That doesn't mean that every wild notion you come up with
is gonna be genius, but if there is something that you feel is good,
something you want to do, something that means something to you,
try to do it.
Because I think you can only do your best work if you're doing what you want to do.
I was told to say an anecdote. Anecdotes are easy.
So, I thought to myself, what kind of anecdote
can I tell these people who really have more important things to do.
And I figured I'm gonna tell you how Spiderman came into being.
It's a true story,
although sometimes it's hard even for me to believe it.
We had already done the Fantastic Four and I think maybe the X-Men,
I can't remember the order, but my publisher came to me and he said,
"Stan, I want you to come up with another superhero!"
So I said, "okay!" Went home and, when my publisher said do something,
I better do it, cause I wanted to keep my job. I thought what can I come up with now?
And the most important thing in a superhero at first is the superpower.
Once you get that, everything else comes along. So, I thought what power will I give a new guy
and I saw a fly crawling on the wall. And I said, "hey if I can get a superhero
that could stick to walls and crawl on them, man that would be cool!"
So I thought that was good, now I needed a name. Well let's see, Flyman, Mosquitoman,
I got down to Spiderman. SPIDERMAN. It just sounded dramatic.
So, okay, I had my hero, I had his power, his name,
and then I figured just for fun, I'm gonna give him personal problems
cause except for you people who are perfect, your lives are perfect,
but most other people have personal problems. Then I thought I'd make him a teenager
cause there were no teenage superheroes that I knew of at the time.
So, armed with all that wonderful material, those great ideas,
I ran into my publisher's office and I told him. This was the reaction he gave me:
"Stan that is the worst idea I have ever heard."
"First of all..." and he started to give me his reasons,
cause very logical man, very intellectual. "First of all, people hate spiders,
so you can't call a hero Spiderman." "You want him to be a teenager?!
Teenagers can only be sidekicks." "And you want him to have personal problems?
Stan, don't you know what a superhero is? They don't have personal problems."
Well, I left the office disappointed but obviously a much wiser man.
And I couldn't get Spiderman out of my system. So we were about to kill a magazine, I think
it was called Amazing Fantasy. It wasn't selling well and we
were sending the last issue to press. When you do the last issue of a magazine,
nobody cares what you put in it cause the book is dying.
Just to get it out of my system, I put Spiderman in Amazing Fantasy,
featured him on the cover, forgot about it.
A month later, all the sales figures came in. My publisher came racing into my office,
"Stan, Stan! You remember that character we both loved so much, Spiderman?"
"Let's do him as a series!" Now, why am I telling you this?
Besides the fact that I have to kill a little time.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good,
don't let some idiot talk you out of it!
That doesn't mean that every wild notion you come up with
is gonna be genius, but if there is something that you feel is good,
something you want to do, something that means something to you,
try to do it. Because I think you can only do your best work
if you're doing what you want to do and if you're doing it the way
you think it should be done. And if you can take pride in
it after you've done it, no matter what it is, if you can look at that and say, "I did that,
and I think it's pretty damn good!"
That's a great feeling. So, don't let
idiots talk you out of something that you think is good.