Writing took a back seat to what Stan Lee was truly great at: Being Stan Lee. Even though his name was plastered on Marvel comic books for decades, he was pretty much done writing them by the early 1970s. Instead, Lee turned his attention to whatever caught his mustachioed fancy in the moment -- reality TV, screenplays, web series, porny cartoons and trying to convince Hollywood to make Marvel movies.
Taking a page from Stan’s playbook, Kevin Smith is less in the film business than he is in the Kevin Smith business.
While his films have garnered increasingly harsh reviews over the years (2016’s horror/comedy Yoga Hosers, for example, sits at 23% on Rotten Tomatoes), Smith has been building an empire doing anything and everything that tickles his toes -- a staggering number of podcasts, comic books, public appearances, and reality TV. He’s also directing geeky TV shows like Supergirl and The Flash, but not because he thinks he brings much to the table as a director. “I bring no vision, whatsoever,” he confessed to Vulture.
But those TV side-gigs are excellent fodder for the rest of it. “What those are good for is content, because if I’m going to stand on a stage and talk, you’ve got to be relevant and talk about new adventures.”
You can’t say the guy isn’t working it. “The only reason I ever have anything going on all the time is because I’m so f---ing terrified of becoming irrelevant that I have to be in as many places as possible,” Smith says. “If one stop doesn’t work, I can jump to another one and say, ‘Well, this was always the aim!’”