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[epic tones]

- [Announcer] The 2008 National Medal of Arts to Stan Lee,

for his groundbreaking work as one of America's

most prolific storytellers,

recreating the American comic book.

His complex plots and humane superheroes

celebrate courage, honesty, and the importance

of helping the less-fortunate,

reflecting America's inherent goodness.

[applause]

[heroic music]

- Stan Lee is a giant and a giant

like Walt Disney is a giant.

- Lee created Spider-Man, and the Hulk,

and Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Iron Man.

- These characters are larger than life.

- Stan Lee is a pioneer in the truest sense.

- Without him, there are no comic books stories,

no Marvel stories really being told.

- He really put himself into the comics.

- He hooks into old, tried and true themes,

but he's done it in a way

that I don't think anyone else has.

- Stan was really the first comic book writer

to make the human being behind the mask

more important than the mask itself.

- The most famous name in American comic book history.

- Stan Lee. - Stan Lee.

- Stan Lee. - Stan Lee.

- Stan is very hot.

- He's 86?

I look older than he does.

- The man who kinda changed the face of comics.

- That's Stan Lee.

That's, you know.

I'm like, oh my god.

- It influenced the lives of like millions and millions.

- He's really become a major icon himself.

- When I met him on the set, I saw everybody

crowding around him, it was like Mick Jagger was there.

[cheering and whistling]

- I've been here for three days straight for Stan Lee.

[cheering and whistling]

- I just relate to so much

of what Stan Lee writes in his characters.

[cheering and applause]

- Peter Parker reminds me of myself.

- I learned to read because of Spider-Man comics.

- Stan Lee.

[whooping and cheering]

- We love you, Stan.

[orchestral music]

[cheering and applause]

- Stan Lee.

- [Stan] Uh-oh.

- I'm your greatest fan ever.

[cheering and applause]

[epic heroic music]

- Creating comics was never part of my childhood dream.

I never thought of that at all.

Believe it or not, I wanted to be an actor.

I'd go to the movies and I'd think,

gee, I wish I were up there on the screen.

That must be the most fun you could have.

I remember my really first hero was Errol Flynn.

[dramatic music]

[swords clanging]

- Did I upset your plan?

- [Stan] Well, my upbringing was in the Depression days.

- We lived in the Bronx on University Avenue.

- That old apartment that we lived in, wow I hated that.

My mother and father slept in a couch in the living room

that opened up into a double bed

and I slept in a little bedroom in a bed.

I still remember how important it was

to have enough money for a loaf of bread

or a bottle of milk.

One biggest worry my mother and father had

that I used to hear them repeating all the time,

is what will we do if we can't scrape enough money together

for the rent this month.

And that went on and on.

My father was too worried about just getting a job.

The poor guy was out of work most of the time,

which is why I was working even when I was in school,

I always had part-time jobs.

When I was 16 I worked

at the world's second-largest trouser manufacturing company,

then I got a job as an usher

in New York at the Rivoli Theater in Times Square.

I got into comics by accident when I heard

there was a job open at Magazine Management,

they wanted me to work in the comic department.

Some department, it was two people, Joe and Jack.

And they were the two who were really running Timely Comics

when I came there to work.

Jack was the artist and he did some of the writing, also.

Joe was the writer, mainly, but he was also the editor.

So he was the one I had most to do with.

He'd send me down for sandwiches

or ask me to fill an inkwell.

I mean, I did a lot of real journalistic things with them.

- I remember the first day he came here,

he came to the office, he had a little flute

and he'd sit in a corner and play his flute

and drive Jack Kirby crazy.

[laughing]

I never thought when he came to the office he would make it.

- There was a time when they needed a two page filler.

- Each comic book had to have two pages of prose

to be accepted for second-class mailing privileges.

And that was our contention.

Nobody ever read that stuff.

So I started Stan on writing these two pages.

- And I thought, wow, my first assignment.

So I wrote one called, I think,

Captain America: The Traitor's Revenge.

- Stan treated the thing with great respect.

He was now a professional writer.

- My name at the time was Stanley Martin Lieber.

I took my first name, Stanley, and cut it in half.

I didn't wanna use the name Stanley Martin Lieber,

'cause I was saving that for the great American novel

which I never wrote.

- After about 10 issues of Captain America,

less than a year, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby suddenly left

the entire company and all of a sudden

we didn't have an editor.

Captain America was left in the lurch

without its main writer and artist.

- I looked around to see who'd replace them,

and I realized there was nobody.

I was the only guy there.

So the publisher, Martin Goodman,

he said, "Do you think you can hold down the job

"of editor and art director and head writer

"until I get a real person?"

I was about, I don't know, 18.

I said, "Sure, I can do it."

- It's more that he was there.

He was writing.

He was even a relative.

But the main thing was he also would've recognized

that Stan was a bright kid, he's working cheap.

You know, so why not put him in charge?

- I wrote a lot of the Captain America stories,

but then, eventually, a lot of other writers did,

'cause there wasn't time for me to write everything.

[heroic music]

[planes roaring]

[bombs whistling]

- America went to war and the superheroes

went to war along with them.

What could be more of an ultimate super-villain

than the Nazis?

- Simon and Kirby were the first two

to really play Hitler up as the world's worst villain.

If you'd look at almost any issue

of a Marvel comic, which was then a Timely comic, I guess,

you'd see Sub-Mariner, or the Human Torch,

or Captain America battling some really ugly,

gruesome, fiendish-looking Nazi or Japanese villain.

- Comic books were selling.

We were living our mythology.

We were living our folklore and we were winning the war

through our superheroes and our real heroes overseas.

[patriotic music]

- And, I guess, I myself got so caught up

in all of that, that the next thing I knew,

I had enlisted in the Army.

[military music]

I felt our nation was really in danger,

and I couldn't have lived with myself

if I were a civilian while other people

were over there fighting.

In the Army, I was classified as a playwright.

They sent me to different camps

where I wrote training films.

- He even drew a pamphlet about how not

to get a venereal disease, which he's very good at.

- [Stan] There were only nine men in the Army

who were classified as playwrights,

and I was in great company.

There was William Saroyan, Carl Laemmle Junior,

Frank Capra, and a guy named Theodor Geisel,

whom you may know as Dr. Seuss.

- He was evidently so good, he could always

finish his work so fast, that then he'd be able

to sit around and goldbrick for awhile, I guess, you know.

[cheering and applause]

- After the war ended, we could all get back to normal.

Everybody thought that was the last war we'd ever have,

now there'd be peace in the world.

[whistling]

Hello, how are ya?

Good to see ya.

- Did you have a good day?

- Yeah, how are ya?

You look great, but you always look great.

- What would you like?

- I'd like to put my bag down for a minute,

I'll be right back.

I don't know how we ever got married.

- That's the difference between you and me.

- [Maid] How many years?

