Everyone Is The Hero Of His Own Story: Stan Lee On Creators’ Rights

History is written by the victors, and Stan Lee is nothing if not a winner.

At least co-creator of Spider-Man, The X-Men and The Avengers and a fistful of other lucrative and profitable properties (as I’m sure they are referred to in the Disney front office), Stan started as a simple editor, moved into writing, somewhere along the line in the 1970s became the head cheerleader for Marvel Comics, both in the comics themselves in his Stan’s Soapbox column and in the mainstream press, and wound up making himself a deal skimming fat bank off of Marvel for not doing much of anything at all… probably because no viable corporation wants their head cheerleader to start yowling “Marvel fucked me without lube!” in the public prints.

So Stan lucked out, put himself into a good negotiating position and Got His. And while I stand by my continuing opinion that any comic creator – hell, any human being – who doesn’t want to get fucked by a major corporation probably should make sure their contract contains an anti-fuckery clause before signing it as opposed to bemoaning it afterwards, I have always wondered how Stan feels about guys like Kirby and Colan and Ditko, who were at the very least in the room when these icons were created, and rather than winding up with cameos in the multimillion dollar movie adaptations instead wound up humping an empty table at Artists’ Alley, a premature coffin, or worst of all, an Ayn Rand novel.

Well, wonder no more… or at least, wonder no more how Stan would kinda deflect the question if he was asked. Because Alex Pappademas did an extended piece that includes a short interview with The Man for Grantland. And that interview includes a question to Stan how he feels about the recent uproar over creators’ rights:

I’ve never been one of these people who worries about [that]. I should have been. I’d be wealthy now, if I had been. I always felt the publisher was the guy investing all his money, and I was working for the publisher, and whatever I did belonged to him. That was the way it was. And I was always treated well, I got a good salary. I was not a businessman. Now, a guy like Bob Kane, who did Batman — the minute he did Batman, he said, “I wanna own it,” and signed a contract with DC. So he became reasonably wealthy. He was the only one who was smart enough to do that….

I don’t know… I haven’t had reason to think about it that much… I think, if somebody creates something, and it becomes highly successful, whoever is reaping the rewards should let the person [who] created it share in it, certainly. But so much of it is — it goes beyond creating. A lot of people put something together, and nobody really knows who created it, they’re just working on it, y’know? But little by little, the artists and the writers now are a different breed than they were, and most of them, if they create anything new, they insist that they be part owners of it. Because they know what happened to Siegel and Shuster, and to me, and to people like that. I don’t think it’s a problem anymore. They make much more money than they used to make, when I was there. Proportionately.

Everybody thought that I was the only one that was getting paid off, but I never received any royalties from the characters. I made a good living, because I was the editor, the art director, and the head writer. So I got a nice salary. That was all I got. I was a salaried guy. But it was a good salary. And I was happy.

It would be easy to scoff at Stan’s claims that he’s not wealthy from his creations (or co-creations), and that he was nothing but a simple salary man even though that “good salary” for being “acting” Chairman Emeritus is a cool million a year for doing absolutely fuckall.

However, bear in mind that a man with independent wealth would, it seems to me, be very unlikely to appear in Who Wants To Be A Superhero? Twice.