00:00It's a true story, although sometimes it's hard even for me to believe it, but we had already
00:07done the Fantastic Four and I think maybe the X-Men, I can't remember the order, but my publisher
00:14came to me and he said, Stan, I want you to come up with another superhero. So I said, okay,
00:21and I
00:21went home and when my publisher said do something, I'd better do it because I wanted to keep my job.
00:27I thought, what can I come up with now? And the most important thing in a superhero at first
00:32is the superpower. Once you get that, everything else comes along. So I thought, what power will
00:39I give a new guy? And I saw a fly crawling on the wall and I said, hey, if I
00:45could get a superhero
00:46that could stick to walls and crawl on him, man, that would be cool. So I thought that was good.
00:53But now I needed a name. So I said, well, let's see, fly man, mosquito man. I got down to
01:01spider man, spider man. It just sounded dramatic. So, okay, I had my hero. I had his power, his
01:09name. And then I figured just for fun, I'm going to give him personal problems because except
01:16for you people who are, that your lives are perfect, but most other people have personal
01:21problems. And then I thought I'd make him a teenager because there were no teenage superheroes
01:29that I knew of at the time. So armed with all that wonderful material, those great ideas,
01:37I ran into my publisher's office and I told him this was my reaction, the reaction he gave
01:43me. Stan, that is the worst idea I have ever heard. First of all, and he started to give
01:52me his very logical man, very intellectual. First of all, people hate spiders. So you can't
02:00call a hero spider man. You want him to be a teenager. Teenagers can only be sidekicks and
02:10you want him to have personal problems. Stan, don't you know what a superhero is? They
02:17don't have personal problems. Well, I left the office disappointed, but obviously a much
02:24wiser man. And I couldn't get spider man out of my system. So we were about to kill a magazine.
02:33I think it was called amazing fantasy. It wasn't selling well and we were sending the last issue
02:39to press. When you do the last issue of a magazine, nobody cares what you put in it because the
02:46book
02:46is dying. Just to get it out of my system, I put spider man in amazing fantasy, feature him on
02:54the cover,
02:55forgot about it. A month later, all the sales figures came in. My publisher came racing into my office.
03:05Stan, Stan, you remember that character we both loved so much, Spider-Man?
03:12He said, let's do him as a series. Now, why am I telling you this? Besides the fact that I
03:20have to kill a little time.
03:23If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don't let some idiot talk you out of it.
03:35Now, that doesn't mean that every wild notion you come up with is going to be genius, but if there
03:43is something
03:44that you feel is good, something you want to do, something that means something to you, try to do it.
03:52Because I think you can only do your best work if you're doing what you want to do and if
04:00you're doing it the way you think it should be done.
04:03And if you can take pride in it after you've done it, no matter what it is, you can look
04:09at it and say, I did that and I think it's pretty damn good.
04:12That's a great feeling. So don't let idiots talk you out of something that you think is good.
04:21By the same token, that doesn't mean every single thing you think is good is going to win a prize.
04:27Got to have a little judgment there. I want to wish all of you the best luck in the world.
04:34Just do your thing. Do it as well as you, that's the important thing.
04:39Don't shirk. Whatever you do, give it your best shot. You'll be glad you did.
