>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm here to introduce Sean
Howe who is joining us as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Sean is here today to discuss his book Marvel Comics, the Untold Story. The iconic superheroes of Marvel
Comics have had grand adventures for decades yet there tales pale in comparison to the behind the scenes drama involving their creators. Sean Howe is a former editor at Entertainment
Weekly and the Criterion Collection. His writing has appeared in New York, the Los Angeles
Times, Spin and the Village Voice. Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[applause]
>> Sean Howe: Hey, can everybody hear me okay? All right. I'm going to talk a little bit and read a little bit from the book and then I'm actually looking forward to conversing actually with everyone, so hopefully you've got some questions that we can kind of geek out together. I don't know how many of you are Marvel Comics fans, but I'm going to just start a little bit by talking about what Marvel Comics is. Everyone now with these Hollywood movies everyone and their mother knows who Ironman is and probably who Tony Stark is which kind of blows my mind, like if I was 12 years old and you had told me that you were going to live in a world where everybody knows the secret identities of all these characters, I would not have believed it. A few years ago a friend of mine she sort of sheepishly admitted to me that she didn't read comic books and she was actually, I could tell that she was a little bit ashamed and the idea that a pretty girl was apologizing to me for not really getting into comic books was a sign that things had changed a lot. So Marvel Comics, I would argue are the modern mythology of America. It's a pantheon of gods. It's something that every kid grows up with exposure to these legends. It's also, this is going to sound like a flippant claim, but it's the most complicated fictional narrative in the history of the world I think. I've tried really hard to think of counter examples. I know the Guiding Light ran for 70 years, five days a week, but I don't think that that even approaches what the Marvel Comics story is. And for those of you that don't know, all of these Marvel
Comics characters are interlocked. Spiderman might go to the dentist and run into the
Avengers, so that's a huge--when you're a kid and you're reading these comic books or when you're an adult and you're reading these comic books, there's something that's really magical about that, those deep connections in this world. It's kind of like if Lost or Breaking Bad or The
Wire or Madmen or if you took all of those four shows and combined them together and then each character had a spinoff series and those ran for 50 years each, that's like some hint of just how complex this one tapestry is. So that's a pretty magical thing and maybe later someone can give me a counter example, because it seems almost like it's the most complicated, fictional narrative in the history of humans. It seems like it can't be, but that's what I've been able to figure. So these stories and this Earth story I guess, this is handed down through generations of creators and that's one of the things that I really wanted to get into with this book is the idea that there are very real people who are behind this mythology. These people really put their hearts and souls into the work and became very emotionally attached to being custodians of these characters and they didn't ever get to have any say in where these characters would end up. They passed along the responsibilities of this grand story and inevitably they were disappointed in the lack of financial stake that they had in it and the lack of creative control, but they also kept coming back because they cared so much about the Marvel universe. I think, to

sort of illustrate my point, I sometimes say to people do you know who created Luke Skywalker and people usually are pretty quick to say George Lucas, and do you know who created
Sherlock Holmes. Does anyone here know who created the character of Wolverine? I hear a couple of wrong answers, but thank you for playing. [laughter] Len Wein and John Romita. So my point here is simply that these are characters that have become pretty prominent in
American culture and yet no one knows who the authors are, or fewer people than should know. And I think a lot of that is because it's a collaborative art and it's not necessarily natural to memorize multiple names of people for every character. There's a little bit of an exquisite corpse situation going on with comics; exquisite corpse is the French surrealist would work on a piece of art, hand it off to another person and that person would only see what the last person had done and they would continue the piece of art and then hand it off again and no one really got to control what the final product was. So Marvel Comics started, and I'm sorry if this is remedial for some of you, but Marvel Comics started after the first flush of success of
Superman in 1938. There was a pulp magazine publisher called Martin Goodman who was one of 13 children, the son of Russian immigrants. He dropped out of school in the fifth grade, but he became a very successful pulp magazine publisher and he decided that comic books were a good way to get rich quickly. After Superman came out, Martin Goodman saw this as the future and he bought some stories from--they started to sprout up, these things called comic book packagers where artists and writers would put together these new superheroes and they would get them all ready for publication and then they would sell them off to a publisher, so
Martin Goodman bought some stories that included the first Human Torch story, the first
Submariner story, two characters that would go on to have very long lives in Marvel history.
