Interviews

Stan Lee attends Pre-E3 Activision event and talks about videogames featuring his characters
By Michael Lafferty 

“When you play a videogame, you are part of the story. To me, that really has the edge.”

His name is legendary, and even though his hearing is not as good as it once was, when Stan Lee speaks, people hush and listen.

The man, along with Jack Kirby, is responsible for a new breed of superheroes and published the first Fantastic Four comic back in 1961. It set the stage for a new world in which superheroes had human frailties, and some – including the Amazing Spider-Man – even suffered from angst when juxtaposing the responsibilities of power with personal wants.

During a pre-E3 event recently in Santa Monica, Activision showed off the latest videogame iterations of the Marvel characters Stan Lee introduced to the world – which includes X-Men Legends 2, the Fantastic Four and Ultimate Spider-Man. Who better to attend the event than the man himself. Lee entered the room to a rousing ovation from the assembled media, and then took time to talk a little with the crowd. 

He was asked if he maintains any kind of control over the movie and videogame depictions of his universe and if Spider-Man and Superman battled, who would win: 

Stan Lee: “Obviously, Spider-Man would trounce the poor guy. You see, he would be getting out of Superman’s way all the time and he would exhaust him. And finally, when Superman was too tired to make another move, Spider-Man would web him up and ship him back to Krypton, or wherever he came from. You know, we did a book years ago, Spider-Man versus Superman, I don’t know if you ever saw it, it was a big giant-sized book, and we had to write it so it ended up as a draw between the two of them, and the biggest problem we had on the book was whose name is first – Spider-Man versus Superman, or Superman versus Spider-Man. So we had to do two covers to satisfy both companies.

As to the first question …

“I don’t want control at all. Let me tell you how cagey I am. If the movie is good, or the game, or the TV show, or the cartoon, I somehow get a lot of credit for it. If it’s bad, hey, I had nothing to do with it.”

Does he think that videogames exploit or diminish the world he created, and do they detract from their comic book origins?

Stan Lee: “I wouldn’t call videogames an exploitation. Videogames are an art form and a form of entertainment in themselves. But compared to a comic book, a videogame is much more exciting and it makes the person who would be a comic-book reader, it makes him or her a participant, and in a way it is more fun and exciting to be a participant than it is to be a reader. When you read a comic book you are reading the story as it is taking place. When you play a videogame, you are part of the story. To me, that really has the edge.”

How important are videogames to drawing in new readers? And does he have control over which characters make it into the videogames?

Stan Lee: “I would think that the readers of the comic books are among your biggest fans. I have not questioned everybody who reads comic books, but I would just guess if you are a comic-book reader, you would love to play the videogames because A – you are familiar with the characters, you care about the characters or you wouldn’t be a reader of the comic, and here you have the chance to move them, to control them and guide them in their fights and so forth. It just seems to me to be a natural that the readers would be very enthusiastic about the games.”

“I really have no control over it (the characters that make the way into the games). Maybe I would like control, but nobody ever asked me.”

One journalist noted that there was a time when comic books were blamed for “turning children into monsters” and videogames are now suffering – in some quarters – from the same rap. Stan Lee was asked for his perspective on that.

Stan Lee: “There is always going to be somebody who feels that all the ills of the world are blamed on the movies we see, the games we play, the books we read. … These videogames – kids love them. I don’t want to comment on the ones that may be too violent; I don’t know what is too violent and what isn’t. I just know that kids get a lot of their own natural energy, it’s a way to expend it, to have a lot of fun, it excites them, they enjoy it – to me, these games are great.”

If Spider-Man is about responsibility and power, and X-Men is about growing up different, what did the Fantastic Four represent?

Stan Lee: “When I write these things, I wasn’t trying to make them represent anything, I was just trying to think ‘what can I write that people would enjoy reading?’ The Fantastic Four was really the first of the Marvel books that I had done, the new Marvel worlds, you might say. And I wanted to get a team that was more like a family, and I wanted to violate the clichés. I didn’t want them to have secret identities, I didn’t want the heroine not to know that the hero was who he was, and I didn’t want a little teen-age sidekick. I put the obligatory teen-ager in, but I made him a regular member of the team. … I tried to be realistic and have some fun with it. I never really thought about what it represented except maybe it might represent what would happen if four normal people got super powers and what would their lives be like.” Then he smiled broadly and said: “kind of like The Incredibles.”

He has made cameos in the movies, but will he ever make a cameo in a videogame?

Stan Lee just smiled at that one. “Somebody has missed a great opportunity,” he said, somewhat mischievously. “Can you imagine if a kid is trying to decide ‘should I buy this videogame or that one,’ and he says ‘wait a minute! Stan has a cameo in this one!!’ I mean, need I say any more?”