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Thanks!

When I started at Marvel I was moderately appalled by the floundering around when it came to the writing of Sue. So many who seemed to cling to old notions that she was "useless" as a member of the team. Much of it was pure chauvanism, of course. Writers who didn't want to thrust her into the heat of battle, to show how tough she really was.

Almost understandable. Over the span of my career I have from time to time been accused of "violence against women" in my work. But what I was doing was treating female characters exactly as I would male, and sending them out to take their lumps just like the boys did.

By the time I became a writer, I felt the days of female characters being primarily used as hostages was long gone.

Reed is, of course, an early example of Stan's naming rules--that if the name does not immediately identify the character--the Thing, the Human Torch, the Invisible Girl/Woman--the reader should be able to pick the character out of the group by a process of elimination.

It's a school of thought much trampled upon in recent decades.

(There's a tale of Stan seeing the ANAD X-Men and having trouble figuring out who was who. He assumed Storm to be Banshee, and Nightcrawler to be Wolverine.)