Do you feel that you’re being screwed?
—60 Minutes II correspondent Bob Simon to Stan Lee, October 2002
In 1993, things seemed reasonably stable in the world of comics and in seventy-year-old Stan Lee’s niche at Marvel. The comics were selling. The stock was soaring. What was there to complain about?
After all, while Marvel seemed to not exactly be taking the world of Hollywood movies by storm, it was only a matter of time before James Cameron would be starting on his Spider-Man—just a few annoying contractual issues had to be worked out with some other rights holders. In addition, Marvel’s characters were, or would be, appearing in a number of animated series which Lee was involved with to one degree or another.
Lee seemed to be able to do as much comics scripting as he could handle (not to mention writing the ongoing Spider-Man newspaper strip). Maybe the comics couldn’t keep selling at the rate they were now, but even if sales dropped by half, they’d still be selling millions and millions each month, and the direct market was an efficient mechanism through which to sell them. No returns meant that the company couldn’t lose on the wholesale end, and the comics shops would be able to sell any overages as back issues. Everyone was happy as long as the pipeline of comics from creators to publishers to retailers to consumers stayed healthy.
Ronald Perelman had certainly gotten his money’s worth for the $82 million he’d paid for Marvel. In addition, Perelman was buying up other comics and comics-related companies, such as sticker and collectible-card enterprises. He was paying top dollar for them, but it was all part of a grand scheme. It ended up just not being the scheme people thought it would be.
Always restless—and always worried that disaster might strike comics no matter how good things looked—Lee was, as always, open to side deals.
Publisher and entrepreneur Byron Preiss had been friends with Lee for years. Born in 1953 (the same year as the Lees’ deceased infant daughter, Jan), Preiss had been a fan turned book packager and publisher who had decided to not just meet his childhood comics and science-fiction idols but to go into business with some of them. Preiss had done projects with Will Eisner, Jim Steranko, Isaac Asimov, and many others.
In 1993, he worked with Lee on two projects. Preiss had licensed the rights to do—through publisher Berkley Books—a series of prose novels and short story collections based on the Marvel characters. He made Lee the titular editor of the short story collections—his “Ultimate” line (Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate Silver Surfer, etc.)—for which Lee would write forewords as well as some of the fiction.
Preiss had also brainstormed with Lee on a series of prose novels unconnected to Marvel that went under the overall title of Stan Lee’s Riftworld. The first Riftworld novel came out in 1993, followed by two others. Written by veteran novelist Bill McCay, with spot illustrations by Watchmen’s Dave Gibbons, Riftworld was the story of comics publisher Harry Sturdley, who ran a comic book company, the Fantasy Factory, and how he dealt with events set into motion when he encountered actual superheroes—and villains—brought to Earth through an interdimensional rift.
Work was also begun at Preiss’s on comics whose premise was that they were produced by writers and artists working for the Fantasy Factory. And, eventually, a comics version of Riftworld was put into production, edited by this author (who moved from Marvel to Preiss in 1995), scripted by Lee, with pencil art by artists including Dan Jurgens, famous for his work on Superman.
With Avi Arad taking on more and more of Lee’s film and TV producer duties, and with Lee’s Marvel “futureverse” line of comics reimagined as the Marvel 2099 comics—with Lee only working on one of its titles, Ravage—he embarked on a different line of comics for Marvel, this one called the Excelsior line. From his L.A. office, with trusted colleagues—including Roy Thomas and artist Sal Buscema (brother of John)—on board as creators, Lee was again editing a line of comics. According to Thomas, Lee was hands-on with all aspects of the line’s titles.1 For better or worse, it was kind of a reminder of the ’60s.
But on February 6, 1994, another reminder of the ’60s happened. Jack Kirby passed away.
According to Lee, he and Kirby had reconciled shortly before Kirby’s death. As Lee recounted:
I saw him at a comic book convention. And I walked up to him, and he said, “Stan, you have nothing to reproach yourself for.” He smiled and we shook hands, and I walked my way and he walked his way.2
Regarding Kirby’s funeral, according to Raphael and Spurgeon:
With Roz [Kirby]’s assent, Stan Lee attended Jack Kirby’s funeral. “I stayed in the back,” says Lee. “I didn’t want anyone to see me … and start talking about Jack and me and our relationship.”3
And according to Evanier:
Stan Lee was … sitting quietly in the back throughout the speeches, then departing without saying much of anything to anyone. Roz wanted to give him a big hug, right in front of everyone to show that … there was no bitterness left dangling. But Stan, quick as ever, was in the parking lot by then, gone before she could get near him.4
Raphael and Spurgeon noted:
A week or two after the funeral, Evanier arranged for a phone conversation between Stan and Roz. Lee was later instrumental in securing from Marvel a modest pension for Roz.5
As with many complicated relationships, Lee and Kirby’s would prove to not be concluded simply because one of them had died. It would, in fact, become more complicated as the years went by.