- Oh, do you know how many years?

- 60.

- I'll tell you, 60 years.

- 60 years this year.

- On the 5th of this month.

- And I still don't think I've got it right.

- Well I may as well tell you the whole truth, really,

and nothing but the truth.

I crossed over on the old Mauretania from England

during the last of the lovely wars,

and I came over as a war bride.

And I became a hat model.

And Stan said to one of the salesmen there,

"That's the girl I'm going to marry."

And he said, "Not a chance, she's married already."

And he said, "No, that's the girl I'm going to marry."

And six weeks later I was in Reno, spending his money.

- I can't dance.

- Come on, get up.

- I'm no good.

No, I won't do it, I will not...

People who think I'm wonderful, I will not...

No, no, please don't do this to me.

Just go ahead, you're real good.

Should've seen her 60 years ago.

Okay, this is what she hates.

You don't do that.

You don't that in this dance.

- This is how you messed up.

There you go.

♪ Young and gay and sweet and dancing

- Everything is mutual.

I love her and she loves me loving her.

- And he loves him, and I love him loving him.

And that's it.

There we go.

You know how lucky we are to be able

to move like this at our age?

Sweet Jesus.

- After World War II, I got married.

My wife and I, we lived in Long Island.

- We lived in a wonderful, crazy apartment he had.

96th and Madison.

We had this little penthouse.

We had a lot of wonderful, crazy friends.

And Stan was with Timely Comics then.

And he was on Empire State Building.

I remember how marvelous it was to go up

in that elevator and there would be Stan

with these young men, sketching and doing,

and laughing and talking.

- [Stan] Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to welcome you

to the home of Marvel Comics, the Bullpen.

- [Interviewer] Stan, I always wanted to visit the Bullpen.

What is the Bullpen like?

[chuckling]

- [Stan] Well, there are very few bulls.

- There was an extensive bullpen

Coming and going in that bullpen

was some of the giants in the industry

and Stan had them at his disposal.

- We turn out about one complete comic magazine

every working day.

When I would describe the kind of drawings I want,

if somebody was recoiling in horror at some scene

and the artist would draw like that,

I'd say, that's okay, but how about [shrieking]?

How about like that?

- He would jump on the couch.

He would leap across.

He would do Aunt May's voice.

- He would jump up on the desk,

practically, to act out how he wanted to heroes to do

and that was a major feat to get up on that desk

with all that junk on it.

- He was a believer in the silent film approach

to storytelling, don't do anything mildly.

If somebody is gonna pound on a desk,

you know, you don't go.

No, you go.

You smash.

That's the way he used to do it.

So he would animate everything he wanted to do.

He would say, "Have Doctor Doom do this,"

and he would jump in front of you

and he would leap and he'd leap over the couch.

There are stories that before I was doing

sessions with Stan, that people down the hall,

they would see Stan doing these gyrations in his doorway.

One time, he was doing the old comic stick,

where somebody's strangling you.

He was strangling himself and pulls himself back in,

and everybody comes running down there.

They thought somebody was attacking Stan in his office.

But he was very animated.

- You know, it's a funny thing,

some people somewhere think that I wrote and drew.

They think that the strips were just mine,

but they would've been nothing

if not for the artists that I worked with.

I just put the words in the people's mouth.

And I may have come up with the original idea,

but after that, it was a partnership.

- Stan allowed the artist to be themselves,

and that, I think, was the key.

- If you take a look at credits on comic books

back in the 1950's, good luck.

There were rarely any credits.

You didn't know who the writer was.

You didn't know who the artist was.

Stan made sure that everybody got a credit,

and he started building personality around these people.

- I'm suddenly Jazzy John.

- Gentleman Gene Colan.

- Joltin' Joe.

- Darlin' Dick Ayers.

- Rascally Roy Thomas.

- Jack Kirby became Jolly Jack Kirby.

- Now you're part of the bullpen, you were somebody now.

- I wanted our readers to feel they're part of a group,

an inner circle, and we're all having a lot of fun

that the rest of the world doesn't know about.

So I wanted to form a club.

I gave it a silly name, the M.M.M.S.,

the Merry Marvel Marching Society.

♪ You belong, you belong, you belong, you belong

♪ To the Merry Marvel Marching Society

- [Stan] Hey out there in Marvel land, face front

This is Stan Lee speaking.

You've probably never heard a record like this before,

because no one would be nutty enough

to make one with a bunch of offbeat artists.

So anything is liable to happen.

- [Jack] Hey, who made you a disk jockey, Lee?

- [Stan] Well, Jolly Jack Kirby,

say a few words to the fans, Jackson.

- [Jack] Okay, a few words.

- [Stan] Look, pal, I'll take care of the humor around here.

- [Jack] You, you've been using the same gags

over and over for years.

- [Stan] Hey, what's all that commotion out there, Saul?

- [Steve] Why, it's Shy Steve Ditko.

He heard you're making a record and he's got mic fright.

Whoops, there he goes.

- [Stan] Out the window again?

You know, I'm beginning to think he is Spider-Man.

- [Steve] You mean he isn't?

- [Stan] 'Nuff said.

Now, let's all get back to work in the bullpen.

And as for you, Marvelous Merry Marchers, welcome.

- [Bullpen] Wahoo!

[jazzy music]

- In the gay, halcyon early days,

Jack Kirby developed most of the Marvel heroes with me.

Jack drew like a movie director.

He couldn't draw anything dull.

- In a very short span of about five or six years,

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created more successful characters

than any person or two people together

have ever created in the history of comics.

- I always marveled at the fact that Jack was able

to design so many varied characters,

and yet make each one totally different than the other.

Jack would just put his pencil down and start drawing.

He drew with such certainty, he knew

just where every line was gonna go.

There was no hesitation, and it worked out perfectly.

It was incredible.

- I'd feel that story first.

I know those people, first.

When I put them down, they've already lived,

and I put them down as I'd like them to live on those pages.

- I had worked with Jack so much,

we did those monster stories,

we did westerns, we did war, we did everything.

[explosions and gunfire]

I would give 'em the plot.

I told them what I wanted the story to be.

- I used to hear them plotting stories,

but I don't remember them ever agreeing on anything.

Jack had his own idea.

He went home and did his version.

And Stan, when he got the pages,

said, "Gee, Jack didn't remember anything we talked about."

Jack did one version, Stan made it something else,

and that's why there's a disagreement

between Jack Kirby and Stan Lee as to whose story it was.

- [Stan] We used to have disagreements.

I never thought it got him angry.

I love fighting with people.

Maybe it bothered him when I always said, "You're wrong."

I don't know.

- A lot of reporters always thought,

oh, Stan created everything.

They'd come into Stan's office and Stan would sit there

and he's so charming and wonderful, you

- Somebody wanted to interview me

for the Herald Tribune Magazine section.

