Stan Lee Gets Into Bed With Disney

Stan Lee, the granddad of Marvel Comics who created Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, has agreed a deal with Disney to supply it with concepts for superheroes. The deal will see Lee generating ideas for characters that will feature in games, film, comics and books.

According to Lee's company, Pow! Entertainment, around 20 new characters are in the “active stages of development”, including El Lobo, Chameleon, Thunder Rider, Whirlwind, Doubleman, Nightbird and Blaze.

"I've got millions of them," Lee told the BBC. "I have filing cabinets filled with ideas for movies and television shows and all sorts of things... I've been waiting to be associated with someone like Disney so I can start tearing into these things."

SPOnG reckons Stan should spend a bit more time on his homework. He already invented Chameleon way back in 1963's Amazing Spider-Man #1, and Whirlwind is already a Marvel character while Blaze is a nasty demon type over at DC Comics.

Still, Disney proved with The Incredibles that it doesn't need a big-name license to launch a super-hero franchise. Good ol' Stan is nothing if not a one man idea factory who should certainly be able to provide the company with plenty of materiel to repeat the process. SPOnG just hopes we don't see a repeat of the gaming sequels to the The Incredibles, when a perfectly good idea was slowly bled to death.