‘Usually a day is all any of them took.’— Stan Lee on How Long it Took To Write His Comics Book Stories

“I’m a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the fastest.”
Stan Lee

RollingStone printed a “Lost” Q&A with Stan Lee and here’s an excerpt that gives you a glimpse of how quickly ideas for the comic books featuring X-Men, Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. Books in the Marvel universe that became the foundations for movies that made billions of dollars at the box office.

Brian Haiatt: Someone asked Bob Dylan, how did you write all those 1960s songs in a short period? And he looked back, and even he doesn’t quite know how he did it. Do you feel the same way?

Stan Lee: No, I know how I did it. I was very lucky, it came really easily to me. Once I knew who the villain was, and if I had already established the main characters, which you only had to do once, then writing the story didn’t take that long. It took a little less than a day. You know, I’d wake up in the morning, I’d talk to my wife for a while, and read the paper, and then I’d start writing, and by dinner time it was over, and I had done the book.

I don’t know if Stan Lee had any superhero powers, but he sure got a lot done on some days. In that interview Lee said of his ideas for the comic books, “Usually a day is all any of them took.”

P.S. Of the $24 billion that Marvel movies have made, one of them was this year’s top-grossing film The Black Panther, which alone made 1.3 billion worldwide. Lee created that character with Jack Kirby in 1966.

Scott W. Smith

 

 

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