Stan Lee's Decades-Long Obsession With Making Smut

Here’s a life lesson that we assumed (and hoped) we’d never have to give: When an old man tells you that he wants to draw your sister half-naked wearing nothing but the tightest of tights, your immediate response shouldn’t be: “The only thing I hate about this idea is that we aren’t doing it right now.” But that’s basically what happened when Stan Lee approached Pamela Anderson’s brother in the early 2000s with an offer to turn the supermodel into a comic book heroine. The result was the honestly underrated Stripperella, a show about an exotic dancer/crimefighter that managed to become more than fodder for your Palmela Handerson with a heavy dose of weird-ass humor.

But Stan Lee had nothing to do with the tone of the show. That was left to two guys he never met. All he had was the initial idea of “Boobs?” and the weird thing is, he’s been trying to make a career out of that idea for a really long time. And the weirder thing is, he initially wanted Whoopi Goldberg to be part of it. Stan Lee met Goldberg at Fabio’s birthday party in the only year when that sentence could make sense: 1995, after which he approached her with ideas to produce superhero movies starring her. One of the roles he had in mind for her was Chastity Jones, whose power was being sexually irresistible to men. “It’s a power any woman would want!” Lee told Goldberg, thankfully in the form of a recorded VHS message, which Goldberg presumably disposed of with a pair of barbecue tongs.

Please don’t let this change your opinion of Stan Lee. He didn’t get more obsessed with porn as he got older. He always tried to make smut. In the ‘70s, he pitched an idea for a porno comic to Playboy titled Thomas Swift. It would feature characters like Lord Peckerton and High Priestess Clitanna, with one proposed strip being called Thomas Swift and His Evasive Erection. It was supposed to be drawn by legendary comic book artist John Romita Sr., famous for his Spider-Man work and the co-creator of Punisher AND Wolverine. But it never happened so we will never get to see that masterpiece because this whole planet has always been Hellworld.

Stan Lee did eventually get horny on main, or rather its ‘80s equivalent, when his wife Joan published the erotic novel The Pleasure Palace in 1987 about a Tokyo brothel owner and a widow reporter interviewing him. It has been widely suspected that Lee ghostwrote it for his wife, despite smutty novels being traditionally 69th anniversary gifts.

The legendary editor’s other XXX-rated ideas that never materialized include Decoy, “A one hour erotic action series” about “one hot, desirable ‘babe’ isn’t shy about using her voluptuous body and all her feminine wiles to get what she wants” and something called, umm, “Bikini Betty, the Peach of the Beach.” We just pray to God that last one wasn’t a live-action Flintstones spin-off or something.

All of this was actually a symptom of something bigger, though. Namely the fact that Stan Lee, the man synonymous with comics, didn’t actually respect comics all that much. For most of his life, he tried to use them as a jumping-off point to something bigger and better, which in his mind were movies and TV shows, and he was willing to keep throwing smut at that door until they let him into the club. At this point, we’re starting to suspect that Hollywood only greenlighted the MCU to get Lee to stop sending them bar napkins with crude drawings of boobs on them.

Follow Cezary on Twitter.