sir!”

TW: They actually taught you the gesture?

SL: Oh, yeah!  And let me tell you the biggest thing.  One day Franklin Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, came into the theater. Well, you can imagine — the President’s wife!  We all hoped she’d come down our aisle.  I got her.  She came down mine.  I guess I did that… (Gestures again) … so well.  And I was so proud.  I was walking down the aisle with my flashlight shining for her and my head high and some son-of-a-gun had his foot stuck in the aisle and I tripped over it and I fell on my face.  The next thing I knew, the President’s wife has me by the shoulders, helping me up and saying: “Are you all right, young man?” (Laughs) I’ll never forget that.

TW: How old were you at the time?

SL: Oh, I don’t know, seventeen.  It was a big thing to be an usher. I was very proud.

TW: I heard at one point you also were writing obituaries…

SL: Oh yeah.  That was when I was in high school as a spare time job.  I wrote obituaries for a news service of people who were still alive.  See, if you’re a celebrity, they have your obituary already written. ‘Cause you may wonder, somebody dies and in the next edition of the paper there’s a two-page write-up.  How did they do it so fast?  It’s been on file.

TW: Right.

SL: So that’s how you can tell you’re a celebrity.  I’d love to think my obituary is on file somewhere. (Laughs)

TW: I’m sure it is. (Laughter)  So what brought you to Timely Comics?

SL: My cousin, Jean Goodman, was married to a fellow named Martin Goodman, who had this little publishing company.  And I heard that they were looking for an assistant there.  So I went up to the office and I didn’t know it was comics because he also published other magazines.  I just knew that they needed somebody.  And it turned out that they needed somebody in the comic department.  The whole department was really Joe Simon, Jack Kirby and a brother of Martin’s named Arthur Goodman.  I never really knew what Arthur Goodman did.  He walked around with a ruler and measured the covers all the time like it was very important that they be the right size.  Other than that, I never saw him.  Anyway, I must’ve been the only guy who applied for the job, ‘cause they hired me.

TW: Had you had any aspirations at all to work in comic books up until that point?

SL: No, never.  I mean, I liked comics.  I used to read them. They had different comics when I was a kid.  They had Moon Mullins and Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy and the Katzenjammer Kids, things like that.

TW: Great comics strips.

SL: Rip Kirby, Flash Gordon… you know, I read them, I loved them…

TW: What were your aspirations?

SL: I wasn’t sure.  There were a lot of things… I wanted to be an actor but I knew there was no chance.  I wanted to be a lawyer but I couldn’t afford to go to law school.  I wanted to be in advertising but I had no idea how you get into advertising.  I wanted to be in anything where you dealt with people, where you weren’t sitting alone at a desk… so naturally, I ended up being a writer.  I sit alone at a desk! (Laughs)  Although I didn’t really just sit at a desk because I was lucky.  I was not only a writer, I was also the editor and art director.  So I was working with people.  That was what I liked the best.

TW: When did you become the editor and art director?

SL: Very soon. A year or so after that. Something happened. There was a problem between Jack and Joe and Martin Goodman and they left.  And I was the only guy there, except for his brother but his brother just walked around with a ruler.

TW: Did they leave to go work at DC?

SL: No, they didn’t… it had something to do with… they did something that I think they weren’t supposed to have done, according to Marvel.  Maybe they worked for another company secretly.  I don’t know what it was.  But [Martin] let them go and there I was, alone in the department, so he said: “Do you think that you could hold down the job of editor until I find a grownup?”  Because I was about seventeen, maybe close to eighteen.  Well, when you’re that age, what do you know?  So I said: “Sure, I can do it!”  And he never found a grownup apparently, ‘cause I’ve been there ever since. (Laughs)
And then I became the head writer because, at that time, I was practically the only writer. But I used a lot of the other guys that they had been using and little by little we built up a team of people that were working there.

TW: What titles were you writing once you took on this task?

