Podcast appearances and mentions of stan lee media

Episode 983-Jason Interviews James Aquilone - Darkest Depths - Monstrous Books - James Aquilone is the owner of Monstrous Books, writer of the Dead Jack Zombie Detective series, and editor of the anthologies Classic Monsters Unleashed, Shakespeare Unleashed, and the 50th anniversary Kolchak: The Night Stalker graphic novel. He has won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Graphic Novel and two Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards.The launch of DARKEST DEPTHS had been planned for 2023 as a joint project among Crystal Lake Publishing, Bram Stoker award winner James Aquilone, and acclaimed horror author and producer Taylor Grant. Sadly, after Taylor fell ill, the campaign was put on hold. Taylor, who was a development executive at Stan Lee Media and Head of Global Animation at Wattpad WEBTOON Studios, ultimately passed away from cancer in September 2024. Now DARKEST DEPTHS will serve as a tribute to Taylor and feature the last comic story he wrote, “It Lives in Darkness.” Additionally, profits from this crowdfunding campaign will be donated to his son Zane.Taylor believed in helping others and DARKEST DEPTHS will continue his legacy of mentorship by giving writers the opportunity to break into the comic book industry. Following the campaign, submissions will open for additional stories, the number depending on the campaign's final funding level. It is our hope that the DARKEST DEPTHS series will be the launching pad for many aspiring comic book writers.Back It: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manbomb/darkest-depthsTheme Songs by Drew: Darkest Depths & LegacyLike & Subscribe on Youtube www.youtube.com/@comicsforfunandprofit5331Patreon https://www.patreon.com/comicsfunprofit Merch https://comicsfunprofit.threadless.comYour Support Keeps Our Show Going On Our Way to a Thousand EpisodesDonate Here https://bit.ly/36s7YeLAll the C4FaP links you could ever need  https://beacons.ai/comicsfunprofit Listen To the Episode Here: https://comcsforfunandprofit.podomatic.com/

Jon talks to New Dimension Comics owner and founder about his experience buying the bulk of stuff from Stan Lee Media.

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Abraham Riesman, the author of the electric new book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, out last week. It's another podcast Sunday edition. Let me know what you think of these.I have been waiting for this book for ages, I'm a huge fan of Abe's and the topic could not be more prescient. We talk about the actual role Lee played in making the characters, how Stan Lee was ahead of his time when it came to making a living as a proto-influencer, and the undercovered, complex and unsavory period from the 1970s through his death. It's a complicated portrait of a complicated guy, and is deeply reported at every stage.True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee can be found wherever books are sold, and Riesman can be found on his website and on Twitter. This interview has been condensed and edited.The book is out, you've been working on this for quite a while at this point. It was delayed back in September. It's all about one of these people who have become a very central figure in modern American pop culture, Stan Lee. What got you interested in him as an individual?Oh, geez, what got me interested in him? I guess you have to go a long ways back for the beginnings of it in that I grew up reading comics and being interested in Marvel. I think I first became aware of Stan Lee when I was very young, watching the now mostly forgotten Marvel Action Hour cartoon show. He used to introduce the animated segments there. And basically he remained this figure in the background of my life, in the way that he's been in the background of the lives of countless people who have engaged with Marvel superhero products. And long story short in 2015, I started writing a profile of Stan for my then place of employment, New York Magazine, and it came out in 2016. Then in 2018, when Stan passed away, an editor at Penguin Random House who had read the 2016 profile approached me about writing a full biography, and that's where it began.He's interesting because he had a fairly seminal role at a company that has become incredibly central to American pop culture, but he himself has appeared in a lot of these entities. How did you get at the question of who is Stan Lee in terms of both the public and private and the individual person?Well, it's a big question, isn't it? I tried to base it on as much evidentiary stuff as I could, as opposed to surmise and opinion. So, I did more than 150 interviews. I went through thousands and thousands of pages of his personal and professional documents, which were mostly ones that I got from the University of Wyoming, their American Heritage Center, which is where Stan's papers and other archival materials are stored — long story about why it's in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming. But, yeah, in addition to reading through documents, I