The year 1994 saw the syndicated debut of the animated Marvel Action Hour, on which Lee was executive producer and also doing writing and voice work. The Hour featured Iron Man and Fantastic Four cartoons. Later that year, Lee was voted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame at that summer’s San Diego Comic-Con.
In the meantime, some of the old contracts Marvel had signed off on over the years had come back to haunt its film plans. It would take another eight years to sort out the conflicting, overlapping rights to Spider-Man that were signed away. In fact, 1994 would see the release of an on-the-cheap, tacky Fantastic Four movie from Roger Corman’s studio that was made simply to keep the rights in place and was never officially released.
Regarding the live-action area, Lee pointed out to reporter Frank Lovece, in 1994, that
in the past, we [Marvel] were much more naïve about movies [and TV shows]. Somebody would come up to us and say, “Hey, we wanna make a movie of one of your characters,” we’d say, “Wonderful! Oh, isn’t that great!” We were flattered, and we’d license them the right to do it, and we had no control over it. But now we’ve grown up and any movie that’s made—I have a partner named Avi Arad … an incredibly creative guy … just a pleasure to work with—anyway, now any movies that are done, Avi and I are co-executive producers, which means that the movie company can’t just do the movie any way they want to. We have to approve the story, the script, the casting, all of that. So it’s a whole different thing now.6
Lee also told Lovece that Marvel had given him a lifetime contract. He’d certainly come a long way from his role as a “human pilot light” in the dark days of the post-Wertham 1950s.
By mid-1994, the enormous expansion of the comic book market of the past few years was rapidly losing steam. Marvel, especially, with the shaky status of the numerous companies it had recently purchased, and the financial machinations of the Perelman organization, was feeling unprecedented pressure to maximize profitability.7
Perhaps the company’s most ill-advised move was the purchase of comics distributor Heroes World, with the intention of making it the sole supplier of Marvel’s comics to comics shops. Overwhelmed by the sudden, massive increase of orders, Heroes World was unable to do the job adequately, and many retailers were unable to get the comics they had ordered, leaving consumers without their comics, and free to spend their money on other companies’ comics—or on whatever else they might have wanted. In effect, this move destabilized a comics distribution system that was already suffering from overexpansion.
With the comics market in crisis, and with Marvel overextended from its purchase of overvalued companies, there came an urgent demand from upper corporate levels to cut costs. Marvel was restructured. Its staff was rearranged, shaken, and ultimately severely thinned by multiple waves of layoffs. As part of the cost cutting, Lee’s Excelsior comics line was halted and, to this day, hasn’t been seen in any way, shape, or form by the general public.
Indeed, by early 1995, it seemed to me, based on personal conversations at the time with Stan and Joan Lee, that Lee felt he was being marginalized by Marvel, and sensing that the company might look to renege on its generous treatment of him. Joan Lee commented how, periodically, if whoever owned Marvel would consider saving money by jettisoning or ill-treating her husband, that’s when the Lees would call in aggressive lawyers to protect their interests, implying that this might turn out to be one of those times.
In May of that year, I had resigned from a chaotic Marvel—not an easy decision—to become head of Byron Preiss’s Virtual Comics line, a roster of comics that were designed to be consumed initially on the fledging internet—in which Preiss was a pioneer—as well as, eventually, in print. At that summer’s San Diego Comic-Con, Lee, aside from promoting Marvel, was also promoting the upcoming comics version of the Riftworld novels, which was part of the first group of Virtual titles.
Also in ’95—sporting a recently grown beard, as if in mourning for Marvel’s fading glory—Lee appeared in Kevin Smith’s film Mallrats. Playing a fictionalized version of himself, Lee had much more than a cameo. In the movie, wandering aimlessly—and somehow without attracting attention—in a New Jersey shopping mall, after a store-signing there, Lee crossed paths with the film’s protagonist, Brodie, played by Jason Lee (no relation). Seeing that Brodie was in distress over a breakup with a woman, “Stan Lee” proceeded to deliver a soliloquy about a fictional long-lost love of his own, which ended with him advising the young man, “Do yourself a favor, Brodie. Don’t wait. Because all the money, all the women, even all the comic books in the world, they can’t substitute for that one person.”