And I said, "But look, if you're gonna interview me,

"I really think you should interview Jack Kirby

"at the same time, 'cause he works on it with me."

He came up to the office and he interviewed us.

Jack told me that he was gonna stay up late Saturday night

with his wife and they were gonna go

to the newsstand so they'd get it right away.

The first five columns were all about me

and how wonderful I was.

In the sixth column, he started talking about Jack

in a very unflattering way.

I got a call from Roz, Jack's wife,

and I hadn't seen the article.

I thought she was calling me to say how great it was,

how excited they were, and she was in tears.

She said, "How could this have happened?"

It was the most horrible thing, really.

Jack quit, and I really suspect

it might have been as simple as the fact

that he got tired of having the credits read

by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby all the time.

And he may have wanted to strike out on his own.

As far as I'm concerned, there's no controversy.

He was the greatest partner a guy could have.

Eventually, Jack contacted me and he wanted

to come back again, which made me happy.

[jazz music]

- Do you think that there is any danger

in taking young people and showing them figures

and fantastic apparitions like some of your superheroes,

Captain America, Hulk, and so forth.

- Oh no, no more danger than reading fairy tales

or poetry or the Bible.

- It is my opinion without any reasonable doubt

and without any reservations, that comic books

are an important contributing factor

in many cases of juvenile delinquency.

- [Stan] Dr. Wertham was the leading opponent of comics

and the most vocal one.

At the time when he was having his big harangue

against comics, people were very concerned about violence

and about sex and about I guess anything

that Dr. Wertham wanted to mention.

- He interviewed a hundred juvenile delinquents,

they all said that at one time

or another they read comic books.

Therefore, Dr. Wertham concluded,

comic books cause juvenile delinquency.

- [Paul] When I was a boy and played with a gang,

we did a lot of things, we roasted potatoes

and went on expeditions, we tipped over

garbage cans now and then, we wrote nasty remarks

about the teacher on the sidewalk,

but we never spent an afternoon

sitting around like this, reading.

They're reading stories devoted to adultery,

to sexual perversion, to horror,

to the most despicable of crimes.

- Senators were merciless.

They would say, "You're in it for the money."

Of course you're in it for the money.

We're not, you know.

And is it worth the money if you're gonna

distort youngsters' aspect of life?

- One of my favorite accusations that Dr. Wertham made

was that comic books cause asthma,

because children were staying indoors to read them

instead of playing in the fresh air.

- [Stan] The fact that he was a psychiatrist,

this impressed parents and they began to think,

golly, what's going on in these comics?

- Dr. Wertham suddenly gave parents an easy answer,

don't think you're a bad parent

it's those damn comic books that are ruining your children,

and people seized on that and jumped on it.

- See, Americans were embarrassed about comics.

- Stan and I never used to say we worked on comics.

I said I was an illustrator, Stan said he was a writer.

Never mentioned comics.

- Occasionally, some people who we weren't too familiar with

would come over to me and say, "And what do you do?"

Oh man, I didn't wanna admit what I did,

so I'd say something like, "Oh, I'm a writer,"

and I'd start to walk away, but he'd follow me.

"What do you write?"

I'd say, "Um, stories for children."

I'd walk away again, he'd follow me.

"What kind of stories?"

At some point I had to say comic books.

At that point he would turn around and walk away.

The publishers got together and hired a psychiatrist

or somebody, I think her name was Trulock, Mrs. Trulock,

to head up an organization called

the Comic Magazine Association of America,

and they would be a self-censorship group.

And they would make sure there was nothing objectionable

for kids, not too sexy, not too violent, et cetera.

- You couldn't sell a book unless it had their seal on it,

approved by the Comics Code.

- The imposition of the Comics Code created a blandness.

It stifled creativity.

And the extremes that were built into the code,

if you look at them today, are almost laughable.

[jazz music]

- No topics shall explicitly present the unique details

and methods of a crime.

Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited.

Subjective and salacious illustrations is unacceptable.

- It was an incredibly frustrating time also.

I would meet somebody somewhere,

hey, you're the guy who writes Millie the Model.

Gee, I read that, that's great.

Never heard that.

The sales got very bad and our publisher, Martin Goodman,

had to drop a lot of comic books.

- It took about two years when we got to the point

where that's when we went belly-up.

- And Martin said, "Stan, I'm going to Miami,

"I'd like you to tell the staff that we have to let 'em go."

That was always the thing I had to do,

and that was like one of the worst moments of my life,

because these weren't just artists

and writers who worked for me,

these were people who were like my closest friends.

I knew their wives, I knew their kids,

I knew all about them, and I had to,

I'm sorry we won't have any work for you

for oh, I don't know, maybe a year or two.

Oh god, it was the worst.

- I didn't get any work.

There was no place I could get any work.

So, I got a job as a security guard for General Foods.

- I thought for sure, in '54, that I would

never be working in comics again.

- We moved up to 260 Park Avenue.

Stan, he had one little room, and he was all by himself.

He had no secretary and no bullpen,

no one to do any corrections.

- [Roy] Stan was virtually the only employee

in the comics, you know.

- Doing comics was like, you were on the bottom rung

of the creative totem pole, so to speak.

Here I am, a grown man, I was in my 30's,

and I'm doing juvenile things.

Most of my neighbors, they were stock brokers,

they were bankers, they were businessmen,

they were doctors, they were lawyers.

They didn't take me seriously.

What kind of reference was the fact

that you had been writing comics?

So I kept staying there, 'cause I had a wife and a baby,

a child, but I didn't know where else to go.

But finally, I was ready to quit by about 1960 or '61.

I had been doing it for 20 years and I said to my wife,

"Look, I'm sure there's something I can do.

"I'll try to write a novel or something."

And she said, "Stan, if you wanna quit,

"why don't you first do one comic book

"the way you'd like to do it for a slightly older audience.

"Write it the way you feel like writing it.

"Get it out of your system.

"The worst that can happen is you'll be fired,

"but you wanna quit anyway."

When Joan finally said, "Why don't you do one book

"the way you'd like to do it,"

it was like a light bulb exploded over my head.

I felt, well at last, at least I'll get it out of my system,

and then I'll quit or be fired.

Martin said to me, "Why don't you do a book

"with a bunch of heroes?"

So I figured, okay, I'll get a group of heroes,

but this time, I wanted to do them my way,

and I wanted to write things to appeal to older people too.

If I had a superpower, there's no way

I would wear a mask and not want people to know who I was.

I'd want everybody to know, look at me,

I can do things you can't do.

I'm better than you are

and here's my name if you don't believe it.

[cheering]

It was right there in that moment,

with Fantastic Four number one,

that the Marvel age of comics started

and that what Stan Lee has become started.

- 1961, now there's a notable year.

John Kennedy became president.

Alan Shepard became the first American in space.

The bikini became fashionable.

