Stan Lee - Iron Man and what set us apart from the competition (17/42)

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   • Stan Lee (Writer)  

The creative genius of US writer Stan Lee (1922-2018) generated 'Spider Man', 'X-Men', 'The Hulk' and other complex characters. Marvel Comics with Lee at the helm became hugely successful. In January 2011, Lee received the 2428th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. [Listener: Leo Bear; date recorded: 2006].

TRANSCRIPT: Then I decided I would go against… I would try a tough one. All the kids… there was some war going on at this time – either Korea or Vietnam, I can't remember – but everybody was against the war. So I thought, I'm going to get a guy who makes munitions, and I'll make him a real industrialist. Something the kids would hate, you know… what did they call the… the… there's a name for it, I can't think of it. The something industrialist… Military industrialist. Military industrial… something... complex. Complex. Thank you very much. The military industrial complex. The kids in those days hated it. I've never been known for my memory. Oh, speaking of memory. I've been asked why do so many of your characters have the same letter in the first name as the second… Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Reed Richards, and on and on. And the reason I did that is because my memory is so bad, and was, and is… if I could at least remember one name if gave me a clue as to what the first letter of the other name was. So it would make it easier for me to remember it. See I'd be worried, my memory is bad now, I'd be thinking, oh, I've got to have Alzheimer's. But it's always been bad so I'm not worried about it. At any rate… so bad that I forgot where I left off.

So… oh, the military industrial complex. I made up a guy named Iron Man who was sort of like Howard Hughes. He was an inventor, an industrialist. He made munitions. All the things kids hate, but I said: ‘I'm going to make the kids like him’. And apparently they did, Iron Man was a very successful strip and it's still… they're making a movie of him now. And then I did… let's see, it's hard to remember them all. Iron Man… I did Sergeant Phil… Oh this was funny. My publisher Martin said to me at one point, ‘I don't understand why these books are selling so well’, which was a funny thing to say. And I said, ‘Because the style is different than all the other comics'... I'm writing… oh, and I also injected a lot of humor. For example, one thing I was proud of were the credits I wrote. For example, a lot of the other books didn't even give credits. They never mentioned who wrote it, who drew it, it was just a strip. Or sometimes they'd put the artist's name down. You know, the artist would just sign his name. That was it. But I tried to make it like a movie. I'd say… and I tried to write the credits in a funny way, so that the kids would read them... for example, ‘Written with passion by Stan Lee’;‘Drawn with… enthusiasm by Jack Kirby’; ’Lettered with a scratchy pen point by Artie Simek’. The last one was always something that was a different rhythm than the first two, you know? And I'd make the credits some sort of gag every time. The kids liked it. And then I started a… a page called the Bullpen Bulletins page, when I'd write announcements of things that were happening. And I wrote a column called Stan's Soapbox where I would philosophize about anything in the world, sometimes nothing to do with comics. And what happened was, I became like the living symbol of Marvel Comics. I was the one guy everybody knew and they thought I was talking to them. The readers thought of me as a kindly old uncle, maybe with a sense of humor. And the reason I did that, when I was a kid I was a voracious reader, and one of the books I read was The Adventures of Jerry Todd. Nobody ever heard of that except me. But the writer… it was a series of books like The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. One thing the writer did at the end of the book, he had a couple of pages where he would talk to the reader, and ask how the reader liked it, and tell how he happened to write it. And of all the books I read I felt I knew this writer, because of those pages. I think he wrote… he signed his name Leo Edwards. God knows if that was his real name, because nobody used their real name in those days but, Leo Edwards, I was so impressed with him. So I tried to get that feeling in the comics, and I think… I think it worked because wherever I go, or went, people would feel they knew me 'cause they had been reading the books, you know?

So at any rate, I had the Bullpen page, I had the Soapbox page, and even on the covers, I tried… to put things on the covers that would make the readers think that we're real people and they know… for example, one cover I remember, one book…

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