Stan Lee Media

~ the obit ~

Stan Lee was seventy-five and had spent his entire career at Marvel when he put his name to an internet company in October 1998. The pitch was that the web could do for new characters what comics had done for the old ones, faster and without a printer, and that the man who had co-created most of the Marvel roster was the obvious person to try it. Peter F. Paul raised the money and took the co-founder title.

What they built was an actual animation studio in Los Angeles, not a licensing shell. Through 2000 it employed around 140 people producing Flash cartoons for the web, and in November it won that year's Web Award for best entertainment portal in a category that had Disney and Warner Bros in it. On paper this was a company that was working.

The stock said otherwise, or rather it said something first and then said the opposite. Shares traded near $10 through the summer of 2000. By mid-December they were at thirteen cents, NASDAQ halted trading on the 18th, and the company that had carried a market capitalization above $300 million in February was carrying about $1.69 million. Operations had already been suspended on 15 December, with nearly everyone laid off. The Chapter 11 filing followed on 11 February 2001.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the 7th portal ~

The flagship was The 7th Portal, which premiered on 29 February 2000: a superhero team assembled from around the world, delivered as a serialized web cartoon rather than a monthly issue. It ran in a browser, which in early 2000 meant a Flash plugin and a great deal of patience.

I was sixteen and on a dial-up line in Turkey when this was the future everyone was describing. The future in question was a several-megabyte animation streamed to a 56k modem, which is to say it was not something I could watch, and the projects that assumed otherwise were being funded on the assumption that broadband was already here. Stan Lee Media raised and spent its money inside that gap.

~ peter paul ~

Paul and a corporate officer named Stephen Gordon had been borrowing large sums from Merrill Lynch through nominee accounts, using Stan Lee Media stock as collateral. The structure let them take cash out against shares without dumping those shares onto the market, so the price stayed where the loans needed it to stay. When it stopped working it stopped all at once.

Paul left for Brazil, and extradition eventually brought him back to plead guilty to violating SEC Rule 10b-5. He went to prison in October 2009 on a ten-year sentence, nine years after the company he broke had stopped existing. He also had a separate and noisier legal history involving campaign finance and the Clintons, which is the part most coverage of him leads with.

~ what happened to the characters ~

The company came out of bankruptcy in November 2006 as a corporate husk, and the husk spent the following decade suing over who owned what. The claim was that Stan Lee had assigned his rights to characters, including his Marvel work, to Stan Lee Media in 1998, which if true would have made a defunct dot-com the owner of a large piece of Hollywood. Courts did not agree, repeatedly, into the 2010s.

The cartoons themselves are mostly gone, or survive as low-resolution rips of Flash files nobody kept the originals of. For a company whose entire premise was that the web would preserve and distribute what print could not, that is the detail worth writing down.

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