Marvel would spend the next few years in financial turmoil, culminating in a 1998 battle of superhuman proportions between financiers Carl Icahn and Perelman. Before that, though, on February 23, 1996, Chip Goodman unexpectedly died of pneumonia at age fifty-five. Lee would later say that, “Chip was actually a good guy.”8 The younger Goodman had had a successful career as a magazine publisher of pretty much everything but comic books.
In late ’96, Perelman took Marvel into bankruptcy, with the general belief he did so to protect the company from Icahn. A surreal period ensued where, depending on various court rulings, control of the company changed hands several times, with different teams of executives coming and going in a bizzaro-world version of musical chairs.9
Also that year, Marvel—which, in ’94, had split its editorial department into character-related editorial divisions—restored the single editor-in-chief system, installing Bob Harras—who had led the X-Men editorial division—in that position. Harras did the best he could with a company that was recovering from financial chaos.
In 1997, after yet another restructuring and round of layoffs, Marvel decided that it did, indeed, want Lee to represent them to the world, and so the editorial department set about making every comic dated July of that year a part of “Flashback” month (featuring tales of the characters before their superhero careers began) in which each comic published would be introduced by a humorous, comic book version of Lee as imagined by the writers and artists of that comic. Lee actually scripted his own appearance in the X-Men “Flashback” issue.
After attempts to marginalize him, it was plain now that—at least in the comics division—when push came to shove, there was value in having the company’s essence embodied by the most famous face and name in the medium. Whether either side liked it or not, Marvel and Stan Lee were as much as ever inextricably identified with each other.
Eventually, in September 1998, ownership of Marvel was, unexpectedly, awarded by the bankruptcy court to Avi Arad and Isaac Perlmutter’s Toy Biz company, which had almost miraculously managed to outmaneuver both Perelman and Icahn. They set about rescuing the company from the wrecked state into which it had fallen. Perelman’s company, nonetheless, walked away, by most accounts, with somewhere between $50 million and $250 million from his ownership of Marvel.
Part of the fallout of Marvel’s bankruptcy involved the fate of Lee’s lifetime contract. The bankruptcy had the effect of voiding any contracts the company had entered into, including the one with Lee. When Perlmutter offered him a two-year contract at a severely reduced salary, Lee refused to sign, and his lawyer went into action. As Sean Howe observed:
Without a contract, Lee might contest the ownership of some of the characters for which Marvel had, on innumerable occasions over three decades, credited him as the creator. And even if Lee didn’t have much of a case, the damage to Marvel’s public image would be devastating.10
Faced with this reality, the company negotiated another lifetime contract with Lee, guaranteeing him—in exchange for a small fraction of his weekly worktime—an increased annual salary, as well as pensions for his wife and daughter should he predecease them.
Significantly, the contract also guaranteed him a percentage of profits from any Marvel films or TV shows (at that point, a negligible amount), and also gave him the freedom to engage in any other work he chose, including laboring on projects that might directly compete with Marvel.11
So here was Lee, tied to Marvel, yet free to do whatever else he liked. He was part of Marvel and yet not part of Marvel.
What was he going to do now?
Despite all this upheaval, and after decades of being unable to grab the brass ring on big-screen success, Marvel finally achieved a sizable hit with the screen adaptation of Blade: The Vampire Slayer, which debuted on August 21, 1998, focusing on a supporting character from Marvel’s Dracula comic books. (The previous year’s Men in Black was technically a Marvel hit, as well, since it was owned by Malibu Comics, which Marvel had purchased several years before. But the public didn’t identify MIB with Marvel, and it did nothing to enhance the company’s brand.)
So it was neither Spider-Man nor the X-Men that would put Marvel on the big-time Hollywood scoreboard, but Blade, a character—played by Wesley Snipes—that no one outside the circles of hard-core comics fans had ever heard of. It was Blade’s success that would lay the groundwork for the soon-to-come movie hits, X-Men and Spider-Man.
While Lee did film a cameo for Blade, it was not included in the released version of the film. But by that point, he had a vision for his future that didn’t necessarily include Marvel as a major part of the picture, anyway. He was taking advantage of the contractual clauses that allowed him to go into business against them. He was going into business for himself.
