Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I'll just say to Jack, "Let's let the next villain be Dr. Doom" ... or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He's so good at plots, I'm sure he's a thousand times better than I. He just makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing ... I may tell him that he's gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I'll give him a plot, but we're practically both the writers on the things.

A superhero's catchphrase should be like a really memorable advertising slogan. It sticks in your head and you can't stop humming it. And let's face it, superheroes are just really selling themselves as products.

Once, I'd written a Western story, and one of the panels was just a hand holding a six-shooter, and there was a puff of smoke coming out of the barrel, and a straight horizontal line, indicating the trajectory of the bullet. So that page was sent back to me from the Code office, saying that the particular panel was too violent. I asked them what they meant, and they told me--I swear--"The puff of smoke is too big." Well, of course. So I had the artist make the smoke a little smaller, and the youth of America was saved.

I've written so many things over the years that I don't want to go back to being just a scriptwriter. I'm in what I consider to be the enviable position of all I have to do is come up with the idea and write an outline that makes it seem like it's a viable idea that will interest people, and then other people write the scripts -- and I become the executive producer or the producer, depending on how much involvement I have, and I get a creative credit and then move on to the next project.

Some people are able to not only entertain the public in any way that they can but also in some way to throw in some sort of inspirational message with the entertainment. I have always tried to do that with whatever I wrote. And I'm sure that a lot of other writers do, too.

Jack [Kirby] and Joe [Simon] wrote and drew the stories themselves in the beginning and I was just, like, the office boy. But after a while they had more writing than they could handle and I was the only guy around, so they said, "Hey Stan, you think you can write this?" When you're seventeen years old, what do you know? I said, "Sure, I can do it!" And that was it.

Comming from your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man