Meeting Stan Lee

I'm back talking with the fabulous Sandy Jimenez, creator of Marley Davidson: Bronx Exorcist and more. He had the opportunity to meet one of the gods of the comics universe -- Stan Lee. Naturally, I had to hear all about this!


Can you tell me a little more about hanging out with Stan Lee?
Is there anything in particular that he said or did that stands out?

I was introduced to Stan Lee in March of 2012 by Mike Carbonara who runs New York Comic Book Market Place. Lee had come back into New York from promoting the latest battery of Marvel movies, I think he had just come off of the press junket for the big Avengers movie of that year if I'm remembering it right.

He was very kind. I try to ease up on the questions with guys in the industry, because they get hit with a lot of questions from fans all of the time and he really did look exhausted. He was too tired to eat in fact.

He asked me about my work, I told him what I was up to. I asked him how he felt about where Marvel was now. He said he had always seen it as a character-based company that would be a springboard to other media, it just took decades to happen on the scale he thought it deserved, and admitted he didn't think it would happen on such a global scale -- they had tried TV and motion pictures before.

He said it was a shame Jack Kirby didn't live to see some of the movies, because the effects work was finally beginning to catch up to what Kirby was drawing decades ago.

When I asked him about the early days at Marvel, he told me that he was actually tiring of the comics business in those years and that he, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others were of a generation working in comics who felt they had nothing to lose by doing things differently.

 I mentioned Black Panther, and he stifled a laugh waving it off.

He and Jack Kirby introduced the Black Panther, at the height of the Civil Rights era, a radical, and in my opinion, protest-driven concept at a time when just including any African American character took a certain kind of moral rectitude, and naming him after a Black revolutionary socialist organization [although some people say its the other way around, the point is they kept the name even after Huey Newton and Bobby Seale starting becoming active] was really an anti-establishment act and almost self destructive considering how conservative comic books and their supporting businesses like distributors and toy makers were in those days.

Stan admitted that he and Jack Kirby were trying to get into trouble, hopefully make a name for themselves on the back of some controversy and leave the company or even the business altogether. Stan said the more chances they took, the more the readers responded. He did offer the Hulk as an example. While he says the look of the character was inspired by a popular Aurora Frankenstein model kit (publisher Martin Goodman asked him and Kirby to come up with something that would capitalize on its popularity,) making him cognitively impaired, (or "mentally retarded" in the parlance of the time) was the angle that they thought would generate some heat, some notoriety, but somehow it never happened. Lee said people responded to the Hulk on a very human level, and that in turn made them go deeper with its stories as a nuclear-age Jekyll and Hyde story. So, I was really impressed with Stan Lee to say the least.

There's been a lot of controversy over the past decade and a half about who really deserves the credit for Marvel's explosive period of creativity in the 1960s and early 1970s and while that may never be sorted out to anyone's satisfaction, I'm convinced those comic books and those characters would not have had the impact, nor would they be as compelling as they are today if he had not been at Marvel during those years.

There's more to tell about our meeting, but I guess I'll leave that for another time.

 You can see more of our hero here at Vampryotechnic Studios and Sandy’s work can be seen now at at The Camden Center for the Arts at Rutgers University. The Compulsive Narratives: Stories That Must Be Told show is up through April 26th.