Tag: Stan Lee

Stan Lee has canceled his Monday appearance at the 2012 Hero Complex Film Festival, according to Theo Dumont, a spokesman at Lee’s POW Entertainment. Lee, the 89-year-old comic book icon, was the centerpiece of the final night of the festival, which was also to include video-taped greetings from industry peers and Hollywood elite as well as a screening of “X-Men,” the movie that 12 years ago ushered in the new era of superhero cinema. The festival, in its third year, will now end on Sunday night. Lee is distraught and depressed about the recent death of business associate Arthur Lieberman, according to Yuka Kobayashi, another staffer at POW Entertainment. While Lieberman died on May 1, Kobayashi said the collective fatigue of multiple appearances tied to “The Avengers” release have made it necessary for Lee to clear his upcoming schedule. Lee will be appearing Saturday at ...

It’s almost here — we’re just one week from the start of the 2012 Hero Complex Film Festival and with the franchise in its third year we’ve moved to a sweet new home (Regal Cinemas at LA Live, where in September we brought you a 30th anniversary screening of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with Steven Spielberg and surprise guest Harrison Ford) and expanded the program (four days now with more than a dozen guests, including three that haven’t been announced). To get a bead on the festival, peruse the photo gallery above — be sure to click the “CAPTIONS ON” option if you don’t see text across the bottom of each image – and you’ll get a snapshot description of all of eight of our separately ticketed screenings. The box here on the right leads to the ticketing page. And how about those fun images in the gallery? ...

Stan Lee, the living Marvel himself, will close out the 2012 Hero Complex Film Festival – and he’ll get some on-screen backup from Wolverine, Magneto and the other uncanny mutants in the landmark 2000 film “X-Men.”‘ “An Evening with Stan Lee” will bring the 89-year-old dynamo of pop culture and co-creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men and hundreds of other characters onstage for an in-depth conversation. You could say that Lee is the most famous name in comic books who isn’t a comic-book character — but at this point he he’s appeared in so many Marvel stories — both on the page and on the screen in his movie cameos — that it’s difficult to know where Lee the creator stops and Lee the character begins. Stanley Lieber was born in New York City on Dec. 28, 1922, but when he got ...

Fans hungry for talk of zombies and mutants can get their fill at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC, where writer Robert Kirkman will talk about his work for “The Walking Dead,” “Invincible,” “Ultimate X-Men” and his new project, “Super Dinosaur,” which he has described as “a Pixar movie on paper.” The question-and-answer session with Kirkman, hosted by Hero Complex writer Geoff Boucher, will be held in the Ronald Tutor Campus Center at 10:30 a.m. on April 21. Here are a few other events Hero Complex readers may want to check out at the festival, which runs April 21-22: • “With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story”: The documentary will screen at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. April 22 in the School for Cinematic Arts’ Ray Stark Theater. • “Graphic Novel: Drawing Outside the Lines”: ...

This post has been corrected, as detailed below. With Sunday’s premiere of “Ultimate Spider-Man,” Disney XD looks to adds a new chapter to the character’s long history as an animated success. It was 1967 when ABC aired the first episode of the original “Spider-Man” series and the catchy theme song (with lyrics by  Paul Francis Webster, the three-time Oscar winner who wrote “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing”) helped propel it to the status of pop-culture classic. We caught up with Marvel pioneer Stan Lee to talk about his recurring voice role in the new show and the wall-crawling hero’s sticking power. HC: You’ve been making cameos in Marvel feature films since “X-Men” in 2000 and we’ll see you this summer in Marc Webb’s “The Amazing Spider-Man” —  but you’re taking it to a different level with this role in “Ultimate Spider-Man.” SL: That’s right, we’re not kidding around anymore, this ...

SPIDER-MAN at 50: This is the 50th anniversary of the Marvel icon and all year Hero Complex will be talking to notable names about the character’s success and singular appeal. Today: Darwyn Cooke explains how he found a connection — and a career — in early Spider-Man comics. If you look his audacious career, you might think Darwyn Cooke doesn’t believe in the concept of sacred ground — this is, after all, the writer-artist behind an upcoming prequel to “Watchmen,” an acclaimed revival of Will Eisner’s “The Spirit”  and IDW’s ambitious, ongoing adapations of Donald Westlake’s Parker novels — but the Nova Scotian said that in his youth there was a holy text that arrived and inspired his entire artistic life: “The Amazing Spider-Man” King Size Special No. 9 back in 1973. “For me, the greatest Spidey story I ever read was the first. It was ...

SPIDER-MAN at 50: It’s the 50th anniversary of Marvel’s greatest icon, and all year Hero Complex will talk to notable names about the character’s success and singular appeal. Today: A guest essay by Neal Adams, one of the most influential comic-book artists of the modern era and one of the industry’s leading voices for artists’ rights. Spider-Man is the epitome of the difference between DC Comics and that eruption of creation that became Marvel Comics. It’s a difference that has been clouded by time. Comics historians (of which there are too many – don’t ruin comics, comic historians, remember what happened to jazz and rock ‘n’ roll) will remember Jerry and Joe’s Superman was intended to be a bad guy. At first, that is. Then before he appeared, he became a good guy. That was the beginning of superhero comics; a guy gets super powers and “decides to ...

Over 30,000 people attended the first Comikaze Expo  on Nov. 5 and 6 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Comic book legend Stan Lee, actors Mark Hamill (“Star Wars,” “Batman” animated series), Ernest Borgnine (“The Black Hole,” “The Poseidon Adventure”), Richard Hatch (the original “Battlestar Galactica” series), and even Charlie Brown himself (voice actor Brad Kesten) were on hand. The real stars, though, might have been the fans themselves — the tradition of cosplay has become a true sensation in recent years  and, in the photo gallery above, you can get a sense of the heroic lengths that fans will go to create their own costumes and step into the sci-fi, fantasy and superhero worlds they adore. – Jay West RECENT AND RELATED ‘Hunger Games’: See the character posters Wonder Woman at 70: DC’s icon gets new origin ‘Hawk & Dove’ preview: Chaos ...

This post has been corrected, as detailed below. Stan Lee has been writing in a sort of breathless, everyman version of Shakespeare jive for decades – the Asgard that he and Jack Kirby created in the 1960s was based in Norse myth but the tonal aspiration was galactic Olivier – so when I watched the video above I had to smile a bit. It’s a trailer for Lee’s sci-fi graphic novel called “Romeo and Juliet: The War,” which is a very traditional revisiting of the tragedy except with, you know,  laser blasters, starships, genetically enhanced superhumans and  malicious cyborgs. The book, from 1821 Comics and co-written by publisher Terry Dougas, comes out Nov. 30 and features the high-gloss images of  Singapore-based artist Skan Srisuwan. [For the record, 11:59 a.m. Oct. 24: A previous version of this post misspelled Terry Dougas' last name as Douglas and incorrectly ...

Forget the heroes in Hollywood — consider for a moment how busy the characters of the Marvel Universe  have been in video games in 2011: This year has seen the release of  Thor: God of Thunder (Sega); Captain America: Super Soldier (Sega); X-Men: Destiny (Activision); Spider-Man: Edge of Time (Activision); a 3DS version of Superhero Squad: The Infinity Gauntlet (THQ); and the crossover brawler Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds (Capcom), which will be super-sized this November into Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. And with The Amazing Spider Man (Activision) just being unveiled at weekend’s New York Comic Con, things don’t look like they’ll be slowing down anytime soon. For Stan Lee, who co-created so many of Marvel’s icons, watching the ongoing video-game invasion has been just as rewarding as seeing the film projects such as this year’s ”Captain America: The First Avenger,” ...