Inspiring Creative People

To inspire creative people a leader must create a synergistic environment. Synergy means, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” One of the greatest examples of a synergistic leader is Stan Lee, who is credited with creating the Marvel Universe including Spiderman, X-men, Avengers, Fantastic Four and many more.

The real genius of Stan Lee was not in his writing ability, but in the creation of a whole new way to produce comics that empowered the creative people around him. 

Essentially, Lee would talk over the story with the artist and create an outline of the plot. The artist would then illustrate the comic pages from that outline. Once the pages were illustrated, Lee would go back through the pages and write the dialogue.  This enabled Stan to write multiple books simultaneously and push out an enormous amount of content.

Many have criticized Stan Lee for this style of writing saying that the real writers of the comics were the artists. There are others that say that Stan’s new method gave the artists more freedom and inspired their creativity. No matter what side of the argument you land, you cannot say that this method did not work. The bottom line is that it took Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and many others to create these wonderful characters. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Are there creative people around you that you are not pulling on? Gather them together for a creative meeting and start throwing out ideas. Creative meetings can be risky, but they are worth the risk. You might even create a new universe.

Can you write like Stan Lee?

We have asked our artists to create a new story of the Masked Hero and leave out the words.

The Title of this story is “The Search for the Lost Lessons”.

We want YOU to write the dialogue! Our hope is to create some synergy and to have some fun.

Every Tuesday, for the next four weeks, we will publish four new panels from the artists.

You can download the first four panels here. 

Simply write in the dialogue, scan the comic strip and email your masterpiece to service@SuperChurch.com.

Have fun!