Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas: The Story Behind The Stan Lee Universe
When you have two greats of the comic industry discussing the man who is in many people’s minds the great of the comic industry, you sit back and listen to what they have to say. That’s exactly what I did when I interviewed Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas, whose current project, The Stan Lee Universe, collects decades’ worth of Lee’s greatest archives, from his notes on the creation of the Fantastic Four to radio interview transcripts to his interactions with luminaries of film, music, and pop culture. It’s a mind-bending trip through comics history, a treat for all true believers. Here, Danny and Roy discuss the book, a compulsively readable document for any comics fan.
What made now the right time to do The Stan Lee Universe?
Danny: There’s never a bad time to do it.
Roy: That’s exactly what I was going to say. Since 1961, there hasn’t been a bad time. Maybe the fact that it’s the 50th anniversary of Marvel doesn’t make it bad either, but I can’t claim that was a major thing, and I don’t think Danny does either, really.
Danny: Uh, no, really. A little bit about the origin of the book is Roy and I had each done 85th birthday tributes to Stan: Roy in Alter Ego magazine, and I in Right Now magazine, both TwoMorrows publications, and we thought we would combine them into a book. Then we got the bright idea that one of us would go to Stan’s archives in Wyoming to look through the 90-plus boxes of material that were there. We thought maybe we’d get a few extra pages for the book, and it turns out that it became quite a large part of the book. So instead of just combining the two tribute issues, we really did a page-one redesign of the entire contents. About a third of the book is probably from the archives, and maybe another 10 or 20 percent is from Roy’s collection of Stan memorabilia, and then just stuff other people gave us, so it started out as sort of a simple thing and became a very complicated thing. But it did start out initially as Stan’s 85th birthday tribute, and it’s fortuitous it’s coming out on the Marvel 50th anniversary.
How did Stan feel about it when you approached him about doing it?
Danny: You know, I emailed with Stan. He said, “I love the idea; I’m flattered, but I don’t have time to do a new interview.” Which was fine, because in the book we have some interviews with him. Some have rarely been seen, including ones that have been transcribed from radio air checks in the ’60s that I found in the archives. They aired when they aired, and that was the last that was heard of them.
Roy: There was one other interview that I wanted to put in. About four or five years ago, I was working on a book with Stan that was going to have his voice recorded. When you pressed an icon, you heard his voice saying a couple sentences. We had about two, three, four hours of tape from those interviews. Stan gave us permission to use that and I rounded up copies of it, but it turned out it wouldn’t fit, so I stuck that in Alter Ego. That would have taken up about half the book.
Danny: The book is around 200 pages. We could have easily done another 200 just based on stuff that we, especially Roy, had accumulated over the years and from the archives.
Roy: We didn’t even cover Stripperella!
Danny: [Laughs] That’s true, we didn’t! But yeah, Stan was quite pleased with the book and he told both Roy and me how much he liked it.
What was the most surprising artifact you found for the book? Does anything in particular stand out?
Roy: I was most personally pleased to include this little exchange Stan had with my old friend Jerry Bails right after we started Alter Ego back in 1961. It was the first time that Stan ever would have written my name probably, unless he had answered a letter I had written, but I don’t think that came until a little bit later. So that was kind of nice to see, because he was responding to a review I had written in the latter part of 1961 to Fantastic Four #1. It was about as early as you could get in dealing with the Marvel Age. So that was really nice. I also loved seeing that postcard he had written, which I remember telling people about, and the burst of information in it. I had been telling people for years how when I had seen the first appearance of Spider-Man in Amazing Adventures #15 on the newsstands, a week or two before, Thor and Ant-Man and so forth came out, and I was really startled because I was looking for Thor and Ant-Man from Stan. And I thought, well, what did he do, just decide to change the bug that he was going to base this superhero on? And the reason was because of the postcard that he had sent to Jerry Bails, which is in the book, mentioning the Human Torch and Ant-Man and Thor were coming out this summer. But there’s not a word in there about Spider-Man coming out. What it was is that those of us who had gotten this little piece of information weeks in advance were looking for Ant-Man. And I suddenly see Spider-Man and I thought Ant-Man had been shelved or mutated. It’s fascinating to see these old notes that Stan sent out to people.
