Stan Lee, This Generation's Homer

People today are trying to put into words what Stan Lee meant to the comic book industry. Some, I hope, will succeed.

I won’t even try. I have never read a Marvel Comic book (nor one from DC). I have no interest in superheroes, though I watched Batman and the Canadian-voiced Spider-Man cartoon series of the ‘60s on TV (the latter is where I first saw Lee’s name). About all I know about him is from the very opinionated fandom surrounding superhero comics/films and his personal soap opera played out in the entertainment press (and will, perhaps, continue despite his passing today at age 95). Whatever I could say would sound trite, obvious and inadequate.

Instead, I will pass along the earliest interview in the popular press with Lee I’ve been able to scope out. It’s by Dean Pope of the Philadelphia Inquirer of March 17, 1966. His legions of fans, I hope, will find his quotes of interest.

ZAP! POW! Comics Sweep Princeton
PRINCETON, March 16
NOT even the Ivy League could escape.
Before you could say ZAP or POW the craze for comic book heroes had taken over Princeton University and Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk were big men on campus.
A hard core of about 70 Princeton students demonstrated their devotion to the superheroes by turning out for a two-hour comic session last week featuring one of the Nation’s top comic publishers.
The meeting was sponsored by the Merry Marvel Marching Society, one of the several organizations on campus devoted by comics, and the speaker was Stan Lee, editor and writer of Marvel Comics.
Lee has been in the comic book business 25 years, but only recently have his publications come into their own, he said. “When we switched to superheroes five years ago the boom started for us,” he said.
The superheroes include the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Mighty Thor, Captain America, the X-men, Iron Man, Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandoes and Dr. Strange.
The Princeton audience seemed to agree ecstatically with everything Lee said, which may be one of the reasons his company sold 45 million comic books last year compared to a mere 13 million five years ago.
“We think of Marvel Comics as the 20th century mythology, and you, Mr. Lee, as this generation’s Homer,” a Princeton junior told the speaker.
“I’ve always thought my education was based on the comics,” said an English major. “They were always set in some way out place like Crete or the ruins of Ankor Watt. That’s what stimulated my intellectual curiosity and sense of history and adventure.”
The student then asked Lee why he didn’t have an archeologist with superpowers to go along with his assortment of radioactive teenagers and Norse gods. “We could have a plumber with superpowers and it would sell,” the editor answered.
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Lee said he felt “like a father” to his comic creations. “I pretend I’m Shakespeare,” he said. “Right now comics are the lowest art form in peoples’ minds. I’d like to fit them to equality with the movies. Then I’d be the Segei Eisenstein [sic] of comics.”
Lee said the usual method for creating a comic story is for the writer to give the artists a plot, the artists draw the panels, and then the writer fills in the dialogue.
He said sometimes new characters get slipped in by artists. “I marvel that everyone doesn’t copy our methods,” he said.
The comics publisher defended his industry as “the only media appealing to college students and soldiers which doesn’t emphasize sex. True, there’s a certain amount of ‘action or violence,’ but that’s to make the stories exciting,” he said.
Lee said comics used to sell predominantly in the summer but with a rising market among students and soldiers sales are now steady throughout the year. “We’re so ‘in’ that we haven’t reached the general public yet,” he said.
But Lee added new people aren’t coming into the industry like they should.
“I don’t know where the new people in comics are going to come from,” he said. “All those in it now are old and there are no bright young artists coming from places like the School of Visual Arts in New York where they used to study cartooning for the comics.”
Tom Tulenko, president of the Merry Marvel Marchings Society, said many other Princeton students are avid comic readers in addition to the 60 or 70 in formal club chapters. He and his twin brother Tim have been devotees for years and have hundreds of comics piled in their dorm room.
“Very few freshmen join,” he said. “Most of the guys wait until they get to be upperclassmen before they really get into this stuff.”