Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Stan Lee’s ‘Strange’ confession
Stan Lee has been to a screening of the “Doctor Strange” movie.
The 93-year-old writer/ editor/inventor of much of the Marvel comic universe would like to tell you what he thought of it, but he can’t.
“I’m going to make a confession to you,” Lee said during a recent phone interview for the L.A. Comic Con that bears his name. “I don’t see very well, and I don’t hear very well. I saw the screen, and I could make out, vaguely, what was going on, but I’m not sure. And I couldn’t understand a word that was said!
“So I can’t wait until it comes out on a disc, to get it home and adjust everything to just the level that I can get. But what I saw looked pretty good to me, whatever the hell it was.”
While Lee wrote most of the early, surreal comics, which began appearing in Strange Tales #110 in the summer of 1963, much of the credit for creating the Sorcerer Supreme is generally given to its original artist, Steve Ditko. Worshipped by fans to almost the same extent as Lee’s other key Marvel collaborator, Jack Kirby, Ditko had brought his boss’s most popular creation, Spider-Man, to visual life a year earlier.
Don’t expect to hear the artist’s opinion of the “Doctor Strange” movie either, though. Ditko stopped making public statements and appearances decades ago, and fans and journalists who have come to the steel door of his New York studio have been politely but quickly turned away. In 2012, he did tell the New York Post that he hadn’t made any money from the successful “Spider-Man” movies.
“I’ve never spoken to Ditko,” says Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige. “I’ve spoken to people who’ve spoken to Ditko, but I’ve not knocked on his door, which I think is what you have to do.
“I hope he sees it,” Feige says of the “Strange” film. “I don’t know if he’ll ever see the movies or read any of this stuff, but it certainly is an attempt to be a love letter to his genius. I’d love to think he would see it sometime.”