The Stan Lee Meets... series from 2006 was, in Marvel's promotional words, "a series of stand-alone specials celebrating the 65th Anniversary of Stan Lee's employment at Marvel!" Perhaps "association with" should be substituted for "employment at," since I'm not sure if Stan was actually drawing a paycheck from Marvel Comics for 65 years (though feel free to fact-check me on that); nevertheless, the series was a nice set of stories that gave readers one of their last looks at Stan's wise-cracking style of relating to (and, in this case, interacting with) Marvel's characters. We've already seen that style on display to some degree in the Doctor Strange and Silver Surfer installments of the series--yet with Doctor Doom having been featured prominently in the PPC as of late, it seemed appropriate* to give the man his due with "The Man."*In fact I'd almost use the word "urgent." I can't explain this sudden anxiety I feel on the matter--but, judging by the limo with Latverian plates that's been passing in front of my home recently, I can't shake the feeling that a certain doctor feels that I've waited too long as it is.
These "meet and greet" stories are really more like brief chats between Lee and his host, which seems to be intentional in order to avoid saddling him with a full issue of scripting in what amounts to a six-issue commitment; consequently, there are other segments in these issues scripted by other writers, but which still provide the full flavor of Lee's presence as he takes us through different avenues of Marvel and its characters. In this particular issue, for instance, Lee is there as a character in his own right, as he defends his treatment of Doom in past stories; yet in the story that follows, Lee is still present (in a manner of speaking) as writer Jeph Loeb follows up on Doom in the aftermath of his battle with the Thing during the time that he'd seized the Baxter Building.
But we begin, of course, with Lee's personal meeting with Doom, at the, uh, request of a representative from Doom's court who shows up on Lee's doorstep and doesn't take no for an answer. The next thing Lee knows, he's halfway across the world standing in front of a most imposing edifice, and its even more imposing master.
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