Danny: There were things that actually were left on the cutting-room floor because they weren’t historically important, but it was funny to see in the archives, say, a note from Stan to a hotel saying that he liked the hotel’s towels and wondering if he could buy half a dozen of them because he wanted to have them at home. That’ll be in the sequel, Volume 2! Just looking through the book, in the hardcover—both editions have 16 pages of color, but the hardcover has an extra 16 color pages—there’s a story called “The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw,” which was written by none other than Mario Puzo, who of course wrote The Godfather and the first Superman movie and many other things. He was a regular writer for Martin Goodman’s men’s magazines. I found it in this special plastic container [in Stan’s archives], because Stan obviously saw it as something special. On the cover of the book and the first couple pages was the inscription “For Stan Lee, whose imagination I cannot hope to equal.” I never even knew until I saw it that Puzo had ever done children’s books at all. It’s certainly not in his general profile.
And in both editions [of Stan Lee’s Universe], I found the audio material interesting…
Roy: Especially that wonderful interview I had never read before with Dr. Hilde Mosse, who was the associate of Dr. Fredrik Wertham. That was a pretty nice exchange! Stan was pretty ballsy in that.
That was one of my favorite parts of the book, too. The entire interview was riveting.
Roy: I think that was a real find that Danny made there, because no one has ever seen that published before.
Danny: And it was just sitting there! I think a lot of Stan’s archives, a lot of his A/V material, the tapes of his radio and TV programs were lost in a fire in the early 80s in his LA studio. So what’s here somehow survived the fire and then all the different moves that the studio made.
So, Hilde Mosse was Fredrik Wertham’s research associate, and she, like Wertham, was this very mixed bag. The other things she did were very progressive and very pro-education. A Jewish day school is named after her in Wisconsin, and she has a book about childhood literacy. But she and Wertham both had this thing about popular culture and comics in particular, so the interview, or the debate or whatever you want to call it, is from 1968, so it’s really 15 years after the comics controversies of the ’50s, but she’s still fighting that battle as if it were going on, and to her it is. She’s very passionate about it and very sincere, and if you hear the tape, although she was a German refugee from the Nazis, she has this thick German accent, so it sounds like Stan is debating—
Roy: Rosa Klebb! [played by Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love]
Danny: [Laughs] Right! So, she and again a very serious and impassioned…she doesn’t have that much of a sense of humor. But she’s serious and impassioned. And I tried to get that in the transcription, too. But then Stan would go [in the radio interview], “Yeah, you know, but listen, doc…” She’s very formal and he’s very—anyway, it’s very historically important and it’s philosophically important, but it’s entertaining, too. Roy is right. That was the most interesting thing.
Roy: Normally, Stan would bend over backward to be accommodating, but he had his dander up with this one. I happen to know that that ’50s thing—well, the first time that he and I really ever had an awful set-to was because he was upset over something that brought back memories of that and triggered an exchange that I didn’t understand for an hour or two until we got to talking about it. And so I think that that particular time and all the trouble it caused him and other people, fighting for your job and your livelihood, having to almost pretend you didn’t work in a field you worked in, I think that really touched a nerve and he wasn’t in a mood to be as accommodating as he would be most of the time with people with whom he disagreed.
Danny: Yeah, I think Roy hit it on the head there. We gave it a lot of space in the book and we tried to illustrate it as TwoMorrows is famous for, with pictures of books and people who are important historically, to not just reflect what’s being talked about in the debate itself but they provide a lot of context with what is going on or what is being referred to. Roy found a panel from the X-Men that sort of echoes Stan’s theme, that’s kind of the main thing being said in the debate. The panel says, “Beware the fanatic! Too often his cure is deadlier by far than the evil he denounces!”
Roy: That was the end of the Sentinels storyline.
Danny: In doing some research, I found out that Mosse’s brother was actually a prominent historian, so I included a picture of his book. It’s not unlike if you remember Gerard Jones’s Men of Tomorrow, in which he finds links between so many different currents of popular and serious and high and low culture. In a way, Stan and Marvel are right at the crossroads of all those different currents, too. I think that The Stan Lee Universe reflects that as well.
Do you both remember the first meeting you ever had with Stan?
Roy: It was in July of 1965. I was working at DC Comics for Mort Weisinger just a week or two after I’d come to New York. Actually the first time I talked to Stan was over the phone at my hotel room. He called me back because I had dropped him a letter saying that even though I was working for DC, I wanted to meet him for lunch or for a drink after work, and he said, “Well, I live out on Long Island and don’t really socialize much. But you know, we’ve got a writer’s test here and I’d love to have you take it.” It’s hard to resist a challenge like that, so over the next couple of days, without meeting him, I sneaked up there, took it, and brought it back the next lunch hour, and then I got a call at DC asking me to come up during my next lunch hour to come up and see Stan. During the next 10 or 15 minutes after we met, he offered me a job. And since I was very unhappy at DC already, I quit, and by that afternoon I was working for him and writing and building model stories. I don’t remember too much about the conversation. We never discussed the writer’s test, oddly. I guess I passed it! But he never brought it up or anything. He just was staring out the window and he said, “Well, so what do we have to do to hire you away from National?” I said, “Well, just offer me a job!”
The other thing I remember is one of the first things I asked of him when we got started talking was what do readers think of the continued stories? Because that was a big debate at that time. And he said, “Oh, they hate them, but we’re still going to do them because it helps me get started on each of these little 10- or 12-page stories. If I had to think of a new one every month, I’d go crazy!” It just became a general conversation like that, and I guess he just assumed that if I could write this dialogue for a few pages of Fantastic Four, as I did in the test, and he’d seen a few of my articles—he probably didn’t remember anything about my Fantastic Four review, because I had done that four years earlier—I think he figured I could write. Well, once I got in there and he began to edit me, he found it took a little bit longer than he thought!
Danny: I don’t have a specific first-meeting-with-Stan memory. My first job in comics, at Marvel, was working for Larry Lieber, who was Stan’s brother. Larry had come back from being the editor at Atlas Comics, and he was running the British department at Marvel. So I know that Stan used to have to approve the covers for the British books. We were putting out reprints of the books in black-and-white for sale in England. So I would think at some point when Larry was too busy I might have gone into Stan’s office and shown him some covers. You would think I would remember something like that better. Stan was still in the office when I started working there, but only two or three days a week. So he was almost this force that permeated the office, but he usually was inside meeting with high-level guys like Roy. I was just an assistant in a secondary department. Oddly enough, I think I worked more closely with Stan after I left Marvel, when I was working for Byron Preiss, and then in the period leading up to that, I took a trip out to the West Coast, where he and Joan treated me and my then-girlfriend very nicely, including leading us down the hill from their house during a mudslide and storm so we could get to the road safely. Then there was the time all the editors went out to San Diego and Stan entertained us at his house. Probably my best memory is reasonably early on, when I was editing Spider-Man books back in the ’80s. Stan was scripting the Spider-Man annual, and he sent the script in and of course I thought, “Well, how do I edit Stan? There’s some stuff here that I have questions about.” But it’s ridiculous that he would even listen to me. So I kind of sucked up all my courage and I called him on my phone. I had known him for several years before that, and he was the most professional guy I had ever dealt with. I told him what I thought didn’t work. If he thought I was wrong, he defended it. If he thought I was right, he thanked me for the change. And he said, “Whatever you think is right, we will do.” Considering he could have said, “Print it and shut up!”—that he was that professional, that willing to hear a critique of his work and then deal with it in such a professional manner has always impressed me. That’s not my first meeting with him, but it’s one of my most memorable.
Both of you guys have legendary careers in this industry yourself. How did Stan influence you as writers, editors, and creators?
Roy: Well, of course, in my case, I came in there specifically to be influenced by him. I already was in the business, [and I liked] many DC comics, especially those put out by Julius Schwartz, and also Doom Patrol and some other things here and there, as well as other comics over the years. Certainly Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad and Walt Kelly’s Pogo series, too. But I felt very definitely by 1963, ’64, let alone ’65, that Stan was writing the best comics in the field. As well, there was the excitement of the Marvel art by Kirby and Ditko and the other people. But when I came in, I was hired as a staff writer, basically to imitate Stan. And if not imitate Stan, at least write them in a way that he was happy with, which usually meant imitating him. Or else you had to show him something else that he liked that wasn’t his style and that he felt would still sell. Therefore, he became a tremendous influence on me. Not just from reading his comics back then, but he would often go over the comics with me, usually with the production manager, Sol Brodsky, every morning that he was in, two or three days a week.
He would come in with pages, and he would go over what he had written. Sometimes he would go over why he had written a certain thing. That was usually for my benefit more than for others’. And of course, both pleasurably and less pleasurably, I was edited and critiqued by Stan on the stories I worked on. But it gradually got to be okay. So obviously he was a tremendous influence on my style, although I did tell him a few years later, only half facetiously, that everything I did as a comic writer was either something he taught me or a reaction against it.
Danny: I just want to add before I give my answer that in The Stan Lee Universe, there’s Roy’s reminiscence about his early days and being trained by Stan. Also, Gary Friedrich and Denny O’Neill and Marv Wolfman and Herb Trimpe and a lot of people talk about how Stan worked with them and how they developed.
