Stan Lee......

[KensPen]

Ok True believers,
anyone else think Stan has gotten a royal shafting?

I remember as a kid, with my mountain of comics, (mostly Marvel) that Stan Lee owned Marvel Comics.

He is the equivilent to the 20th century Brothers Grimm, as his tales and heros are woven deep into our pop culture....

I see all these movies based on Marvel heros hitting the big screen,
the stories and plots and characters lifted from the pages he wrote,
and I don't think he is profiting much from these Blockbuster films.

[THUNDER HANDS]

1. i doubt

we'll see Stan Lee on a street with a sign that says "Will Draw For Food" anytime soon. :D

[Swede]

2. He seemed quite happy on the X-men II DVD.

He talks on the Daredevil and Hulk DVDs too. I think Mr. Lee is fantastic (pun intended) and I think he's getting a nice bit of crumble.

[truthspeaker]

3. I assume he's getting royalties

I know Marvel is getting paid piles of cash. I don't know how much of that Lee gets, or who typically holds the copyrights in the comic business. Anyone have an idea what Lee is being paid?

[Zolok]

4. Stan is in serious need of a hearty slap upside the head....

if he deserves royalties then so does Larry his brother the writer who toiled at Marvel for years, Jack Kirby who heavily influenced the creation of dozens of licensed Marvel characters, Steve Ditko who MADE Spiderman a top seller....
Stan is a self congratulatory old fraud...I hate him.
:)

[Don_G]

5. I Think He Filed A Lawsuit On At Least One Movie

He was supposed to get royalties and wasn't. I haven't heard if he won or anything about him lately.

Update: He's 80, high-schooled only and drifted into the job as director of Marvel Comics a year or two after he accepted an $8 per week job there starting as a go-fer.

Latest info here: http://www.smdailyjournal.org/article.cfm?issue=11-29-03&storyID=26032

[Champion Jack]

7. Don't forget his Stan lee.com

flash animation fiasco that raked in millions in VC then went belly up.
I know people who STILL haven't been paid for their work on that.

[thom1102]

6. Well, you have to lay some of the blame at his own feet...

Marvel's woes had much to do with his poor managment skills as much as to other people shafting him. Don't get me wrong, I feel bad that Stan isn't making as much as he could be, but at a time when Batman, and Superman were being made into relatively successful movie franchises, Marvel managed to score some pretty AWFUL movie deals the produced low budget "b" grade movies of their characters (see Dolph Lundgren as the Punisher, and Matt Salinger (who?) as Captain America (1991))

I feel bad for the guy who created Captain America. Apparently, he has no rights to the material he created and lives off of social security, barely eking by. They did a story on him on one of those news magazines, and he is holding up production on a new film version because of his suing for some portion of the royalties. This to me seems a shame. Give the guy a percentage or two of the profits made by the product he invented! If the movie is even half as successful as the X-men movies, that would give the guy a couple of million dollars for a priceless addition to American culture. It's really a shame.

[KensPen]

8. Ironically......

when we finally invented the serum he foresaw...
we are using it to hit homeruns, and not making the world a safer place....

:P

[FunBobbyMucha]

9. Quit whining, Stan...

...it's true that the comics industry was woefully cruel to its golden geese, creating disharmony and disloyalty among its artists and writers, an acrimony that led to the formation of Image in the early Nineties by Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, etc (Image has produced some of the worst comics I've ever read, but they at least have the distinction of giving the creators all rights to the sales, toys, movie deals, etc).

However, Stan Lee is the consistently brand-named top of the heap. Even today, most non-fans would at least recognize his name alone on a list of top creators. He's milked this for personal appearances, extended book contracts, Kevin Smith's slob-the-knob-a-thon, etc. Jack Kirby died much worse off than Lee, and Gene Colon had to resort to Ebay a few years ago to pay to fight off glaucoma.

And especially WORD to the poster who cited Lee's awful managerial choices at Marvel. From the gawdawful Incredible Hulk series thru Corman's lamentably bad FF (Not even ha-ha bad, just bad bad bad), the bullet wound in Mssr. Lee's foot is self-inflicted.