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 ZZ: Today we think of the comic business as rather glamorous. But I get the sense that back then it was considered kind of seedy.
SL: Yeah. It was. It was the bottom of the barrel of the arts, in a sense. Nobody had any respect for it, and if anybody over the age of 14 was caught reading a comic, people would sort of look down on them. I tried to change that. When we started with Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and The Hulk and all those characters -- The X-Men -- I tried to write them using a college-level vocabulary and to get the kind of stories that maybe an older person might care about. It was always walking a fine line because we wanted to appeal to older readers without loosing the younger readers.
ZZ: These days TV and movie studios and publishing houses have dozens of development executives to work on scripts. But your best creations were started by two guys alone in a room.
SL: Well, we did. We had total creative freedom. I still had to get what I did approved by our publisher. But once he saw that the first few scripts we did were successful, it was just a case of me dreaming up a character, calling the right artist. It was usually Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko or John Romita or John Buscema or Gil Kane. I don't think that there'll ever be a time when that talented a group of artists is available again. It was great. I would tell them essentially what I wanted. They would go home and draw it, bring it in. We'd argue about it for a while. And that was it.
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"Nobody had any respect for it, and if anybody over the age of 14 was caught reading a comic, people would sort of look down on them."
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Stan Lee
;)
