by Sean Howe
On December 20, 1940, Captain America #1 hit newsstands. It told the story of a scrawny army-enlistment reject named Steve Rogers who was administered an experimental “super-soldier” serum that bulked him up and allowed him to fight those who would threaten the United States. No bulletproof Superman, he carried a stars-and-stripes shield that matched his patriotic costume. Except for the appearance of actual Nazis, Captain America didn’t add much to the formula that MLJ Magazines’ The Shield had introduced: just another scientifically improved, star-spangled enemy of Fifth Columnists. But the ever-shifting angles and fluid action of Kirby’s artwork gave it wings. Captain America #1 sold a near-Superman number of one million copies, exceeding everyone’s expectations; the office was deluged with orders for the “Sentinels of Liberty” fan club, which for a dime included a brass badge depicting a smiling Captain America. Simon focused his energy helping Timely to capitalize on its success, brainstorming titles with Goodman—U.S.A. Comics, All-Winners Comics, and Young Allies, which featured Toro and Bucky, teenage sidekicks of the Human Torch and Captain America—and designing logos. Simon and Kirby held story conferences in the tiny waiting room out front, where they handed out assignments to writers. “And when the script came back,” said Simon, “we’d tear it apart, change the dialogue and everything else. When things got really hectic, we’d write the story right on the drawing board.” For the second issue of Captain America, they sent the hero to Germany, where he and Bucky infiltrated a concentration camp in the Black Forest. “Dot Yankee schwein vood upzet mein plans,” Hitler worried, before Bucky kicked him in the stomach.
While Kirby hummed to himself, cranking out pages behind a cloud of cigar smoke, Stanley would empty ashtrays, sweep floors, fetch coffee, and erase pencil marks from inked pages. Sometimes he would get to proofread, and often, to the consternation of his older coworkers, he would break the silence with an ocarina. “Jack sat at a table behind a big cigar,” he remembered years later. “Joe stood up behind another big cigar, and he would ask Jack, ‘Are you comfortable? Do you want some more ink? Is your brush okay? Is the pencil all right?’ And then Joe would go out and yell at me for a while, and that was the way we spent our days.”
After a month or two, Simon gave Stanley a break, or maybe it would be better described as busywork—text features were needed to qualify for magazine postal rates, Simon told him to write a short Captain America story that would be accompanied by two panels of illustration. He turned in twenty-six ham-fisted paragraphs, with the title “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge,” which he signed with a pseudonym, so as not to derail his future career as a serious writer. The byline read “Stan Lee.”
A few months after that, Stan started to get the occasional assignment for actual comics stories, and by the summer he was writing the adventures of characters like the Destroyer (Keen Marlow, American doctor, drinks a serum developed by a German doctor, and fights Nazis across enemy lines) and Jack Frost (an icy avenger comes to New York from “the far North” to fight crime).
When Simon wasn’t throwing work to Stan, he was throwing work back at Funnies, Inc., at Goodman’s request. “Martin wanted me to make it as hard as possible on Funnies. He was making the stuff in-house for much less than he was paying them. He wanted me to ask for as many corrections as I could come up with in an effort to make them throw up their hands and give up.”
Everett and Burgos, meanwhile, were upping the ante: “The Human Torch Battles the Sub-Mariner as the World Faces DESTRUCTION!” shouted the title page of Human Torch #5, in which the previous battle between the fire-and-ice heroes was put to shame. This was accompanied by an illustration of the “maddened Sub-Mariner” riding beside Hitler, Mussolini, and Death herself; the Four Horsemen of a four-color apocalypse. The story opened with Namor witnessing the destruction that a German-Russian battle had wrought on his underwater kingdom, and, persuaded by the feminine wiles of a “refugee princess” of another aquatic civilization, vowing to conquer the world above the sea. Over an astonishing sixty pages his rampage unfolded, as he and his forces took Gibraltar from Britain, wiped out an Italian fleet, flooded North Africa, drove a glacier into Moscow, and directed a tornado at Berlin. There was no distinguishing between the Axis and Allied powers. He brainwashed the Human Torch into aiding him, too, until the Torch caught a glimpse of the stars and stripes. “Shocked to the core at the sight of his flag,” hummed the narration, “Torch descends, dousing his flame, and salutes.” Everything came to a head after Namor flooded New York City with “a mammoth tidal wave so high it surmounts the city’s tallest building, so wide it stretches from the battery to the Bronx, so terrific it slams down the world’s most famous skyline as if it were built with cards and then, its fury still unspent, spans the Hudson River and roars westward! Goodbye Broadway! So long, Times Square! Down goes the Empire State Building! Down goes the George Washington Bridge!” It all climaxed at the Statue of Liberty, with a showdown between the Human Torch and Namor, who regained his senses and received an unlikely pardon from FDR. Along the way, there were cameos by characters from the pages of Marvel Mystery Comics: Angel, the Patriot, Toro, and Ka-Zar.