Well, sort of.
That year—even before Marvel was awarded to Toy Biz—Lee, with a sometime business associate named Peter Paul and a couple of other people, formed a company called, appropriately, Stan Lee Media. Lee’s formal title was chairman. Paul had amassed an impressive roster of Hollywood names that he was associated with through the American Spirit Foundation (ASF), which he ran. The ASF had been established by actor Jimmy Stewart to improve public education. With Paul in charge, it had given annual Spirit of America awards to figures such as Ronald Reagan, Gene Roddenberry, Bob Hope … and Stan Lee.
Paul had enlisted Lee to become the ASF’s chairman and to head up its Entertainers for Education committee. Paul would introduce him to such figures as Muhammad Ali, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Tony Curtis. Paul proposed to Lee the idea of starting an intellectual property development company, which would focus on the internet, then a magnet for investment money.
Paul, though, had a checkered past, including having served time for a scheme involving an attempt to defraud the Cuban government out of more than $8 million. He claimed to Lee that this had all been a frame job on him (by whom kept changing) and that he was really part of a secret U.S. government plot to overthrow Fidel Castro. No proof has ever surfaced to confirm his claims.12
Lee chose to take Paul’s explanations at face value, deciding to cast his lot with this guy with whom his direct experience was positive. More or less sidelined by Marvel—though still its public face—Lee, at seventy-five, remained energetic and ambitious. There would be something satisfying to be achieved in creating a successful new entertainment company, one on the cutting edge of new technologies.
While certainly not a techie, Lee was an early adopter of email—AOL had given him a special account as part of a venture with Marvel—and was made aware of the internet’s possibilities by Byron Preiss. Stan Lee and Peter Paul had as good a chance as anybody else at being successful in a dot-com venture. When Stan Lee Media quickly went public, Lee and other executives became multimillionaires on paper, although he was forbidden to sell any stock for a lengthy period.
For Lee, SLM meant being back in the saddle, spending his days with teams of creative people—the staff would come to number 150 people—collaborating on new characters and stories. No one would tell him that starring in or narrating a cartoon series or comic book would be “corny” or “self-involved.” Just the opposite. Lee’s ideas were not merely tolerated—they were necessary. The company’s main products were the ideas created or blessed by its famous chairman. As Evanier, who briefly worked for Stan Lee Media, put it, “Peter had thrown Stan a lifeline. Stan was not ready to retire quietly.”13
Indeed, according to Evanier, Lee was terrified of ending up as purely a subject of nostalgia, the way some of his contemporaries had. When asked, during the Stan Lee Media period, to be on an old-timers panel that Evanier was slated to moderate at the San Diego Comic-Con, Lee responded, “Mark, I will do any panel you want me on as long as it’s about current material. I will not do anything about history, no matter what. I am an active, current producer of material, and that’s all I want to talk about.”14
More than any internet forays by Byron Preiss or even by Marvel itself, Stan Lee Media gave Lee a chance to stay relevant in the hot medium of the present moment—and perhaps to even become incredibly wealthy. Veteran Marvel editor Jim Salicrup, who worked for a time at SLM, said about Lee’s involvement with the company’s products: “[Stan was] incredibly hands-on! It was his name on the company—which I don’t think he was all that crazy about—and he wanted everything to be as good as possible.”15
But for all Lee’s enthusiasm and attention, the bottom would soon fall out from under the company. Evanier came to believe that, Stan aside, the other executives didn’t really care much about the properties the company came up with, that “the purpose of the company was to be sold … to make [itself] look so damned successful that Yahoo! or Amazon or Sony or somebody would just acquire it for a huge sum of money.”16
Whether a major investor would come along or not, Paul started surreptitiously committing various types of securities fraud with the publicly traded company. The fraud was discovered by the authorities, and Paul, after fleeing to Brazil, ended up in prison in the United States.17
Lee’s paper multimillions disappeared. The company closed its doors in mid-December 2000, Lee avoiding any legal charges, but forced to see staff laid off en masse. It must have felt to him like the Timely Implosions of ’49 and ’57 all over again. It was reported that he collapsed when the layoffs were announced.18
Lee managed to emerge from the fiasco relatively unscathed, although he vowed, “I’ll never be so stupidly trusting again.”19
On November 3, 1998, Lee’s friend, Batman cocreator Bob Kane, passed away. Lee said of him, “He was fun. I got a big kick out of him.”20 Fond of each other, they also had a playful rivalry over the popularity of Batman versus Spider-Man. Lee also recalled:
We used to have a thing, he said to me, oh, a couple years before he died, he said, “Y’know, Stan, you and I ought to do a movie together. Can you imagine something by Bob Kane and Stan Lee?”
