Stan the Man

During the drive down to Florida, I was able to catch up on a paperback book a friend of mine had lent me, Iron Man: Beneath the Armor.  The book is more or less a history of the Iron Man comic, but aside from that, it also includes a bit of the history of Marvel Comics itself.

One of the non Iron Man things I found most interesting was Stan Lee’s secret to his naming convention for hero alter ego’s.  Apparently, if Stan had actually been the one to come up with Tony Stark’s name, he would have ended up with a name like Sam Stark.

Stan revealed that he has a thing about the first and last names starting with the same letter.  With names like Peter Parker, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Stephen Strange, Matt Murdock, and Bruce Banner how were we to catch on?  His thinking was that he was less likely to forget a characters name this way.

Well, I found it interesting at least.  Now whenever I see a name like that, I’ll be thinking it’s a Stan Lee name.

On an Iron Man related note.  Having read the history of Iron Man and what has happened to him in the comics since I stopped reading them, I miss Bob Layton and David Michelinie even more now.  They were the ones working on the comic when I first got into Iron Man and those truely were the glory days.  Some of the story lines have just gone plain stupid.  However, I do like what Adi Granov has done with the armor in recent years (his designs were the basis of the movie armor).