The whole comic was produced in a matter of days, with nearly a dozen hands on deck, making the story up as they went along, writing dialogue directly onto the pages. “We just stayed there the entire weekend,” said Everett. “Nobody left except to go out and get food or more liquor and come back and work.” When they ran out of room in the apartment, one artist set up in the bathtub. They slept in shifts, played the radio through the nights, and deflected noise complaints from neighbors.
The issue was a sellout.
With Captain America riding high, and titles multiplying, the daily grind at Timely was demanding. But Simon and Kirby were natural hustlers, and they continued to quietly freelance for other companies, even as they were hiring additional staff at Timely. It was a smooth arrangement—until Maurice Coyne came to Simon and told him that Goodman was shorting him and Kirby on their royalties: nearly all the Timely overhead was being deducted from Captain America profits. Instead of confronting Goodman, Simon and Kirby called Jack Liebowitz at DC Comics, who’d already made clear his interest in them. Liebowitz told them that they could make five hundred dollars a week with DC. They rented a cheap room at a nearby hotel and worked after hours developing projects for Timely’s competition. They may have pushed their moonlighting too far, though, when they started going to the hotel room on lunch hours. Stan grew nosy, and then suspicious, and insisted on tagging along to lunch.
“You guys must be working on something of your own!”
They reluctantly let him in on the secret, and soon he was joining them during lunchtimes at the hotel—“getting in the way,” as Simon put it.
The extracurricular activity didn’t remain a secret for long. Within days, the Goodman brothers surrounded Simon and Kirby for a confrontational firing.
Kirby was convinced that Stan had ratted them out. “The next time I see that little son of a bitch,” he told Simon, “I’m going to kill him.”
The Goodman brothers decided to take advantage of the eager protégé in their midst, at least until they found someone new. At eighteen years of age, Stan Lee found himself the editor of a major comic-book company. He had a small office off the artists’ room, which they now called the Bullpen, and into which the growing staff and their desks were now crammed.
He was still blowing his ocarina, a little more brashly now. “He’d make us wait while he finished blowing whatever tune he was playing,” recalled Vince Fago, one of his new hires. “He’d even go into Martin Goodman’s office and blow it at him.”
Lee’s consistent jauntiness belied an upbringing that hadn’t been easy. His father, Jack, a dress-cutter, had been unemployed most of Stan’s childhood, and Stan’s earliest memories were of Jack poring over the want ads and fighting with Celia. Stan slept in the living room of their cramped Bronx apartment. It would be easy to say that his voraciou
s reading and moviegoing were the classic escapism of a hard childhood—except that rather than withdraw into fantasy, Stan was always jovial and outgoing, as interested in learning about public speaking as he was in entering essay contests. Years later, he would often recall being inspired in high school by a visiting newspaper subscription salesman who entranced a class with his pitch. He’d learned to do that job himself, selling for a rival newspaper. Now that upbeat, communicative manner was serving him well: his employees were inspired by his decisiveness and energy. What might have been seen as childish guile by Joe Simon looked now, to the people who worked for Lee, like the qualities of a leader, with or without the propeller beanie he sometimes wore. He was dictating scripts to writers over the phone, making snap decisions about new titles, and himself writing two or three stories a week. “No matter how many new titles were thrown at him at the last minute, he somehow never failed to meet the deadlines,” remembered one artist. Goodman was still involved in cover choices—as he would remain for decades—but Stan Lee’s leash was getting longer.
