RICHARD: So what made the project worthwhile for you?

JORDAN: What attracted me to the project was the challenge of trying to pull together all the strands of Stan's life and career that are out there in the hundreds of interviews he's conducted over the years, plus the accounts from his friends and colleagues. In my view, that had never really been done before in a satisfactory way.

We also wanted to "set the record straight" -- which sounds like a horribly pretentious thing -- but it's also kind of important, because there are a lot of misperceptions out there about Stan and what he did, particularly among mainstream journalists and regular folks.

TOM: I was just really curious about Stan - let's face it, he was a big figure in my childhood, like he was for a lot of kids - and I thought I could help put together a much more interesting portrait of his career than what came out in the autobiography.

MARVEL MASTERWORKS: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN VOLUME 1 HARDCOVER

RICHARD: Was there any specific moment or story you uncovered that said "that's it - that's the reason I'm doing this"?

JORDAN: It wasn't so much a game of "gotcha" as it was a project designed to show his accomplishments for what they were, rather than what most people think they were. Stan accomplished a great deal in his life. We wanted to make sure that was all properly accounted for, and we placed it in the context of the history of comics.

TOM: I think it was when we saw a Father's Day TV show from the late '70s with Stan and a bunch of other famous New Yorkers and their kids. One of the dads was Don King, which was really exciting, because Stan and Don in the same room is like the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali of hype. Stan destroyed him.

I think the thing that made doing the book click for me was examining Stan on both sides of the Marvel superhero period - this desperation to make something of himself in his late 30s, and this dawning realization in his early 40s that the comics were really starting to hit. I found that really fascinating.

RICHARD: So this is a "work of record"? Do you believe you've succeeded? The caricature on the front cover suggested to me that the work is a caricature... no photo rights?

JORDAN: The caricature on the front is a caricature, lovingly rendered by the amazing illustrator Jeff Wong. The book itself isn't a caricature (I hope). As for whether we've succeeded in writing a "work of record," I don't know. That will be up to reviewers and university librarians to decide, I suppose. It's hard to ask that question of any writer, because on any given day, my feelings of self-worth are yo-yoing between overweening confidence and abject failure. Let me just say that I hope we wrote a work of record and leave it at that.

TOM: There are tons of photos in the final version, Rich. Sixteen pages of them. Including Stan in a swimsuit, and one of Steve Ditko, although Ditko's not in a swimsuit.

As for the book, I hope it's good, but more than that I hope no one looks at my author's photo.

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