Stan Lee says he likes to keep busy, and luckily that's never been a problem for the 86-year-old comic-book legend.

Lately, he's kept busy working with the folks at Disney on properties created by his POW! Entertainment company. So when it was announced on Monday that Disney would take over his former workplace, Marvel -- lock, stock and dozens of Stan Lee characters -- he got a call before the world heard the news.

"I thought it was just great," he says of the $4 billion deal. "It's terrific for Marvel, it's sensational for Disney. It's the perfect blend of two companies that should be together."

Hyperbole flows from the man who wrote the book on superheroes, including the original X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man and the Fantastic Four. The energetic co-founder and chief operating officer of POW! will make a Sept. 12 appearance at Pittsburgh Comicon at the Monroeville Convention Center.

The idea of the thousands of characters generated by Marvel under one umbrella doesn't faze him, although there are sure to be alterations in how the public gets to see his creations, from cell-phone apps to theme park rides to Broadway shows.

"Disney is the greatest marketing company in the world," Lee says. "They will just know how to market these characters wonderfully. And the Marvel people will still be doing them the way they should be done."

Lee has been learning firsthand what the Disney brand can do. POW!'s first-look deal with the Mouse House has spawned a couple of projects, including "Time Jumper," a digital-media comic that launched on iTunes in July.

" 'Time Jumper' is something new. It's like a cross between a comic book and an animated cartoon," Lee explains. "It's not really animated, but there's movement on the screen and there's music, and you hear voices. You also see the dialogue lettered. It's a whole new way of telling a story. You'll be able to see it on your cell phone. After a while you'll be able to see it on the Internet, on your computer, and sooner or later you'll be able to see it on TV and, if we're lucky, in a movie."

When it's suggested that he's at the forefront of modern technology, Lee chuckles.

"Oh, yeah, that's me. Mister Cutting-Edge."

Sounds like another hero by the man who says he's just doing what he's always done, with characters and their back stories always the main ingredient in his success.

Lee is so recognizable in the industry, he's up front as the face of the "Time Jumper" Web site. Find your way to huntheadquarters.com, and you'll be recruited by H.U.N.T. (Heroes United, Noble and True), although the site says, "the global leader in technology-driven security solutions." The recruiter in the video for H.U.N.T. is "Lee Excelsior, CEO" -- an alter ego for Stan Lee.

Pitchman is his real-life role, too.

"We have three movies in development at Disney. We have a number of other movies we're developing with different studios, and we're working on a few different television shows -- we haven't sold them yet, but we're pitching them," Lee says.

"I just try to keep busy. I come up with an idea, I go to a pitch meeting. If somebody likes it, that's great. They go ahead and produce it, and I go on to the next thing."

New Stan Lee characters are cropping up all the time, including another partnership with Disney: Nick Ratchet. The Hollywood Reporter has said the movie version has a production team and described the story as "a Jekyll & Hyde struggle between a meek, ineffectual police officer and his online alter ego, a tough avatar cop named Nick Ratchet who emerges from inside a video game to usurp the life of his creator."

In Japan, POW! has the popular manga superhero, Ultimo, and an upcoming animated series whose hero is aptly named Hero-Man.

With so much going on and fresh off a visit to Comic-Con International in San Diego, where Lee can mingle with thousands of fans, a trip to Pittsburgh might seem like small potatoes ... or not.

He says he feeds off such visits, "because how else can you know what to write, what to dream up, if you don't know the fans?"

There was a time, years ago, when he was on the college lecture circuit, but he was the one who came to the classroom to learn.

"At the end of every lecture, there'd always be a question-and-answer period. I made sure that was always the longest part ... because by the questions they would ask, I knew what the fans were the most interested in and what they cared about, and that would help me so much in deciding what to write."

There's some noise in the background on Lee's end of the phone, at POW!'s Los Angeles offices. He apologizes, saying there are some people waiting to talk to him.

"I hope you got everything you needed," Lee says as a way of goodbye.

Then he's off on a new super adventure.