I am of a generation where I was the perfect age to have the early Marvel comics bore right into my brain. I was reading DC Comics and I thought that was all I needed to know about comics. I was certainly enjoying them. Then a friend of mine said, “There’s a thing called Fantastic Four you might want to check out.” I went to my local candy store and bought it and was blown away by it. I remember buying FF #2 for a nickel because, of course, it was an old comic at that time, so why would you pay full price for it?
Roy: I found it in a used bookstore before I ever saw it new on the stands! I got it for a nickel or something too!
Danny: Yeah, it was an old comic! Why would you pay full price?
Roy: Yeah, but I think I got it right around the time it came out! Somebody must have bought it, not liked it, and turned it into this bookstore about two days later.
Danny: That’s funny. Stan was a great influence just on my concept of literature and life as a kid. So I started reading these Marvel comics and they were far and away a whole other world and a whole other experience than the DCs were. Oddly enough, I think I had been reading Millie the Model in the barbershop, so it was that same sense of humor. A lot of Stan’s revolution was bringing humor and bringing romance and crossing all these other genres together with Kirby and Ditko and all the other Marvel artists. They made it into something so special and new and for me to be 8, 9, 10 years old and reading it was—my head exploded, essentially. I think it influenced the non-comics writing I did, too, and then when I came to work at Marvel, as Roy said, Stan set the standard, so people like Roy and Len Wein and Marv Wolfman developed it or took it all in different branches, but that whole idea of telling a story where it was as much about the characters as about the plot and about this interrelated universe that kept growing and growing and was an increasingly fascinating place. For me, I don’t think there’s any way to put a limit on Stan’s influence on my writing, especially because I came to it as such a young child.
Did putting this book together make you guys nostalgic for the way the comics industry used to be? I know reading it did that for me.
Roy: Yeah, it’s like another world. Of course, I’m not involved really that much in comics now, except from a distance. I write one occasionally. But I’m here in South Carolina and not interacting that much. It was a different world, and I’m sure it was already very different by the time Danny came in. When I came in, there were, like, three or four people working in the office. That was Marvel Comics. It was Stan’s office, and two other offices with five or six people crowded in them, and that was it. By the time I left in ’74, it was quite a bit larger.
Danny: That’s a really interesting question and a really tough question. Because Stan’s way of telling a story and the Marvel Way of telling a story had become so much a part of what popular culture is—Buffy and 24 are TV series that really may as well have been Marvel comics, because they were more Marvel comics than a lot of Marvel comics sometimes are. I can just say that I was teaching a Paul Levitz course—I teach quite a bit of classes on comics, and Paul Levitz has been doing it lately too. I sat in for Paul recently; he asked me to teach a lesson that he couldn’t be there for, at Pace University. He gave me the easy job: He said, “You have two and a half hours. Tell the class the entire history of the comic book industry.” So I prefaced it by saying, “Everything I’m about to tell you is about people who have become as mythic as the characters they created. And every story I’m about to tell you has about five counter-stories, and I’ll tell you why it’s not how it really happened. But I will do my best to give you some sort of history of comics and of the people who created them.” So to me it feels that, as Roy said, Marvel was so small. Though of course, in the ’40 and ’50s, it was pretty big and then it shrank for various reasons, because of the Wertham business and the change in distributorship. There’s a certain feeling that you get, like wow, it would really be something for it to be three people in a room just making these comics without having to worry about whether it will sell sippy cups or will it sell movies or will it sell lunchboxes or designer jeans.
Roy: Or having a meeting with a bunch of editors—I’ve only been involved with it once or twice at Marvel. It’s not that it was singularly unpleasant or anything like that. It was just the whole idea! I didn’t mind going out to lunch to kick something around but oh, God, the idea of project meetings and things like this, to me it’s just the anathema of the way—I found I couldn’t even work very well with the guy I brought in the field, you know, Denny O’Neill when he was an editor at DC and he would tell me he wanted everything written out in advance for some story of, say, a Batman project I was doing or something. He would say, “I don’t like any surprises,” and I said, “Well, to me the surprise in writing is what it’s all about.” I start working and discover things as I go along. But that was something you could do then. Stan would see what Jack or Steve had done and suddenly he would write a story a little differently than he thought of it maybe when he gave the plot, or maybe there were elements that he hadn’t ever thought of in the first place. Something was always kind of coming up, and it was always flying by the seat of our pants and so forth. Maybe you can’t see that anymore. Certainly you can’t when they’re part of conglomerates and owned by media giants. But it’s nice that it used to be. It’s interesting. Companies like Warner and Disney, they can in this day and age, with their structures as they are now, they can inherit or buy DC or Marvel Comics, but I don’t think they really could have created them the way that they really were. [It took] little shoestring operations. What we were trying to do in the book was to cover all the range, but at the same time, we were trying to get some of that behind-the-scenes of the early days and the later days. It was nice to see the interchange between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. We don’t have much to document the early days, but at least there was this interchange when they were developing the Silver Surfer, although it was relatively late in their relationship.
Danny: And the interview with them on that radio program also in the ’60s. We have the transcript of that as well.
I love the notes too on the development of the Fantastic Four, Stan’s synopsis, which is included in The Stan Lee Universe. For example, how Sue Storm was going to be a Hollywood starlet and Ben Grimm was a hunky pilot and all the other behind-the-scenes notes that capture the excitement regarding this comic.
Roy: Yes! There’s also the synopsis of Stan’s plot for Fantastic Four #8. I remember seeing that synopsis in Jerry Bails’s house when I came to Detroit to visit him. I said, “This is a script?!?! You just give the artist some sort of synopsis and then the guy goes off and draws it and then he adds balloons? What a crazy way to do comics!” Now of course I think the fact that they’re not done that way anymore is one of the things that’s wrong with comics.
Danny: I don’t think anybody even handles original art anymore. It’s all electronically transmitted.
Roy: People get annoyed with me when I say I want to handle the original art. They want to give me a Xerox. Now of course it’s all electronic. I loved having that original art. Stan of course would draw balloons right on the page, so we all picked that up from him. But on the splash page, he would write out word for word what he wanted in there, because he wanted to make sure how much space it would take in the balloons. Basically, once something was written of Stan’s, you just went and you wrote right on there, so if they changed the balloon, the inker of course was going to have to figure out what you’d been scribbling on there.
Danny: Well, that was back in the days when original artwork was considered just so much paper. Nobody was thinking “Oh, my God, he’s writing on the original art!” You know, the closest I came to an experience like the original Marvel Bullpen, which I really envy Roy having been there at that time, is when I left Marvel I went to work for Byron Preiss, who was doing a startup electronic comic division. So that had that atmosphere. There were like three or four of us, and we were basically inventing this new medium. Actually, Stan was part of that because there was a series of novels called Stan Lee’s Riftworld that he had done for Byron, and we were adapting those to comics form. So then I would get to have conversations with Stan about what the art should look like and how the script should read. That was almost a throwback to decades before, where suddenly we were working in this very small startup situation. It later came out and was called Stan Lee’s Alexa.
One thing I also wanted to mention about the book is how Stan has always been at the nexus of different streams of popular culture. I had known from the Bullpen Bulletins but had forgotten this. Country Joe and the Fish was a very famous band in the ’60s. Young people might know them mostly from the Woodstock movie, “Give me an F!” He’s that guy doing that cheer. So The Fish went to visit Stan and there was correspondence in the archives from this Fish organization, and the letter they write is pretty witty, but Stan’s response to them is addressed, “Hi, Piscatorial Pals!”
Roy: Well, that showed he had no idea who they were! You know, Stan, he was somebody, as you say, at the nexus of a lot of different pop-cultural currents back in the ’60s through the early ’70s, in particular, and he’s retained some of that even since then, but the interesting thing is it almost always came to him, because Stan was so busy writing and editing that he didn’t go out looking for anything. Fellini had to come up to the office, and Stan didn’t know really who he was! I’m sure he wasn’t any more familiar with Alain Resnais when he first contacted him.
Danny: We have letters from Alain Resnais, and from Stan to Alain, in the book and pages from the script Stan did for Resnais and an anecdote about Fellini—
Roy: And he had no more idea who Country Joe and the Fish were. What had happened, of course, was that Gary Friedrich, a writer on staff there, was a big fan of them and through Gary I had become a fan of a couple of their songs, especially of “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine,” which is a wonderful song. I played their album over and over. So Stan, he always figured that people came up—I remember that one of the members of Peter and Gordon had come up several years earlier and there were a few others here and there, even in that period—Stan just always figured, “Well, this just might do the comics some good.” I don’t think he would have been all that interested otherwise. I think Stan was always just thinking of it as public relations. But he wasn’t going to bother to find out what the music was like. If you gave him an album, the chances were that he wasn’t going to play it. But on the other hand, you know, if he did, he might appreciate it. He just didn’t really have time to go following other people. Other people kind of came to him. Which is funny, considering comics is kind of this despised little art form within this time, and you have all these people kind of beating a path to his door. He wasn’t going around seeking out this guy or that guy and saying, “Hey, come and do comics with us.” He wasn’t seeking out Country Joe and the Fish to do comics with them, or movie directors. They were coming to him.