SL: We had a thing called The Destroyer, I think I made that up.  We had a character called Father Time.  We had The Angel. We were still doing Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch and, of course, there was Captain America. There were a lot of others, I don’t even know what they were.

TW: Who were the artists that you were dealing with at the time? Simon and Kirby were gone from the scene…

SL: Yeah. Again, I have the world’s worst memory.  There were two fellows, Al Avison  and Al Gabrielle, they drew some of the Captain America issues. And then there was Syd Shores, who used to ink Jack Kirby’s Captain America but he was also a good penciller, and he began penciling Captain America. And then, of course, Carl Burgos did some things and Bill Everett, although I think they mostly worked on their own Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. And other artists came and went and I really can’t quite remember who they were now.

TW: Comics boomed in the 1940’s.  Throughout the war, they were selling in the millions, right?  About how many titles would you say you were handling?

SL: There was a time when I think we were turning out more titles than anybody, close to a hundred a month, it seems to me.  We were just grinding them out like sausages.  My biggest problem… we had so many good artists and writers, the material wasn’t the problem… getting it out on time was the problem.  And I was responsible.  I remember in my office I had four clocks, one on each wall.  (Indicates the four points of the compass)  There, there, there and there.  No matter where I was facing, I saw a clock so I always knew what time it was.  Because I knew by 3:00 we have to get this magazine to the printer, by 4:00 I need the artists to come in with this thing.  We didn’t really have a production man as such.  I was sort of doing it all… but I enjoyed it, it was great, I was working with great guys.  It was like playing, you know?  I was with my friends and we were playing, turning out magazines.

TW: Sounds like a killer pace.

SL: It was.  And then I was writing.  But I did my writing at home on evenings and weekends. After a while, I couldn’t keep up with it, so I said to my wife: “I’m going to tell Martin I need a day off to just stay home and write”.  She says: “He’s not going to give you a whole day off every week to write.”  I said: “Well, I can try.”  So I asked him and he did.  Then, later, the load of work got so much, I said: “I’ve got to ask him for another day off.”  She said: “It’s insane! I’d be embarrassed. You can’t ask him for that. You want to take two days off to write?”  He said OK.  It ended up I was staying home three days a week.  I stayed home Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I did my writing.  And Saturday and Sunday and evenings, of course.  Tuesday and Thursday, I was in the office editing and art directing.  But it was easy for me to edit ‘cause I had been doing most of the writing and I’m my own biggest fan.  I liked whatever I wrote so it didn’t need that much editing. (Laughs)  I spent most of my time [in the office] just art directing.

TW: You were working at Timely when the war came along.  You went into the army?

SL: Oh, that’s right.  I was in the Army for about three years.  I volunteered.  I had Signal Corps training.  I was supposed to go overseas and repair communications wires…  I learned to climb telegraph poles… for the troops so they’d be able to communicate while they were in battle.  But just as I was about to ship over, they found out that I had worked in comic books and they needed a writer in the training film department.  So I got yanked out and sent to Astoria, New York, where the Army had their training film department.  I spent most of the war writing training films and training manuals and things like that.

TW: There’s a particular achievement of yours?  A slogan…

SL: Well, I did a poster… it’s hard to know how to say this tactfully… but when the soldiers had carnal knowledge of a female overseas, they were supposed to go to what they called Prophylaxis Stations – Pro Stations — and they would be treated in such a way to make sure they weren’t infected by some female who might have had a venereal disease.  I was asked to do a poster letting the troops know that after you’ve been with a woman, go to the Pro Station or you’ll get venereal disease.  So I drew this little cartoon of a soldier, an enlisted man, walking up to a Pro Station and I put a dialogue balloon over his head and he’s going like this…  (puts his thumb through imaginary lapels) … “VD? NOT ME!”  (Laughs)  That was it.  They printed, like, a hundred trillion of those and I probably won the war that way, by our men not getting VD!