And Marvel Comics made its debut.

- Just all these comics that were

unlike anything that I'd seen before.

The pages rippled with energy.

[glass shattering]

- Comic book superheroes, up until 1961,

were cardboard characters.

They didn't really have a sense of humor.

There was no texture to it.

There were no subplots.

- We try to write stories we would enjoy,

and apparently there are enough people in the world

who have the same tastes.

I hate to say that,

I'd like to think my taste is far better,

but apparently everybody must have

pretty much the same taste

because the books sell pretty well.

- All of a sudden, Stan's superheroes were dealing

with angst, self-torment, anguish.

- This was really the first time

that an added dimension of personality

had been brought in to the superhero.

Stan was able to tap into something

where you became interested in the character

as opposed to the costume.

- Wait a minute, they're fighting with each other.

They don't particularly like each other.

They don't like their powers.

They think it's like a curse,

and not something good that happened.

- One character, the Thing, who's one

of the most popular ones, the first time

he wore a superhero outfit in the street,

he reacted in a way I've always felt

a character in a book should react,

instead of taking it for granted,

he said, "I feel like a nut in an outfit like this.

"People are looking at me."

And we've had stories where they were evicted

from their headquarters because they had lost a lot

of money in the stock market

and they couldn't pay their rent.

Things that had never happened to superheroes before.

See another thing, I didn't see any reason

for our superheroes, such as the Fantastic Four,

to live in cities like Metropolis or Gotham City.

I figured, hell, why can't they live in New York, you know?

I knew New York, so I made it New York.

I could write comfortably about New York.

And when they went to the movies,

why do they go to the Beeshoe Theater?

Why don't they go to the Radio City Music Hall?

And when the Human Torch, who was a teenager,

Johnny Storm, when he wanted a sports car,

he wouldn't buy a Whizbang V8, I got him a Chevy Corvette.

So again, I tried to make things as realistic as possible,

even though these were fantasy stories.

- Things exploded at Marvel so much

when he was doing this in the early 60's,

that by the late 1960's, the distributor

that owned DC basically told Marvel,

you're selling so good, we're making more money

off of you than the publisher we own,

publish everything you want.

- [Stan] We sell about 60 million copies,

60 million magazines, a year.

I guess that would break down to five million a month.

- When we passed DC, I almost flipped.

You know, DC was the Cadillac of the industry,

I couldn't believe it.

1961 on, with the Fantastic Four, comics grew exponentially.

It was absolutely a miracle.

- I would say from '60 to '70,

that's when I enjoyed the comic book business more

than I have ever enjoyed it.

- '61--

- Was the Fantastic Four.

- '62 you had--

- The Hulk.

- Ant-Man and--

- Thor. - And Spider-Man.

- 1963--

- Sergeant Fury. - Iron Man.

- Giant-Man. - Doctor Strange.

- X-Men. - The Avengers.

- '64-- - Daredevil.

- And 1965-- - Nick Fury.

- 1966-- - The Silver Surfer.

- It was like we were on a roll and nothing could stop us.

[triumphant music]

- What makes Stan happy?

It's peace and quiet, and his computer.

- For the past 47 years, since we've lived here,

everything I've written, I've written in here.

This is where I work.

It's a functional room, which has all the things

I need to work in.

I like it because it's comfortable.

I got my copier there, my fax machine here,

my computer there, and a little chair to sit on

if I wanna read a book, and I have my desk

to write things on and it's just the way I need it.

My wife hates this room with a hatred

that defies understanding

because I wouldn't let her decorate it.

She's not very happy about those things up there,

my little boxes with supplies.

She hates all the wires behind this computer.

She hates this room.

- We have good donnybrooks.

Nothing that's ever violent, but then I'm very bossy

and he's very bossy and we're always looking

to top each other off the charts.

- One of the worst fights we ever had,

I don't remember what I said or did,

but it got you angry, and you remember,

I had that beautiful,

Remington noiseless portable typewriter.

My mother bought it for me, I had it for years,

I wrote some of my first stories on it,

that's the typewriter I wrote the Fantastic Four on

and Spider-Man, and the Hulk, and the X-Men.

You got mad at me about something I said.

- Because you were a camera buff then.

Probably something like, Joan,

how can you stand there, you idiot,

the sun's in the wrong position, or something.

- [Stan] Well why would that get you angry?

- You have no idea.

- Well, anyway, whatever I said,

she lifted that typewriter up like that,

my heart was in my mouth and I kept thinking, oh no,

she won't, she wouldn't, she wouldn't.

And she threw it down and it shattered

into a million pieces.

[booming]

[rock music]

The 60's was the atomic age and people started building

bomb shelters in their backyards.

I remember, we lived in Long Island at the time,

and there were one or two people in our neighborhood

who actually got construction crews

and they built these shelters, cement-reinforced,

and heavy doors that would seal shut above the shelter

and they stocked them with water

and all kinds of canned food and they were

gonna sit it out if ever any atomic bomb

or missile was launched.

People were really afraid they'd be either killed

or burned alive or horribly disfigured,

and everybody was involved in science

and nuclear fission, so when I created the Hulk,

I wanted to give it a scientific basis.

[light rock music]

[explosion roaring]

I had always loved the movie Frankenstein,

and I really thought that the monster was the good guy.

He didn't wanna hurt anybody, he just wanted

to be left alone, but those idiots with torches

kept chasing him up and down the hills

and through the countryside and he always had my sympathy.

I had also always loved Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

And I said, "What if my monster could be a guy

"like Dr. Jekyll, and when he becomes the monster,

"that's like Mr. Hyde."

So I thought, psychologically,

we could have fun with that story-wise.

The two entities of this one person,

and they both hate each other

and would like to destroy each other.

- The Hulk is a guy that's kind of a lost soul.

He's had no connection, doesn't remember where he came from,

and is basically searching for someone to like him,

to be nice to him, that he's an okay guy.

- Stan walked in and, in his take on super-humans,

he paid way more attention to the human than the super.

He made the characters real.

He made them feel like people who you knew,

they were your friends, they were neighbors.

And suddenly, people got emotionally invested in this

and they cared about it.

- And I think what Stan did

was make really humanistic super-heroes.

- One of the things that I've learned from Stan

is what's really important is not Spider-Man,

it's the guy in the Spider-Man costume.

It has to be about Peter Parker.

- Peter Parker was supposed to be every man,

or every young man, with all the conflicts

and uncertainties and confusions that any young man has.

- Peter Parker is your normal kid from Queens

who's a bit socially awkward, has girl problems,

they have money problems.

- I tried to put him in the real world

and give him the kind of things that regular readers

could relate to.

I mean, he'd have ingrown toenails.

His costume would tear while he was fighting.

It was very easy for me to identify with Peter Parker,

'cause all I had to do was think of a lot of things

that happened when I was young.

