...and tomorrow I'm getting my autographed comic framed.
This was at his guest speaking at the UT student union tonight, and I fortunately had a friend who got me a VIP pass.
Front row, left of center, baby!!
Mr. Lee was incredibly charming and funny and had all 700 or so of us captivated. The Q&A afterwards was the best attended of all the speakers ever at UT, apparently.
Here's a couple of highlights I wrote down:
On D.C. and Batman (and razzing the creator, who is a friend of his), "By the way, in case I never told you, I hate teenage sidekicks!" His opinion was that it was a bit of a strange idea, having some kid run around with a grown man: "At the very least, people would talk!"
One guy had an excellent question, I thought. The gist of it was the parallels between Malcolm X, who wanted to put black people above white people against Martin Luther King, Jr., who promoted true equality. In the X-Men, we have Magneto (mutants over humans) and Xavier (again, equality). Did he do this on purpose? Mr. Lee answered, "Was it intentional? Damn right!"
When asked what he thought of Wolverine, Mr. Lee said he is, "One of the best characters I didn't create."
And the last one that had me rolling was his opinion on some of his villains, specifically Dr. Doom. Mr. Lee liked Dr. Doom because "He's not a criminal... he's just a guy who wants to rule the world!" An example of lawbreaking might include something like littering, which could get a person a citation, but "you could walk up to an officer and say 'Officer, I want to rule the world,' and there's no law against it." He was also very proud of coming up with the country Latveria, because it sounds like a real place - you could use in in conversation and no one would ever know!
So anyway, hope you enjoyed my little article here... I am just so excited! Mr. Lee was a total sweetie and I think the whole audience felt like kids with their favorite grandpa for about an hour and a half. It was a great experience.
