THE BIG ISSUE The Big Issue - 11 January 2016

clockwise: Spider-man is marvel’s most profitable superhero to date; The X-Men comic has inspired seven films so far, grossing $3bn globally; the avengers (2012) was the first Marvel production to hit $1BN in ticket sales; james nesbitt stars in stan lee’s lucky man ‘Stan Lee is t WorldMags.net ore importan m than Walt Disney’ Mark Millar , the comic book writer behind Kick-Ass and Kingsman: The Secret Service, talks about the colossal impact of Stan Lee ! K O Z Disney owns the rights to many things, including the Avengers and Star Wars. The public would surely love to see some crossover there, so could that happen? Well, I don’t know how many characters you can have in a movie but obviously the people who produce these things are looking to be as successful as possible. If they feel that incorporating Star Wars with the Marvel characters will be very successful, they’ll ﬁnd a way to do it. Can you imagine Spider-Man saying: “May the force be with you?” It may come to that! The possibilities are overwhelming! Nothing overwhelms people in the movie or television business. They are always looking for the next great idea. Star Wars and Marvel coming together sounds to me like a good idea. We did it in the comics. I created the Avengers by taking many of our characters and making a team out of them. We can have as many characters join the Avengers as we want to for future movies. That might be fun too – all of a sudden Luke Skywalker is an Avenger! There’s not many people you could say it about but the world would be a very diferent place without Stan Lee. I would be doing a job I’d probably hate. I wouldn’t have discovered comics because the comics industry wouldn’t exist. Stan was one of two or three people who saved it back in the early 1960s. He was the pioneer, giving us something we’d never seen. Before Stan, superheroes were very one-dimensional. They were guys with black hair or guys with blonde hair. They wore grey suits or blue suits. They did good and that was it, the stories were relatively unsophisticated. Stan humanised them. He gave them that second and sometimes a third dimension. Peter Parker (AKA Spider-Man) was young, skinny and not good looking. He made God-like characters relatable. He did what I do (obviously I copied him), writing about the world we were living in. Everybody else was writing about fantasy worlds, whether it was Gotham City or Metropolis, but Stan’s Marvel Universe was the world outside your window. He’s more important than Walt Disney. Disney was in there in the beginning with Mickey Mouse but what followed wasn’t his. But all the really good Marvel superheroes are Stan’s. They have been feeding on Stan’s ideas and characters for 50 years now, and in Hollywood the well they go to is Stan’s well. If you look back over the last 15 years, the top grossing movies tend to be related to Stan in some way. There is a contagious enthusiasm in his work. He wrote an introduction for a Spider-Man book I wrote a few years ago. I’d obviously read the book several times because I’d written it, and then when it was published I read Stan’s introduction and he got me so excited about my own story that I re-read the book. That’s the power of Stan. Stan is who we want to be when we grow up. I went to the Palms Hotel when I was on a book tour. I was heading of at about four in the morning and the manager said I was a lightweight; Stan was here until six last week and he was up on stage dancing. He always has two Scotches so that he’s never without a drink. As one goes, the other is being reﬁlled. All superheroes have to have a ﬂaw. So what is yours? My ﬂaw is probably that I talk too much. I should give shorter answers when I do an interview. Lucky Man airs January 22 on Sky 1 WorldMags.net L-R: Kingsman; kick-ass

THE BIG ISSUE The Big Issue - 11 January 2016 | Page 23