Creator of Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk
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With the current rage over Superman due to last year's hit movie, many people will purchase a copy of the comic for the first time in years, and may be disappointed to see how much it has changed. Once the largest selling comic book hero on the market, Superman was knocked out of first place long ago by Spiderman, the creation of a 56-year-old native New Yorker named Stan Lee. Besides selling about one million Marvel1 comics each month, Spiderman appears as a daily strip in some 500 newspapers around the world.
But even without this giant success, Stan Lee would be rich and famous. His fertile mind has also given birth to the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Doctor Strange, and a host of other modern-day mythological2 figures. As publisher of Marvel Comics, he rules over an empire that branches out into dozens of areas — prime-time television drama, animated3 cartoons, hardbound and paperback4 collections of comic reprints, novels about Marvel characters, toys, games, posters, clothing and much more. Most of these spin-off products are the work of other companies that have bought the rights, but Stan Lee remains5 the creative force behind the whole operation, as I discover during a meeting with Lee at the Marvel headquarters on Madison Avenue.
"I think the title of publisher is just given to me so I can have more prestige when I'm dealing6 with people," says Lee in his clipped, precise voice, as he stretches his feet onto the coffee table of his brightly decorated office. "I'm a salaried employee of Marvel — your average humble7 little guy trying to stay afloat in the stormy sea of culture. The company owns the properties, of course, but I have no complaints. I don't think I could have as much anywhere else. … My main interest is to see that the company itself does well and makes as much money as possible."
He is an intense, energetic man of wiry build who dresses in a casual yet elegant manner. As he shifts the position of his arms and legs on the couch, there is something unmistakably spiderlike in the movements. For all his politeness, he cannot mask the impression that his mind is racing8 far ahead of his rapidly spoken words.
"My involvement with this company goes back to about 1939," says Lee. "I was always the editor, the art director, the head writer, and the creative director [from the age of 17]. In the early 1960s I was thinking of quitting. I thought I wasn't really getting anywhere. My wife said, 'Why not give it one last fling and do the kind of stories you want to do?' So I started bringing out the offbeat9 heroes. I never dreamt that they would catch on the way they did."
He emphasizes that he did not create the characters alone, but co-created them with the help of an artist. Nevertheless, it was Lee who revolutionized the comic book industry by introducing the concept of what has been termed the "hung-up hero" — the superhero whose powers do not preclude10 him from having the same emotional troubles as the average mortal. This is what makes Lee's characters so believable and so irresistibly11 entertaining on television. It explains why CBS' The Incredible Hulk is a hit, and why the same network has filmed eight episodes of The Amazing Spiderman. On January 19 from 8 to 10 p.m., CBS will broadcast the pilot for a new Marvel-based series, Captain America.
"Dr. Strange may come back again," says Lee. "It was made into a two hour television movie." His old Spiderman cartoons, too, are still in syndication.
He claims to work "about 28 hours a day," and a look at his dizzying list of activities supports this claim. Besides running the Marvel headquarters, Lee makes frequent trips to the West Coast to develop shows for ABC and CBS, writes some cartoons for NBC, acts as consultant12 to the Spiderman and Hulk programs, writes an introduction to each of the dozens of Marvel books published each year, writes occasional books and screenplays of his own, gives lectures all over the country, and — what to some would be a full-time13 job in itself — writes the plot and dialogue not only for the Spiderman newspaper strip, but also, since November, for a Hulk newspaper strip that already appears in more than 200 daily papers worldwide.
Few people know Manhattan as well as Stan Lee. Born the son of a dress cutter in Washington Heights, he has made the Upper East Side his home for the past 15 years. "I'm a big walker," he explains. "I'm a fast walker: I can easily average a block a minute. So if I want to walk to Greenwich Village, I give myself an hour — 60 blocks. I wouldn't know what time to leave if I took a cab."
Asked about new projects in the works, Lee mentions that Marvel is planning to produce some motion pictures that will be filmed in Japan. "And I have a contract to write my autobiography," he adds. "I was surprised and delighted that they gave me five years to do it. So I presume I'll wait four years; maybe in that period, something interesting will happen to me."
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1 marvel | |
vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异;n.令人惊异的事 | |
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2 mythological | |
adj.神话的 | |
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3 animated | |
adj.生气勃勃的,活跃的,愉快的 | |
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4 paperback | |
n.平装本,简装本 | |
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5 remains | |
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹 | |
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6 dealing | |
n.经商方法,待人态度 | |
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7 humble | |
adj.谦卑的,恭顺的;地位低下的;v.降低,贬低 | |
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8 racing | |
n.竞赛,赛马;adj.竞赛用的,赛马用的 | |
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9 offbeat | |
adj.不平常的,离奇的 | |
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10 preclude | |
vt.阻止,排除,防止;妨碍 | |
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11 irresistibly | |
adv.无法抵抗地,不能自持地;极为诱惑人地 | |
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12 consultant | |
n.顾问;会诊医师,专科医生 | |
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13 full-time | |
adj.满工作日的或工作周的,全时间的 | |
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