Danny: I think especially with the rock stars, the cosmic stories they were doing, that he was doing with Ditko and with Kirby, I think was very attractive to hippie rock musicians of the era. I was put in touch by Country Joe with two members of the band, David Bennett Cohen and Barry Melton, who I interviewed and they reminisce about visiting Stan and the Bullpen. And Gary Friedrich also remembers it from his point of view. The funny thing is Country Joe and the Fish were famous for their antiwar music and also for a song that name-checks a couple of Marvel characters, “Superbird,” but they ended up appearing in Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #15. We have those panels in the book, too.
This is an amazing collection of comics history.
Roy: I have to say one thing: I’m listed as the co-editor, and I wrote some stuff for it and did some stuff for Alter Ego that appears here, but I do want to say that most of the heavy lifting on the book was done by Danny. I was so bogged down between Alter Ego and the Conan series that I kept saying I don’t know if I can pull my weight on this book. If you like something in the book, chances are Danny’s mostly responsible for it.
Danny: That’s very nice of you to say, Roy, but the truth is Roy did plenty on the book and the book would not have been possible and would not have been what it is without Roy and his contributions. It was definitely a team operation.
One last question: If you had to pick your favorite Stan Lee creation, what would it be?
Danny: Well, the flip answer might be my favorite Stan Lee creation is Stan Lee. [Laughs] You can read about how he did that in his autobiography, Excelsior, in which he documents how he went from being a kid riding his bike around Manhattan and the Bronx to becoming Stan Lee.
Roy: The moment I saw him in the summer of 1961, my favorite Marvel character and one of my favorite all-time comics characters is The Thing.
Danny: You know, I am 100% with you on this.
Roy: I could never get as interested in The Hulk because he was just an imitation. Not that he wasn’t a good character. Stan made up a lot of good stuff with Jack and with Ditko and with a few other people. But I don’t think anything was as important to comics and to the growth of it as what he and Jack did there. To come up with the idea to make a monster a member of a four-person superhero team, because obviously the template was being asked to do a Justice League of America, and the closest thing to that was the Martian Manhunter, who just looked like a baldheaded green guy and had nothing monstrous about him. But in Stan’s, instead of having the Human Torch and Invisible Girl and maybe one or two other people, maybe a Submariner-type character, Stan made the other guy a monster. In part it was because they were already doing monster comics and they thought that people who liked those comics might buy the Fantastic Four, but somewhere or other, very soon he quickly evolved into one of the best-written and most fully realized characters in comics, and one of the most important.
Danny: I am so much in agreement with Roy in this. As great as Spider-Man is, and Thor and Daredevil, The Thing was really, he was a monster who was a hero. When I picked up that issue of Fantastic Four #4, which was my first Marvel comic—
Roy: Oh, you’re one of the latecomers!
Danny: —and just that first page, suddenly the Human Torch has run off and The Thing goes, “Oh, to heck with him! Who cares?” I went, “Jeez! That doesn’t seem very heroic!” So Stan created a character who was a monster with the personality of a standup comedian. I mean, really, I know Rodney Dangerfield didn’t become famous until years after that, but you can look back at that and say that’s Rodney in rocky skin. I think The Thing was also—and this may be revealing more about myself—I think he was in some way everybody’s father, who was this tough guy who came from the Greatest Generation who wanted the best for his kids and had this cynical exterior and was always kind of making sarcastic jokes.
Roy: I think there was a little bit of William Bendix in there as well. I think it’s not just a total coincidence that Stan took one of his famous sayings from The Life of Riley—“What a revoltin’ development this is!”—and made it his tagline. I always could see William Bendix in some kind of Styrofoam suit playing The Thing, even though Bendix had more of a higher-pitched voice. Also, for some reason—I think the cigar helps—The Thing reminded me of Alley Oop, who was a favorite comic character of mine. Stan and Jack just captured this wonderful feeling with The Thing. Spider-Man is probably Stan’s primary creation and most important creation in a certain way, but without The Thing and the Fantastic Four, I don’t think there is a Spider-Man.
Danny: Right. That was what showed everybody, from the publisher to the reader, that it was possible and he could take it to the next level.
