What if it actually works out?
Dan PetersonSynopsis — AI-drafted from Dan's notes
In Lee’s telling, he pitches a hero with a spider power: a teenager, with personal problems. His publisher tells him it is the worst idea he has ever heard, and gives three reasons, all of them category rules. People hate spiders. Teenagers can only be sidekicks. Superheroes do not have personal problems. Each objection names the thing that later made the character distinctive.
Lee puts the story in the last issue of a title that was already being cancelled, “just to get it out of my system”. The sales come back and the publisher asks for a series. The channel’s moral is not to let some idiot talk you out of an idea you believe in. Lee’s own hedge sits underneath it and is easy to miss: not every wild notion you come up with is going to be genius.
Where I land
I liked the “don’t let an idiot talk you out of it”. I loved Stan Lee: what an inspiration. Kind of random to have saved this one, I suppose, but alas.
The part that lands harder is who the idiot was. More often than not, in my own projects, it was me. Countless projects have died before they were ever shown to another person.
Lee had a publisher, a distribution network and an audience already attached to the failing title. That is a real advantage and it is worth naming. However, it also shows where my failure mode sits relative to his: his came after a gatekeeper said no, and mine came before anyone was asked. I was too afraid to put myself out there, within the firing line of criticism. It is probably the fear of criticism, if I’m being honest, more than any preference for working alone.
As such, the useful lesson here is structural rather than motivational. Amazing Fantasy #15 was a slot where failure cost nothing. Finding that slot is the transferable part; “ignore the doubters” is not.