Those characters were created by a bunch of, by two 20-year-old kids and that was kind of the norm. It was just a bunch of underpaid kids who were kind of cranking these things out wishing that they could get a break and maybe they could get a comic strip gig because that paid a lot more money than comic books. But Marvel Comics Number One was the name of this comic that Martin Goodman published and he called the company Timely Comics which was named after, he sort of ripped off Time Magazine and he had something called Timely Magazine and that was kind of a peek into the mind of Martin Goodman who one of his more infamous quotes is "fans aren't interested in quality." He just liked to crank out a sure moneymaker. The
Human Torch and Submariner fought each other in 1940 and that's kind of the beginning of this big universe and where everything crosses over and all of the characters bump into one another and that's a big moment in the history of fiction in a way. Those were two characters that were really popular. A year later, actually a few months later Martin Goodman decided that it would be a lot cheaper if he could just get someone directly to create some comic books.
Rather than going through the comic book packager, he hired a couple of guys named Joe
Simon and Jack Kirby to start cranking out their own stories. Captain America was I think the first one that they did. That came out in late 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor and the cover was Captain America punching out Adolf Hitler, so it was the dream fulfillment of a couple of
Jewish kids. So Captain America was a bigger hit even then Marvel Comics had been and it was time to expand operations a little bit and a guy named, a teenage kid named Stanley Lieber, who you can maybe guess would go on to change his name to Stan Lee. He came in. He was
Martin Goodman's wife's cousin and he would buy sandwiches for Jack Kirby and Joe Simon on their lunch break and he would clean out the ashtrays where they had used their cigars and he

would pick up when they would use their razors and all of that junk would go on the floor.
That's what Stan Lee did. When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon started to feel like they were getting ripped off in their contract they quit and Stan Lee moved into the position of editor. He stayed there for 15 years. He stayed there longer, but his first 15 years things were really good. He built up the staff. He had a line of secretaries that he would dictate to his secretary and while she was still typing, he would move to the next secretary and he would dictate to her and he was very happy to be surrounded by pretty secretaries at all times and the thing that sort of stopped all of this happiness and secretary having was in 1954 there was a Senate subcommittee hearing on the effect of comic books on juvenile delinquency and there were church sponsored burnings of comic books and there was a book called Seduction of the
Innocent by a guy named Fredric Wertham who was a child psychologist and it was all about how terrible effect these comic books were on kids. And the comic book industry was decimated almost instantly. Marvel or Timely as it was still called sort of stuck around on a thread for a little while and then there was a, they signed with a distributor that quickly went out of business and everyone was laid off. Stan Lee ended up in the corner of this magazine publisher sitting in a cubicle and writing the remaining stories. He got a group of freelancers to work with him, but it was, Marvel Comics was really just this guy in his late 30s who was, had seen his best days before him it seemed, and he was cranking out these like monster movie characters. There was Groot who was a walking alien tree that would just threaten small towns and this was what looked like what would be Stan Lee’s future. Then superheroes came back.
Stan Lee worked with Jack Kirby who had now come back. He had fallen on some harder times and so Jack Kirby was clinging to the ship of Marvel Comics and together they, Stan Lee and Jack
Kirby created the Fantastic Four and the X-Men and the Hulk and Iron Man and Thor and Steve
Ditco was another freelancer and he and Stan Lee put out Spiderman and so pretty soon there was a change of fortunes and now these guys who were in their 40s were suddenly seeing that maybe they had another shot. Marvel started hiring more people. That's, I'm going to read a little bit about this moment. By now, Marvel's newsprint masterpieces were being referenced in Cornell physics classes and Colgate student newspapers and Lee was fielding regular requests for campus speaking. Newspapers, slowly at first, set up and took notice. The Wall Street
Journal noted the sales increases, while the Village Voice pointed out beatniks embrace of the kooky hip stories. Marvel Comics were the first comic books in history in which a post adolescent escapist can get involved, the Voice gushed, for Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically the real world. Lee's snappy self-conscious patter was singled out as was the various multitudes of the New York City settings. There are approximately 15 superheroes in the Marvel group and nearly all of them live in the New York area wrote the Village Voice. Midtown Manhattan is full of their landmarks. On Madison
Avenue the Baxter building houses the Fantastic Four and their various self protective devices.
