Former Marvel artist hopes Stan Lee's dream has been granted

The relationship between Todd McFarlane and Stan Lee began years ago, when Spawn's creator and Venom's co-creator was just a teenager at the baseball camp who was staying at a hotel at the same time as a convention comics.

Lee was one of the guests at the convention.

"For me, 16-year-old Stan Lee, trying to get into comics, is the pope," he says. "Because every comic book you buy, his name is at the top. "Stan Lee Presents." Each book: Stan Lee, Stan Lee, Stan Lee. And like, oh, my God, here it is. Stan Lee is in front of me. So I went to him.

McFarlane says that Lee sat in a chair and stayed there for seven hours while questioning the comic legend.

McFarlane finally joined Marvel at the end of the 1980s, illustrating for "Incredible Hulk" and "The Amazing Spider-Man". By that time, Lee had forgotten the interaction with a 16-year-old nerd playing baseball, but the memory never left McFarlane. He stated that the day the Marvel boss had treated him "as if royalty" remained "cemented" in his brain.

"I see the giant that he is, both from a creative point of view and even more from my point of view," he says. "Just for his way of interacting with the fans, and for the way he treated people and whom he was kind enough to give me seven hours at the age of 16. He tried to do almost the same thing, but with only 30-second sentences. " every person who was in front of him. His energy level was really amazing, and I think that's partly why he started acting like an old man at the end of the evening, we forgot he was . "

Lee died Monday at the age of 95. A month before his death, McFarlane went to the veteran comic strip, worried by recent headlines about alleged financial problems in Lee's estate. During the visit, one of Lee's requests regarding his deceased wife, Joan, hit McFarlane.

"Sometimes [during my visit] he said, "Todd, I just want to go see Joanie," says McFarlane. "A little before the end, he [said]"I just want to see Joanie." So, hopefully, depending on the spirituality of everyone, whatever people believe, hopefully, he will realize that wish. "

In an interview with HuffPost, McFarlane talked about his last visit with Lee, giving a glimpse of the life of a legend that even his most fervent fans might not know.

So, how did you spend your visit with Stan a month ago?

I was at home every time I came to LA. I have tried as much as possible, whether he was awake or at home, to pass and say "hello" just for 10 to 20 minutes. He was good at feasting people with stories. He had a thousand stories. It's a good thing to have a long life: you have beautiful stories. Even when I was on stage with him, he told this story to everyone and I was deeply entertained. When we were together in the car, he was telling stories. And then I went to his place, it was a private place and he told stories.

The last time I went to see him, I could tell that the tables were slightly diverted. I could see that he was tired. The energy was not there, so I said, "Hey, Stan, you know what, you always tell me stories. Let me tell you a bunch of crazy stories about my life, my wife and my career, and I can lighten up the load a little here for an hour. "One thing that is not appealing about turning 95, is that the body tends to betray you a little bit. His eyesight and hearing became very bad, so he was frustrated, especially after the death of his wife a year earlier. "I can not enjoy life. I can not even see him. And, oh, by the way, even if I want to enjoy it, my wife is no longer there. But I guess it's not entirely unique for people who live as long as he does.

I also know people who think that what he did was a shtick. Because there was so much energy, you go, ah, it just puts that kind of action here. I sometimes got off the plane and he met me and we shared the taxi ride where we were going, and he was going – I have recordings of him – I was just laughing and I was telling jokes [with] I'm the target of his stories. Like, "I do not understand why you are here. I am the most beautiful of the two. It's going to be such a terrible sign with you on it, "and blah blah blah. I had already heard about it, but as I said, I'm amazed. I have a father who still has a lot of energy, so I'm amazed by those who still see the world's glass half full.

With the headlines we saw about his estate, how was it to visit him?

In addition to being a dear friend, the other goal was to make sure that old man was good, right? My father is still alive, so I was probably planning because, again, you are in the business here. You read all the stories. Where do facts and fiction begin? I was in the middle of it all, so maybe one day I will tell my story, but I'm going there, I have to keep going to see to make sure that when Different people were around him, he was at least treated with the respect that a 90 year old man should have. Just the common decency. I just hoped that he was comfortable with common decency. That's all.

Everything else, that he was Stan Lee and all the rest, was a little bit secondary to me. I would like it not to be there. I would have liked him to go to the exit. "I had a beautiful 70 year old woman and I went to the top." And there was not that little cloud that had been spinning around him for about a year. But Todd only rhymes with God.

What does it mean to go back on his legacy?

In comics, he is at the top. He is at the top for two reasons. You can go vertically, and the vertical represents the number of characters and ideas you've created, and then you start stacking them on top of each other. So he created this huge column of hype that some of us will simply pretend to go to our grave after committing a fraction of what he did. This in itself is almost unprecedented. Then you start moving horizontally and spreading these characters around the world – especially in the last 10 to 20 years with the movies he's created, that wide range of characters – they've gone spread over a whole planet. Who do this?

You start to get into these categories, you start counting these creators on fingers that have that kind of impact. I speak of all the countries of the world. From a strictly creative point of view, the only other one I can think of remotely in this category is Walt Disney. He also built an empire and spread it across the country. I must believe that the goal of any creative person is to create something that will eventually survive you, which means that it was relevant and important to a sufficient number of people. Disney did it and we are now dead for decades. Obviously, we'll see that Stan Lee had a giant impact like this, if not bigger.

What fans may not realize about Stan Lee or do not really like it?

Talking with him, he was also nervous about his creations and if his ideas were good enough like all of us. All the same doubts that pervade any amateur or professional who simply say, "Do I do it, do not I?" We now have the necessary hindsight to assert that they did it and that it worked, but when he spoke to me about creating these – He did not know that he was about to unleash unprecedented creativity in front of us. He thought that some of them could fail miserably. I think it's a lesson to teach everyone that even the greatest do not know if they are good. He was just as fallible as we at the beginning of all this, and he would be the first to admit that he was very lucky on his side and that things were going pretty well. I'm sure he could have waved a magic wand and shared it with a lot of people.

Are there any characters he thought would not succeed? For example, did he ever say, "I did not know Spider-Man."

Take Spider-Man. Spider-Man was launched in a comic titled "Amazing Fantasy," because they basically wanted to get rid of the book. Because it was wading. So they said, "Hey, come up with something and maybe the book might bounce back or we could keep it for a few more months." Maybe he thought about it a long time ago. Maybe he's going, "Hey, cool name."

But that could have been easily the last issue of "Amazing Fantasy", and that was the end of this character. But with Jack Kirby showing this cool suit, and later Steve Ditko giving us the work, it ends up having the opposite effect. Oh, my God, we can not cancel this book. We will have to keep this character, but … let's go from the book of "Amazing Fantasy" to "Amazing Spider-Man". And from there, since "Fantastic Four" had just been released, was the foundation on which Marvel was built – these first two ideas.

I do not think people understand in a way the story of what was happening with comics. We came from Senate hearings in war zones on the theme "Comics were bad for society". He had the task of trying to come up with something more pure Americana, if you will. The code of the comic [Authority] He was trying to make it a little lighter, which is why Peter Parker is a little clumsy. Even The Thing … he played with a lot of lightness.

He also knew that when you have these components, you have to have a big nasty opponent so that the hero seems more inspiring. When you talk to him, it's almost like an architect telling you how he's going to build a building. Then you hope that it is in bad weather. He just kept pumping them and he kept doing it.

I've already asked him … there's a reason why many of his characters have names that start with the first and last letter: Peter Parker, Doc Doom, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Bruce Banner. In part, he worked a lot and his memory was not so good. At the time, he said, "It's like I have to find a cheater to remember all those characters. I was creating at such a fast pace. When he was in the middle, he replied, "I do not know what will stay here. So I have to find these shortcuts in the creation process for everything to work. I hope it will stay. And the vast majority did it.

He was also attached to brilliant artists who helped to give a visual appearance to the stories you wrote. I think he would be the first to admit that he was very lucky. Maybe that's why he loved fans so much because he knew that if they did not like what he was doing he would not have a career. He was grateful that they gave him a career.