It’s not often I become a quivering fanboy while interviewing someone, but it happened a few weeks ago when I got the chance to speak with comics legend Stan Lee. As the man who put Marvel Comics on the map in the 1960s by creating the likes of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, he’s pretty much responsible for much of the joy I experienced as a kid.

My childhood revolved around comic books. I’d bike downtown several times a week to buy them, then spend the rest of the week reading them. I learned to draw by emulating the likes of John Romita Jr., John Byrne and Marc Silvestri, and I’m pretty certain comic books contributed a great deal to my reading ability. And that of course led to writing, which is what I do for a living. In some ways, my entire livelihood can be traced back to Stan the Man.

The topic of the interview was video games, particularly how comic books can be translated into them. Alas, the number of games based on comics that are good still outnumber the bad, a topic on which I wrote (and included some comments from Lee) over on MSN. As it happens, Activision recently released two Canadian-designed games based on comic books, both of which I found to be decently fun. Check out my reviews of X-Men Destiny, from St. Catharines, Ont.-based Silicon Knights, and Spider-Man: Edge of Time, from Quebec City’s Beenox.

I put together a bit of my interview with Lee with clips from the two games in the video below. If you’re a fan of comics, video games or Stan Lee, check it out: