Stan Lee

Stan Lee can't understand it. "What is taking the Pulitzer Prize Committee so long to call me?" he wonders. "They know where I am. They know how to spell my name. Their letter must have gotten lost in the mail." Lee then breaks into a robust laugh at the thought that his writing career, as prolific as it has been, should merit a Pulitzer. But for a legion of middle-aged adults and teenagers alike who have grown up on a steady diet of Spider-Man, The Hulk, Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer, among others, some sort of prize for Lee most certainly would be in order. After all, Lee is not only the person who created or co-created many of the most popular comic book characters of all time, he is also godfather to the modern comic book industry. Over the course of his 50-plus-year relationship with Marvel Comics, he has created a new methodology for writing and producing them. Lee has also been a central player in bringing Marvel super-heroes into the animation realm.

Fantastic Four is now being developed into an animated series.

Indeed, as Chairman of Marvel Studios and Publisher and Chairman of Marvel Comics, the "seventyish" Lee is still doing his best to keep Marvel's creative juices bubbling. These days, he concentrates on story development and works with the writers of all televised Marvel-based shows, especially when they first debut to help keep them consistent with Marvel standards. His role is now to develop animation and feature film scripts for the big screen, rather than for the newsstand. Lee is not currently writing any Marvel comic titles, although he does write the syndicated Spider-Man newspaper comic strip. "I spend most of my time in the office working on movies, television shows and animation," says Lee. "I'm not involved with the comic book operation day-to-day anymore. But I do keep my hand in it, and I regularly talk with our people in New York about characters and stories. Plus, I spend a day or two at home each week writing scripts and other projects I hope to see developed. I dream of the day we do a major animated film based on a Marvel super hero," with Thor or Namor, the Sub-Mariner being the two titles he thinks would best translate to the big-screen in animated form."

X-Men, the comic book from Marvel and ...

Marvel's Animated Hits
Lee sees animation as a great forum for his classic characters. His interest in animation goes back to the 1970s, when he began living in Hollywood part-time in order to supervise development of the original Fantastic Four program, which was then animated by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. Eventually, at his urging, Marvel established a permanent animation operation in Los Angeles in 1980. Lee has worked full-time out of this L.A. office ever since, even as Marvel has gone through various ownership changes.

Marvel's corporate fate remains up in the air following attempts to restructure Marvel Holdings Inc. after a six-month war for company control between financiers Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn. However, the value of the Marvel character library virtually insures the company will continue in some form, and plans to bring Lee's classic characters to new media formats continue unabated. "I stay out of all that business stuff because my area of concern is the creative end of things," Lee says. But he does point out that animated TV programs based on Marvel characters continue to perform to solid numbers on television, with the Spider-Man cartoon being one of the most successful animated shows in history. "Our animated product does very well," he says of shows such as Spider-Man, X-Men and The Incredible Hulk. "The business area is where they were having problems, not with the product. Our shows generally do very well and our comic books are still very high quality, and that's the most important thing as far as I'm concerned."