I said, “Yeah, it’d be great, something by Stan Lee and Bob Kane.”
But I thought it was a good idea, and I said, “Well, let’s do something.” I said, “Here, I have an idea of a character we can use.” He said, “No, no, don’t tell me.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “Well, it has to be a collaboration, it has to be something we both think of.” I said, “Well, how can we both think of it at the same time?”
And we never got around to doing anything because he didn’t want to use something I thought of, and he never really told me anything he thought of, and it was a very funny situation. But he kept saying, “We ought to do something together.”21
Oddly, it was at Kane’s funeral that Lee found himself thinking about Ditko. As Evanier, who was also there, recalled, recounting a scenario worthy of its own movie:
Stan loved Ditko. We were at Bob Kane’s funeral [where] the only people who showed up from comics were Stan, myself, Paul Smith, and Mike Barr.… Stan came up to me before the funeral and said, “I have to speak. What do I say?” And I told him some things he could say, and he went up and said them. I kind of wrote a speech for him.
So we’re standing by the grave site, and they were having [mechanical] trouble lowering the coffin into the grave.… We were standing there waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Stan turns to me, and I swear this is true, he says, “You know, Steve Ditko was the best inker Jack [Kirby] ever had.” And I did kind of a double take, like, “Why are we talking about that?” And I said, “Yes, he did a great job.” And he said, “Of course, we couldn’t use Ditko [to ink Kirby regularly]. He was too valuable as a penciler because he was a great artist.” And he started telling me how much he loved working with Ditko. And he said, “Jack was more creative, Jack was a better artist, but I just loved working with Ditko. We had a lot of give and take.”
Okay, fine. And he said, “I couldn’t wait to write [the script for] a Ditko story when it came in.” And I said, “Well … you gave the last couple of Dr. Strange stories that Ditko drew to Roy Thomas and Denny O’Neil to script.” He said, “Oh, no, I didn’t. I would never give them away to somebody else. Ditko’s the last thing I would ever give away.” I said, “The last couple of Dr. Strange stories Ditko did were dialogued by either Roy or Denny.” And he goes, “Really?” And I go, “Yes, they were.” “Oh, I’ll check that, but I think you’re wrong, because I loved working with Ditko so much. I was never happier than when I was dialoguing his stuff and writing his stuff.” And then he talked a little more about Ditko. And it’s like, why are we talking about Steve Ditko, for God’s sake? Bob Kane is dead and in front of us.
Then, making conversation, I said, “Right around the other way here is where [comedian] Stan Laurel is buried.” And Stan goes, “Really? Let’s go look at it!” … And he leads about eight people over to see Stan Laurel’s grave site.… And he goes, “Wow, that’s Stan Laurel. He was a great guy. He was the funniest man there ever was.” And I said, “Shouldn’t we get back to Bob for a minute? Shouldn’t we wait until Bob is in the ground?” So we went back and waited that out.22
Though people at a burial may say or do odd things to avoid the reality of death, Lee clearly felt strongly about Ditko. And while Ditko may, decades before, have felt some affection for Lee, by 1999, it seemed to be gone. Time magazine, in its November 16 issue, had covered Kane’s funeral, including Lee’s eulogy, and the magazine credited Lee as “the creator of Spider-Man.” Ditko responded with a letter, which was printed in the December 7 issue:
Re: the eulogy for Batman’s Bob Kane by Stan Lee, whom you describe as “creator of Spider-Man”: Spider-Man’s existence needed a visual, concrete entity. It was a collaboration of writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko as co-creators.
This was the same year that Ditko’s lengthy assaults on Lee started appearing in various magazines he put out through publisher Robin Snyder. In one, he noted Time’s omission, and commented that, “I was the only one with a printed clarification.”23
Something had changed for Ditko. No longer was he the person who, seven years earlier, had exchanged hugs with Stan Lee and been willing to spend the better part of a day discussing doing possible new projects with him.
