If you’re a fan of Stan Lee, you’ll like the interview a lot…especially the audio as he was quite funny the day we spoke to him. Anyway, enjoy the interview…and for more info on Stan's insane career, click here for his Wikipedia page.

Question: You’ve done a lot of cameos in the Marvel films. Which one has been your favorite?

Stan Lee: I really love them all. I was disappointed with the one in the Iron Man movie I must confess…because I had a line there that they cut out. Those of you who have seen it, I’m standing there with my arms around three attractive blondes which was not too unpleasant, and they wanted me to be a little like Hugh Hefner so they even gave me a pipe. I had a pipe in my mouth and then Tony Stark, at some big gathering, taps me on the shoulder from the back…he thinks I’m Hugh Hefner and when I turn around and he says something like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I don’t remember what he said, but I was supposed to say, and I got this line from the director, he gave me the line, ‘Oh, that’s okay. I get that all the time.’ But when the movie came out they had cut the line. Either the movie went too long and they had to cut out a second wherever they could, or he might’ve thought that it would’ve gotten too big of a laugh which would ruin the mood. At any rate, the funny thing about it, when I turned around to say that to Robert, I had the pipe in my mouth and this girl’s head was right over here. I turned around and I hit her right in the face with the pipe. So, needless to say we did another take for that one, but it was fun.

Q: What happened to your cameo in The Hulk? We never saw the effects of the soft drink.

Stan Lee: I don’t know what the director had in mind, what Louis had in mind. I’ll tell you what, every one of these seems to bring up a funny story. If you saw The Hulk I’m holding a bottle and I drop the bottle. I think I taste it and I drop it and it shatters and I go, ‘Wow.’ That was all I did, that was my whole dialogue ‘Wow’. Now like any actor I tried to stretch my role. So the first time I did it I went, ‘Wooow’ or something like that. Louis came over to me and said, ‘No, Stan. Wow.’ So the second time I did it I went, ‘Wow.’ He said, ‘No, no. A little lower. Wow’ So I did it again and he said, ‘A little lower.’ It was the most frustrating thing, I wanted to emote. I have no idea who I was supposed to be or if in the sequel I comeback again and I’ve turned into a monster, or if he forgets about it. I don’t know.

Q: He told us that he wants you to feel like you gave something to the character.

Stan Lee: That’s funny. I’ll tell you something else, originally that wasn’t supposed to be my cameo. I was supposed to be rowing a boat somewhere and taking them somewhere, but they were filming that out of the state and I couldn’t go, so they gave me the wow to do instead. I bet the boat would’ve been a bigger role. I should’ve moved on that. Too late now.

Q: The circulation of comic books is not what it was when you writing the books. The characters still are icons and the kids all know them…but when you’re doing POW! Media, how do you plan on reaching out to the new generation that doesn’t read comic books? What’s the plan for reaching kids today?

Stan Lee: Well, our new company POW! for those of you who don’t know, but maybe you’ve already figure it out, POW! stands for Purveyors of Wonder. That’s with an exclamation point because I don’t want anyone to think it means Prisoners of War. It’s really fun. I’ve got this little company and we’re not doing comic books yet, although we may. But we’re doing movies and television shows, DVD’s and electronic entertainment and things that you’ll be able to see on your phones. I’ve never been busier and have never been having more fun. We signed a first look deal with the Disney Company and we have three really big movies that are being developed there now. Someone mentioned that there’ve been no new superheroes, one of those projects, or actually you might say that two of them feature new superheroes. I can’t tell you what they are, but one of them is called Blaze. One is called Nick Rachit and one is called Tigress. They’re all totally different I think that they’re going to be good. Everything that Disney does is good and based on my story how can it miss. Then we have some television things that we’re working on and we’re doing an animated series with Paris Hilton because I feel like she needs a little publicity so people can get to know her. We’re doing one with Hugh Hefner who we mentioned before. It’s going to tell the real stories. No one really knows about Hugh Hefner, or you think of him as someone who just likes wine, women and song. That’s just an act. He is one of America’s greatest superheroes, secret agent and I’m going to tell the truth about how this man has been saving our nation and nobody knows it. Then we’re doing another one about a guy that I want to make famous because he deserves it and that’s Ringo Star. These three are going to be cartoons and I think they’ll be very good. So I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a long time.

Q: Didn’t you almost quit before you created Spiderman and Fantastic Four? You were almost done with comics, weren’t you?

Stan Lee: You know more about me than I do. Well, I might as well get into that for a moment. What had happened was that I had been doing these comics for so many years and I was doing them the way that my publisher wanted me to and he had no respect for the audience at all. He felt comics were read just by illiterate adults or very young kids who didn’t know the difference. So he would say to me, ‘Stan, you’ve got too much dialogue in that story. Take it out. Nobody wants all that dialogue. There’s too much going on. Just have a lot of action. I just want a lot of fight scenes. That’s what will sell the book.’ It was a job and for twenty years or whatever it was, I did what he wanted. I was getting sick of it because I felt, ‘This isn’t what I would want to read. I’d like to write the kinds of things that I would want to read.’ So I wanted to quit and this was about 1960. At that point he learned that DC Comics which was called National Comics at the time, that they had a group called The Justice League and it was selling well. It was a group of superheroes. He said to me, ‘Why don’t you come up with a group of superheroes like “The Justice League”?’ Well, I wasn’t going to make it like The Justice League, but I knew what he meant. But I felt that I’ve had enough of this and I wanted to quit. My wife then said to me….so she really deserves all the credit for everything that’s happened. She said to me, ‘You know, Stan, you want to quit. Why don’t you do the book he wants, but do it the way that you want to do it. The worst that can happen is that he’ll fire you and you want to quit anyway, but you’ll can get it out of your system.’ So I did this book called The Fantastic Four. And I tried to go against a lot of the conventions. I didn’t give them costumes. I didn’t give them secret identities. In fact, I didn’t have a heroin who didn’t know the hero was really a superhero. They all knew who each other were and the heroin was engaged to be married to the hero and the obligatory teenager was the heroin’s kid brother and he wasn’t the usual teenager, but he didn’t want to be a hero. He just wanted to go out on dates and make money and drive a Corvette. I tried to make them as realistic as I could within the framework of a superhero comic. It caught on. That’s how we got started.

Q: Can you talk about Time Jumper….is that a digital comic?

Stan Lee: Yeah, that’s something that POW! is doing with Disney and it’s going to be a digital character. You’ll be able to catch it on your telephone. You’ll be able to catch it on the internet and hopefully it’ll either become a TV series or it’ll become a movie, but Disney is very excited about it. They’re putting a lot of work into it and obviously it’s about a guy who travels through time, but it’s not your usual, ordinary time travel type of story. We have high hopes for that. I love the name Time Jumper.

Q: Stan, now that Iron Man has proved that a lesser known comic character can make a successful movie, is there a classic Marvel character that hasn’t had their own film get a film?

Stan Lee: Yeah. I can’t wait until they do Dr. Strange. He’s the master of the mystic arts, for those of you who are untutored in comic tome. I imagine that they’ll get around to him pretty soon.