Visionary_design newspaper

VISI ONA Highlighting the design genius of our generation

May 2018

the entertainment industry edition

INSIDE

RY

Childish Gambino captures the grim surrealism of being black in America A history of album artwork Technique behind the dancing on the ceiling scene

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EDITORIAL News

Editorial Visionary newspaper highlights the design visionaries around the world. This edition focuses on the design thought,and practiced techniques within the entertainment industry.

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MUSIC DESIGN-LONGFORM

A history of

R TW O RK

Martin Chilton

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MUSIC DESIGN

“Music and art will always go together as artwork can be as much a part of a record as the sound. Music fans have always taken pleasure from looking again and again at old album covers.”

Tony Bennett said of the marvellous album covers of the 50s that, when you bought a record, “you felt like you were taking home your very own work of art”. Indeed, artwork can be as much a part of the identity of a record as the sound. Billions of music fans over the past century have taken pleasure from looking again and again at old album covers.

The name “album” comes from a pre-war era when it literally referred to the album that contained the 78rpm shellac disc, held in a drab heavy paper sleeve with only a title embossed on the front and spine. Sometimes the discs were contained in a leather book, similar to a photographic album.

The first signs of change came in the 30s, from pioneering designers such as Alex Steinweiss, whose illustrated covers – for singers such as Paul Robeson, or the classical records of Beethoven – led to huge increases in sales. However, it was the advent of the long-playing 33⅓rpm record that changed everything. The heavy paper used for 78s damaged the delicate grooves on LPs, and record companies started using a folded-over board format sleeve. The format was ripe for artistic experimentation and ultimately led to covers such as The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers – something unimaginable in more conservative times.

Nat King Cole Album CoverA landmark artwork that first attracted mass attention in America was the Capitol Records design for Nat King Cole’s The King Cole Trio album – a lively abstract image featuring a double bass, a guitar and a piano keyboard under a gold crown. The four 78rpm records housed inside made history, topping the first Billboard Best Selling Popular Record Albums chart, on 24 March 1945. The King Cole Trio spent most of the rest of the year on the bestseller list, with many of its singles reaching No.1.

There was no turning back. Nat King Cole showed that cover design was going to be a massive cultural influence; it was one of the few mediums which reached millions of people in the golden age of radio and before television had become king. Moreover, the music sales industry had a global impact, because it provided designers with a way to express their creativity and originality to the whole world.

A host of renowned artists, including Andy Warhol, Roger Dean and Burt Goldblatt, kick-started amazing careers by designing album covers.

Many of the greatest covers of all time are associated with the post-war jazz and bebop era. Jim Flora, who had trained at the Chicago Art Academy, worked in advertising before transforming RCA Victor’s art department in the 50s.

“I was hired because I was the jazz man,” he said. Flora paid tribute to Steinweiss’ genius and his role as the man “who invented the record jacket… we called the old sleeves ‘the tombstone’ and we got rid of them as soon as possible.”

Flora’s distinctive drawing style was a light-hearted blend of caricature and surrealism, with humorous juxtapositions of physically exaggerated characters, some with Picasso-skewed eyes. His celebrated portrayals included Louis Armstrong and Shorty Rogers. Flora came up with monthly masterpieces, including the album covers for Bix + Tram and Kid Ory And His Creole Jazz Band. He used pigmentation to make Benny Goodman, Charlie Ventura and Gene Krupa look like bedspread patterns.

As a jazz fan, Flora adored working closely with the musicians. He went to a recording session to sketch Duke Ellington, recalling: “Duke was always a very affable, wonderful man. He would come over, check on me, and say,

‘Oh that wasn’t a very good profile. I’ll give you a full face.’”

Asked about his magnificent work, Flora said simply: “All I wanted to make was a piece of excitement.”

Art was closely intertwined with jazz in this era, something that pleased not only designers and customers but the musicians themselves, as Tony Bennett noted. Records were little cultural artefacts. Hawaii-born graphic designer S Neil Fujita worked at Columbia Records from 1954 to 1960 and designed covers for Charles Mingus, Art Blakey and Miles Davis, among others. He brought modern art, including his own paintings, into the equation, for example in his cool design for Dave Brubeck’s Time Out album, which showed the influence of Picasso and Paul Klee.

It wasn’t only designers who played a part in this era; photographers became a key component of the process.

Many of the best-known Impulse! covers were by designed by art director Robert Flynn and photographed by a small group that included Pete Turner (who shot many great covers for Verve and was a pioneer of colour photography), Ted Russell and Joe Alper (a man who went on to take some iconic Bob Dylan images).

One of the most renowned photographers was Charles Stewart, responsible for cover shots on more than 2,000 albums, including his wonderful portraits of Armstrong, Count Basie, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. He was introduced to the record industry by his college friend Herman Leonard and never looked back. Leonard himself is one of the most respected jazz photographers of all time, to the extent that Quincy Jones remarked that “when people think of jazz, their mental picture is likely one of Herman’s”.

Sometimes it was just bold use of typography – as in Reid Miles’s design for Jackie McLean’s It’s Time – that produced a simple yet eye-catching triumph. Miles said that in the 50s typography was “in a renaissance period”. Sometimes companies chose an iconic symbol or look that would define their output – as Impulse! did with their trademark black, orange and white livery and striking logo.

As well as gifted designers, Blue Note co-owner Francis Wolff’s own powerful photographs of musicians (playing music and relaxing off stage) also helped forge the label’s instantly recognisable identity. His photograph for John Coltrane’s Blue Train, showing the saxophonist looking anxious and lost in thought, is like a journey into a genius’ psyche. The practice of using powerful photographs of the musicians has survived, and can be seen in the simple yet arresting photograph of Norah Jones on the 2002 album Come Away with Me. John DeVries would have been celebrated if he done nothing other than the one stunning illustration of Billie Holiday for a Commodore Record in 1959. DeVries had a real affinity for the music he was representing visually.

Before moving into the album world, he designed a famous flyer for a 1942 Fats Waller concert and was also a noted song composer. Along with Joe Bushkin – a member of the Tommy Dorsey band – DeVries co-wrote the hit ‘Oh! Look at Me Now’, a song that helped launch the career of a young Frank Sinatra.

It wasn’t just jazz that was undergoing an album revolution in the 50s. At the start of the decade, most rock music was sold as cash cow 45rpm singles; albums were primarily used to collect hits together in one package. The marketing was usually tied to cinema releases, and the imagery for many albums – especially soundtrack ones – came from film posters, such as Jailhouse Rock. Sometimes the albums were just stunning photographs with lettering, such as

William V “Red” Robertson’s picture of Presley for the RCA album of 1956. There was also a plethora of what has been called “Technicolor retouched grins”, with covers featuring full-size pictures of the faces of young crooners such as Frankie Avalon.

There were innovative people at work in the popular music industry in that decade. At Capitol Records, Ken Veeder, who was head of the photographic department for more than 20 years, designed a number of impressive covers, including Gene Vincent’s 1956 album Bluejean Bop!. Other designers blended black-and-white and colour images, as in Decca’s Little Richard LP. Some used striking images, as in the lone wolf illustration for Howlin’ Wolf’s 1958 Chess album Moanin’ In The Moonlight. Topical concerns also sometimes featured, as in the mushroom cloud photograph on the cover of The Atomic Mr Basie.

In the 60s it became fashionable for bands to commission covers from artists and art school friends. The Beatles famously worked with Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton; The Rolling Stones with Warhol and Robert Frank. Young designers who were interested in the music began developing the imagery that is still associated with rock’n’roll.

In London, rock music intermingled with the worlds of fashion and fine art.

The Beatles’ Revolver album of 1966, featuring the work of Klaus Voorman, was a stepping stone – and With The Beatles was another memorable cover – but nothing quite matched the impact of the Blake/Jann Howarth cover for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That cover truly broke the mould, not least for being an album where music and visuals began to meld as one creative entity.

One musician who has taken a keener interest than most when it comes to album covers is John Mayall, who left a career as a graphic artist to form The Bluesbreakers. “I always excelled in art and went to junior art school,” Mayall said. “I still use my artistic experiences to design album covers, posters and things that are related to my musical career. They now run hand in hand, really. Of more than 50 or so albums I’ve recorded, I designed at least a third of the covers.” One of his most famous was Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, which became known “The Beano Album” because Clapton, who later admitted he was in an “unco-operative mood” during the photo-shoot, started reading a comic. Mayall decided to use that shot.

The Rolling Stones broke ground with their covers in the 60s. The band were never short of self-belief, which shows in the bullish poses for Nicholas Wright’s photograph for their debut album, which contained no mention of the band’s name on the cover. For the follow-up, 1965’s The Rolling Stones No.2, they used a cover shot taken by the celebrated David Bailey, with Mick Jagger stuck at the back of the group. Bailey said: “With The Rolling Stones I had a connection. And I liked the idea that they dressed like people on the street.”

The stark, in-your-face approach, continued with Out of Our Heads (1965) – shot by Gered Mankowitz because Bailey was unavailable – and did not really change until a couple of years later with the 3D artwork for Their Satanic Majesties Request, when psychedelic poses and quirky costumes were all the rage in the year of Sgt Pepper. A 50th-anniversary deluxe box set reissue brings that original artwork back to life.

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MUSIC DESIGN

By the end of the 60s, graphic designers such as Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley and painter Stanley “Mouse” Miller were key members of the San Francisco psychedelic music scene.

The West Coast scene was having its own creative flowering, and Grateful Dead albums began to reflect the artworks they were housed in. Mouse, who had made his name in hot-rod art and painting T-shirts at custom car shows, played a key role. Miller was responsible for the “skull and roses” logo that became the Grateful Dead’s enduring hallmark. Miller, a born iconoclast, copied a block print image on a poem he found in the San Francisco Public Library. “I thought, ‘Here’s something that might work for the Grateful Dead,’” he recalled.

The 60s was also an era when album covers were becoming more defiant and raunchier. The cover for The Velvet Underground And Nico featured a bright yellow banana print from Warhol, contrasted against a clean white background. Original pressings featured the banana as a sticker, complete with instructions to “peel slowly and see”.

If you did this, a suggestive flesh-coloured banana was revealed. But creating the artwork was too time-consuming and expensive – each sticker had to be hand placed – so the sticker ideas was abandoned for later pressings. On the cover of The Rolling Stones’ 1971 album, Sticky Fingers, there is simply a photograph of a man’s crotch – albeit covered by jeans. (Again, first pressings were interactive: the jeans’ zipper could be drawn to reveal underwear.)

Album art as concept was the new thing, and British designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell were at the forefront with the firm Hipgnosis. Some of their designs have become symbols of music in the 20th Century, such as the giant inflatable pig over London’s Battersea Power Station which graced the cover for Pink Floyd’s Animals (1977); or the disturbing image of blonde-haired, nude children climbing the Giant’s Causeway for Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy (1973). Thorgerson said they wanted to encapsulate in art what bands were trying to say in their music: “Pictures of a band, like The Beatles, or Take That, what do they tell you? They tell you what they look like, but nothing about what’s in their hearts, or in their music,” he said. “If you were trying to present an emotion, or a feeling, or an idea, or a theme, or an obsession, or a perversion, or a preoccupation, when would it have four guys in it?”

Hipgnosis used photography to powerful effect and seemed to have a constant stream of ideas. They became especially known for their association with Pink Floyd – especially their cover for The Dark Side Of the Moon. Dave Gilmour called them his “artistic advisors” and Powell said his relationship with Thorgerson worked because “I had a vision to build a company, he had the intelligence to create an art house – and that’s exactly what Hipgnosis became”.

They suited an era when prog rock musicians were keen on overblown and fantastical album covers. With their ability to mix sex, surrealism and suburban alienation, Hipgnosis became key artistic inspirations in that era. So did artist, publisher and designer Roger Dean. Quickly becoming to Yes what Hipgnosis were to Pink Floyd, Dean provided artwork for the band for nearly five decades, including for their 2014 live set Like It Is. Album cover art has attracted some seriously talented people, and though the number of artists whose work has

featured on covers is too long to list, it includes luminaries such as Stanley Donwood (Radiohead), Warhol and Banksy – and Jeff Koon’s steamy cover for Lady Gaga – in an art heritage that stretches back to Salvador Dalí’s design of the cover for Lonesome Echo for his friend Jackie Gleason.

Swiss surrealist artist and sculptor HR Giger created the disturbing album art for Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery in 1973, and, eight years later, for Debbie Harry’s debut solo record, KooKoo. In between, he won an Oscar for designing the famous creature in the movie Alien.

The right album cover has a huge impact on a singer’s fortunes – something evident in the work that French illustrator and graphic designer Jean-Paul Goude did for Grace Jones. The elegant aerobics of Island Life – a photograph that was made into a collage in a pre-digital era – helped transform Jones into an international superstar. Some photographs help define an album – such as Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA or Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – and it was no wonder that artists such as Suede, Christina Aguilera and Madonna have used fashion photographers to take the shots for album covers. Music as fashion shoot is usually good for business.

Though beautiful album covers are desirable for their own sake, memorable ones do help commercially. In the 70s and 80s, bands began to realise how to make themselves highly marketable. The rise of merchandising – and the special logos groups adopted – helped turn bands into brands. Among those at the forefront of this were Chicago, Led Zeppelin, Santana, Def Leppard and Motörhead.

As the music business changes – with customers no longer going into record shops and lingering over the visuals before they buy and album – the cover is just one element of a larger branding and marketing campaign, often involving a promotional photo-shoot, videos and merchandise.

Consumers still want detailed information about the songs and the band members on the album they have bought – a function filled by the PDF “digital booklet” – and new opportunities may arise in an interactive era of

smartphone and tablet applications. Some musicians have a positive attitude about music design in the digital age.

Hugh Syme believes that what has been lost in terms of size offers different creative possibilities in terms of fold-out booklets, in what he calls “a whole new era of iconographic thinking”.

One example of innovative thinking was Beck, who helped devise the interactive nature of The Information in 2006 – which was issued with a blank sheet of graph paper for a booklet, and one of four different sheets of stickers for fans to make their own album art.

Music fans are also often avid collectors, and one interesting development in album art and presentation has been a growing market for the deluxe box set market. The artwork and packaging in this field has grown more inventive, sometimes tipping a nod to the original creative process.

Soundgarden’s third studio album, 1991’s Badmotorfinger, was reissued in a seven-disc edition with a 52-page booklet and extras that included a 3D Lenticular lithograph of the Badmotorfinger icon, an iron-on patch, and, impressively, a revolving battery-operated saw.

All these innovations are breathing new life into the album artwork scene, while advances are also being made in motion graphics and kinetic typography. A whole new world of music new-media awaits.

And, of course, the renewed popularity of vinyl means a return of album art design in its original form. Modern superstars such as Kendrick Lamar, Lorde, Stormzy and Evanescence are among 21st-century musicians whose albums showcase interesting album art.

Perhaps the next few decades will produce something to match The Beatles’ iconic “White Album” package, Carly Simon’s sensual black-and-white Playing Possum; Sex Pistols’ bold yellow-and-pink Never Mind the Bollocks… cover or any of the masterful Blue Note covers of the post-war era.

Music and art will always go hand in hand.

-roland

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MUSIC DESIGN

C

H I L D I S H

Childish Gambino captures the grim surrealism of being black in America Mitchell S Jackson

The film is directed by Hiro Murai, Glover’s frequent collaborator on Atlanta, and it is indeed ballistic. It begins in a warehouse with the artist Calvin the Second shown seated and strumming a guitar while choral sounds and choir voices sing: “We just wanna party.” Glover, who has been in the background dances over, bare-chested, mimicking the expressions and gestures of a minstrel.

He proceeds to pull a gun from his waistband and shoot Calvin in the back of his now bag-covered head.

After that murder, Glover shouts “This is America”, and the music shifts from the choral sounds to a trap music baseline.

A crew of school uniform-clad children join Glover and together they perform a choreographed routine that features a panoply of dances including Atlanta’s whip and the South African Gwara Gwara. For most of the video, Glover and the schoolchildren keep right on boogying in seeming obliviousness, while a riot suggestive of several cultural and historical references erupts behind them.

Near the middle of the video, Glover side-moonwalks into a room while a choir in faux jubilance sings: “Get your money, black man (get your money).” Someone off-screen tosses Glover an assault rifle and, in a scene suggestive of the Charleston mass shooting, Glover massacres the choir members and de-

MA IB N O

In his provocative new video This is America, Donald Glover, as his hiphop alias Childish Gambino, artfully uses the surreal to comment on black lives ‘The day after it was released I watched it numerous times, each time encouraged by noticing a detail I hadn’t caught the previous time.’ Photograph: Record Company Handout Once upon a night in my black life, I bought a 9mm Glock 16 replete with an extended clip off the street, bought it because I’d been robbed for the drugs I sold a time or two and decided against being a mark again, that the next dude that tried me would suffer bullets.

Decades ago, that was my America.

Decades later, it’s an America that still exists for untold others. And though that shouldn’t be news, it’s a truth worth reminding us. In his artful and provocative new video This is America, Donald Glover, as his hip-hop alias Childish Gambino, attests to as much.

This is America: theories behind Childish Gambino’s satirically designed masterpiece

camps while a mass of people rush into the room.

Later moments of the video show Glover and his gleeful dance crew grooving again, and also a solo of him channelling Michael Jackson on the roof of an old car – all of which is still back dropped by symbol-laden mayhem. At the end of the video, Glover is shown running in a dark room from a blurry mob of white folks.

Part of Glover’s brilliance is his resistance to using his work to proselytize or offer advice on how to reconcile the America made of our disparate experiences within its borders. Instead, he invites his audience to examine both the fore and background of their lives, to pose questions.

There’s much to see and ask of This is America. The day after it was released I watched it numerous times, each time encouraged by noticing a detail I hadn’t caught the previous time. There’s the hooded figure galloping across the background on the white horse of death, a police car trailing behind him. Is Glover reminding me of the crisis of police shootings? There are the young men, high in the rafters, filming the riot below on their cell phones. Might this be Glover suggesting our complicity in commodifying suffering? There’s the (black?) woman at the end of video, paces behind him, also sprinting from the white mob. Should I read this as the implication that black men can’t provide the protection our women deserve because we’re too busy running from angry white power?

Through it all, Glover danced and danced and danced. Should his performance serve as a reminder of the role dance has played in black lives since our captured ancestors were forced to dance on slave ships during the middle passage? I’m not sure, but it definitely makes one reflect.

G illustration@catherine_roland

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FILM DESIGN

David Wright The iconic look of Hulu’s breakout hit “The Handmaid’s Tale” is, in large part, due to award-winning costume designer Ane Crabtree.

The wardrobe she created for the show is so recognizable that it’s become a popular choice for Halloween costume and protest marches.

“We make, not a hundred percent, but at least ninety percent of it here,” she told “Nightline.” “Our present day is actually you know three years in the future at best, although it’s so closely married to modern, what’s happening in modern politics. It really is only a hint of the future and so all of America, all of the clothing has been taken away. In my mind, we try to make a good, realistic intellectual sense of who made all these clothes.”

Details of Elisabeth Moss’ “The Handmaid’s Tale” costume are seen here.

Most of the costumes are designed to look uniform, except for the clothes worn by Joseph Fiennes, who plays Commander Waterford, and Yvonne Strahovski, who plays his wife, Serena, “because they’re the 1 percent,” she said.

The walls of Crabtree’s studio are lined with unlikely inspirations and influences. Cary Grant, for Fiennes’ sharp suits and long flowing topcoats. Coco Chanel, for Strahovski. Debbie Harry and Patti Smith for June, the main character played

by Elisabeth Moss who ultimately becomes the handmaid at the center of the story.Crabtree took home the 2018 Costume Designers Guild Award.

The palette she

works with is mostly primary colors, as prescribed in Margaret Atwood’s book. As with Star Trek uniforms, the colors denote a person’s role in society. Robin’s-egg blue for the wives, charcoal and black for the husbands, dark brown for the aunties, and of course dark red for the handmaids.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” star Elisabeth Moss and author Margaret Atwood pose for a photo together.

“It’s like blood,” she said. “Everything is by design. We went through a million different shades of red, and we knew that it had to match any skin tone and be beautiful -- from a beautiful porcelain white Lizzie Moss, to a beautiful chocolate Samira Wiley.

“Also, red is so impossible usually on film. It can be really ugly,” she continued.

“It can take all the color and pull it towards itself and you’re not going to look at anything else. Of course you still do that a little bit in our show, but I tried to find what I call an intellectual red. That wasn’t blaring.”

As for the other iconic looks of her designs, “I call them tribal uniforms because each tribe does exactly what they are deemed to do,” she said. “So they are in that way like Star Trek. But I always say that the simplicity makes the real estate really difficult and really important. More pertinent than any other show because you can’t over design this.”

Crabtree also designed the iconic bonnets the handmaids wear, their “wings,” which fit snugly on the head, held in place with magnets against the wind gusts in Toronto,

where the show is filmed.

“It’s used as a lightbox because there’s, well not zero, but very little makeup.

It’s natural,” she said. “And it’s a way to actually create light in the face.”

The bonnets, she says, also serve as a secondary function because makeup would look out of place in the handmaid’s world.

“The hidden stuff is we have to redesign for the weather in Canada because it’s freezing, right?” she told Nightline. “I didn’t want a show where everyone is walking around in sleeping bags, it wouldn’t be good for the story.

I’m learning on this show a way to make things hidden, they’re kind of like inventions on warmth.”

Referencing the handmaids’ standard uniform, Crabtree shared, “This is a kind of very modern, sporty, Gortex that we now secretly use to put the inside the capes.”

Crabtree mostly works with her team of designers, but when schedules permit, she and the show’s Emmy winning Director of Photography Colin Watkinson merge their talents.

“It’s like two kids making a plan for

THE FUTURE IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE

The hidden meanings behind the designs of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ costumes

something crazy, seriously we get that excited, even after thousands of months.”

As the show’s cinematographer, Watkinson, agrees: “It’s good to understand the color palette.

[The show] has a very strong color palette, and, every time I speak to Ane, I feel very confident to what we’re doing. I love coming down here and talking about it.” Their collaboration has created a winning formula.

“He tells me how he’s going to shoot it, how he’s going to paint it with light, and our brains start to meld together…

It’s really good, he’s my partner in crime.”

THE HANDMAID’s TALE

illustration@catherine_roland

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Stan Lee spent seven decades focused on a single task: inventing superheroes.

Mention Marvel Comics, and the first thing that comes to mind is superheroes like Spider-Man and the Hulk. The next thing, probably, is Stan Lee -- who helped create those iconic characters and has been the public face of Marvel for decades. Lee at age 95 passed away – a comic designing icon.

Lee drifted away from Marvel in the mid-1990s -- indeed, he spent years in litigation with the company -- and passed away still chairman of another business, POW! Entertainment. Still, Lee never really left Marvel. At 86 until his passing, he served as its chairman emeritus, and though the position is largely ceremonial, it acknowledged Lee's role in building one of America's most enduring brands.

We take a look back at when the creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men spoke about how he has stayed creative for more than 60 years.

I grew up in New York City during the Depression. My earliest recollections were of my parents talking about what they would do if they didn't have the rent money.

My cousin's husband, Martin Goodman, had a company called Timely Publications, and they were looking for an assistant. I figured, Why not? When I got there, I found out that the opening was in the comic book

department. I would fill the inkwells, go down and buy lunch, and erase pages and proofread. Then they were fired for some reason. By the time I got the job, Superman had been created.

We had the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, Father Time, Hurricane.

The most important thing in those days was the cover. All these books were on the newsstand, and you had to hope your cover would compel somebody to buy the book.

And everything depended on the name.

A character like Hurricane was a guy who ran very fast. Later on, when I was looking for new superheroes, it occurred to me that somebody crawling on walls would be interesting. I thought, Mosquito Man? It didn't sound very glamorous. Fly Man? I went down the list and came to Spider-Man. That was it.

In 1961 we did The Fantastic Four. I tried to make the characters different in the sense that they had real emotions and problems. And it caught on. After that, Martin asked me to come up with some other superheroes. That's when I did the X-Men and The Hulk. And we stopped being a company that imitated.

All of the characters at Marvel were my

ideas, but the ideas meant nothing unless I had somebody who could illustrate it. For Spider-Man, I got Steve Ditko to illustrate it. Whenever I would discuss the strip, I would say that Steve Ditko and I created Spider-Man. I certainly don't own the Marvel characters.

New World Pictures bought Marvel in 1986. At last, we were owned by a big, rich company. But everybody was nervous. I was invited to a meeting of the New World executives. I figured I was going to be fired.

I'll never forget: I walked in to the boardroom, maybe a dozen people sitting around the table, and the first thing one of the executives said was, "Stan, would you mind autographing some of these comic books?"

So I figured that was a good start.

We eventually decided to form another company, POW! Entertainment. It's been a lot of fun. A couple of years ago, we made a first-look deal with Disney, where anything I create I have to show them first. If they don't want it, I'm free to take it elsewhere.

We're doing a couple of television things, and we have a couple of deals with other film companies and some publishing companies.

When I was a kid, Disney was one of my gods. I just loved movies like Snow White and Pinocchio. I never dreamed that years later I would have a first-look deal with Disney. That in itself is so gratifying. And then, when Disney bought Marvel, it was almost like completing the circle.

I just wish it had happened when I was active with Marvel.

Being Marvel's chairman emeritus is strictly honorary. Occasionally, they'll ask me to write a story for a special issue, and I go to their booth at the comic book conventions and sign autographs. I do whatever I can for them. Even when I sued them in 2002, I used to say it was the friendliest lawsuit there ever was.

[Lee alleged that Marvel failed to pay him a share of profits from the first Spider-Man movie. The suit has since been settled.]

At POW!, I write the stories and come up with the ideas. If Gill says to me, "Stan, we need another thing to submit to Disney," I sit down and I think about what I can do that hasn't been done before. If I can't think of a new superpower, I try to think of a new quality that a character might have. Maybe this character has a certain ability that's given him nothing but grief. Thinking up stories is easy. Thinking up the characters is easy. It's finding a way to make it something that people have never seen before — that's what's difficult. It's also what's the most fun.

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