Excelsior Indeed

Stan Lee and his brainchild Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire)

And then there's that moment when you're reading along in a good book, and you're surprised by one of your own quotes.
"I guess I treated the whole thing like a big advertising campaign," Stan Lee said. "I wanted to give the product — which was Marvel Comics, and myself in a way — a certain personality."
That's from a 1983 interview I did with Stan published in David Anthony Kraft's Comics Interview magazine, and cited in Sean Howe's book "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story."
Stan went on to say that he'd been inspired by the Jerry Todd books he'd read as a boy, titles like "Jerry Todd and the Whispering Mummy" and "Jerry Todd and the Flying Flapdoodle" (I'm sorry I missed that one, although I've seen more than enough flying flapdoodle in my day). The author had chatted directly with his fans and made them feel like part of a club, and that warm feeling of in-joke inclusion stuck with him. Stan also had Volkswagen in mind, an odd-looking car made cute by being cleverly dubbed a Bug.