For example, I might have a big date

with a girl that I really liked,

and wouldn't you know, I'd have an allergy attack

at that night and I'd be sneezing all over the place.

Or there'd be another girl that I really wanted

to make an impression on.

I'd take her out to dinner and then on the way home,

I realized I didn't have enough money for a cab.

And you could imagine the great impression

it would make on a date if you have to take her home

in a crowded subway.

So it was not too hard for me to come up

with things for Peter Parker.

I just had to think of the things that happened to me.

- Spider-Man is Stan, I absolutely feel that.

All of the things that Stan is, his morality.

Uncle Ben, you know when...

All of that is Stan's attitude towards mankind.

- You see, I always felt with superheroes,

why would somebody spend his whole life

fighting the bad guys?

Why not just get married and have kids

and lead a normal life?

So I wanted to give Spider-Man a real motive, a real reason

and let the reader understand that he always

carried this guilt feeling with him,

and that was the reason for that.

With great power, comes great responsibility.

- It's a great morality tale.

Peter Parker didn't come out of the gate as a good guy.

He was selfish.

He was like, look, I got these powers.

You know what, I'm gonna go make some money.

I'm gonna cashout on this.

And he went for that.

And he made a mistake.

And in a very karmic way, lets somebody

who should have been apprehended by him.

And that person ended up killing his Uncle Ben.

That was a real important lesson.

- [Stan] My father, he just always told me,

"Stan, the most important thing is to do the right thing."

And I used to write, you know, if you treat other people

the way you'd wanna be treated,

there couldn't be anything bad in the world.

- So from that came the nature

of the man writing Spider-Man and the whole thing.

- How I came up with the idea for Spider-Man.

I have said this so often at so many places

that for all I know, it might even be true.

I was trying to think of a new character,

and obviously one of the most critical decisions

you make is what superpower does the character have?

Well, we already had the strongest man in the world,

someone who could fly, on and on.

What was left?

And then I saw a fly on the wall and I go,

wow, wouldn't it be something if I had a character

who could stick to walls like an insect?

So I liked that and I said, "I'm gonna do that."

Then I needed a name.

Names are very important.

So I thought of the first logical one, Insect-Man.

Somehow it didn't sound glamorous or dramatic.

I figured, well, Fly-Man?

No, that didn't do it.

Mosquito-Man?

I went down the list.

I got to spider, Spider-Man.

I don't know why, but it sounded dramatic, frightening.

I would want to read something called Spider-Man.

- Who wouldn't want to be able to swing on a web

and stick to walls?

Are you kidding me?

I'm 46, if I could do that tomorrow,

I'd come in from the top of this roof into the building

everyday going, yeah, I'm a Spider-Man.

- I've tried to call myself the co-creator

of these characters.

On Spider-Man, I came up with the idea,

and then I first gave the strip to Jack Kirby to draw,

and Jack drew the first couple of pages,

and I was looking over his shoulder and I said,

"Wait a minute, you're still

"making him too glamorous-looking."

So I said, "Ah, forget it,

"Jack, I'll give it to someone else."

So it occurred to me to give it to Steve Ditko,

and Steve brought so much to the strip,

and I don't think the strip

would have been as successful without Steve.

I don't know what the universal conception of creator is.

Steve definitely felt that he was the co-creator

of Spider-Man, and that was really,

after he said it and I saw it meant to a lot to him,

that was fine with me.

So I said, "Fine, I'll tell everybody

"you're the co-creator."

That didn't quite satisfy him, so I sent him a letter,

I put it in writing.

To whom it may concern, this is to state

that I consider Steve Ditko to be the co-creator

of Spider-Man along with me.

Something like that.

And I sent it to him and I said,

"You can show this to anybody you want to."

Steve actually still lives in Manhattan, New York.

And when I was in New York a few years ago we did meet.

And we did discuss doing a strip again sometime.

Who knows, maybe we'll still come up with something

and surprise the public with it.

I would love that.

When is Valentine's Day?

- [Female] 14th of February.

- Why does nobody ever say, what is your wife

gonna get you for Valentine's?

Why does nobody ever say that?

- Well, she's probably out shopping right now,

figuring it out.

- Yeah, it's a big problem for me.

- He's the most romantic man in the world.

Happy anniversary to beautiful Joanie.

Wanted to give you the world, but it wasn't for sale.

Don't know about perfume, because I'm a male.

Can't buy jewelry, my picks would just be a waste.

I'm a dunce about clothes, and you have plenty of those.

So all I can do and all I can give you is my love.

Sorry, can't go on.

I adore you, to my wife.

- My wife is really the greatest person in the world.

She's far more talented than I am.

She sings, dances, had been an actress, was a model.

It's a funny story, when I first married her,

she had been acting and singing

and had a great career ahead of her.

But in those days, guys tried to be very macho,

and I said to her when we got married, I said,

"No wife of mine is gonna work."

And she said, "Okay."

And it was the stupidest thing I ever did.

She could've been supporting me all these years.

- You know Stan's story told us,

if you wanna be successful and prolific,

put yourself in debt and the way to do that

is to marry a wife who's a spender.

And Joan Lee, he says, is responsible

for half of his production because if she didn't

get into so much debt, he wouldn't have had

all the motivation to produce his body of work.

So Stan Lee's debt has made the world richer.

And Joan is responsible for that.

- My daughter is not sensible and cautious

and I am not sensible and cautious.

We just spend his money gleefully.

- [Interviewer] What's it like having a father who

is the king of the comic books?

- Well his, um, how do I say it?

He's unbeatable.

I mean, his imagination, his creativity,

and his brilliance has not made it easy

for other men that I've met in many ways.

- Now I'll stop twisting your arm.

[laughing]

- [Interviewer] How much did that cost you?

- You see this new outfit?

- [Interviewer] Maybe this is an actress

he hired to come and do this.

- I have to say, I'm his greatest fan.

- Now I'll send you back to Central Casting

and I'll tell my daughter that everything went well.

[laughing]

- [Guest] That's a great line.

- [Stan] Coming from you, I appreciate it.

- Out of all the characters your father's created,

who's your favorite?

- Me.

[laughing]

- That's a better line.

Son of a gun.

[laughing]

Her mother took care of most of the cultural life, I think,

and she grew up wonderfully.

She's the most beautiful woman, talented.

She's a jewelry designer, she's an artist,

been an actress, she's...

We're very proud of her.

We had another daughter who didn't survive,

but we called her Jan, which Joan felt

was the closest thing to Stan.

Joan had her room all prepared,

it was so beautifully decorated.

- So she lived about seven days.

And she died.

But we never really discuss it, it's interesting.

We never really went on a great discussion about Jan.

I saw her once, I just insisted that I see her.

And she was small, smaller than Joan.

A pretty, pretty little baby.

And I'll never forget, because they were so thrilled.