Doctor Strange is a master of a cult knowledge and often walks around in ectoplasmic form. His creators imply that he lived in the village because no one there is likely to become alarmed by being jostled by a wraith. Meanwhile, in San Francisco poet Michael McClure featured a Doctor
Strange monologue from Strange Tales Number 130 as a centerpiece in his controversial 1965 play at The Beard. A similar infatuation gripped the art world. Roy Lichtenstein appropriated one of Kirby's X-Men panels for his painting image duplicator and future Warhol collaborator
Paul Morrissey made a 10 minute experimental film, the origin of Captain America, in which an

actor read from Tales of Suspense Number 63. There were scattered other comics in the background of Morrissey's film and all of them were from Marvel. Lee sees the opportunity and slapped a Marvel pop art productions logo on the corners of the covers. Kirby found residences with modern art as well. He experimented with photo collages in his Fantastic Four stories blending grandiosity to outer space and interdimensional sequences. The comics also caught the attention of Robert Lawrence a partner in Grantray-Lawrence Animation, who spotted them on the newsstands and made the connection to the pop art movement. He contacted Martin Goodman who by now was teaching his younger son Chip the ins and outs of the family business. Grantray-Lawrence made a sweetheart deal to produce an animated series
The Marvel Superheroes, taking all of its images directly from published comic panels. The studio secured a continuing interest in merchandising profits related to the show. We wrote an unbelievable contract with the Goodmans, Lawrence boasted, because they didn't know what they had and where to go. None of this impressed the guys at Magazine Management. That's good men's magazine company. They couldn't understand why all of the sudden attention was being paid so much kid’s stuff. When Marvel fan Federico Fellini in New York to promote Juliet of the Spirits swept into 625 Madison Avenue to meet Stan Lee. Men Magazine editor Mel
Shestack scoffed that Lee didn't even know who Fellini was. Years later Shestack insisted that the director had quickly lost interest in Lee and cottoned instead to the more colorful magazine editors who were themselves like "living comic books." Such condescension was the norm.
They were always making jokes about. They would come in and giggle remembers Flo
Steinberg the Marvel secretary. Mario Puzo would look in and would see us all working on his way to the office and he would say work faster little elves. Christmas is coming. In truth the magazines were still Martin Goodman's bread-and-butter. The big sellers were the men's magazines, said Ivan Prashker, another editor. It wasn't the comic books. The guys who worked at the men's magazines all thought that Stan Lee was a schmuck. In the fall of 1965 assistant editor Roy Thomas recruited fellow Missourian Dennis O'Neil to work as Marvel's second assistant. Within a matter of weeks one of the magazine editors tried to enlist O'Neil in a scheme to dose Stan Lee with LSD. He was going to supply a sugar cube of acid said O'Neill.
My mission should I have chosen to accept it would have been to drop it into his coffee. O'Neil a self-described hippie, liberal, rebel who had been lectured by Lee for wearing a T-shirt depicting a cannabis plant nonetheless declined. At the end of 1965 when a reporter named
Nat Friedland visited the Marvel offices for a 3000 word profile for the New York Herald Tribune he found a Lee in an unusually candid mood. I don't plot Spiderman anymore, he said. Steve
Ditco the artist has been doing the stories. I guess I'll leave him alone until sales start to slip.