also watched a bunch of home movies. There was this Holy Grail moment of the last day I was at the archives — I only had five days there — I found this box among the almost 200 boxes of materials there that was just a bunch of unlabeled home movies.I started popping them in the little VCR they had at the reading room, and was just blown away by the fact that right under my nose there had been all this stuff that the Lee family either advertently or inadvertently had left behind for posterity. So, you take that, you take the documentation, you take the interviews, you take the comics, you just throw everything in a blender and try to sort it out in your brain and then put it on paper. There's no magic recipe to it. You just have to engage with the source material and then see if you can craft something from it.It's fascinating because this is an individual around whom a couple of major corporations have attempted to construct a mythology.A lot of your reporting, whether it was in that feature from a few years back or in the book itself, it's not poking holes, but really saying a lot of what we held up to be the myth of Stan Lee, is it necessarily as black and white as it might appear. Do you want to go into some of what you found?There's a lot that Stan was less than truthful about, a lot of things he just outright lied about and then other things where there were sins of omission or misdirection. And the big thing that matters when it comes to talking about Stan's dissembling — there's a lot of things that matter with that — but the big one, as you mentioned, is the corporate claim on Stan and the characters that Stan was credited with creating. What my research turned up was there's literally no evidence Stan created any of those characters.There's not?No, there's none. There's nothing. There's no presentation boards. There's no diary entries. There's no contemporaneous accounts from friends saying Stan was working on this and told me about it and then he created it. Nothing. It was a fly by night industry, so there wasn't a whole lot of documentation of anything to be fair, but there's significant evidence — it doesn't prove it, I don't have a smoking gun — but there's significant evidence or at least testimony that goes against Stan's word and says that one of his main collaborators, Jack Kirby, was the guy who came up with almost all of those characters.Jack was also an artist. So he, according to him and his defenders, created the characters from whole cloth, whereas Stan at best can only claim to have come up with the idea. He was not an artist, so he didn't come with the visual look of these characters. It's a sticky thing because, again, you're not going to find a smoking gun. There really was just terrible documentation and a large lack of professionalism at comics companies circa the 1960s.These were not the glossy corporate entities that they are now. Marvel was not a Disney subsidiary as it is now back in 1961. So, we don't really know who created those characters, but what I wanted to do in the book was just say the fact, which is we don't know that it was Stan. We've just taken it for granted that Stan was presented to us factually as the progenitor of these characters, usually at best you'll get people saying, “Jack was the co-creator, Jack did it with Stan.” Now that may be the case, but we don't know that. We can't say that with any certainty. It may well be that Jack was the only one who was actually coming up with these characters and that he was doing them from whole cloth. That's not even getting into the stuff that Stan more transparently lied about when it comes to crediting his collaborators for the actual comics they made. It's a long, complicated thing, but basically the process by which the classic Marvel stories were created was not "Stan sits down and writes a script, and then hands the script to the artists to draw." Stan was not writing scripts. He was having brief conversations with the artists who would then go home and write the story. So, really they were writer-artists.They would go home and just draw out the entirety of the narrative that they were working on in the comic, add in little notes sometimes in the margins about what dialogue should go in there, and then they would hand this completed story, or more or less completed story, to Stan who would then add in dialogue and narration. Now, the dialogue and narration were very important, I don't want to discount that, and he also wrote the letters columns in the back, which were enormously influential and helped create the Marvel phenomenon. But he wasn't crediting his artists as co-writers, which they were. You can even argue that they were the primary writers since they were the ones who were actually coming up with the structure of the narratives. Anyway, I could go on and on like this, but that's just one area in which I wanted to cast some light on the disputes and force people to live with the ambiguity, which no one likes, of not knowing who actually is responsible for these things that are so enormously popular and prominent.We