And then, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Carl Burgos, Syd Shores, and Bill Everett were all drafted. Before long, Lee enlisted. “How would you like my job?” he asked Vince Fago one day in 1942. (Fago was a smart choice: he specialized in “funny animal” comics, which had been quickly gaining in popularity thanks to Dell Comics’ Disney tie-ins.) Lee was assigned to the Signal Corps on November 9, reporting to duty in Queens. At first he was climbing telephone poles and stringing wires for radio communications, but eventually word got out that he was a writer. Soon he was writing posters about venereal disease, manuals about tank operation, and cartoons to train payroll officers. Transferred to North Carolina and then to Indiana, he still wrote the occasional Captain America—only now, he was credited as Private Stan Lee.
After a German U-boat sank two tankers near Long Island in 1942, Martin Goodman became an air warden, patrolling the neighborhoods surrounding Woodmere, making sure that residents kept their windows blocked at night so that no lights would be visible from the ocean. As Goodman drove around Hewlett Bay, he and his son Iden would stop at all the newsstands to make sure Timely’s product was prominently displayed. Goodman wasn’t just protecting America—he was looking out for Captain America, too.
Throughout the war, Captain America was the company’s best-selling title, a leader in a field that was rapidly growing. In less than two years, the number of comic books sold each month grew from 15 million to 25 million; by 1943 it was a $30 million per year industry. A large percentage of those sales were to overseas GIs, and Captain America couldn’t have found a better audience, with stories like “Trapped in the Nazi Stronghold,” “Blitzkrieg to Berlin,” and “Tojo’s Terror Masters” guaranteed to fly off PX racks.
The average print run of a Timely book during the war, recalled Vince Fago, approached a half million per issue. “Sometimes we’d put out five books a week or more. You’d see the numbers come back and could tell that Goodman was a millionaire.”
Goodman moved into a sprawling colonial mansion, with five fireplaces and four master bedrooms, in the upscale neighborhood of Woodmere, next door to a country club. When he took his father to see the house, Isaac Goodman was astonished. “This,” he said, “was the kind of house I was a serf on, in Russia.”
After the war, in 1945, Stan returned to a changed Timely. Those funny-animal comics had flourished under Fago, and there was a steady influx of new talent on everything else: for Jap-Buster Johnson alone, future novelists Mickey Spillane and Patricia Highsmith were submitting scripts. Goodman had moved his magazine and comic book operations into the fourteenth floor of the Empire State Building, and the staff had swelled. Teams of pencilers, inkers, letterers, and colorists would punch in at 9 a.m. and huddle at their desks. Now there were different departments, with the funny-animals division rivaling the superheroes division. A permanent breeze swept through a permanently stuck window—there was no air conditioner—as the sounds of distant traffic wafted in.
It didn’t affect Martin Goodman, though. Every afternoon, after approving covers, surveying the work of new artists, and analyzing his sales charts, Goodman would go to the corner of his office, lie back in a chaise longue near his window that looked out on Thirty-Third Street, and close his eyes, paying heed to the Don’t Forget to Relax sign that hung in his office.
Lee hired a small fleet of sub-editors, each of whom moved into their own offices and worked on their own titles while he quickly adjusted to the new comic trends. He banged out scripts for Millie the Model, Tessie the Typist, and Nellie the Nurse, and redoubled the superhero line. During the war, Fago had continued Lee’s strategy of overassigning and keeping inventory on hand. (“We always had backlog, so I could drop another story in if someone was late or drank and lied about it. Then we’d put ten guys on it to get it done.”) At one point, Fago had amassed about $100,000 worth of inventory, just hidden away in cabinets, ready for emergency use. Stan moved it into a closet; he didn’t need it. There was a younger wave of talented young artists knocking at the door, eager for anything he’d throw them: Johnny Romita, Gene Colan, John Buscema, Joe Maneely. With his incredible surplus of energy, Stan self-published Secrets Behind the Comics, a pamphlet that divulged the ways in which comic books were produced. “He has been in complete charge of more comic magazines than any other living editor,” his bio read.
