Stan's still the man

Stan Lee is still creating new superheroes. His company, POW! Entertainment and IDT Entertainment have teamed up to create a pair of new animated superheroes that will debut on DVD under the banner “Stan Lee Presents” and air later on Cartoon Network.
“They’re pretty much Marvel type, you know, what I’ve done all the time, but they’re different. I don’t want to repeat myself,” Lee said Saturday at Comic-Con Intl.
The first feature stars a teen-age superhero character called Condor. “I felt that it was time that we had a really good Latin superhero,” says Lee. “He’s a skateboarding wizard also. And you can since it’s in animation, there’s so much we can do with the skateboarding.”
Lee says Condor will be in some ways similar to his hallmark creation, Spider-Man, in that he’ll have to deal with his parents, girl trouble and school. “It has a lot of action, but I’d like to think it also has a lot of heart.”
The second title is Mosaic. “Mosaic is a little more fanciful. There’s more fantasy to it and it has to do with another race of people,” Lee says. “Again, we place it in the real world with a lot of real world situations and incidents so that it doesn’t seem ridiculous or far-fetched.”
Condor and Mosaic will debut on DVD first and then air on Cartoon Network in the first quarter of 2007.
But that’s not all. Lee also says he’s working on developing a movie called “The Forever Man” at Paramount. The project is still in the early stages of development and writing the screenplay.
Lee also has his reality competition show, “Who Wants to Be a Superhero?” debuting Thursday on Sci Fi Channel.
“Obviously, we can’t expect them to try to leap over buildings or run faster than a Ferrari, so we test them on qualities that we think a superhero should have, like courage, sympathy, dependability,” Lee says.
Early response from critics and viewers has been positive and Lee says he’s happy with the sportsmanlike tone of the show. “The people don’t hate each other. They’re not out to hurt each other. They’re all competing, but all the competitors have become friends and when one is eliminated you should see how the others try to comfort the one who was eliminated.”
Lee also is getting back into the comics action, scripting the “lost issue” of Fantastic Four, which will reconstruct the original plot and art for issue #102, which was Jack Kirby’s last on the title.
Marvel will be celebrating Lee’s 65th anniversary with the company next year with a special project. For each issue, Lee will write a 10-page story in which he interacts with one of his Marvel creations and another 10-page story written by the company’s top writers that will be in some way about Stan.
“I made them funny,” he says. “Nobody has ever done a humorous story about these characters. The world may not realize this, but I love to write humor. I like to write humor more than anything. So I finally had a chance to get it out of my system.”
Lee says he kept that humorous approach for an X-Men comic book story he wrote for an upcoming DVD release of the movie trilogy. “I figure if I’m going to write comics, there’s no point in just doing another X-Men adventure,” he says. “But by making them funny, it’s all a new way of looking at it. But I’m doing them in a humorous way without changing the characters. The humor comes out of my interplay with the characters, but the characters remain in character. I’m not poking fun.”