always talk about people who were ahead of their time, and oftentimes that's indicated as a very unambiguously positive statement, but the idea of a person who is a brand creator, that seems fairly prescient for a couple of reasons. It's not the first time that, again, not necessarily negatively, not necessarily positively, somebody has been able to float to vast cultural influence through basically brand definition and steering.You're exactly right. Stan was, in a time when we didn't talk about branding the way we talk about it now or being an influencer or any number of pop-y terms that we use to describe the present day media landscape, he really was an influencer and a brand himself. His personal brand and the brand of Marvel were intimately intertwined, and he was so good at promotion. There are very few people in the history of American life who have sold better and at a higher profile than Stan Lee, and that's huge. Jack may have been the person coming up with the characters, but Jack was a terrible salesman in terms of public relations and advertising and slogans and all of that. That was not something he was good at or enjoyed, whereas Stan, that was what he lived for.He loved being a raconteur. He loved creating a fan base. He loved all of that. And without him, I don't think we would have the Marvel phenomenon, even if the creative material had been in there, it wouldn't have become this — again, to use a modern term to describe something not so modern — it wouldn't have gone viral in the way that it did. He was ahead of his time. I find myself, as I promote this book, often looking in the mirror and thinking, well, I've become my subject. There's so much in just the modern publishing landscape that requires you to be a Stan Lee if you want to succeed. It's all about individual hustle and getting your name out there. I wasn't alive in the ‘60s, but I don't presume these things were talked about in quite the same way that they are now, and they were skills that Stan had that, if anything, in the ‘60s were maligned.That was back when the biggest object of joking that you could put into a satirical pop culture thing was about ad men. That was one of the reasons that Mad Men was the show that it was, because it was set during a time when being in advertising was in a lot of ways like having a tech gig now in that there was good money to be made, it was very much a hotly discussed industry, it was all based on bluster, et cetera, et cetera. And at the time you could really make fun of somebody for being a big promoter and advertiser, but Stan was really good at it! Now it's something we look at with a great deal of admiration, or at least grudging admiration when people can pull that off. And Stan really did.Partially because they're both owned by Disney now, but you have a guy like Jim Henson who was very much in the trenches of making the art that he was promoting pretty consistently, and then Stan really was a little bit more hands-off than I think people tend to think when it comes to developing characters.For the most part. Again, we don't know because we can't go back in time and figure out exactly who said what inside a closed room. We'll never know for certain, but even when it comes to creating individual comics as opposed to just creating the characters, yeah, he was relatively hands-off when it came to an individual comic, because he wasn't writing a full script. He was not being the auteur of these comics. He was saying, “okay, here's some ideas,” and then people would go and run with them. And a lot of the time it wasn't even, "here's some ideas, go run with," it was the writer-artists would come to him and say, “we're going to do this.” Stan would maybe have some tweaks, but would largely just say, “okay.” Then the writer-artists would go home and do that. So, it's not exactly like you say. It's not like Jim Henson going and tinkering away with his characters, it's much more of an ambiguous and distant creative role that he had.Over the course of Marvel's history, obviously, the company had I think some of the most tumultuous possible business situations through the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s. What of Stan Lee's later life and pops culture ascendance do you track in the book?All of it. There's nothing that was off-limits for this book. It's the full arc of his life to the best of my ability. I tried to keep it short, it's not a Robert Caro, but I talk a lot about what happened later because I think that that's the most interesting stuff to be honest. I think we're pretty well-covered — not as well as we should be — but prior to the release of my book, we were pretty well covered in terms of stories about Stan's life and work in the ‘60s. People have written about that stuff pretty extensively. Now, I have things to add to the ‘60s narrative that hadn't been there before, but comparatively, not that much, because it's been so heavily excavated. But when it comes to things that happened to Stan from 1971 and onward, basically no one had written in-depth about any of