Since Spidey got so popular Ditco seems to think he's the genius of the world. We were arguing so much over the plot lines that I told him to start making up his own stories. He won't let anybody else ink his drawings either. He just drops off the finished pages with notes in the margins and I fill in the dialogue. I never know what he'll come up with next, but it's interesting to work that way. Friedland was impressed with Lee. He painted him as an ultra-Madison
Avenue rangy look-alike of Rex Harrison responsible for crippling the comic circulation to 35 million copies a year, selling 40,000 memberships to the Merry Marvel Marching Society Fan
Club and inspiring 500 letters a day. Friedland depicted Lee wearing out his eyes from reading fan mail and fretting over the choice of exactly the right sound effect for a page of Fantastic
Four number 50. Charmed by lease self-deprecating quips and Fellini anecdotes that reporter

barely made mention of Martin Goodman and skimmed over Ditco’s contributions referring to
Spiderman as Lee's masterpiece, the most offbeat character he could think of. Friedland arranged to sit in on one of Lee and Kirby's Friday morning plotting sessions and his timing couldn't have been better. They were hashing out the Fantastic Four which was approaching a firing on all cylinders peak tying together the subplots they had been weaving for months. The
Thing finally beats the Silver Surfer, Lee pitched to Kirby as Friedland jotted notes but then
Alicia makes him realize that he made a terrible mistake. This is what The Thing always feared more than anything else, that he would lose control and really clobber somebody. The effusive
Lee gained momentum as he went forward with Kirby simply interjecting with nods and rights and uhs. The Thing is broken hearted. He wanders off by himself. He's too ashamed to face
Alicia or go back to the Fantastic Four. He doesn't realize how he's failing for the second time, how much the FF needs him. Friedland cut to Kirby a quote, "a middle-aged man with baggy eyes and a baggy Robert Hall-ish suit. He is sucking a huge green cigar and if you stood next to him on the subway you would peg him for the assistant foreman in a girdle factory." " Great,"
Friedland quoted Kirby as saying in a high-pitched voice, "great." Many months later when an account of the Thing’s fight with the Silver Surfer finally emerged, Kirby had changed it and expanded it significantly. It appeared as encoded to a grand space opera a brew of existentialism and high adventure for which he had done the heavy lifting. Despite his perpetual freelancer status Kirby not only generated plots with Lee, but was also the primary force when it came to designing characters on the pages of the stories. By now he was in a sense the director of the films they made together, composing each shot and driving the narrative with the momentum of his images. I don't see him for a week Lee told one interviewer. He comes back a week later and the whole strip is drawn and nobody knows what
I'm going to see on those pages. He may have come up with a dozen new ideas, you see, and then I take it and I write it on the basis of what Jack has drawn. He's broken it down to continuity for me. He's drawn the whole thing actually. I put in the dialogue and the captions, so he doesn't know exactly what I'm going to write, what words I'm going to put in their mouths. I don't know what he's going to draw. In fact, the Silver Surfer who had yet to debut at the time of Friedman’s article was wholly Kirby's creation. It had been a surprise to Lee when the completed pages arrived. Occasionally when Kirby came into the office he artist John
Romita would catch a ride home to Long Island with Lee. Romita would crawl into the back of
Lee’s Cadillac and listen while Lee and Kirby discussed plots. As the convertible dodged in and out of Queens Boulevard traffic they would volley ideas each oblivious to the other. It's almost like I was watching Laurel and Hardy Romita said. These two guys are in the front and Jack is saying well Stan Lee, what are we going to make the kid like? Is he going to be a wizard? Is he going to be a genius? Is he going to be superpowered or is he going to be a normal kid in the midst of a crazy family? And Stan would say well let's try this and let's try that, so Stan would go off on a tangent and Jack would be talking about what he thought should happen. And Jack would go home and do what he thought Stan was expecting. And when Stan got the script I used to hear him say, Jack forgot everything we were talking about. Early in the morning of
January 9, 1966, Stan Lee got a phone call from Roz Kirby that's Jack's wife. The Herald Tribune story was out. She was almost hysterical Lee said, and she shouted how could you do this?
How could you have done this to Jack? When Lee finally got his hands on the article he said later he could understand her outrage. She had every right to be upset. About four fifths of the

article was about me and made me out to be the most glamorous, wonderful human being that ever lived and in the very last few paragraphs, those were about Jack made him out to sound like a jerk. Lee pleaded his innocence to the Kirbys. Before long the credits on Fantastic Four and Thor regularly read a Stan Lee and Jack Kirby production. There would be no more written by Stan Lee on the Kirby books. Tempers cooled but Kirby would remember the slight for the rest of his life. Shortly after the Herald Tribune piece appeared Steve Ditco dropped off his pages with production manager Sol Brodsky and announced that when he finished his current assignment he would not be doing any more work for Marvel Comics. Sol Brodsky rushed into
Stan Lee's office to tell him but Ditco had made up his mind. He even wrote a letter to the still bruised Jack Kirby encouraging him to join him in the exodus. Kirby, though, had a wife and four children to support. He couldn't leave the steady gig at Marvel, not yet. So Jack Kirby eventually left. It's probably not a spoiler to many of you. Do you guys want to talk about
Marvel Comics? [laughter] Any questions?
