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Creating Characters With Stan Lee

Posted by Zonk on from the pumpkin-bomb-the-hell-out-of-the-place dept.

GameDailyBiz has an interview with Stan Lee that touches on a talk he gave at the 2005 D.I.C.E. Summit entitled "Superheroes - Creating Characters for the Ages". From the article: "I submitted the idea of Spider-Man to my publisher and he hated it. I said my hero was a teenager -- the publisher said a teenager could not be a hero but only be a sidekick. I said he was insecure and had personal problems -- my publisher said a hero does not have personal problems... The lesson to be learned, don't listen to experts because they don't know what they're talking about and just get you down."

6 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. A hero by FidelCatsro · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "a hero does not have personal problems." someone should of told that to batman , who was by all accoutns completly psychotic and had schitzo effective episodes where he saw his parents murderd which drove him to wipe out crime with a vengance

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
    1. Re:A hero by Pluvius · · Score: 2

      I'm not sure that those aspects of his character were really explored until well past the 60s.

      Rob

    2. Re:A hero by jayhawk88 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Pluvius is right though. When Batman first came out in the 40's, his character was very dark and almost pulp-like. He killed bad guys on a regular basis. But when he got popular during the Golden Age, he was definitely the "Adam West" style Batman, who's biggest non-Batman-related concern was whether to go to the Charity Bachelor Auction or not. We still were told why he became Batman of course, but the comics were all about his actions as Batman, and any story we saw as Bruce Wayne was just peripheral.

      It wasn't until Marvel came along and started writing characters who had problems in their non-hero lives that you started to see things like Batman going dark again.

  2. It's managers in general that are clueless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    don't listen to experts because they don't know what they're talking about

    Lee is wrong to attribute this cluelessness to "experts". Real experts know what they're talking about but are almost never seen in the roles being discussed, which are effectively managerial positions.

    Some experts move to management of course, but as soon as they do that they start to become "past experts", and then they very rapidly become no longer experts at all even when they think they are. When you don't *DO* stuff yourself, you lose touch with the real doer's world and start talking hypotheticals.

    And that's the upside of the problem. On the more common downside, management came up through the ranks without ever doing anything that required training a clue beyond how to run a spreadsheet.

    The archetypal PHB is an pretty accurate portrayal that all of us easily recognize in our companies, and even the cartoon versions taken to extremes for a laugh still have a considerable amount of truth in them.

    Lee was talking to management. Surprise, surprise, they got it totally ass about face.

  3. ob simpsons quote by howman · · Score: 2, Funny

    Stan Lee won't leave my store.

    --
    flinging poop since 1969
  4. okay... by Tom7 · · Score: 2, Funny

    The lesson to be learned, don't listen to experts because they don't know what they're talking about ... and so I didn't read the article.