FESTIVALS : VANCOUVER

Settling into this one-off public interview, it doesn’t take long to see why this gregarious octogenarian is so revered by his fans. There is the fact, that as the storywriter with Marvel Comics, he forged new superheroes with a human dimension and struck a chord with readers and, later, with filmgoers for ever. Characters like Spider-Man, The Hulk, Dare Devil, and X-Men.

But he also clearly enjoys being with his fans. For an eighty-year-old, his cross-generational appeal is impressive. There are people of every age, from a few children of seven or eight, no doubt attending with mum or dad, to mature students of the Marvel phenomenon.

He is attentive, enthusiastic and loves to talk. Even when one female questioner suggests that his career has gone to seed with his recent adult cartoon projects, his good humour is unfurrowed.

Lee has been working with Pamela Anderson on a television series about sexy superhero Stripperella, who is "a stripper by night and superhero by late night". He has also been developing a story around Hugh Hefner and the Playboy bunnies with his production company POW! ("It stands for Purveyors - Of - Wonder!" he intones dramatically).

His response to the criticism is that he’s still doing what he’s always been doing - having fun.

"The world thinks of Hef as a hedonistic pleasure-seeker who's only interested in sex and women," Lee says. "But our cartoon series is going to show the other side of Hugh Hefner, the Hugh Hefner who is doing secret work for the government."

Maybe he’s also just keeping up with the times. Lee is the first to admit that the content of cartoons has grown a lot darker since his Marvel Comics heyday in the 1960s. He cites, as an example, how the secretary character that he created in Daredevil has morphed from "a nice young girl, secretly in love with Daredevil" into a drug addict and a prostitute.

"I’m not a dark kind of guy. I’ve written dark stories in my time but it’s not what I specialise in," says Lee, who likes to paint himself as an ordinary guy. "I've got a wife and a daughter. I've been married 56 years. I don't do drugs. In fact, I've never been arrested. When I think about it I'm probably one of the dullest people on Earth."

Lee describes his path into comic books as almost an accident.

Born in New York in 1922, he started with Timely Magazines (before it became Marvel) in 1939. He didn’t know it was a comic publisher, but when he found out he thought he’d hang on to the job until something more meaningful came up. "After half a century I was still there…"

During the war he saw military service for 3 years writing training film scripts in director Frank Capra's military unit. "They needed a real nobody," jests Lee.

To stem the boredom of writing army classification manuals Lee invented ways of making his work more interesting. He remembers how morale was low because soldiers at the front were not getting paid on time. They needed more trained payroll clerks and fast. So he invented a game - Fiscal Freddie, where trainees had to negotiate a maze overcoming various obstacles en route til they completed the course. Lee claims it speeded up the training process massively. "I hate to brag," he says with thick irony, "But I single-handedly won the war."

After a period of being a "hack" writer, Lee got into his stride with comic book stories, revolutionising the genre. Cartoons had never depicted the psychological life of their super-heroes, they were like aliens from another planet. Marvel super-heroes were set in real places and had human lives and human problems.

"It always bothered me that comic characters were one dimensional. But what about their personal life? Who were their friends? Did they go to the bathroom?" he says.

"Unless you care about the character you don’t care about the problems and you want to know how they deal with them," he says.

Lee chuckes as he remembers the convention back then of creating stories about a Superhero and a teen as sidekick, as popularised by Batman and Robin.

"If I was a superhero, would I want to hang around with a teenager in tights? If nothing else people would talk." Later in his career, Lee was asked to rewrite the Batman story. He made him "a black man who had been in jail".

Out of his philosophy came Lee’s most famous creation Spider-Man. The way Lee tells the story of old Spidey’s creation, it sounds like it might never have seen the light of day. Apparently, his publisher’s response on hearing Lee first pitch the story was highly negative on the grounds that 1) People were afraid of spiders 2) Teens were meant to be sidekicks like in Batman and Robin and 3) He had problems.

"He then asked ‘Do you know what a superhero is?’" says Lee. He ignored the advice and "sneaked" the first Spider-Man book into print and it became a best-seller.

His publisher later asked him up to his office and said, "Do you remember that Spider-man that I liked so much. Why don’t we make it into a series."

During the Sixties Lee and his team of cartoonists were putting out 5 books per week ("and on the seventh day I rested").

The "Marvel Method", as it became known, came about out of expedience. Lee wasn’t creating stories quickly enough for his artists so he gave them rough outlines for a story and sent them off to their inglenooks to put together images of the main points in the story.

Then they would come back with the artwork and he would add captions. He found that this worked better than doing it the other way round.

Lee remembers excitedly how he and his team went to great lengths to reach out to his audience and to avoid appearing "like a bunch of stiffs". They created a fan club, the Merry Marvel Marching Society, started rewriting the fan mail, to make it sound more interesting (until fans "caught on"), and Lee sounded off with "Stan’s Soap Box" column. They made "the worst record ever heard", a plastic thing taped to the book cover, so that fans were able to hear voices of the people behind the comics. They also spiced up the television credits to make animators and crew sound like Super-heroes.

He recalls how he created the "No Prize" for fans who wrote letters complaining about mistakes in the comic papers. They had no cash for prizes so Lee would send an empty envelope by post with the message "Congratulations you are the winner of a coveted No Prize!"

The club eventually came to an end when "management decided we were spending too much time on it".

It was not the last time that he was at odds with management. Lee is now going through a legal disagreement, "the friendliest disagreement", about the amount of money Marvel owes him for the movies adapted from his stories.

Marvel super-heroes are such hot properties in Hollywood that the studios are lining up to buy up the rights. Ghost Rider (starring Nick Cage), The Fantastic Four, Iron Man and the next Spider-Man are all slated for release in the next year or two.

But is there anything that ever causes him embarrassment? Yes. The villain Diablo, who (on further research I find) is a moustachioed, devilish character who didn’t age and who tormented peasants in Transylvania.

"I didn’t know anything about him. He was a total un-Marvel personality," says Lee, reminding us that he often forgets things. "I don’t even know what book that was. I’d like to buy them all and burn them all."

Even Super-heroes have their bad days.

Lee’s favourite movie adaptations:

1. Spider-man
2. X-Men 2
3. X-Men
4= Daredevil and The Hulk