According to Lee’s interview with Jonathan Ross in Ross’s 2007 In Search of Steve Ditko documentary, Lee called Ditko after the Time letter appeared. Lee described the conversation to Ross:
Steve said, “Having an idea is nothing, because until it becomes a physical thing, it’s just an idea.” And he said it took him to draw the strip, and to give it life, so to speak, or to make it something actually tangible. Otherwise, all I had was an idea. So I said to him, “Well, I think the person who has the idea is the person who creates it.” And he said, “No, because I drew it.” Anyway, Steve definitely felt that he was the cocreator of Spider-Man. And … after he said it. I saw it meant a lot to him.… So I said, “Fine, I’ll tell everybody you’re the cocreator.” That didn’t quite satisfy him. So I sent him a letter.
As we’ve seen, in an open letter, on Stan Lee Media stationery, dated August 18, 1999, Lee wrote a message that included the sentence:
I have always considered Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s co-creator.
As Lee recounted to Ross, “Ditko quickly pointed out that considered means ‘to ponder, look at closely, examine,’ et cetera, and does not admit, or claim, or state that Steve Ditko is Spider-Man’s cocreator.
“At that point,” Lee told Ross, “I gave up.”
From the ashes of Stan Lee Media, Lee, with his longtime lawyer, Arthur Lieberman, as well as colleague Gill Champion, formed a new intellectual property farm, which they called POW! (for Purveyors of Wonder) Entertainment. With no intention of expanding as quickly as, or on the scale of, SLM, POW! was designed to be the primary outlet through which Lee’s ideas—often featuring Lee himself in some way—would be conveyed to the public and pitched to other media companies. These would include such concepts as Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, Stan Lee’s Superhumans, and Stan Lee’s Mosaic.
Lee would still do work for Marvel—the syndicated Spider-Man strip, of course (which Larry Lieber had been drawing since 1986) and, as always, serving as the company’s friendly public face. But in theory and by contract, he was obligated to give no more than 10 percent of his time to the company.
As the 2000s began, new Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada and his boss, publisher Bill Jemas—the latter of whom seemed to revel in coming out with controversial publishing initiatives and public statements (a great way for a cash-strapped company to get free publicity)—were hell-bent on getting headlines for Marvel’s comics and reviving its battered public reputation. They were trying to reposition it—as Lee had decades before—as the little engine that could. This risk-taking led to conflicts with Arad, who was spearheading Marvel’s media initiatives in Hollywood and wanted the company to project an air of no-nonsense stability.
All this, though, was not Stan Lee’s battle.
The reality seemed to be that Lee’s participation in Marvel’s future would be largely from the sidelines, despite his lifetime contract with the company.
So Lee busied himself and POW! with developing numerous projects, many with prominent companies and celebrities—including Ringo Starr, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Pamela Anderson—attached. Like SLM, POW! would also go public, although its shares would never reach the fantastic heights that SLM’s briefly had.
And in 2001, thanks to an inspiration of Lee’s friend and Batman movies producer Michael Uslan, Lee wrote a series of comics for DC called Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating … The simple but elegant premise was, what if DC’s most famous characters were reimagined by Lee—who had only ever written comics for Marvel—and a who’s who of top comics artists? Each issue’s title was Just Imagine Stan Lee with [artist] Creating [character]. So there were comics in the series such as:
As Uslan recalled in a conversation with me:
I said to Stan, “What if I brought you over to DC Comics and you re-imagined all of their superheroes the way you would have done them? Would that be of any interest to you? And what if I could team you up with the greatest artists who ever lived?”
Stan was absolutely tickled by the idea, and I could see his creative juices flowing. He said, “Well, DC would never go for that.” I said, “Leave that to me.”24
Other artists involved in the project included such brand names as Gene Colan, John Byrne, Terry Austin, M. W. Kaluta, John Severin, Richard Corben, Dave Gibbons, Dick Giordano, Dan Jurgens, and Tom Palmer. Uslan wrote backup stories for the issues, and Mike Carlin was the series editor.
In the process of working on Just Imagine, Uslan got to experience something that he had up until then indeed “just imagined.” As he recounted:
I’ll never forget being in Stan’s office in L.A. when [John] Buscema’s artwork [for Just Imagine Superman] came in.… Stan was raving about … what an amazing artist he is, [but] there were a page or two that he was not happy with how the plot was interpreted. He was trying to explain to John what he wanted, and he wasn’t getting the point across.
After the conversation with Buscema ended, Lee put some tracing paper over the problematic art boards and handed Uslan a pencil. Uslan continued:
And he says, “Start drawing.”