that.There've been some attempts at it. The comics journalist Tom Spurgeon and his collaborator Jordan Raphael, who's now a lawyer, wrote a book together, the first biography of Stan in the early aughts. It had a lot of really good stuff, but it too was heavy on the ‘60s and some of the ‘70s and then drops off. And I just felt, well, there's got to be something in there and turns out, I think that's where the whole story was. That's where you see the vast majority of what Stan's life was like, both in terms of just the numbers of years— he was alive for much longer than that one decade of the 1960s — but also because that's where you start to really see what fame and success and money did to Stan.What was it?Well, a lot of things, but one was he wanted more. He was never satisfied. He didn't like comics, particularly. He didn't like superheroes, particularly. He said that on the record — that's not me inferring — it's just people don't pay attention when he said that because he would also talk out of the other side of his mouth and say he loved the medium, and he loved the genre. But evidence points toward that not really being the case. Every time he tried to break out of comics, which was basically every day of his life since he got back from World War II and went back to his comics job he had left to go be in the service, every time he was trying to escape comics, it was never to make more comics. It was never, "I want to go do superhero stories in another medium either." It was, “I want to go make movies and I want to be taken seriously as a novelist or as any number of other things that are not comic book writer.”Later in life, once he had the taste of fame that he got from his work in the ‘60s, he just spent the rest of his life from 1971 until 2018 just trying to be something else. That led to a lot of disastrous incidents. I trace the history of his two post-Marvel companies. His first one was a Dot Com Bubble-era company called Stan Lee Media. The other one is one that still exists now as a subsidiary of this big Chinese conglomerate, but it's called POW! Entertainment, and both of them were accused of enormous criminal, or at least unlawful, malfeasance, of bilking investors and juicing a stock and all kinds of stuff. No one had talked about that, no one had looked at that. And yet that's where Stan's true colors — in a lot of ways, I don't want to say always — but where a lot of his professional true colors came through. He wanted to have money, he wanted to be famous. He wanted to break out of just being thought of as the Marvel guy. And it never happened.Around the end of his life, or by the end of his life I should say, he was world famous for being the Marvel guy, but he was not world famous for anything else. No one talks about the great triumph that was Stan Lee's Stripperella, or Stan Lee's The Mighty 7, or Stan Lee's Superhero Christmas. All of these silly tossed off things that didn't really go anywhere. No one talks about them. They just talk about the work he did in the ‘60s, and that's something that Stan found very frustrating. He wanted to be known for more.It's an incredibly powerful story and it's so deeply reported. It's gotten a lot of love from folks within the comics industry, many of whom have seen this, but have not had a chance to really see the real situation laid out. I suppose coming to the end, what do you think your main takeaways about this are? What do you think the main difficulties are? And where do you think this goes next?Well, I don't know. I'd love to see what people have to say about it. I've been very gratified to get some nice responses so far, but I want this to be something that opens up discussion, not just about — this is all highfalutin, I don't know if any of this will happen — but I would love for this to be the beginning of a discussion about the ‘great man' theory of business. I hate it. I hate this fixation we have on having singular geniuses who are responsible for the products that we like. We want there to be an intimate one-to-one relationship between us and the creator. If you want to get really heavy about it, you can talk about it in religious terms.Maybe we want to feel like we have a relationship with one who creates, with one who has this godlike ability to make something out of nothing. That leads us down dangerous paths because we start avoiding the truth. We're not looking for the actual ways in which something does get created. The other problem is we then throw under the bus all of the many people who are not the one great man, who are in some part, or sometimes in most part, responsible for creating the thing. So, I would hope that if there's a lesson to this book, it's question what you're told about people, and especially what people tell you about themselves. People have regurgitated Stan's version of events for more than a half a century now. We just have widely taken this one man's word as gospel.I would love for this to be something that prompts journalists and historians to think more carefully about who they believe, because oftentimes