Nothing cartoonish about Stan Lee's comic book worlds

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Though he may not wear tights, haul gargantuan boulders on his shoulders or possess the ability to fly, Stan Lee is a superhero nonetheless: the father of an entire superhero race, in fact.

The co-creator of the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, the Mighty Thor, Daredevil, Doctor Strange and Spider-Man, Lee - who turns 84 in December - has earned the right to rest on his marvelous Marvel Comics laurels. But with the DVD release this week of "X-Men: The Last Stand" and "X-Men Trilogy" (Fox Home Entertainment, $29.98 and $44.98), Lee sounds as lean and hungry as a young Peter Parker chasing down deadlines at the Daily Bugle.

"Each one is a new surprise to me," Lee says of the film adaptations of his comic book classics. "I wish they could make them faster: I wish they could make one a month. `Spider-Man 3' should be out next year, and wait until you see my cameo in that! I meet Peter Parker in the street, and I think what I say will get a tremendous reaction."

For Lee, the challenge and chief concern in watching his characters emerge on the movie screen involves preserving their humanity. From the start, Lee's comic crusaders differed from the DC Comics variety (Batman, Superman) because he made them vulnerable, saddled with flaws and uncertainties.

"The temptations and pitfalls are to go too far - to exaggerate too much and just put things on the screen because you can put them in," Lee says, especially in regard to CGI computer effects. "To me, the most important thing is the characterization: to know them, to understand them and appreciate them. The effects are just to allow you to depict the characters as well and vividly as possible. But I have never been a guy to think of the effects first, and then the characters second."

Lee, who says he dreamed up all his characters "out of my head," has a particular affinity for Spider-Man's grumpy newspaper boss, J. Jonah Jameson: "I probably modeled him after myself. He knew his business, he knew how to sell papers - but he was a blusterer, a little bit bigoted, a little bit narrow-minded. I worked for a publisher once who was a blusterer."

And even with Cyclops, Storm, Professor Charles Xavier and the rest of the X-Men crew, Lee still thinks about the one character he couldn't rescue from a mired plot line. "I was working with (artist) Jack Kirby, and we needed a villain for the Fantastic Four, and we had a very short deadline. The villain is the main thing; once you have the villain, everything comes up easily. So I came up with the name - and I still like it - Diablo. I said to Jack, `Draw Diablo.' But I couldn't figure out what to do with him. He was my one failure."

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