TW: Instant immortality.  (Laughter)  After the war, towards the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s, the comic business started to decline.  Superheroes fell out of fashion and I know Timely went on creating all kinds of other titles.  Is there any in particular title from that period that sticks out in your mind?

SL: Not really.  We did so many.  We did everything.  We were doing horror stories, and crime stories.  Martin, my publisher, was a very smart guy.  He wasn’t all that creative but he was a good businessman.  And his theory was: Find out what’s selling and put out magazines like those.

TW: This was his publishing philosophy?

SL: That was his philosophy… and it worked. He made a lot of money.  So if westerns were selling, he’d say to me: “Put out a lot of westerns.”  Suddenly he’d look around and he’d see that war stories were selling, and he’d say: “Let’s drop a few westerns and put out war stories.”  And that’s the way it was.  We did teenage stuff, we did animated cartoons, I did Terrytoons and Silly Seal and Ziggy Pig and Heckyll And Jekyll.  We did romance stories, we did everything, whatever was selling at the time.

TW: All the war stuff, Combat Kelly, Combat Casey.

SL: Our names were very basic.  Martin loved simple names.  Combat Kelly, Combat Casey, Battle Brady, Combat, War, War Adventures… I mean, just the simplest names. We did that with romance:  My Romance, Your Romance, Her Romance, True Romance, Our Romance.  (Laughs)  In fact, it was a funny thing… I wrote most of the romance stories.  Now, they were supposed to be confessions and they’re supposed to be written by women.  If it’s a confession story told by a woman, you can’t have a man writing it!  But I was writing ‘em and I always liked to put my name on it.  Now how can I put my name on it… ‘I Was An Abandoned War Bride’ by Stan Lee?!  You couldn’t do that.  But I figured out a way to do it… I would write on the title page: ‘As Told To Stan Lee’.  So I was able to put my name on without violating anything.

TW: A real confessional. (I hand Stan a pamphlet-sized publication)  During that period, you came up with this.

SL: Yeah.  (He takes it and grins)  I decided to be a publisher. Secrets Behind The Comics. I wrote this myself. I got a lot of the artists to contribute.  Ken Bald mostly did a lot of the artwork. My dear friend and assistant, Sol Brodsky, laid the book out for me.  I was going to tell the readers how comics are really done and I tried as best I could. The way I did this book is the way I did a lot of training films for the Army, you know, with words and pictures and cartoons.  To me, it’s the easiest way to read a book and that’s why I love comics.

TW: How did you distribute it?

SL: I don’t remember.  I think through the mail.  I think I put ads around.  There may have been a company that also got some out.  But I was the stupidest man living.  I think I printed 10,000 of them.  I sold all 10,000 at a dollar each and I thought: “Wow, I’m a success!”  It never occurred to me to print another 10,000  to keep it going.  I figured I sold ‘em, I made a profit, I’m a good businessman!  Then I went back to my own thing. (Laughs)  I did that a few times.  I once put out a humorous book of golf photographs with funny captions and I called it Golfers Anonymous.  Sold 10,000 of those in five days and I said again: “I’m a success, I’m a great publisher!”  I never went back to press.  (Laughs)  I am not the smartest guy you’re ever going to meet.

TW: As Timely moved into the ‘50’s, you began to work with new artists.  What can you tell me about Joe Maneely?

SL: Joe Maneely was… aw…  he was so good.  He could draw anything and he could draw it faster than anyone.  He and Jack Kirby were two miracle men.  Jack used to draw as though the drawing was already in his mind and all he was doing was tracing it on the paper, you know what I mean?  He never made little guidelines first and fiddled around. He put his pencil down, he started the drawing and he was finished.

TW: And there it was. Wow.

SL: And Joe Maneely was the same way.  He practically drew with a pen or with a brush.  His penciling was so slight it almost wasn’t there.  You know, a stick figure or an indication and then he took his brush or his pen, he used both, and it was finished.  He and Jack, I think they could do ten pages a day if they had to.