And he gets on a chair and starts striking a pose and explaining to me what the first panel should be. Then he goes into another pose and says, “Now draw this, from this perspective” … And I’m sitting there, and there he is, outstretched, showing a pose, telling me to draw it. I’m going, “Holy shit! I’m Jack Kirby! I can’t believe I’m in this room with my idol, Stan Lee, and he’s on the furniture, and he’s telling me ‘draw this.’” It was one of the most magical moments in my life … and I really felt like I was experiencing firsthand the legendary creative process of Stan Lee as a writer, as an editor, as a visual genius in terms of his storytelling. And, boy, it doesn’t get better than that.25
A highly publicized project, the Just Imagine series put Lee firmly in the comic-reading public’s eye with a feel-good project that, rather than rehashing which artists were on poor terms with him, instead focused on what artists—from revered old pros to hot, young superstars—were quite pleased to attach their reputations to Lee’s. It also served notice to Marvel that Lee was quite capable of not just competing with them on POW! projects that no one had ever heard of, but on prestige books featuring their biggest competition: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest.
Although still as determined as ever to not retire, Lee, in 2002, did finally take the time to—along with coauthor George Mair—write his memoir, entitled Excelsior! With a cover painting by Romita Sr. of Lee surrounded by his Marvel cocreations, the book’s point of view was that of someone who’d been through a lot, both positive and negative, and had made peace with his life, his accomplishments, and even with his failures—and had now moved beyond comics into the wider storytelling world of Hollywood.
The book looked to the future not with a sense of ending but of beginning:
So things are more exciting than ever. I’m doing just what I’ve always loved to do, creating characters and concepts with which to entertain the public, but now I’m doing it on the largest playing field of all.26
Indeed, Lee would end up living—and working—for another decade and a half, and he would, in that time, become more well known and admired than ever. As busy as he’d be with a wide variety of projects, this would largely be because of his cameos—his small but memorable parts in most Marvel movies and TV shows. The cameo sideline did, however, take a while to gather momentum.
After his debut cameo as a juror in the 1989 TV movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, there wasn’t much Marvel live action for Lee to take part in. He was left on the cutting room floor in 1998’s Blade and had a very short, nonspeaking role as a hotdog vendor in 2000’s hit X-Men movie. Finally, in 2002’s Spider-Man, which debuted on May 3, Lee got to be a hero, saving a little girl from falling debris during Spider-Man’s battle with the Green Goblin. Those short bits were just the beginning of an idiosyncratic on-screen career which would bring Lee back to his original goal of being an actor.
But also in 2002, between the cameos, there would come to be—as had become standard for Lee and Marvel—a controversy over rights and payments that was about to take center stage. Lee would become embroiled again in real-world drama, thanks, strangely enough, to Marvel’s growing success in the world of movies.
Both the X-Men and Spider-Man movies were huge moneymakers and established Marvel’s properties as having incredible, never-before-realized potential. On deck for 2003 alone were movies including Daredevil, The Hulk, and a sequel to X-Men. Marvel had the potential to rake in revenues that would make its publishing money seem like the proverbial chicken feed.
There was one problem, however.
Lee’s 1998 contract, negotiated from the ruins of the company’s bankruptcy, guaranteed him 10 percent of Marvel’s profits from the use of its characters in movies and TV shows. And, as Lee told a reporter for The Times of London the month after Spider-Man premiered, “I haven’t made a penny from Spider-Man.”
In late October of 2002, CBS’s popular 60 Minutes II program reported that Marvel, in violation of the 1998 contract—agreed to by them when no one expected any of Marvel’s movies to see the light of day, much less generate enormous revenues—had still not paid Lee anything beyond his admittedly generous salary, and that Lee was considering suing the company.
“Do you feel that you’re being screwed?” asked correspondent Bob Simon.
“I don’t want to say that,” Lee replied. “After all, I’m still a part of the company. I love the people. I love the company.”27
Nonetheless, on November 12, Lee initiated a lawsuit against Marvel, citing the provision in his contract that called for
participation equal to 10% of the profits derived during your life by Marvel … from the profits of any live action or animation television or movie … productions utilizing Marvel characters.
The referenced portion of the contact further stated that
Marvel will compute, account and pay to you your participation due, if any, on account of said profits, for the annual period ending each March 31 during your life, on an annual basis within a reasonable time after the end of each such period.28
Marvel had paid him none of the contractually promised profit participation.
Stan Lee, the ultimate company man, was suing the company he’d been employed by for over sixty years.