>>: So you mentioned kind of these stories [inaudible] what kind of area in history did you find the most interesting besides the Kirby dealings?
>> Sean Howe: So the question is what did I find most interesting in the history, what era?
Yeah, I think in the early ‘70s there was something kind of analogous to what was going on in
Hollywood, sort of what is known now as the easy riders raging bulls era where you had an industry that was kind of in the doldrums and they were just sort of allowing these younger
Turks to take a shot at whatever they wanted to do, so in Hollywood that would be like Coppola and Scorsese, and in comic books it was guys like Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart and Jim
Starrland, several of whom would basically go off and hang out in New York City and get drunk and drop acid and act out like fights that they wanted to illustrate in comic books and there would be a lot of stories about like finding God, so that stuff is really interesting to me because it's so far removed from what in most of my lifetime, you know, Marvel Comics has become a little more staid and so I like the self-expression of those counterculture days. You had like a character and his secret identity would be reading Carlos Castaneda and listening to Stevie
Wonder records and there's something sort of audacious about freighting those kinds of ideas to an audience of like 12-year-old kids.
>>: Did you get any insight into the influences on Lee and Kirby and Ditco like when they were growing up, what sorts of things [inaudible] were dramatically or narratively were they taking in that led to their production of these characters and stories?
>> Sean Howe: The big influences on Lee and Kirby I guess would be Hollywood movies, you know, like Errol Flynn movies and the science fiction pulps like amazing stories. Jack Kirby has told the story of he was a really tough street kid in the lower east side and he talks about he was walking along and there was a magazine in the gutter and he picked it up out of the rain and it was Amazing Stories and there was a spaceship and that that opened up this whole world of imagination for him. Yeah, I would say just science fiction and Hollywood adventure was pretty big for both of them. That would be the common ground.

>>: Did you do any contrast, compare with the Marvel experience with the DC and the whole conflict between the two, or how one rose as the other fell?
>> Sean Howe: The question is about the competition between DC comics and Marvel Comics.
DC comics is Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and a lot of really, once anyway, wholesome iconic characters who had very little that normal human beings could relate to.
And then Marvel Comics kind of put a stake on characters with feet of clay. You had like the angsty teenager, Peter Parker, and you had a whole bunch of characters whose lives got worse after they got superpowers. You know, it was kind of a bummer but it was something that I think kids and teenagers could really relate to. So DC Comics in the ‘50s and ‘60s were like
Coca-Cola and Marvel was like coming up as Pepsi I guess, and DC would actually have editorial meetings and they would look at Marvel Comics and they would decide oh, it's because the art is more crude. It's just because kids like the junky work because Marvel Comics was much more immediate and raw and so DC was like we've got to get, we've got to start making crappy artwork. That will like--and so the was this long history of the competition of DC and Marvel and DC is generally thought of as a little bit more square, I guess, but even today people who work at Marvel and people who work at DC, there's this really weird rivalry, but I get into this in the book and yeah, it's a fascinating relationship and sometimes they change roles, and sometimes DC has been the edgier of the two companies, but they really are, if you take those two publishers out of the field, you know, you are left with a much smaller comics industry.
>>: There's no interaction between them? Individuals?
>> Sean Howe: Individuals, like the individuals between the DC characters and the Marvel characters?
>>: No, no, the human individuals, the real people, is there any interaction between the head of DC and the head of Marvel et cetera?
>> Sean Howe: Oh, sure. It's an industry where people, yeah, there's a fraternity of comic book industry people and so they certainly, people who work at Marvel and people who work at DC have relationships, but there is a fierce competition that is sometimes very personal.