TW: That’s incredible.
SL: Yeah.  And versatile.  Both Joe and Jack could do anything —  comedy, romance, action, westerns, war, weird… anything.

TW: I could be wrong but I get the impression that a lot of the current generation are not familiar with Joe Maneely.

SL: It’s a shame.  He didn’t do that much… well, he did quite a bit but he didn’t… he died very young in an accident.  He did The Black Knight, which I loved.  It was as good as… it was like Hal Foster.  His westerns were great, he did some horror stories, he even did a newspaper strip with me, I think it was called Mrs. Lyon’s Cubs and we had that in the paper for a while.  He was terrific.

TW: As the ‘50’s went on, you did a lot of monster magazines and weird tales…

SL: Oh, I loved those, I loved those.

TW: The stories that I loved at the time and still do were the stories you did with Steve Ditko that eventually became…

SL: Amazing Adult Fantasy.

TW: Yeah. But even before that, there was always one story peppered into those books that was a five pager by you and Steve Ditko.  Is there anything you can tell me about those?

SL: Only that I loved doing them.

TW: They were so characteristic and different from the other stories that went on.

SL: I liked them so much that we later put out a book called Amazing Adult Fantasy, which was just those stories by Steve and me.  I don’t know why they weren’t bigger sellers because, to me, they were my favorite things.  I would just try to think up any kind of a fantasy story or a high concept story or a weird story and give it a O.Henry ending.

TW: They always had a wonderful twist at the end.

SL: Yeah. And we did it in three or five pages.  Steve…  you couldn’t have gotten a better artist for these things and I loved writing them and we were able to do them quickly.  I’m so glad you remember them because I loved them.

TW: What was Steve Ditko like?  What’s your reflection on him?

SL: He was the greatest guy to work with you could ever find. He was fast, he was dependable, his quality was always consistent, it was never: “Well, that isn’t quite good enough.”  Everything he did was great. And he cared, he put everything into it, he had a style that was totally distinctive, all his own.  I loved working with him. And you could depend on him.  You couldn’t find a better guy.

TW: Did he contribute to the plotting in any way?

SL: Well, they were always my plots but I may have said to him: “Steve, what I want is a guy walks into a store, he does this and that, and it turns out that the storekeeper is a ghost!”  I mean, I may have only told him a little bit and he determined how he was going to lay the strip out, what the panels would be, so he, in a sense, co-wrote them with me.  But it started with my story.

TW: That generally became the Marvel style.

SL: Yeah, always.  That’s right. And it happened because I had so much to write.  I didn’t have time to write complete scripts.  So after a while I stopped writing the scripts and I would say to Jack or Steve or John Romita or John Buscema or Gene Colan or whoever it was:  “This is the story I want to tell.  Now go ahead and draw it and I’ll put in the words later.”  And that was it. And these guys were so good at story boarding that they probably did it better than it would have been if I had written it panel by panel.

TW: I want to ask you about Jim Mooney.  I understand that he was a very good friend of yours.

SL: My best friend. I had two really great friends in the business. Ken Bald, who drew Patsy Walker a long time ago and one or two other things.  He was an artist for King Features, he did Dark Shadows.  He was a great guy.  He had been a Marine captain during World War II.  I think he was in either Iwo Jima or Okinawa, I don’t remember. And I hated him ‘cause he was so good looking.  He looked like Tyrone Power!  And he was a war hero!  I was so jealous of him when I first met him. (Laughs)  ‘Cause he had everything!  He had a beautiful wife who was an actress.  Nobody had a right to have everything like he did!  But we became best friends and we still are.  Jim Mooney… unfortunately we lost him last year… he was also my best friend.  He was an artist who worked for DC and for everybody, and he was a real Renaissance man.  He was a real artist to his fingertips.  He made a living in comics, but he was also a sculptor, he played the guitar.  He lived up in Woodstock where, later on, was where the hippies were…

TW: So his was a kind of Bohemian lifestyle?

