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Stan Lee: "My publisher told me that Spider-Man was the worst idea I have ever heard."
"My publisher came to me and said, 'Stan, I want you to come up with another superhero.' So I said okay. And I thought, 'What power will I give a new guy?' And I saw a fly crawling on the wall. I said, 'Hey, if I can get a superhero that could stick to walls and crawl on them man, that would be groovy.'"
Stan continues:
"I needed a name. Fly-Man, Mosquito-Man... I got down to Spider-Man. It just sounded dramatic. Then I figured, just for fun, I'm going to give him personal problems because most people have personal problems. And I'd make him a teenager, because there were no teenage superheroes at the time."
He brought the idea to his publisher:
"This was his reaction: 'Stan, that is the worst idea I have ever heard. First of all, people hate spiders so you can't call a hero Spider-Man. You want him to be a teenager? Teenagers can only be sidekicks. And you want him to have personal problems? Stan, don't you know what a superhero is? They don't have personal problems.'"
Stan left disappointed but couldn't let it go:
"We were about to kill a magazine called Amazing Fantasy. It wasn't selling well, and we were sending the last issue to press. When you do the last issue of a magazine, nobody cares what you put in it because the book is dying. Just to get it out of my system, I put Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy. Featured him on the cover. Forgot about it."
Then the sales figures came in:
"A month later, my publisher came racing into my office: 'Stan, Stan! You remember that character we both loved so much Spider-Man? Let's do him as a series.'"
Stan shares the lesson:
"If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good don't let some idiot talk you out of it. That doesn't mean every wild notion is going to be genius. But if there's something you feel is good, something you want to do, something that means something to you try to do it.
Because I think you can only do your best work if you're doing what you want to do. And if you can look at it after and say, 'I did that and I think it's pretty damn good' that's a great feeling."
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