>>: You mentioned that the writers don't really own the stories as they go. Who makes the decision to kill off the superhero like Captain America? And more recently who makes that type of decision? Do you have any insight to that?
>> Sean Howe: The question is who decides to kill off the characters when that happens and I would say that usually it's the marketing department, or the sales department. That's changed over the years. It's really, it's actually in the last couple of decades that characters have been killed and reincarnated with shocking regularity. There's this quote attributed to Stan Lee from the ‘70s where he said that we don't want change here; we want the illusion of change.
Because if you have a contract with, you know, they merchandiser who was licensing your characters, you don't want to just start killing off those characters or giving them new costumes

and so everything is supposed to sort of come back to square one which is--I mean, that's the great challenge of serial fiction, you know, and that's where the art and commerce ends of this world really are up against each other because how do you keep things interesting in fiction if nothing can ultimately change?
>>: Were you able to go into detail in the book at all about like the ongoing battle of editor versus writer versus artist, you know, how editorial control, the ebbs and flows. Sometimes the writer gets super popular so editor control kind of drops and there seems to be this age of editors versus age of writers. You go into that at all?
>> Sean Howe: Yeah, so the question being does the book get into the changing power dynamics between editors and writers. At Marvel Comics now it's really these editors who call the shots in house and that has ebbed and flowed also over the years. You've sometimes had star writers who really get kind of a free ticket to write about what they want. Generally those are in the times where the business isn't very good and there's nothing to lose. Marvel of course is part of Disney now and so everything is very, their intellectual property is very tightly controlled these days. That's another thing that I just find to be fascinating. If you accept
Marvel Comics as the mythology of the modern world, we don't own those. Those are not actually the people’s myths; they are Disney property, which is sometimes not the--it's a great business plan, but it's not the most romantic of notions from a creative side.
>> Amy Draves: Sean, a couple of online questions from Chris Fox. You sort of just answered that Marvel’s best days are behind them now that Disney owns them. I don't know if you want to add to that or not. And then the other question was would you comment on Marvel and the
McCarthyism?
>> Sean Howe: In terms of Marvel's best days are behind them, they may be too big to fail in a certain sense. Disney's pockets are pretty deep, so from that perspective, from a strictly financial perspective, Marvel’s best days are probably, definitely ahead of them. In terms of how much fun they will be to read, I guess the jury is out. The McCarthyism question, I mean, I guess that's a reference to the sort of witch hunt days of the 1950s I was talking about earlier, the seduction of the innocent book and the churches burning comic books, but that stuff stayed with Stan Lee for the rest of his life. He was always afraid that that was going to return and he was very careful to not step on any toes or offend too many people and probably still is to this day.
>>: I was wondering if you could talk about how Marvel Comics in the 1990s, the departure of what we feel in the Claire McFarlane, the so-called bubble to happen and then the eventual collapse and then what happens in the before and after the [inaudible]?
>> Sean Howe: In the early 1990s a couple of the most successful, I guess half dozen of the most successful of the Marvel artists decided that they would break out on their own and formed their own company because they were tired of not owning these characters. They became known as Image Comics. Spawn was made into a movie and that was a big character

for them. That was, those guys who did that have reputations for being little bit cocky, little bit arrogant and very much, you know, looking out for themselves, but the truth is acting in their best self interests was really a great example for a lot of people and that was a real burst of energy for the idea of creating one's own comics in that you had more options than just working for DC or Marvel. They ended up not really being such a great publisher for quite a while, but they are doing some pretty impressive work now and they are also making a lot of money off the Walking Dead, for one.
>>: Do you have any insight into Stan Lee’s recognition of just how iconic and revered he is as a person become legend? Does he take that seriously? Does he find it weird or do you have any insight into that?
>> Sean Howe: I'm not sure--Stan Lee is really an enigma and he's got such a strong guy smiley personality that very few people have seen even a glimpse of anything else below that surface.
I mean certainly he's aware that he's a star because he goes to comic conventions and he's met with mobs of screaming fans.
