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Stan Lee to create 'new' superhero!

Started by longmanshort, 01 March, 2005, 09:20:19 PM

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longmanshort

Comic book veteran Stan Lee is to team up with producer Robert Evans to create a movie featuring a new superhero.

Foreverman will focus on a character who has to face problems in everyday life as well as using his special powers to save the world.


This may be me being thick or something, but ... surely that's a description of Spiderman?

In fact, surely it's a description of every single Marvel superhero ever? With the possible exception of the Silver Surfer!?

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4307869.stm" target="_blank">Why, man?! WHY?!?!?

+++ implementing rigid format protocols +++ meander mode engaged +++

House of Usher

" Stan Lee to create 'new' superhero! "

Call me a spoilsport, but oh I do wish he wouldn't.
STRIKE !!!

Matt Timson

Didn't he create a 'new' hero back in the late eighties?  I'm sure he was called Speedball.

I wonder if anyone bothered to tell him what a speedball was?

Pffft...

GordonR

He also created 'Ravage 2099', in the mid-90s.  *shudder*

Let's face it, the man hasn't had any ideas in the last 30 years or so.

Dunk!

Surely Marvel pay him a million dollars a year just to exist not create.

Time for his muse to be forceable evicted.
"Trust we"

shazhughes

Hasn't he just won a huge court case so he's entitled to a huge chunk of the earnings from Marvels films, so he cant be short of a bob or two. Plus at his age he cant have that long left to spend any money he has.


GordonR

I'll eat a copy of the next Xmas prog if Foreverman: The Movie ever sees the light of day.

Check out Robert Evans' cv.  Like Smilin' Stan, his hayday was 30 years ago.  More recently, he produced The Saint, The Phantom and Sliver.  *shudder*

I knew a one-time 2000AD artist who, about 8 years ago, worked on a new line of Stan Lee-created comics that Marvel were going to put out through the Malibu imprint.  People like Kurt Busiek were brought into work on Stan's ideas, and the development went on for about 6-9 months.  And the whole thing got dropped, because it was irredeemably rubbish.

SimonC

'He also created 'Ravage 2099', in the mid-90s. *shudder*'

He co-created it with Paul Ryan, although I suspect the use of Stan's name was purely symbolic, as it was in most titles of that period.

Ravage 2099 was written by Pat Mills and Tony Skinner. Most issues drawn by Joe Bennett, which was allegedly a pseudonym for an Argentinian comic-artists' collective.

SimonC

GordonR

No, the later issues of Ravage 2099 were written by Pat Mills & Tony Skinner, once the editor had successfully managed to politely persuade Stan that his energies might be best directed elsewhere.

It was still rubbish, though.

SimonC

Having worked on the 2099 books at that time, a lot of stuff was let slip during phone calls from Joey Cavalieri and Matt Morra...Stan's scripts never got anywhere near an artist and, allegedly, pretty much everything was written in house. Probably by the nearest intern, as nobody gave two shits about these books.

Mills and Skinner were drafted, in an attempt to give the book some kind of direction, along with Punisher 2099 which (God forgive me) I drew for a short while. And there are very many, potentially libelous stories, to be told regarding that whole fiasco..!

I can't believe I'm going to publicly say this without the excuse of alcohol to fall back on, but...

I have a real fondness for Stan (there, I've said it and I feel better already). Maybe there's just 1 percent of my cynical soul which remains childishly enthusiastic about the comic 'industry', but where so many of Stan's peers ended their careers in bitterness and disillusionment (Buscema, Kirby et al), I kinda like the fact that Stan still seems to be genuinely charged-up by the whole thing.

Obviously he lost his mojo decades ago, but fair-play to the guy...let's see how fresh, innovative and contemporary our work looks when we're 150 (or whatever). Comics thrive on eccentricity, and I reckon Stan's up there with the best of them.

Si

GordonR

I remember talking to Joey Cavalieri - I did some never-published work for him - and getting some of the inside gen on the internal politics problems of the 2099 line.

Punisher 2099 wasn't so bad, with some trademark moments of good old-fashioned entertaining Mills bonkerness, even if some of the villains - a cyborg maniac who could change his own violence settings by pressing buttons on his ches; a outlaw rebel who rode a futuristic flying surfboard - might have seemed a bit familiar to Dredd fans...

shazhughes

Besides Stan Lee having lost his mojo a few decades ago isn?t part of the problem also that every super power, weapon, animal characteristic and even remotely cool sounding name been used at least more than once.
Imagine being at the dawn of the superhero age and being able to come up with anything and know that you?d pretty much be the first, now its all just a re hash of the same tired old themes.

Tordelbach

"More recently, he produced The Saint, The Phantom and Sliver.  *shudder* "

I have to admit shamefacedly that I quite enjoyed the garish silliness of 'The Phantom', but as for those other two.. oh dearie dearie me.  

The Sharon-Stone-wanks-in-the-bath sequence in 'Sliver' must be one of the most offensively unconvincing unerotic pieces of gratuitous soft-porn shite ever committed to film (I only note this in the hope that someone with talent and sensitivity will take up the genuine artistic challenge of filming just such a scene, but in a valid, justifiable and basically non-crap way).

As for 'The Saint'... Before I saw this atrocity, I used to argue that for many mathematically sound reasons it simply couldn't be substantially worse than the eyeball gouge that is 'Batman and Robin'.  Boy did my words taste bitter.  I often fancied taking a course in film studiesjust so I could produce a final-year dissertation entitled "The Films of Val Kilmer:  Why?"
 


SimonC

"Imagine being at the dawn of the superhero age and being able to come up with anything and know that you?d pretty much be the first, now its all just a re hash of the same tired old themes."

True, but this is the challenge that faces anyone, in any creative medium. Imagine starting a band at the time of The Beatles/Stones/Bowie...

Arguably, everything since then has been a re-hash of the same, finite, chord progressions.

Somehow, though, new songs get written, new comics get created, new plays are created etc, etc.

It's always going to be a case of putting a new spin on an old idea ( isn't there a Zen proposition suggesting there are only seven possible basic story structures? ), but that should be enough to keep us all going for a little while yet :-)

Si

GordonR

"the problem also that every super power, weapon, animal characteristic and even remotely cool sounding name been used at least more than once."

Reminds me of a great throwaway idea of Grant Morrison's from his Doom Patrol Run.  A supervillain that had every superpower you hadn't thought of yet.