They kept telling me, oh she took a little water today.

She took a little of this today.

I was there the eight days that she was in the incubator.

The nurse that was there just came

and said the baby then died.

I had had my tubes tied off, they did that.

And not only did my doctor tie them off,

because tubes can be changed, but he cut them,

so they could not be ever undone.

I tried to adopt, and I couldn't adopt.

I couldn't adopt a Jewish baby, because I'm not Jewish.

I couldn't adopt from a Catholic family,

because I'm Episcopalian.

But in that particular time, you couldn't do it.

You couldn't adopt into any mixed marriage at that time.

- All anybody had to do was come

and look at the way we lived, look at our daughter,

look at my wife with our daughter, look at me,

and they were investigating her and talking to her.

She'd come home in tears.

You don't remember how angry you were when you'd come home

and you said, "I won't put myself through this anymore,"

about those interviews you had to go to.

Have you forgotten?

Boy, that was...

And how angry that made me.

- And how would I bring the child up.

- There seems to be some quality in human nature

where if everybody had the same religion

and everybody lived in the same country,

probably the black-haired people would hate blondes

and maybe the redheads would be shunned.

I don't know, it seems that some people

have to have somebody else

to feel superior to and to dislike.

- His work was very symbolic of the era that he lived in.

He really sort of took a lot of the stuff that was happening

and infused it in these characters.

- One thing I felt there were not enough black superheroes,

so I created the Black Panther.

- Stan was right there at the beginning.

The Falcon, Captain America's, not sidekick,

Captain America's partner.

It was a whole new thing.

These are amazing, amazing themes

to be dealing with in comic books.

- In X-Men, I guess my intention

was to show that the world never fully tolerates

people who are different.

So here, nobody could have been more different

than these five or six mutants that I had created,

and actually we showed that people feared them,

and then little-by-little began to hate them

because they were different.

- I think the way X-Men preaches tolerance

is it comments on it quite blatantly.

It's all about outcasts and they talk about it

and they stick together and they prevail.

Although they are persecuted, they also are tolerant

of their persecutors, of humans, or bad mutants.

And in that way, they preach tolerance even as victims.

- A lot of people feel and have grown up feeling different.

That's really what the X-Men universe

is about is in difference.

- Growing up, I felt very much like an outcast,

although I imagine every adolescent feels that way.

Perhaps a personal fantasy that one of my weaknesses

or the things that make me different

could be what makes me strong.

And that's kind of at the heart of what X-Men is.

- What makes the X-Men heroic

is not so much their superpowers,

but their cause and their focus,

which is let's all embrace each other's individuality

and learn to live with each other.

- But it was a subtle underlying theme,

because basically the main theme was excitement

and adventure and color and if people got the theme,

fine, and if not we still, I thought,

had a good adventurer strip.

- There is something that anyone can take from it.

The things that these characters can do

will obviously appeal to young people, especially,

but then there are these other themes,

these more complex themes which give substance to the work.

- And as the 60's started to become the 60's,

where themes of alienation and acceptance

and feelings against the military industrial complex

became more and more important to a growing youth culture,

he really turned everything on its head once again.

- At that time, everybody was turned

off with the military industrial complex.

Just for fun, I thought I'd make Iron Man,

a symbol of the military industrial complex,

and I'd make the readers like him.

- Iron Man has dealt with a lot of different themes

over the course of his long, storied career.

Everything from dealing with the mixed blessing

of a new, wonderful but dangerous technology.

He's dealt with alcoholism as well.

- Stan kept addressing the issues of the day,

the hot topics, and the personal issues

and angst that teenagers have.

- [Stan] So I decided to have a column every month

where I would talk to the readers.

I called it Stan's Soapbox, and I would talk

about anything that occurred to me about politics

or about school.

- [John] He was including the readers in everything we did.

- [Broadcaster] Over the past few years, Marvel comics

have become some of the most popular reading matter

on virtually every college campus in America today.

- [Broadcaster] Ladies and gentlemen, in the upcoming

segment of the broadcast, we're going to be talking

about comic strips, I guess.

- [Stan] Years ago, we realized how much influence

Marvel comics really do have on people

and our readership starts at the age of six

and goes up, as I mentioned, to and beyond college.

I would say that's my principle objective

to just sort of elevate comics to the point

where they're a more-respected medium of communication

and they're not thought of

as merely something for young children.

[funky music]

- [Broadcaster] The University of California's

humor magazine, the Pelican, recently called Marvel Comics

the greatest revolution in literature on campus

since the foldout news.

- About once a year we'd get a letter,

somebody would write, hey, I bought

one of your books and there's a staple missing,

I want my money back.

[laughing]

You know, I would run through the office,

waving this letter, we got a fan letter.

[funky music]

I do a lot of lecturing on college campuses

all over the country.

In fact, tomorrow morning I'm going to Las Vegas,

the University of Las Vegas.

I guess there's a certain irony

to the fact that some of the children

who had comic books taken away from them

when they were five years old,

when they were in college,

when they were 20 years old or so,

they were inviting me to come and speak at their college.

- [Attendee] I've got a question to ask you.

- [Stan] I have an answer for you.

- [Attendee] How did you create your new characters?

- [Attendee] Where would the ideas come from?

- [Attendee] I just wonder how far ahead you work on these.

- [Stan] Well, I guess we work, you would consider it

three months ahead.

- [Attendee] Have you ever had an issue

rejected by the Comics Code?

- Oh yeah, a few times, usually for non-sensible reasons.

[funky music]

I would talk for, oh, maybe 20 minutes

or as long as it was, but then the thing

I loved the best was the questions and answer period.

I didn't really do it to increase their

but to increase my own.

Every time I would leave one of those lectures,

I knew more about what interested our fans

than I did before I started the lecture,

and I would try to take that knowledge

back to the office with me and try to put it to use.

Little-by-little, I found I was getting more questions

about the Silver Surfer than any of our other characters

from the college kids.

And they were saying, "Stan, were you interested

"in getting a character who embodied

"the Judeo-Christian philosophy," and blah blah blah.

Things I hadn't even thought of.

- He took this character and he sort of altered

into sort of a flying flower child on a surfboard

who was constantly giving in to thinking

about the inhumanity of man to man

and talking about how love would conquer all and so forth.

And this kind of stuff spoke to a lot of the youth

and I think they embraced characters

[rock music]

[shouting]

- Marvel Comics began to take on a personality

and you began to see that there was one guy

behind this whole thing.

- He marketed comic books and superheroes first

to his core audience, second to the college audience,

convincing them that these were as mature

and sophisticated as they thought they were,

and then making sure the world at large knew about it.

- Our characters became popular all over the world.

And they'd gone to England and France and Poland

and Belgium and Spain and Italy and Japan and China.

And I began not to spend as much time in the office.

I didn't see the writers as much.

