At the Salt Lake Comic Con this past weekend, Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee was asked about the recent changes to the Avengers, including the Falcon taking over for Captain America.

“He took over for Captain America? Well, that was a temporary thing,” said Lee. “It’s not as though we’ve lost Captain America. I promise you he’ll be back.”

Lee continued, “See, they make all these changes….I understand they’re going to have Spider-Man or rather they’re going to have Gwen Stacy or maybe Mary Jane if she comes back again bitten by a radioactive spider, and you’ll have Spider-Woman. I heard somebody talking about that. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

Lee went on to offer this explanation of why these type of changes in general are made by publishing companies or movie studios.

“You see, when you have a comic book company, you’re publishing so many books every month, and it’s month after month after month, and you want to keep the readers,” said Lee. “And when you have movies you have one movie after the other, just like the James Bond movie every couple of years. And you have these conferences and you say, ‘What can I do that will surprise the fans and make them want to learn more about the characters?’ So you say, ‘Let’s kill one of them and we’ll bring them back to life,’ or, ‘Let’s take this one who’s an American and make him Chinese.’ I mean anything that they think of that they figure will make the fans talk about it and get interested.”