we just go with whoever the most charismatic and nicest seeming person is and say, well, their version of events is probably true, and then we print it uncritically. I get it. I'm a journalist. A lot of times you don't have enough information to be able to make a claim that you know something is one way or another, but that shouldn't be an excuse to do a shoddy job of describing what you know, or acting like you know something that you don't know for certain.So, I guess that's the last thing. I would like for this book to be something that encourages us to live with the awful agony of ambiguity. We're not necessarily going to know what happened in the past in order to influence things that we like in the present. You sometimes have to sit with the fact that these things are unknowable, and that's hard for people. It's hard for me, it's hard writing a piece to admit that you don't know, but it's also sometimes the only intellectually and morally honest way to approach a subject.So, there you have it, the definitive answer on Stan Lee. It is unknowable. And we must be content with ambiguity within the art that we like. Abraham, thank you so much for coming on. The book is True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, where can folks find it?Easiest way is to go to your one-stop shop for all Abraham Riesman needs, which is Abrahamriesman.com. I'm on Twitter, @abrahamjoseph.All right. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. And we'll want to hear why all of Stan Lee's stuff is in Wyoming at a later time.Some other time. If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

Dollar is a recognized expert in digital media and a longtime champion of interactivity, specializing in accelerating early stage ventures. As CEO of the non-profit ITV Alliance, Allison Dollar has built a community representing leading Fortune 1000 corporations in interactive television, spanning advertising, programming, technology and distribution. For several digital strategy clients she has taken an interim CSO role, including Webcasts.com (IPO as iBEAM), WhiteBlox and GizmoLive. A sample of others include IBM’s eBusiness (AmEx, Bell Atlantic, Mail Boxes Etc.), Liberty Media (Ascent), SimplyTV, WB, Creative Planet, Stan Lee Media, Vi[z]Rt (virtual sets), @d:tech, Silicon Alley, AOL, Envivio (MPEG-4 France Telecom spinoff), celebrities.com, Telcordia (AT&T spinoff), Digital Containers (p2p) and Homerun Entertainment (Scripps), Mozaik Multimedia (cloud video), Trumpit (mobile alerts), SnapCuts (social video messaging) among others. Dollar chaired NAB’s Executive Committee to launch Multimedia World, and sat on the TV Academy's interactive media peer group executive committee and was a Blue Ribbon juror for the ITV Emmys. She regularly programs sessions for NATPE, NAB, CES and moderates at many industry events, such as Digital Hollywood. She was also the Executive Director of the Mobile Excellence Awards. Her book published by NAB’s Focal Press, "Interactive Television: Tracking an Emerging Market," analyzes the historic reworking of the television industry. She co-founded eTV World and Hollyweb conferences, which complemented her role as Executive Producer at PBI where she led online strategy for 40+ PBI media publications, including CableFax, Film&Video, Interactive Video News, and Interactive Daily. Prior, she contributed to the James Agee Film Project, CBS affiliate WBAL and the Maryland Film Commission. Dollar's M.A. is from the University of Virginia. http://www.itvalliance.org

We check in with our legal expert Joe Sergi to update us on some recent comic book related legal matters. We discuss the Superman creators heirs' copyright case, Frederic Wertham, Stan Lee Media, the Super Barbershop, Al Simmons and Spawn and much more. (1:02:22)

Comic Dorks 02: Half of Superman Welcome to episode 2! We run down the breaking Superman lawsuit news, The Sixth Gun TV prospects, the idea that you can now submit your own creator controlled comics to Comixology and make a little scratch, Stan Lee Media sues Marvel, and Stan Lee has nothing to do with it, Kurtz makes a passionate argument against doing anything with Peanuts ever again, our thoughts on Arrow, Mage: The Hero Discovered, Elementals, Grendel, Green Arrow: Year One, Ultimate Spiderman and AvX stuff, Matman 13 and the return of The Joker, The Shadow, and MORE!

We have one huge talking point this week and a whole boatload of headlines. Lucky you!! Don't forget that you only have days before the voting is closed for the 2012 PodCast awards!!Feedback:Thank you for making one of your talking points about antivirus. I have been doing a lot of research on trying to find the best, and in everything I've found and everything I've tried I've noticed that the Microsoft Security Essentials, SuperAntiSpyware, and Malewarebytes, seem to be one of the best combinations as far as free goes. For Paid services AVG Internet Security 2012, and AVG PC Tuneup appear to be the best. I've tried Norton, McAfee, AntiVir, Avast, Symantec, Microsoft OneCare (before it became Security Essentials) Both Paid, and unpaid versions. It's good to hear what you guys use, and to have some validation that I've chosen the better ones to use.Thank You.Toven.p.s. Some anti-virus's won't allow you to install if you have another anti-virus installed. AVG and Microsoft Security Essentials don't seem to like each other much. Atlas Shrugged 2Warm Regards,Robert Headlines:Motorola decides to screw with customers, hopes you'll forgive it.Remember when we talked about Huawei's Chinese intelligence ties? Turns out the Senate just listened to that episode. More links And More linksLenovo pledges to make its Chinese electronics in the USA, 'cause it's a boss like that.HTC isn't looking so good in the recent earnings report. Is anyone but Apple making money anymore?Senate candidate gets slammed for being a WoW subscriber. Maybe if she played alliance? More linksFacebook wants more buttons for you to likeApple and Google spent more in lawsuits last year than R&DGoogle TV has finally gained that function everyone thought it already had!RIM pulls Playbook from stores in either brilliant or stupid moveMozilla releases awesome Firefox 16. Mozilla takes down all links to Firefox 16.Stan Lee Media sued the Mickey Mouse Lawyers Resell your MP3s? Um no so fast.Fastlane:A "blanket-style" DMCA takedown order from Microsoft was processed by Google hitting 65 different websites. According to the notice, all references to the number “45” infringe on Microsoft’s copyright on the number. I don’t think we really need to add a punchline here, do we?Korean rapper, PSY, threw a free "Thank You" concert in Seoul for his fans which ended up literally shutting down the city as people flocked to the streets to see him. PSY has good reason to thank his fans; his hit “Gangnam Style” is currently sitting at #1 in the UK and #2 in the US. Good thing there wasn’t an oscillating fan there . . .Microsoft has decided to phase out its "Points" system used on Xbox Live and the Live Marketplace in favor of using normal currency instead. Previously, someone would need to purchase items using Microsoft Points, which were purchased at the rate of 80 for $1.00. This continues Microsoft’s latest trend of doing things that actually make sense!In an effort to cater to the geek demographic, Bravo has introduced a new reality show called "Silicon Valley". Initial reports compare it to The Hills, only with the words “synergy” and “web” used a lot more. It is even worse than you think it is.Indie game studio PETA has released a new game to point out the horrors of Pokemon. Ignoring the fact that Pokemon aren’t actually real animals, we’re surprisingly going to side with PETA on this one. The thought of capturing animals in the wild just to have them fight each other to the death while living in tiny Pokeballs does actually sound sort of horrific.While Apple Maps might have trouble telling people where the nearest Starbucks is, it seemingly has no problem showing EVERYONE where a top secret military base is located. The long-range radar base in Taiwan had been top secret until Apple missed the memo to omit it and published it’s full info to its mobile app. We’re sure this can only help Apple’s PR in China.A programming glitch on Xbox Live wanted gamers to pay over 4 billion Microsoft points for the new Borderlands 2 expansion pack. Good thing Microsoft hadn’t phased out the points system yet; 53.7 million dollars sounds much worse!Superman can be seen sporting a new outfit in the upcoming Action Comics #18, due out in March. Without a trace of irony, writer Andy Diggle pointed out how iconic and recognized Superman was and how he intends to change that. All joking aside, the suit looks like Batman and Spawn had a baby. Not cool.Talking Point:Do Not TrackZuke’s Favorite: Forget “That Was Easy”, THIS is the button you need!Zohner’s Favorite: Partysaurus RexSchmidty’s Favorite: Our new Intro, complete with Music Video. Thanks, Rymdreglage or Ninja Moped!Stark’s Favorite: CONDORMAN!!!!!!!!!!! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SHOW NOTES Scott Koblish’s web site. Per our talk of Stan Lee Media, check out some 7th Portal Art, 7th Portal episodes, and this piece…

Roll for initiative!  CouchCast 46 is a seething, roaring mass of geekery.  We discuss Xbox Live's GameRoom, Chatroulette, Lucasfilm Animation's Star Wars TV Comedy series, E*Trade talking babies film, Stan Lee Media lawsuit dismissed, SiliFulin robotic tail, Comic-Con news: $753 million expansion of the San Diego Convention Center, Red Letter Media's Attack of the Clones Review, Joss Whedon directing Avengers movie, Ralph Baer inducted in to Inventors Hall of Fame, Craig Ferguson gets robot sidekick, rules of Scrabble are changing, Craig Rucka leaving DC, Capcom donating to charity for downloads of Lost Planet 2, Hot Coffee court settlement, FCC cannot stop comcast internet throttling, Asteroids world record beaten, DOSBox, XBox 360 ability to save data to USB drives, Tron Legacy sequels, XBox Live Arcade Award Winners, and the Big List: The 8 Most Common Ways D&D Characters Die (courtesy of toplessrobot.com).