This interview with Stan Lee, who has died aged 95, was first published in January 2016

If contemporary pop culture has a superhero, it’s Stan Lee. Granted, he doesn’t look much like a superhero: Lee is 93, he doesn’t hear too well these days and his eyes disappear almost completely when he smiles. But Lee is possessed of a superpower that has made him a very rich man: he has an unwavering knack for telling the stories the public wants to hear, for dreaming up the characters that they want to embrace. As the driving force behind Marvel comics for more than 50 years, Lee has come to hold sway over modern popular culture.

Characters that Lee created in the Sixties, in collaboration with artists including Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, now make up a broad swathe of the world’s biggest movie franchises. Rarely does a summer go by without a new instalment of Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man or the Avengers. In recent years the Marvel Universe, as it’s come to be called, has taken over television, too, with Daredevil, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter and Jessica Jones merely the first batch of many more to come.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Sky’s new drama Lucky Man is being touted on the posters as Stan Lee’s Lucky Man: Lee is as much of a sell as the show itself. This is the first Lee creation that isn’t based on a Marvel character, but it has all the hallmarks of his mode of thought: