seanhowe: Excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story: In the fall of 1971, Marvel Comics licensed its characters—cheaply—to a shaggy-haired concert promoter named Steve Lemberg, who planned to adapt Marvel adventures for stage musicals, radio plays, and films. The first part of Lemberg’s promotional campaign was turning Stan Lee into an honest-to-God celebrity. He quickly organized a Carnegie Hall event around him. “An erudite evening of cataclysmic culture with your friendly neighborhood bullpen gang!” Spider-Man shouted from a New York Times ad for the January 5, 1972, event. At a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars, even a sold-out show wouldn’t make Lemberg his money back—the show was a calculated loss leader, designed simply to enhance Lee’s notoriety beyond comic circles. Sporting a mustache and sunglasses (he couldn’t help being a little funky, and a little flashy), Stan the Man gave his best effort. But the proceedings were a directionless mess, with failed improvisations and low-rent superhero costumes crafted from Magic Markers and Lycra. The guest stars that gathered to perform dramatic readings or musical numbers could not have been a more random collection: Alain Resnais; actors René Auberjonois, Peter Boyle, and Chuck McCann; writer Tom Wolfe; Beach Boy Dennis Wilson; jazz drummer Chico Hamilton; and Eddie Carmel, holder of the Guinness Book of World Records title for the world’s tallest man. Lee’s wife and daughter recited a poem Lee had written, “God Woke.” A slide show spilled onto two screens, where crude projections clashed with the brightly colored Carnegie Hall drapes; a rock-and-roll trio of Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe, and Barry Smith covered Elvis songs; and, according to reports, bored audience members ripped up their comic books and fashioned them into paper airplanes to direct at the stage. When it was all over, Gerry Conway went backstage to congratulate Lee and saw that his boss’s face was ashen. He looked, Conway said, “like a deer in headlights.” Lee took a vacation shortly afterward.

seanhowe: Excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story: In the fall of 1971, Marvel Comics licensed its characters—cheaply—to a shaggy-haired concert promoter named Steve Lemberg, who planned to adapt Marvel adventures for stage musicals, radio plays, and films. The first part of Lemberg’s promotional campaign was turning Stan Lee into an honest-to-God celebrity. He quickly organized a Carnegie Hall event around him. “An erudite evening of cataclysmic culture with your friendly neighborhood bullpen gang!” Spider-Man shouted from a New York Times ad for the January 5, 1972, event. At a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars, even a sold-out show wouldn’t make Lemberg his money back—the show was a calculated loss leader, designed simply to enhance Lee’s notoriety beyond comic circles. Sporting a mustache and sunglasses (he couldn’t help being a little funky, and a little flashy), Stan the Man gave his best effort. But the proceedings were a directionless mess, with failed improvisations and low-rent superhero costumes crafted from Magic Markers and Lycra. The guest stars that gathered to perform dramatic readings or musical numbers could not have been a more random collection: Alain Resnais; actors René Auberjonois, Peter Boyle, and Chuck McCann; writer Tom Wolfe; Beach Boy Dennis Wilson; jazz drummer Chico Hamilton; and Eddie Carmel, holder of the Guinness Book of World Records title for the world’s tallest man. Lee’s wife and daughter recited a poem Lee had written, “God Woke.” A slide show spilled onto two screens, where crude projections clashed with the brightly colored Carnegie Hall drapes; a rock-and-roll trio of Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe, and Barry Smith covered Elvis songs; and, according to reports, bored audience members ripped up their comic books and fashioned them into paper airplanes to direct at the stage. When it was all over, Gerry Conway went backstage to congratulate Lee and saw that his boss’s face was ashen. He looked, Conway said, “like a deer in headlights.” Lee took a vacation shortly afterward. http://ift.tt/1TmSpEC