- He had to have Thor and Spider-Man

and Fantastic Four written by other people,

and these were comics that had never,

well, at least Spider-Man and Fantastic Four,

had never been written by anybody else.

- I devoted myself to just trying

to bring the company into other fields,

movies and television.

I had come out to California on business.

I'd stay for a day overnight,

and I thought these people don't realize

that they're living in paradise.

The weather, the open feeling,

so I steamed, how can I move out to Los Angeles,

when all of Marvel is in New York?

So I said to the powers that be,

"You know, why don't we set up our own studio

"out in Los Angeles and I will even make

"the supreme sacrifice, I will uproot my family

"and myself and we will move out there

"and make sure everything goes right.

"It's the least I can do for the company."

Well I don't think there was a dry eye in the room.

"You would do that for us, Stan?"

So they sent me out here to help set up Marvel Productions,

a little animation studio.

Moved out with my wife and daughter.

We sold everything in New York

and we've been here ever since.

[rock music]

Welcome to Marvel Productions near Hollywood, California.

This is where we're turning many

of your favorite comic book heroes into animated TV shows.

- [Spider-Man] Spider-Friends...

- [All] Go for it!

- Very nice, very nice, we can use that.

- At the animation studio, Marvel Productions,

I was the creative head of the studio.

Really, I butted in on all the things they were doing,

you know, on the scripts and the artwork

and the direction.

- [Narrator] The company is currently churning out

250 half hours of animated series

as well as three feature-length cartoons.

- I grew up with Stan.

You know, from his doing his animation

with his voice on Spider-Man and the Amazing Friends.

- [Stan] Hi, Spidey fans, this is Stan Lee,

inviting you to the annual dance at good ole ESU.

But take my advice, don't get too comfortable,

because we'll be knee-deep in danger before you know it.

- I knew him from the cartoon.

- I saw the cartoon on television,

which I became obsessed with.

- Thousands of people never heard of Spider-Man,

hundreds of thousands never heard of Spider-Man

till they saw that animated show.

So they were right, business-wise it

♪ Wealth and fame, he's ignored

♪ Action is his reward

♪ To him, life is a great big bang up

♪ Wherever there's a hang up

♪ You'll find the Spider-Man

- My first stop will be the nearest TV studio.

- The experiment is sufficient as it stands.

- I'm not satisfied.

- I don't have to satisfy you.

[dramatic music]

- We did do a live action television series of Spider-Man.

There was no heart to the series.

A villain would be doing something

and he'd become Spider-Man and go chase the villain

and catch him and climb up a building and that was it.

And after the first few episodes,

I realized it was gonna go nowhere.

And I called a meeting, and we had a meeting

at the network and I thought these people

were sincere and they really wanted to hear my opinions

of what I thought was wrong and how the series

could be improved, and I said whatever I could.

No changes were made and the show went on

and it was canceled after a few more episodes.

Luckily, it didn't ruin the character for other things.

- Stan put in these emotions and these flaws

within each of these characters that made you

wanna turn the page and keep reading.

And people had been doing that

for decades and decades in comic books.

It hadn't been translated to film, necessarily.

There were some films in the 80's and the early 90's

which were, frankly, not very good.

Up until then, I do believe it was just

that surface translation that had been done

on most of the comic book films.

- It's hard to explain the frustrations of we have

these great characters and we knew

how they should be portrayed,

and there were people who wanted to do them,

but nothing really gelled.

- And fans didn't have any hope that Marvel

would ever have any good movies.

- Rock and roll.

All right.

Give me four.

[gun firing]

- Get down, get down.

- Hey, what's going on?

[grunting]

- Scare you?

- That was interesting.

I've never done that before.

- After years of lawsuits and ownership disputes,

Marvel Comics and Sony have settled their differences,

finally enabling the superhero, Spider-Man,

to be fully marketed as a major motion picture failure.

Now, the movie's only challenge is finding an actor

worthy of the tight spandex costume

and who, as chance would have it,

was also born without genitals.

- Finally, one day, a fellow named Avi Arad

came to our studio and Avi understood our characters.

- I remember my first meeting with Stan in the Bel-Air hotel

and he said to me, "Everybody said they'll make

"movies out of this," but that seemed a kind of false faith

that this thing could ever go to the next level.

There were false starts.

Movie-making was complicated, it's expensive.

What worked for us is there's a whole new generation

of filmmakers who really got turned on

to be in the business by comics.

- Geez, not yet, no.

I heard you were here and I said,

"I don't care what, I've gotta say hello to that man.

"I love him."

- I love you, I said, you're like a father.

[cheering]

- Sam Raimi and this guy, they made Spider-Man.

It couldn't have been what it was without this guy.

[cheering and applause]

- I had no doubt that those comic books

would become the most powerful and exciting entertainment

the world has to offer today when the technology

got to such a level that it could portray

that universe in a way that would work with audiences.

- One of the films everybody's looking

forward to this summer is X-Men.

Is that in this venue?

- X-Men is, I hope, gonna be great.

It's the first Marvel character

that's gonna be a big budget movie.

- A meeting was set up with the folks at Marvel,

and Stan Lee showed up at the meeting.

He was so enthusiastic so I thought,

well, I'm gonna go figure out how to honor

what he created in his enthusiasm.

- Everything they were saying

about the first X-Men was negative.

And you'd read in the talk back and then go,

well, it's a Marvel movie so you know it's gonna fail.

And then it wasn't until the movie came out

people's opinions changed on that

and launched sort of the Marvel era of films

that we're in now.

[epic music]

[zapping]

[crashing]

- The trick to the movies is when they capture

the essence of what the great comics are.

- And it's ironic that it took that long

necessarily to realize that the emotional journey

of who these characters are and what they expect

is what you start with, it's what you stay true to.

- If you told us when we were kids

that the weird, nerdy stuff would one day

be the biggest commercial successes,

I would have never believed that.

- When they realized, oh my god,

this is drama, this is comedy, this is this,

this is that, and it became such a phenomenon,

that everybody was in it.

- Stan Lee's decision to go Hollywood has paid off.

- Spider-Man, the action hero.

- [Reporter] Crawling all over 3600 movie screens.

- The boss of the box office.

- The most profitable movie of the year.

- It's bigger than life itself,

when you go into a theater and with all the special effects

and all, that's oh.

- It's hard to describe the feeling

of seeing characters that I had a hand in creating

up there on the big screen, and especially up there

and looking so good.

- Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer opens this week.

The first Fantastic Four movie

grossed more than $300 million.

- All the things that Stan injected into his characters

was in those films.

- Here we go, here we go.

- [Photographer] Swing back, Mrs. Lee, swing back a little.

- I created him, wow.

- [Photographer] Over by the poster.

- So I am just so...

Oh thank god.

How are ya, John?

Who's got a camera, who's got a camera?

