Stan Lee's Mighty 7 Debuts!
The most famous comics creator in human history is back in action! Stan Lee, the man who created such famous superhero teams like the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Avengers, has now come up with a comic book group called the Mighty 7, as part of their self-titled six-issue miniseries which will be available in stores and online this week (and will be published bi-monthly). This series is being produced by Stan Lee's POW! Entertainment (which has a first-look deal with Walt Disney Pictures), A2 Entertainment and Archie Comics.
Calling it, "the world's first reality comic book", a fictionalized Stan Lee and Archie Comics head Jon Goldwater will appear in the series along with other real-life celebrities that have yet to be announced. "I myself am very modestly a part of the story," Lee jokes. The story revolves around five alien criminals and their two guardians who were transporting them to a cosmic prison and instead, they crash-land on Earth. After nearly 75 years of creating some of the world's greatest superheroes, Lee admits the list of legally-available names is running out.
"The more you do something, the easier it becomes. The toughest thing is thinking up new names. I think I've exhausted almost every name there is, so I've got to start making up names now. Finally we ran down the list to 'Mighty 7', it hadn't been copyrighted, so we slammed a copyright on it as fast as we could!"
Because the first few issues are devoted to figuring out the personalities of these characters, Lee has kept characters' moral allegiances a mystery. "That's what Stan Lee in the story has to figure out. Luckily, Stan Lee is a very perceptive individual and will probably work it out," says Lee, laughing. A subplot in the story has the fictional Lee at a crossroads and finds that he may no longer have any more characters to create. In reality, this is not the case.
"Really, the way it happens is it gets more and more fun to do these. You build on what you know from the past, and you add things you think of in the present, and you hope that it'll be successful in the future. It's like working on a puzzle — you've got the elements, now you have to figure out what's missing, what's the one thing that is unexpected and will be exciting to the reader."
Lee has a habit over the years of putting himself in the middle of the comic book action, even having himself banned from the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards and Susan Storm's wedding (which, years later, resulted in a humorous cameo in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). In more recent years, Lee has been popping up in his characters' feature-film adventures. "I would have never thought years ago that I would be in a comic book or I would be in a cameo in a movie. I love it. I guess I'm kind of a ham." Lee will appear in two Marvel film adaptations this year, in The Avengers (which he assures is "one of his funniest") and in the middle of a fight scene in The Amazing Spider-Man. When asked if there was one thing he didn't like about represented in comic books, he replied with tongue-firmly-in-cheek, "I don't think they made me good-looking enough, so I have a problem with that. I thought they'd make me look a little more like Tom Cruise, but you can't win them all." Does Stan Lee still have that spark of genius we all love?