Everyone Is The Hero Of His Own Story: Stan Lee On Creators’ Rights

History is written by the victors, and Stan Lee is nothing if not a winner.

At least co-creator of Spider-Man, The X-Men and The Avengers and a fistful of other lucrative and profitable properties (as I’m sure they are referred to in the Disney front office), Stan started as a simple editor, moved into writing, somewhere along the line in the 1970s became the head cheerleader for Marvel Comics, both in the comics themselves in his Stan’s Soapbox column and in the mainstream press, and wound up making himself a deal skimming fat bank off of Marvel for not doing much of anything at all… probably because no viable corporation wants their head cheerleader to start yowling “Marvel fucked me without lube!” in the public prints.

So Stan lucked out, put himself into a good negotiating position and Got His. And while I stand by my continuing opinion that any comic creator – hell, any human being – who doesn’t want to get fucked by a major corporation probably should make sure their contract contains an anti-fuckery clause before signing it as opposed to bemoaning it afterwards, I have always wondered how Stan feels about guys like Kirby and Colan and Ditko, who were at the very least in the room when these icons were created, and rather than winding up with cameos in the multimillion dollar movie adaptations instead wound up humping an empty table at Artists’ Alley, a premature coffin, or worst of all, an Ayn Rand novel.

Well, wonder no more… or at least, wonder no more how Stan would kinda deflect the question if he was asked. Because Alex Pappademas did an extended piece that includes a short interview with The Man for Grantland. And that interview includes a question to Stan how he feels about the recent uproar over creators’ rights:

Finally Forward Thinking: Avengers Assemble #3 Review

Editor’s Note: There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, so when we needed them, they could spoil the comics that we never could.

Put as mildly as a foul-mouthed, cynical, long-time drunken comic reader can put it, comic publishers almost never handle the release of a movie based on one of their properties well. Put less mildly and more baldly accurately, they generally seem to take the opportunity such a cross-media exposure provides for attracting new, enthusiastic readers to their comic books to grimly set their jaws, strap on their cleats, and stomp hard on their own dicks.

It happens over and over, so predictably that it might was well be a Cylon plot. The Dark Knight is poised to become the biggest movie of 2008, you say? What a perfect time for DC to kill Batman and put a new guy in the suit! Thor looking to open large? Awesome! Kill him! Iron Man breaking bigger than anyone thought in 2008? Sweet, let’s make him a government bureaucrat! It’s like the front offices of the Big Two, prior to the release of a comic book movie, go days without sleep, subsisting on amphetamines, trying to figure out how to convey to potential new readers, who wander into a comic store to learn more about the character they just fell in love with, that it would be in their best interests to fuck off and just keep right on walking.

So imagine my surprise when Marvel, not five days after the release of Avengers in American theaters, put out an issue of a comic book written and drawn by one of their A-list talent teams that looks like the movie, has the same characters as the movie, that is not only action-packed and imminently accessible to anyone who saw the movie, but also goes about answering one of the key unanswered questions from the movie that I have been asked repeatedly since last Friday: “So, that guy in the scene in the credits… who was that guy, exactly?”