That wasn’t all he was in charge of. He moved into a room in the Alamac Hotel and lived the life of a playboy, impressing ladies with his Buick convertible, Sinatra-indebted style, and five-grand bank account. Years later, he reflected about how he’d missed his college experience—“Like you see in the movies—living on campus, having beer parties, getting laid every night.” He’d finally started to make up for that in the army. “I was in love a hundred times,” he said. “They shipped me to different cities all over the country; every city I’d go to, I’d meet some other gal I thought was terrific.” Now he was dating up a storm. Freelancers were stunned by his parade of gorgeous secretaries. “I had three secretaries myself, and I kept them busy. I used to dictate stories in the office. I was a show-off, in my early twenties, as I look back at it. I’d quickly dictate a page of one story to one girl, and while she was transcribing it, I’d dictate a page of another story to another girl, and then maybe a third one to a third girl. I had this great feeling of power, that I was keeping three secretaries busy with three stories, and I knew that occasionally people were watching—and I was so proud. . . . I got a kick out of playing to the crowd.”
But the bachelor life reached its end in 1947, when, through a cousin, Lee met a stunning British hat model named Joan Boocock. A year into her marriage, she was bored already. He convinced her to go to Reno for a divorce; he flew out to Nevada, and they were married on December 5. They took the train back to New York, but skipped a honeymoon. There was work to do.
Comic-book trends were changing at a whiplash speed. Postwar America, suddenly obsessed with the plague of juvenile delinquency, began to pry crime-themed comics from the hands of its youths and, noticing the sultry adulteresses and violent toughs within, figured it had found a smoking gun. (Never mind that approximately 90 percent of all children, hoods and choirboys alike, were reading comics; aberrant behavior might as well have been blamed on chewing gum or tree forts.) Small towns organized comic bonfires, scolding articles ran in Time and Collier’s, and a few towns and cities, including Detroit, introduced legislation to ban the scourge. Sensing the need for preemptive action, a group of publishers huddled and devised a series of content guidelines, just as Hollywood had done with the Hays Code twenty years earlier. Crime comics, strangulated by the new rules, were quickly supplanted by westerns, and then romance comics, and then punch line–heavy gag comics.
Meanwhile, superheroes had waned in popularity, lacking both Axis enemies and a dedicated readership of U.S. servicemen. Lee called for Captain America’s sidekick, Bucky Barnes, to be shot (“I always hated sidek
icks,” he’d say later). By the end of 1949, the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner had vanished, and Captain America remained only in name: Captain America’s Weird Tales was a bizarre horror title in which the Captain himself was nowhere to be found.
That was okay with Lee, as long as something was popular. He needed to keep working. After his mother died, his fifteen-year-old brother, Larry, came to live with him and Joan, who was pregnant with their first child. They moved out of their fourth-floor walk-up with zebra-skin furniture, and into a $13,000 two-story house in the Long Island suburbs, right near Martin Goodman’s mansion.
As a boss, Martin Goodman could be difficult. He was magisterial—even his brothers called him “Mr. Goodman”—and he had mastered the art of the awkward silence, which he delivered with a calm stare. But he had a generous streak. Once, when he discovered that one of his magazine employees was taking his sick child to a veterans’ hospital, Goodman handed the staffer a blank check. “Use this as you wish,” he said. “Don’t leave anything undone that could be done with money.” He offered to take on one editor’s mortgage, and assured another that her job would be waiting for her when she returned from having a child. “The only regret I have,” he told her softly, “is that if I’d known how successful I was going to be, I would have had a fourth child.” But as with so many autocrats, his largesse was capricious. One employee remembered Goodman offering him a cigar while out for a lunch meeting; when he responded with “No thanks, maybe later,” Goodman replied, “Yes, maybe later, but what if I don’t offer you one later?” One never knew when the charity would evaporate.
