Sci-Fi Storm

Stan Lee, who was hospitalized on Wednesday for an irregular heartbeat, was released from Cedars Sanai hospital yesterday and reports that he is “feeling great”.

“All I really want to do is tell you that I’m feeling great,” Lee told KABC via Skype. “I’m glad I spent that evening in the hospital. It did me a lot of good, now I’m home and looking for new trouble we get in to. You know, the usual…I figured that a little check up wouldn’t be bad for me. And in fact it turned out to be pretty good, it got me a lot of publicity. I didn’t realize the whole world worried if I was in the hospital of not.”

We do, Generalissimo.

The 95-year-old creator of so many comic book characters that have become central to the biggest blockbusters of recent years, has kept on the go with a seeming non-stop run of convention appearances.

Stan Lee Media, Inc. (which isn’t really related to Stan Lee himself, since the company filed for bankruptcy back in 2001), is swinging for the fences. The company filed a $5.5 BILLION lawsuit against Disney, claiming that Disney does not actually own the rights to Stan Lee’s creations, and therefore want all the profits from the massive movie hits that Marvel, and now Disney since they acquired Marvel in 2009, plus a declaration of full control over the characters. This directly affects the Spider-Man, Iron Man and X-Men franchises, and several characters in The Avengers.

This appears to be a continuation of lawsuits that started back in 2007. SLMI claims that when the company was formed, Stan Lee assigned all rights to his characters to the company. But later on, Lee assigned the rights to Marvel, the company he originally created and published all those characters. It all hinges on what Lee actually gave to SLMI – was SLMI created to work on new properties, or to administer the old ones?