SL: Yeah. And he also was a great looking guy.  I mean, he could have been an actor. And he was married to… did you ever hear of the Ziegfeld Follies?

TW: Of course.

SL: Well, there was another one called the Earl Carroll Follies.

TW: Sure.  The old Aquarius Theater used to be the Earl Carroll Theater.

SL: Yeah. He was married to an Earl Carroll girl.  So between Jim, who had it all, and Ken, who had it all… my two best friends… I felt like a nebbish! (Laughs)

TW: The schmuck in the middle.

SL: Anyway, I loved both of those guys.  Jim used to love antiquing and so does my wife.  And sometimes we’d go up to Woodstock and he’d drag us through these outdoor fairs, I forget what you call them… there’s things for sale…

TW: Flea market?

SL: Flea market, that’s the word. And it would be muddy, you know, it would have rained and there’s no pavement and I’m getting my feet wet and I’m freezing with a raincoat: “When can we go home?”   And he and my wife and his wife are looking at old rusty doorknobs:  “Oooh, look!  And this is a hinge from a door in San Simeon!  I wonder what they want for it?”  And I’m saying: “It’s freezing!” (Laughs)  I will never forget it.  Jim was the greatest guy in the world.  He and Ken.  Ken lives in New Jersey.  I’m just so sorry I hardly ever get to see him.  Those were the two guys.

TW: I was only familiar with Jim Mooney’s comic book work.  I had no idea that he painted and sculpted.

SL: Oh, he did everything.  I have a thing at home, a mask he made of me… a face of me.  I still have it hanging on the wall.  All the paint has rubbed off.  He did it a million years ago but he just batted it out… it really looked like me.

TW: By the early sixties, there was some distribution issue where Marvel was down to a handful of titles, right?

SL: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened was, we were distributed by a company called American News Company.  And for some reason, Martin had an adviser that he worked with, a good friend of his who was the general manager, and that guy talked Martin into quitting American News Company and doing our own distribution.  Now, I don’t understand distribution but for some reason, when we quit American News, all of the wholesalers whom American News had given the books to got mad at Martin because he left American News.  They didn’t want to accept the books.  And suddenly, Martin found himself without a distributor and his own distribution wasn’t able to get the books into the stores.  And that was a calamity.  I mean, what do we do?  So it ended up our biggest competitor, DC, agreed to distribute our books for us.  At that time we were turning out, I don’t know, maybe fifty, sixty, seventy books a month.  I don’t know how many.  But DC said: “We’ll distribute for you, but only twelve books a month!” (Laughs)  And that’s what happened.  Somehow we managed to build up the line from twelve books to become big again.  I don’t remember what happened.  I don’t think we stayed with DC forever.  We must’ve eventually gotten another distributor.

TW: But you were with DC as a distributor in the early superhero era.  That’s why Iron Man went into Tales of Suspense and Ant-Man went into Tales to Astonish.

SL: That may be, that may be. It was the dumbest thing any businessman had ever done… leaving American News Company at that time.  But even businessmen make mistakes.

TW: And during that period is when you guys hit upon all the superheroes that have become legendary.

SL: We hit upon the ones that became the foundation of Marvel. All in the same period, from 1961 to ’64.  It’s like there was something in the air.  We couldn’t do anything wrong. We came up with Fantastic Four, X-Men, Spiderman, The Hulk, The Avengers, Sgt. Fury, Thor, Daredevil… did I say Iron Man?
TW: It was an incredible outpouring.  As a kid growing up, I had never seen a Marvel comic, I read DC Comics…

SL: Shame on you.

TW: Then I stumbled upon my first Marvel comics.  Fantastic Four #21 and X-Men and The Avengers #2. I remember buying them and they just looked different, they smelled different, they were just kind of bigger and noisier. Within two months I was totally hooked.

