STAN LEE QUOTES II
American comic book writer & creator (1922- )
DC, of course, is trying to catch up to Marvel. More power to them. It's good if everybody does well, but they're certainly starting from a ways back. They have a lot of catching up to do ... Marvel has so many heroes. DC just has Superman, Batman and maybe Wonder Woman. Perhaps they'll use The Flash. Green Lantern wasn't very successful, but we'll see.
STAN LEE
Toronto Sun, April 17, 2015
I don't really see a need to retire as long as I am having fun.
STAN LEE
interview, Feb. 6, 2006
Kids like comics as much as ever, but a very unusual thing happened. There used to be a very big collectors' market; all of a sudden people were paying high prices for back issues of comics. Houses like Sotheby's would have big auctions, and kids would read that a comic book, which originally cost a dime, was sold for $20,000. There were newspaper articles: "Comic books are a better investment than stocks." So, instead of buying one issue of a magazine, they'd buy twenty. They wouldn't even read them, never took them out of the cellophane. Suddenly a book that sold 200,000 was selling a million or half a million. It was the greatest thing. Then the market crashed.
STAN LEE
Stan Lee: Conversations
Jack [Kirby] and Joe [Simon] wrote and drew the stories themselves in the beginning and I was just, like, the office boy. But after a while they had more writing than they could handle and I was the only guy around, so they said, "Hey Stan, you think you can write this?" When you're seventeen years old, what do you know? I said, "Sure, I can do it!" And that was it.
STAN LEE
"Stan Lee: From Marvel Comics Genius to Purveyor of Wonder with POW!", PR, March 13, 2006
I've written so many things over the years that I don't want to go back to being just a scriptwriter. I'm in what I consider to be the enviable position of all I have to do is come up with the idea and write an outline that makes it seem like it's a viable idea that will interest people, and then other people write the scripts -- and I become the executive producer or the producer, depending on how much involvement I have, and I get a creative credit and then move on to the next project.
STAN LEE
interview, April 30, 2002
I'm thankful for our writers
Whose imaginations never fail,
And I'm thankful for our artists
Who illustrate each tale.
I'm thankful for our letterers
Who print the words we write,
And without our classy colorists
We'd just be black and white.
I'm thankful for our editors
Who put it all together,
And the gang that proofs each peerless page
In every kind of weather.
I'm thankful for our printers
So dependable and true,
And also for our auditors
Whatever it is they do.
I'm thankful for our sales force
Selling every neighborhood,
And I thank our competition
For making us look good.
Now here's to all of Marveldom
I can't thank you enough,
Yep, you're the ones I thank the most
For reading all this stuff!
STAN LEE
"Stan Lee's Soapbox", Conan the Barbarian #59, February 1976
For many years we've been trying, in our own bumbling way, to illustrate that love is a far greater force, a far greater power than hate. Now we don't mean you're expected to go around like a pirouetting Pollyanna, tossing posies at everyone who passes by, but we do want to make a point. Let's consider three men: Buddha, Christ, and Moses ... men of peace, whose thoughts and deeds have influenced countless millions throughout the ages -- and whose presence still is felt in every corner of the earth. Buddha, Christ, and Moses ... men of good will, men of tolerance, and especially men of love. Now, consider the practitioners of hate who have sullied the pages of history. Who still venerates their words? Where is homage still paid to their memory? What banners still are raised to their cause? The power of love -- and the power of hate. Which is most truly enduring? When you tend to despair ... let the answer sustain you.
STAN LEE
"Stan's Soapbox"
Someone wants to do a movie of my life now and he's writing a script, and I said to him, "What the hell could you do? I've never been arrested, I haven't taken drugs, I've had the same wife for 54 years -- where's anything of interest to people?"
STAN LEE
interview, April 30, 2002
Some people will say, "Why read a comic book? It stifles the imagination. If you read a novel you imagine what people are like. If you read a comic, it's showing you." The only answer I can give is, "You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?"
STAN LEE
Denver Post Online, May 23, 2013
Never speak harshly of your enemy -- when you can kick 'im in the shins instead!
STAN LEE
"Stan Lee's Soapbox", Conan the Barbarian #55, October 1975
Well, the biggest thing I like about [Spider-Man] is that he seems to be so successful. Everybody else seems to like him. Basically the thing that always intrigued me, what I always wanted to produce was a character that the average reader could identify with. He's not the strongest man in the world. And in his normal identity as Peter Parker, he's not as handsome as Brad Pitt, he's not a great athlete. He's just a regular guy like most guys. And I think that has helped to create the popularity that he has because so many readers can just identify with him.
STAN LEE
"How Stan Lee is bringing women and minorities to the comic world", She Knows, January 27, 2015
We're lucky. Most of our men are good story men. In fact, they have to be. A fellow who's a good artist, but isn't good at telling a story in this form ... in continuity form ... can't really work for us.
STAN LEE
Castle of Frankenstein, no. 12, 1968
Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I'll just say to Jack, "Let's let the next villain be Dr. Doom" ... or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He's so good at plots, I'm sure he's a thousand times better than I. He just makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing ... I may tell him that he's gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I'll give him a plot, but we're practically both the writers on the things.
STAN LEE
Castle of Frankenstein, no. 12, 1968
I'm no prophet, but I'm guessing that comic books will always be strong. I don't think anything can really beat the pure fun and pleasure of holding a magazine in your hand, reading the story on paper, being able to roll it up and put it in your pocket, reread again later, show it to a friend, carry it with you, toss it on a shelf, collect them, have a lot of magazines lined up and read them again as a series. I think young people have always loved that. I think they always will.
STAN LEE
Brandweek, May 2000
I try not to do anything that's too close to what I've done before. And the nice thing is we have a big universe here. It's filled with new ideas. All you have to do is grab them.
STAN LEE
Brandweek, May 2000
Achilles, without his heel, you wouldn't even know his name today.
STAN LEE
"Stan Lee: From Marvel Comics Genius to Purveyor of Wonder with POW!", PR, March 13, 2006
What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say "I want to rule the world," and there's nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four's greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!
STAN LEE
Stan Lee's Amazing Marvel Universe
Well, I guess we were looking for something to hook some new readers. Also, I think boredom had a little to do with it. We had been turning out books for about twenty years. Same old type all the time ... so I figured, let's try something a little more offbeat. Let's try to ... I think the big policy was to avoid the clichés. For example in the Fantastic Four, the first cliché was: all superheroes wore costumes. We soon learned that was a mistake because, much as the readers like offbeat things, there are certain basics that we must have, and apparently superhero fans do demand costumes as we learned in the subsequent mail.
STAN LEE
Castle of Frankenstein, no. 12, 1968
The publisher had me doing western magazines, crime magazines, men's adventure magazines, even romance and teenage magazines and one day he came to me and he said you know one of our competitors has a book called The Justice League and it's selling well and it's a bunch of superheroes, why don't we do some superhero magazines? I said OK, I wanted to keep my job so I came up with The Fantastic Four and the others and that was the only reason. If my publisher hadn't said 'let's do superhero stories' I'd probably still be doing A Kid Called Outlaw, The Two Gun Kid or Millie the Model or whatever I was doing at the time.
STAN LEE
interview, CNN, June 12, 2013
The power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless eternal universe.
STAN LEE
The Avengers, #14