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Games Entertainment

Creating Characters With Stan Lee 28

Posted by Zonk from the pumpkin-bomb-the-hell-out-of-the-place dept.
GameDailyBiz has an interview with Stan Lee that touches on a talk he gave at the 2005 D.I.C.E. Summit entitled "Superheroes - Creating Characters for the Ages". From the article: "I submitted the idea of Spider-Man to my publisher and he hated it. I said my hero was a teenager -- the publisher said a teenager could not be a hero but only be a sidekick. I said he was insecure and had personal problems -- my publisher said a hero does not have personal problems... The lesson to be learned, don't listen to experts because they don't know what they're talking about and just get you down."
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Creating Characters With Stan Lee More

Creating Characters With Stan Lee

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  • A hero (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) <fidelcatsro AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday June 11, 2005 @03:18PM (#12790451) Journal
    "a hero does not have personal problems." someone should of told that to batman , who was by all accoutns completly psychotic and had schitzo effective episodes where he saw his parents murderd which drove him to wipe out crime with a vengance
    • I'm not sure that those aspects of his character were really explored until well past the 60s.

      Rob
      • I am a little young to remember those days , but what really stood out to me about batman was the fact that he was completly crazy and all the more intresting for it

        • Re:A hero (Score:3, Informative)

          by jayhawk88 ( 160512 )
          Pluvius is right though. When Batman first came out in the 40's, his character was very dark and almost pulp-like. He killed bad guys on a regular basis. But when he got popular during the Golden Age, he was definitely the "Adam West" style Batman, who's biggest non-Batman-related concern was whether to go to the Charity Bachelor Auction or not. We still were told why he became Batman of course, but the comics were all about his actions as Batman, and any story we saw as Bruce Wayne was just peripheral.

          I
  • ...and having personal problems. With the "teenager could not be a hero but only be a sidekick" statement, I think that might be the right way to read it.
  • Just make sure you don't apply it to City of Heroes, otherwise Marvel might sue you.

    Rob

  • oblig penny arcade ref (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Should we thank the gods this [penny-arcade.com] never made it or be upset it was never given a fair chance?

  • It's managers in general that are clueless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 11, 2005 @04:06PM (#12790717)
    don't listen to experts because they don't know what they're talking about

    Lee is wrong to attribute this cluelessness to "experts". Real experts know what they're talking about but are almost never seen in the roles being discussed, which are effectively managerial positions.

    Some experts move to management of course, but as soon as they do that they start to become "past experts", and then they very rapidly become no longer experts at all even when they think they are. When you don't *DO* stuff yourself, you lose touch with the real doer's world and start talking hypotheticals.

    And that's the upside of the problem. On the more common downside, management came up through the ranks without ever doing anything that required training a clue beyond how to run a spreadsheet.

    The archetypal PHB is an pretty accurate portrayal that all of us easily recognize in our companies, and even the cartoon versions taken to extremes for a laugh still have a considerable amount of truth in them.

    Lee was talking to management. Surprise, surprise, they got it totally ass about face.
    • It's too bad you posted AC because now I can't be a fan. You've summed up a big problem in education reform which is that people making decisions believe in their expertise when they shouldn't. Some people (and you can spot them right away) enter teaching in order to do something else. There's nothing wrong with being career-minded but these people want to "get 5 years of teaching under their belt" so they can work for the state or go into administration. I guess they don't realize that the farther they
  • I don't know. So far Stan Lee's characters didn't have a lot of depth, they're quite flat.
    Pretty much all games these days have an extra dimension to think in.

  • ob simpsons quote (Score:3, Funny)

    by howman ( 170527 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @05:20PM (#12791115)
    Stan Lee won't leave my store.

  • okay... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:16PM (#12792902) Homepage Journal
    The lesson to be learned, don't listen to experts because they don't know what they're talking about ... and so I didn't read the article.
  • The real lesson here is that there are no hard and fast rules with art.

    -Jeff

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