SL: Good.

TW: Just totally hooked and the DC stuff seemed kind of staid and rigid.  But, of course, you know what you did.  You guys were, in my opinion, revolutionary in creating characters with relationships.  Let me ask this:  Marvel Comics, in the superhero period, fit right in with the zeitgeist of the 1960’s and everything else that was happening in the culture.  I’m assuming you were completely unaware of this when it began… yes?

SL: I don’t know.  It’s a funny thing.  I was trying always to do one thing, to do the kind of stories I would like to read and that’s all I’ve ever done.  I wasn’t thinking:  “I’ve got to do stories that fit in, we have hippies now and drugs are big and this is what the kids like or this is what older people like”.   Even today, with movies, everybody is trying to do a movie for the right demographics.  You do a movie for young men aged 18 to 24 and it can’t be… I never did that and today I don’t do that.  I wrote things that I would have liked to read.  And I like to read about people I can believe in who have problems.  How do they solve them?  ‘Cause we all have problems, you know, personal problems.  So I tried to give our characters personal problems.

TW: Which hadn’t been seen before.

SL: But there was another thing we did that I think was important.  We tried to bring the readers into Marvel and let them feel that they were a part of Marvel.  We wanted to be friendly.  At DC, for example, they had letters pages.  And they would get a letter and they’d print it in the book and it would say: “Dear Editor, I liked such and such… Signed, Charles Smith”.  If I got a letter like that, when I printed it, instead of Dear Editor, I’d cross that out and write “Hey, Stan” and signed it “Charlie Smith”.  And when I answered the letter, I’d say: “Hi, Charlie, Great hearing from you!”  When they answered the letter, it’d be: “Dear Charles, regarding your letter…”  Everything they did was so stiff and formal.

TW: Right, right.  It truly was.

SL: I tried to make ours as though we were friends talking to each other. And I did the Soapbox page and I did the Bullpen page to let them know what was going on at Marvel, to let them feel they knew the artists, they knew the writers…

TW: They were in on all the gossip…

SL: Yeah.  So besides the stories being done a certain way, I tried to treat the whole magazine in a different way.  When they buy a magazine, they’re having a friendly visit with their friends at Marvel.  I wanted it to be that feeling.

TW: And you created the Merry Marvel Marching Society.

SL: Oh, yeah, the club.  That was fun.

TW: And put out records.

SL: That’s right. Yeah.

TW: You said that Martin Goodman’s publishing philosophy was: Find out what sells and then copy that.  And that’s what you had done for…

SL: All my life.  Until the sixties.  Until ’61.

TW: So from that point on, I’m guessing, it was extremely liberating for you.

SL: Yeah, after all those years. After all those years, yeah.

TW: All of a sudden you’re not following the trend, you’re setting the trend.

SL: Yeah.  For the first time.

TW: Very remarkable.  Just a great, great run in comics. I visited you guys in 1964, I was ten or eleven…

SL: ’64, yeah, we were in full swing then.

TW: You were still at 625 Madison Avenue and I brought a bunch of little figures, plastic army men and other figures that I sculpted and put clay on and painted as all the Marvel superheroes…

SL: Really?

TW: … and I left them at the offices and you guys were kind enough to send this letter back. [I hand the letter, typed on old Marvel stationary, to Stan]

SL: Oh. My secretary, Flo Steinberg.  [He carefully reads the letter]

TW: Give us some reminiscence on Flo…

SL: Yeah.  I dictated this to her. How do you like that?  Oh, Flo was wonderful.  She was the most loyal employee you could ever have.  She loved Marvel and she loved the people working there and she loved what she did.  She was rather a shy girl, in a way, and very sweet.

TW: Was she an essential component?

SL: She was definitely part of the Marvel bullpen.  She was just great.  No secretary could have had the enthusiasm or the love for what we were doing more than she did, you know?