- My grandmother had the candy store,

I used to wait for the comics to come in every week,

open 'em up with her, you know?

And then we'd put 'em on the shelf,

and I would read 'em all.

I was the first guy to read 'em, and they were yours.

- You keep seeing all your characters

coming to life like this.

Are you just like a kid inside just jumping up and down?

You're doing it on the outside.

- No, I'm like an old guy

wondering how successful it's gonna be

and how many more of these things I can come to

and talk to guys like you.

This is the fun of it, you know?

This is the payoff.

- I'm sorry, I'm too big for you now.

- You're damn right you are.

[growling]

Eat your heart out, Ed Norton.

[growling]

You know, it's funny, it's a funny situation.

You do all the work, and I get so much credit for this,

but I wouldn't have it any other way.

- We wouldn't be here without you.

- I know, I keep writing you all the time to tell you that.

I'm not upstaging you too much, am I?

- No, no.

- Hey, you know, I hear you have a bigger role than I do.

All I say is, "Wow."

I've always wanted to be an actor,

and to be able to have little part in a movie,

in any movie but especially a good movie,

it's really a thrill.

Welcome back to the Baxter, Dr. Richards.

Look out.

Security oughta be beefed up a lot more.

- Plate invitation, sir.

- I should be on that list.

- [Tony] Hey, Heff.

- You know, I guess one person can make a difference.

'Nuff said.

A million years ago, when I was writing these comic books,

I never suspected that one day I'd be walking

down a green carpet and being interviewed

and people would say, "How do you feel?"

Nobody cared how I felt about anything in those days.

Marvel is gearing up to do so many more.

We'll have Captain America, we'll have Thor,

we'll have Shield, we'll have...

It goes on and on.

Ant-Man.

Can you believe Ant-Man?

- You created so many characters with Jack Kirby,

what would he think of all of this?

- Oh he'd be thrilled.

He would be thrilled.

I'm so sorry that he isn't here to see it all.

Jack was one of the nicest,

most talented people I've ever known.

When Jack Kirby died, it was almost unbelievable,

because there had always been a Jack Kirby

and he was always the king of the comics

as far as everybody was concerned.

And I couldn't imagine not having him around,

not having him drawing.

He was certainly one of the best artists in the business,

if not the best.

- Mr. Kirby, he created or co-created

such classic comic book characters

as the Hulk, Captain America, Thor, and many, many others.

- There was nothing that Jack didn't do,

couldn't do, and he never did less than his best.

He was also one of the nicest, most cooperative,

most helpful, most decent human beings around.

It was a great loss when Jack went.

It was hard, because he meant so much to me

and I knew what we had lost.

[somber music]

Marvel went bankrupt.

It's hard to believe, because they're so great now,

but a lot of things happened.

- Marvel was financially bankrupt,

but the characters, the intellectual properties,

were not bankrupt.

- At one point of the bankruptcy,

one of the current heads of the company

said to a group of bankers, Spider-Man alone

is worth $1 billion.

- And my contract was invalid as all of them were,

and I didn't wanna stop working.

So we got a company together.

They wanted to call it Stan Lee Media,

which I found very flattering.

- Stan Lee Media was formed during the internet bubble,

which was the craze right around 1999.

- I started in comics when they were in their infancy.

Now I have an opportunity to get into the internet

when it is in its infancy, and it's a far bigger,

more powerful field than comics ever were.

These are the early days of what we're doing

and what everybody's doing on the web.

We're gonna make these things more and more interactive,

and that's the one thing they can't do in television.

And we're only starting.

Because I think we're taking over the world.

[laughing]

- Stan is an idea guy.

Stan is a creative dynamo.

[pleasant rock music]

- We were a fully-functioning company.

We had stock options, the company went public.

- Before I knew it, we had a staff of more than 200 people

and we were going great guns.

I never had so much fun.

[somber rock music]

- Stan is the consummate creator,

has nothing to do with business or financial side.

It's possible to get taken advantage of.

- It was a terrible blow to me,

especially people had invested in it,

it had my name on it, it was heartbreaking.

- People started to get laid off

and that's where it was really hard.

Everyone was sad, you know, we didn't wanna go.

We wanted to keep working and being productive.

- [Stan] Hi, Anthony, this is Stan.

I just wanted to tell ya how bad I feel

about the way things happened.

I didn't expect that would happen so soon

or the way it did and oh man I feel terrible about it

and I wanted to tell you it was just a pleasure

working with you, you were great.

- Stan Lee Media was unfortunate,

but that was just a blip on the radar screen.

- Even at age 84, he's still coming up

with ideas for superheroes for his new company--

- POW! Entertainment, purveyors of wonder.

For the first time now, I'm able to do anything I want.

If we wanna do movies, television shows,

DVDs, we can do them and we are doing them.

- The new characters that Stan's creating for POW!

still have a lot of the original emphasis

and problems and sincerities that he had

when he created some of his earlier creations.

But today's world, they're maybe a little bit edgier.

The culture is a little different,

and the difference between heroes and villains

isn't as quite as clear.

- We have three movies in development at Disney.

I still am concerned with just writing the stuff

and making sure that somebody's gonna care about it.

- Stan, you've been doing this for so long,

you've been so successful.

Some people wonder, why don't you retire

and live permanently on exotic vacations?

Why do you keep doing it?

- The word retire is a dirty word.

You know, most people when they retire,

they say, "At last, I'll have a chance to do

"what I've always wanted to do."

But I'm doing what I've always wanted to do.

I'm working with artists, with writers, with directors.

I'm working on creative things.

I'm having fun.

Don't punish me by making me retire.

[heroic music]

Now that the comics are so successful

and the movies are so big, they think of it

as overnight success, I wanna tell ya

it's the longest overnight that anybody ever could have.

- Despite all his successes and recognition,

Stan is really a regular guy.

He truly is the guy that you recognize

behind the mask of all his characters.

[dramatic music]

- I've done everything I wanna do.

I've wanted to write and I've written.

I wanna do more movies.

I wanna do more television, more DVDs,

more mobisodes, I wanna do more lecturing.

I wanna do more of everything I'm doing.

The only problem is time.

I just wish there were more time.

[heroic music]

- All these wonderful things that I have,

I could never have them.

- Well you just bear that in mind

that they come from me--

- Because you are not extravagant.

- I couldn't afford to be extravagant with you.

- Now don't look at the camera.

The only extravagant--

- Wait, excuse me, dear, I was not looking at the camera,

I was looking this way.

Don't ever direct the master.

Now start again, if you wish.

- Now here it goes, now.

Let's get this straight.

In no way at all do you think that you are the master.

[chuckling]

Me, boss, my word.

All right, come around here, then,

I wanna show you something else I'm going to spend.

- I spent 60 years spoiling this woman.

- [Joan] Trying to impress me.

- [Stan] And I never succeeded.

[exciting heroic music]