New Brevoort Formspring

I don’t know about fun stories, but Stan has always been gracious and giving on the times when I’ve dealt with him over the years.

The one story that comes to mind happened when we were working on THE LAST FANTASTIC FOUR STORY, which John Romita Jr. penciled. We were right at the beginning, and Stan had sent over his detailed plot outline for the issue, which we were producing close to the manner in which the 60s Marvel books were–which is to say, rather than a page-by-page script, we instead had a detailed synopsis (and it was several pages long) that described the events of the story, almost like a movie treatment. From that, JRJR would break the story down into its requisite number of pages as he drew it for maximum visual impact, and then Stan would do his final dialogue and copy from the penciled art.

At the time, I had I believe two assistants working with me, Marc Sumerak and Jeff Youngquist. We all read over the plot outline and discussed it, and it was largely fine, but there was one section on which we had some thoughts. So I pulled together all of our assorted feedback and wrote Stan an e-mail outlining what we were thinking.

The next day, I came into the office to find a message on my voice mail. It was Stan. He said that he’d received the comments that we sent over, but that he could only do the story the way he felt worked, and if we wanted something different, we’d have to go to somebody else for the project.

So this was a bit of a crisis. We had pissed off Stan Lee.

Stan’s offices are on the West Coast, so there was a three-hour delay before I would be able to call and speak with him. In that time, my team had huddled and landed on the obvious fact that our suggestions were simply meant as suggestions, and if Stan wanted to do the story in the original way, or in some other way, that would be fine with us. But we wanted him to do the project.

So that’s what I intended to tell Stan when I finally called him later that day. But when I got him on the phone, before I could launch into my spiel, Stan interrupted me so that he could apologize to me. He said that he’d had a long day the previous day, revising some other project he was working on and dealing with changes, and the last thing he was in the mood for when he opened my e-mail was more revisions. But he said that, having had a night’s sleep, the comments all seemed right to him, and that he’d be happy to do the story that way. And that’s what eventually happened.