TW: Do you stay in touch with her at all?
SL: She still does work at Marvel.

TW: I didn’t realize that.

SL: Well, she’s in New York and I’m here. But every once in a while I’ll see her when I go to New York.

TW: There were so many great artists who worked at Marvel. You mentioned Kirby earlier. What is your general assessment of his abilities?

SL: Jack was the greatest. There’s no doubt about it.  I never knew a fellow with an imagination like his. I mean, he could dream up more wonderful things… like The Silver Surfer. I came up with Galactus and I told Jack what to do and how I wanted Galactus to be in the story.  And when he brought the story in, I see this crazy looking guy on a flying surfboard. I said: “Who’s that?” He said: “Well, if you want Galactus to be somebody who goes through the galaxy draining the stars of energy… if he’s so big and powerful… there ought to be somebody who goes ahead of him like a herald who finds the planets for him.”  Which was a wonderful idea.

TW: A great concept.

SL: And I loved the way Jack drew The Silver Surfer.  So instead of just making him a guy who’s finding planets, I decided to really play him up and give him the personality that we gave him.  No matter what I would tell Jack I wanted the story to be, by the time he had drawn it he had added a hundred things that I never thought of that made the story that much better.  He was a genius.  Like so many of the artists who were with us, he never did less than his best work.  It was always top quality!  The same with Maneely, the same with John Buscema, the same with John Romita, the same with Gil Kane, the same with Gene Colan and I could go on and on.  These guys were the greatest.  And they were storytellers.  They not only drew beautifully but they knew how to draw so that from panel to panel it flowed smoothly.

TW: What a treat to work with such an array of talent, to have your stories come back enhanced that way.

SL: I was blessed.

TW: What is your opinion on what’s going on at Marvel now?

SL: I have no idea what’s going on.

TW: You don’t follow the comics at all?

SL: I don’t have time. I mean, I’ll look at them occasionally. I think Joe Quesada is doing a great job.  He keeps coming up with new ideas that people talk about.  They may like some, they may hate some… it doesn’t matter, they talk about ‘em.  There are constant surprises.  He’s got some of the greatest artists.  I see artists in some of these books that… they’re more than just comic book artists, they’re illustrators, they’re painters, they’re designers, they’re… the artwork today is so, you know, so much is done with colour by computers and so forth. And the books look so different than when I was doing them…

TW: Yes.

SL: … that it’s hard to relate to them.  It’s like a different business, a different field.  But they’re beautiful.  The thing that bothers me the most is I used to know everybody by their first name in our company and in the field. I knew everybody. We had all worked together at some time or other. Now, I pick up books, I don’t know the name of one artist and hardly any writers.  They’re all new names and I’m so totally out of it and I hate that.  But there’s nothing I can do about it. (Laughs)

TW: And yourself?  You say you don’t look at the comics that much… what are you up to these days?

SL: Well, I’m working on movies, television shows, DVD’s, things that you’ll see on the internet, on your telephone, you know, all that electronic media… so I keep pretty busy.  It’s exciting and I love it.

TW: There’s a film biography on you due out called True Believer…

SL: Yeah.  It’s a documentary and it’s a little embarrassing, I think. But they’ve been working on it for a couple of years now, interviewing a lot of people and getting a lot of old artwork from God knows where.  They’ve put so much work into it. It’s almost finished.

TW: Have you seen a cut of it?

SL: I’ve seen some of it and it’s beautiful.  I like it but I don’t know if the world is ready to see the story of my life. They intend to take it to the Toronto Film Festival later on this year. We’ll see what happens…

TW: I’m looking forward to seeing it.

SL: So am I. (Laughs)

TW: I won’t keep you any longer.

SL: Well, you’re great to talk to.  I’ve enjoyed this.

TW: Likewise.  I can’t thank you enough.

SL: Yes, you can.
visit www.stanlee.com on the web for more information about the man himself

Stan Lee Throwback www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk