Stan Lee: WNYC Radio Interview, October 15, 1970
Lawrence
Van Gelder: There was a
time about fifteen or twenty years ago when I guess most of the people our age
stopped reading comic books, they thought they were too old for them, they
thought t1-ley had grown uninteresting. But something new is going on today,
and you're the man who I think is most responsible for it.
Can you tell us what is new and what is
surprising in comic books today?
Stan
Lee: Well of course none
of it is surprising to me since I'm right in the middle of it. I guess the
thing you're referring to as "newness" is the so-called relevancy
that seems to be in the comic book magazines today. Jr stead of just a
superhero trying to fight a villain who wants to blow up the world, or little
green-skinned monsters from Mars, we try to set our
stories in in the real world. A character like Spider-Man
will be involved in a campus protest and things of that sort.
Lawrence
Van Gelder: Do you find
that this has an impact among young people, that you get a response?
Stan
Lee: Well, I would guess
we get a response amongst people of every age. Actually we don't knock
ourselves out for the so-called "relevancy" in the sense of getting
political issues and so forth and dragging them in. We've been trying to do
this for the past, I guess, ten years since Marvel Comics started its so-called
"New Wave of Comics." We tried to get relevancy before there were
these big burning questions that are playing out now, in the sense that instead
of superheroes that are obviously cardboard figures, why not treat our
superheroes as real people living in a real world. I think that the theme that
we've had is that these are like "fairy tales" for grown-ups, but
they were to be completely realistic except for the one element of a super
power which the superhero possessed, that we would ask our reader to swallow
somehow. You had to believe that somebody could climb a sheer wall or that his
body could burst into flame or that he was a green-skinned monster. But
excepting those sort of ridiculous points which just made for colorful stories,
we tried to do everything else as realistically as possible. For example, if a
hero had a superhero power, we didn't, ergo, just assume that he'd be lucky in
love and have all the money in the world and everything would come his way. We
tried to show that nothing really brings total success, and just because you
have big muscles, this doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have big
triumphs. And we wouldn't have a character in a silly costume walk down the
street and have people not notice it, as they had been doing in comics for
years before. We'd likely as not have another character in the story say,
"Who's that nut in the skin-tight underwear prancing down the
street?" and so forth. We felt that we were being relevant even then; we
were trying to get people to act the way real people would act given a set of
circumstances.
Stan
Lee: well, in trying for
realism of course, if something is going on today and something we're all
concerned with, it's really almost , it's impossible to keep it out of a story. Now for
example, pollution. We've had ecology stories in Sub-Mariner. One of our
writers, Roy Thomas, has been doing many stories of that sort with great
bearing on problems that concern people today. We've had ecology stories, I
guess. . . . In fact we're big in ecology stories today, in Iron Man comics,
Daredevil. . . . The one in Sub-Mariner dealt with the so-called surface race,
which is polluting the seas, and Sub-Mariner, who as everyone knows is the king
of Atlantis, he took a dim view about all this. We've had, as I've mentioned,
stories about campus riots. We've had Captain America involved in student
dissents. We've tried to do more than just involve the characters in these contemporary
problems. We try to also show how our characters themselves react to the
problems. And well, one thing that I try and do in my own limited way is to
show that nothing is really all black and white. Captain America can't—although
he's considered an establishment figure really—he's beginning to have second
thoughts about the whole thing. He realizes he can't really side with the
establishment 100 percent. He realizes that there are a lot of things that are
wrong, and it seems that many of these things that are wrong, well, it seems to
be no real simple, legal, effortless way to correct them short of extreme
measures. By the same token he's always fought for law and order. He's afraid
that too much violence will breed too much violence and where do you stop it.
And, well, obviously this is really my own philosophy too. I have the toughest
problem in the world in taking a definite stand on almost anything, and I have
ambivalent feelings about virtually everything, and this is either going to
make our stories extremely dull or extremely realistic. I don't know.
Lindsey
Van Gelder: Well are these
issues calculated because these are what kids care about or are these issues
that your artists and writers and you yourself spend time off the job worrying
about?
Stan
Lee: Oh, I think you have
to say that it's what we care about. I mean, after all, we writers and artists
and editors are really, well, we were kids not too long ago, a little longer
for some like myself. But we live in the same world as our readers, and certainly
what our readers are concerned with, we are concerned with. And I think this is
another reason that our books are somewhat successful over the past few years.
We've never tried to anticipate our audience's desires. We never thought of
ourselves as separate and distinct from our audience. We are our audience. And
we've always felt that if we can do stories that interest us, stories about
themes that interest us, well, they have to interest the public because we're
part of the public. So far it's worked out.
Lawrence
Van Gelder: In dealing
with some of these problems, you take on problems that some people don't think
are problems. I mean, they think that always the police are right, that always
the establishment is right, always that the government is right. So in a way
you are taking a political stance certainly in the eyes of some people who may
disagree with you. Does this lead to a lot of critical comment from readers? Do
you get mail from certain parts of the country from people saying, "Now
look, this is wrong and how can you do it? You poison people's minds."
Stan
Lee: We get such a
minuscule amount of that type of mail. I'd think we might say that we almost
get none. We either have the most broadly-minded, clear-thinking audience in
the world, or else the nation isn't in as bad a shape as everybody thinks.
Well, that may sound like a very self-serving statement, in other words,
"if you like our stories, then the country's in good shape," I didn't
mean it to sound that way. But what I mean, we get many letters from people who
disagree with some of the points that we have in the books and take issue with
us, but they are very rational well-reasoned letters. And as much as I can
tell, they seem to be the letters of fairly reasonable people who have an
opposing point of view. Well, my god, we have people in our office who have
opposing points of view. I was working on a piece, booklet, for Ken Koch, the
poet whose new book just came out—plug—and he's on the staff of Columbia, and
the two of us were working on a comic book which would hopefully inform the
voters as to which congressmen to vote for who might help end the war in
Vietnam a little sooner. And we asked one or two of the people in our studio,
the bullpen as we call it, to illustrate the book, and a few of them were
desperately anxious to do it, and a few of them said, "Oh golly no, I'm no
big dove. I wouldn't want to do anything like that." So even in our
bullpen we have divergent opinions, which is something of course if you think
about it, everybody belongs to a family, and how often in a family is there
ever complete concurrence on every issue? And when you try to think of making
the whole world harmonious, or getting people who are so totally different and
have different interests throughout a nation to agree on any issue, why it's
just a staggering concept.
Lindsey
Van Gelder: I want to ask
you about the age groups of the people who read Marvel. I've noticed that the
letters to the editor column read like a, well, sometimes like a SST session.
But usually it seems to be older people arguing very
cogent political points. What kind of letters
do you get from kids, eight, nine, who might not be steeped in this, or are
they?
Stan
Lee: Younger people arguing
cogent points. No, actually luckily we still seem to have a lot of young
readers. We receive as many letters from the younger readers. Usually we don't
print as many so it seems like we have perhaps an overwhelming amount of older readers.
I think it's pretty well balanced though. You see, we try to keep our letters
page interesting and indicative of the feelings of our readers.
Lindsey
Van Gelder: They're great.
Stan
Lee: Thank you. But what
happens is that most of our younger readers will write letters such as
"Gosh! Wow! Your last issue was groovy!" or "Take Stan Lee out
and shoot him! That last issue was terrible! We know he can do better!"
And that's about the extent of it.
Lindsey
Van Gelder: Do they pick
up on politics though?
Stan
Lee: Not as much as the
older readers, no. But they'll say things like "Sub-Mariner's trunks
should always be purple, but in one panel they were green." Well, you can
only print so many of those kinds of letters. It doesn't make for a real
philosophical situation. So for that reason we do print the more interesting
letters, which are nine times out of ten from older readers. But to answer your
question a little more specifically, I guess I've strayed all around the point.
We do get, an unexpected—unexpected, a few years ago—amount of letters from our
readers which deal with politics. In fact, I just wrote a Soapbox column for a
future bullpen in which I mention a fantastic thing, in Captain. . . . Oh, I
might preface this by saying selfishly I use the letters to help me edit the
magazine. It shows me what the readers want and don't want. And for the most
part I try and follow their dictates because they're the ones that buy the
books. Well, I've been very frustrated with our Captain America magazine. I find
it's as if I've been left alone on an ice floe somewhere and I got to shift for
myself. I don't know what the readers want
because every letter we've gotten for the past
three months for Captain America has merely dealt with political issues.
Nobody's said a word about the stories or the artwork themselves. Now I don't
know if people are just reading the magazine just to pick out whatever
philosophy or political connotations there might be. I don't know if anyone
cares if we have super villains or if there's any action or anything. I put a
little notice in the Soapbox asking a few readers to just kinda drop us a line
and let us know if they are still reading the book.
Lindsey
Van Gelder: How did you
get the idea for the women's liberation issue of the Avengers?
Stan
Lee: Oh, I didn't. That
was probably Roy Thomas's idea. He wrote the thing. But I would imagine it's a
question that almost answers itself. Women's lib is so big now, how can you not
have a story or two about it?
Lindsey
Van Gelder: Do you think
you might let the Black Widow or Invisible Girl get her own book?
Stan
Lee: Well, that won't have
as much to do with women's lib as it does with if the book will sell or not.
Actually we put the Black Widow in her own strip in one of our books.
Lindsey
Van Gelder: She's with the
Inhumans.
Stan
Lee: That's right. It's
either an "Amazing" or "Astonishing." I always get those
two mixed up. We're just waiting for some sales figures. I think it will do
well. If it does sensationally well, we'll take the two strips that are
appearing in the one book and give them each their own book of course.
Lawrence
Van Gelder: There was a
time, and I'd like to go back a little to the fifties, when every time you
picked up a newspaper or listened to a speech, some psychologist or some
congressman was taking on comic books. That they were too violent, too gory.
What's happened since then? It hurt the industry at that time, and I think it
left a lot of people who are parents themselves with the idea that they didn't
want their kids exposed to it. What governs you now?
Stan
Lee: I'm sorry that every
question seems to cause a speech on my part. I'll try to answer simply. We are
living in such a fast-changing world that things that were bad, or . . . well,
even women's clothes, if you could ever see a girl wearing her skirt as high as
they've been wearing them in the mini-skirt age of a year ago, ten years ago it
would have been impossible to even conceive of in the street. Now we accept it.
I remember the Beatles' haircut when they first came out and everybody saw the
Beatles' hair, you know. "Wow, how can they go out in public that
way?" I just saw some old pictures of them recently, and they seemed so
conservative. You sort of wondered what all the fuss was about.
Well, the reason I mention
that in the age of Dr. Wertham and all the ... I shouldn't really say
"all"—he was the leading opponent of comics and the most vocal one.
At the time when he was having his big harangue against comics, people were
very concerned about violence and sex and about,
well, I guess anything Dr. Wertham wanted to
mention. And he would point out a panel in a book somewhere where a person was
being killed, and he would make it sound so terrible, and the fact that he was
a psychiatrist, this impressed parents and they began to think, "Golly,
what's going on in these comics?"
Today—and this is why I
mention it's a quickly changing world—today, and it's certainly not an original
thought on my part, it's been said so many times, there's so much real violence
in the world that we live in, you just have to pick up a newspaper. I don't
think there's anything we could do in a comic book that would even approximate
the terrible things that are going on in the world about us. Not that we
attempt to. But I think it's been put in its proper perspective now. Comic
books are just an entertainment medium. They are certainly written far better,
illustrated more beautifully than they were, they are probably written better
than your average TV show or grade B movie. Unfortunately most adults aren't
aware of this because they don't think to pick up one and read it. They tell an
exciting story with more imagery, more imagination, more fantasy and wonder
than you can get anywhere else, except in an occasionally good new science-fiction
story, and even that won't be quite as imaginative. That will just cover one
point usually, whereas a comic book just seems to explore the whole realm of
fantasy and wonder, and it's all for fifteen cents, and it's all in pictures.
And I think a person would have to be paranoid to start criticizing comics
today. I think they are virtually a public service, and they should be
subsidized by the government! (everyone laughs)
Lawrence
Van Gelder: Looking at the
covers of them I think parents will notice that there's a little seal on them
"Approved by the Comics Code," "Approved by the Comics Code
Authority," and that is something that came in after the massive attacks
on comic books in the fifties. Could you tell people a little bit about this
code? I think it might set some parents' minds at rest.
Stan
Lee: Well, it's headed by
Leonard Darvin, a most capable attorney and most conscientious code
administrator. And Len Darvin and his staff of experts or censors or critics or
observers, I really don't know what to call them, his staff. They read
everything that goes into the comics, and they put their seal of approval on
every book before it goes to the engraver. Now this is not just a cover-up.
It's not just some window dressing to impress people. Oh, we spend a lot of
time arguing with the Code: "Why can't we have a story like this or a
theme like this or a picture like this?" And he says "Well, you got
to remember it may be okay for older readers, and I know you have many of them,
but we still have a lot of younger readers, and we have to think of them."
And he very often sets us back on possibly the right path of worrying about the
really young readers. . .. So I think this mentioning of the Code, which I
don't always agree with, as far as any parent being concerned with a young
child reading these magazines; I think these magazines are policed as carefully
and possibly more carefully than motion pictures or really anything else a
child will read. I might add that because I am a big fan of children's books. I
know many of the authors and illustrators, and I look at them occasionally.
There is far more liberalism as far as giving an author and artist free reign
to do things that might not have been able to have been done a few years ago
for the children's market. There's more liberalism in the children's books then
there are in comic books, and the average parent is not going to worry about
children's books.
You know an interesting
thing about my continuing argument with the Code. I've been wanting for the longest
time to have stories that involve the theme of drug addiction, just as we have
ecology and civil rights and demonstrations and so forth. And this is one thing
the Code is very staunchly against. They think more harm can be done than good
if we even mention drug addiction. My point, of course, is that it's a fact of
life. It's like not mentioning the Sun, if for some reason you don't approve of
the Sun. At any rate, just yesterday I received in the mail—and I can't wait
until they contact the Code—I received something from the government, oh I
forget which office, the office of health, education, and welfare or so, and
from somebody apparently highly placed with all sorts of brochures, a lovely
letter that I'm going to keep. "Dear Mr. Lee, we understand that Marvel
Comics is very influential among young people and so forth. We'd consider it a
very fine thing if you would mention drug addiction and do what you can, and
here's. . . ." They enclosed a number of pamphlets to give me background.
And I felt, by god, I cannot wait to call this guy and say "Don't send me
the letter, call the Code and tell them this." Which is what I'm going to
do as soon as I get off the mike here.
Lindsey
Van Gelder: Stan Lee, what
about sex and comics? I know that your competitors have story lines having
Superman and Batman pretty well running away from women, and you don't. You've
had some pretty racy implied sex which may have been in my imagination, but
it's the last place you can read stories and use your imagination. I wonder how
that can be handled within the framework of the Code.
Stan
Lee: You scared me for a
minute when you said sex and comics and your competitors had Superman and
Batman. . . . You finished the sentence pretty quickly. . . . Well, actually as
far as we're concerned we try to be reasonable and rational. Where you wouldn't
see a girl wear her skirt above the knee years ago, but now you do, there might
be situations. . . . For example, I can't see anything wrong if there's a
married couple and you want to show them waking up in the morning in a double
bed. But we don't concentrate on those things. I don't even know how the Code
would feel about it. I don't even recall if we've done that yet. But we
certainly have our characters fall in love, have romantic problems. Again, we
try to make everything as realistic as possible without offending anyone.
Without offending what we'd consider to be any reasonable person. Now, of
course, you could have a radio show on "what is a reasonable person?"
But we really have so many older readers and younger readers whose parents look
at the books also—we've had no letters of complaint. So, as far as sex, I think
we're probably handling the thing perfectly fine, and I know the Code has not
complained, and I don't think we're doing it in the way you just described like
the cowboy who will only kiss his horse. We sort of give the idea that our
characters are reasonably normal human beings who won't turn the other way if a
pretty girl comes by. We're not selling sex in our stories. Let me put it that
way. We don't attempt to play up the sex in anyway. But if a story should call
for somebody who is attracted to somebody of the opposite sex or whatever, we
try to put it in so that it makes sense.
Lawrence
Van Gelder: There was a
time, I know, and I think it still goes on, when you go out and do a lot of
lecturing on campus. I gather you get ideas from students. I wonder what
feelings you get when you talk to them generally about the magazines.
Stan
Lee: The same thing seems
to happen. We start out talking about the magazines. And they are tremendously
interested in the magazines, which is why I do receive so many invitations to
lecture at about every college in the free world I guess. But a strange thing
occurs. After we've been talking about oh, five or ten minutes about the
magazines. Suddenly one student will say "Well, what do you think about
Vietnam?" or "What do you think about Angela Davis?" or
whatever.
And we're off and running
on things that are far more relevant possibly than on whether Spider-Man should
marry his girlfriend. And this takes up almost the whole seminar. In fact these
things go on for hours. They're totally fascinating. If I've learned anything
from the kids on campus, the thing I've learned is that you got to make your
comic magazines or your televisions shows or your movies or whatever relate to
the real world because unless they do, you have meaningless cardboard
characters, and that's not really what people are into today. They want stories
that will tell them something about the world they are living in now. If you
are clever enough to make those stories entertaining or exciting and to use
continuing characters that they want to read more of, I guess that's the ideal
solution. But I've never known anything like [the way things are now].... Why,
years ago I used to lecture, and the whole lecture was just about the comics.
But now it seems every age group, whether they are radicals or whether they are
conservatives, they want to know what about today? What about what's happening
now?
I
was not immediately a big fan of the Fantastic
Four - that would take until issue #19, “Prisoners of the Pharaoh.” I
enjoyed many of the comics until that point, but for some reason that comic
seemed so much different than anything else. Issue #4 had featured the Sub-Mariner. When it came out I had no
idea that there was a “Golden Age” of comics in the 1940s, that would take
until Feiffer’s “The Great Comic Book
Heroes” published in 1965. So I thought, as with the Fantastic Four, that the
Sub-Mariner was a copy of another DC character, Aquaman.
Daredevil had great potential, but most
of his early villains including the Stilt-Man and the Matador, seemed silly.
Then, when Wally Wood came in and did Daredevil
#7, with the Sub-Mariner, I was
hooked. I hated when he left, but really enjoyed Johnny Romita’s take on Ka-Zar.
Then in issue #16, the comic that was most like the Justice League changed its members and removed it big stars. This was different!