>>: I mean even outside the tighter comic book world, right, he does cameo appearances and things and is treated like…
>> Sean Howe: Right, he does cameo tapings on I think Big Bang theory, he was on and he's always hosting another like short-lived reality show [laughter]. He teams up with like Pamela
Anderson on projects and, you know, he definitely likes to have things going on, but yeah, the guy underneath all of that is someone that I tried to get at as much as possible and, you know, I did find a number of documents that sort of showed him, his sort of like Mitt Romney behind closed doors. Like incidences where Stan Lee was like recording his own conversations with someone and he would talk about how he felt underpaid and how he wanted to take Jack Kirby and go out to Hollywood and leave the comic book business forever. It's those moments where he kind of doesn't think that he's on camera that are definitely the most revealing.
>>: Were you able to actually verify--I've heard rumors that he had actually changed his name because he wanted to keep his real name as a legitimate writer. Were you able to verify that or were you able to go into that at all?
>> Sean Howe: So Stanley Lieber legally changed his name to Stan Lee and he says that that's because it had to do with complications of cashing paychecks [laughter].
>>: Because like originally, like I had seen a documentary a couple of years ago and they talked about that and his stories tend to change. He always talks about how he doesn't have the best memory but then he talks about how he had originally changed his name to Stan Lee because he wanted to use Stanley Lieber as a legitimate name so…

>> Sean Howe: Right. I guess you could take that at face value. That might be part of the truth as well. And Jack Kirby was Jacob Kirtzberg. A lot of guys who came up under different names than what they were born, yeah.
>>: So the audience for Marvel comics has shifted a lot over the years. They were very much writing directly for kids for a good portion of the early years. The company now, they seem to be very much targeted at a late teen to adult audience, rather than children. Did you get the impression talking to the writers that that was a conscious decision or was that just as the audience aged it just sort of happened naturally?
>> Sean Howe: The average age of the Marvel Comics reader is I think a little bit higher than 30 right now, which is kind of crazy. I don't know how much of an editorial self-conscious decision it is to target that audience, but I do know that they would love to get kids reading comic books again, because obviously, if the audience just keeps getting older it's going to die off. I think a lot of the problem that they have is distribution. If you’re kid, you know, how often are you going to get in the car and drive to a comic book store somewhere, and that's where comic books are available. You can't just go into the drugstore and count on their being a comic book rack anymore. It's, you know, these companies spend a lot more time I guess than I have trying to fix that, but it is sort of a challenge. The price point of it, a comic book is now three or four dollars. You can't really, I mean part of the magic of the Marvel world is really investing in all of those different stories or a lot of those and enjoying the way that they interlock. You've got to be a rich kid, you know?
>>: I actually have something to say in response to that. I have an eight-year-old daughter and they don't seem to serialize the comics as much for kids, but they actually produce them more in graphic novel format from what I've noticed and there are very kid specific Marvel Comics that are coming out where they have juvenilized a lot of the characters. They've turned them into young versions of the actual characters, so I think it's just the tactic. But I've noticed with
Marvel is a lot of times you’ll have all these offshoot stories that are going for a very direct audience, and so that's kind of where I see maybe they're not doing the serials as much because I think a lot of people that are buying the serials are those that bought them as kids and maybe the kids of this generation are buying them more as graphic novels. Just a theory.
>> Sean Howe: Yeah, that's good. Marvel Comics would probably like to hear from you.
[laughter]
>> Amy Draves: So I have one last online question and then we can move on to signing books, but she says is there anything in the book about women in Marvel culture or writing for girls in the audience?
>> Sean Howe: Is there anything about women…
>> Amy Draves: The Marvel, in the Marvel culture.

>> Sean Howe: There's quite a bit in the book about the way that Marvel has tried to target female readers and they are very clumsy at times at creating super heroines. In 1972 they launched a number of comic books about women and one was the Claws of the Cat and one was Shanna the she Devil and one was Night Nurse [laughter]. So there is kind of a spotty record there. There have also just been tremendous number of I guess abuses piled on some of the female, the more successful female characters, but there are more women working in the comic industry than in the past, and there are a few bright spots on that note, but it's pretty bleak.
>> Amy Draves: Is there one more question or do we start signing? Okay. Well thank you so much for coming. [applause].