Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  Lee began sharing more of the writing duties, often with old friends. “Martin Goodman started pressuring Lee to have other writers do some of the stories,” said Leon Lazarus, an ex-Timely staffer who was himself recruited to script an issue of Tales to Astonish. “He became concerned that Stan would have too much leverage over him, and he worried about what would happen if Stan ever decided to leave the company.”

  At the end of 1962, Lee moved younger brother Larry back over to the westerns, and assigned “Iron Man,” “Thor,” and “Ant-Man” scripts to other veterans. “The Human Torch” was passed like a hot potato, finally landing with an artist credited as Joe Carter.

  Joe Carter’s real name, it turned out, was Jerry Siegel. The co-creator of Superman had been reduced in the late 1950s to pleading for assignments from Superman’s copyright holder, DC Comics, and toiling under the abusive watch of editor Mort Weisinger for little pay. (According to industry legend, Weisinger once said to the meek Siegel, who was seated in his office, “I have to go to the can. Do you mind if I use your script to wipe my ass?”) In the early 1960s, Siegel started making noise about a Superman lawsuit, and, bracing for DC’s wrath, began looking elsewhere for employment. How could Lee not give work to one of the creators of the industry?

  Unfortunately, Siegel’s earnest, old-fashioned scripts didn’t meet Lee’s standards. Nor, it seemed, did anyone else’s. Lee started seizing back “Iron Man” and “Thor” and “Ant-Man.” Despite the substantial plotting contributions of Kirby and Heck and Ditko, when it came to the narration and dialogue, he trusted only himself.

  Desperate to catch up on deadlines, Lee got Goodman’s approval to hire George Roussos, who could ink two dozen pages in a day, for a staff position. But Roussos, wary of Goodman’s hiring-and-layoff cycles, passed. Lee had better luck finding an assistant—a “gal Friday,” in his words—to at least help with the administrative work. In March 1963, a temp agency sent over Florence Steinberg, a button-cute, bouffant-sporting twenty-five-year-old in pearls and white gloves who’d recently arrived in New York from Boston. Steinberg, a former art history major, was every bit as upbeat and outgoing as Lee—she’d been student council president in high school and later volunteered for campaigns of both Ted and Bobby Kennedy. Now stationed at a desk next to Lee, she answered fan mail (hundreds of pieces arrived every day), called freelancers, and shipped pages to the printer for sixty-five dollars a week, while he sat atop a stool and pounded away on his typewriter, or greeted visiting artists for story conferences.

  Their office mates at Magazine Management, including future Godfather novelist Mario Puzo, scoffed at how frantically Lee and Steinberg and Brodsky were starting to work. But for Lee, something magical was happening. As the breakneck pace of new character introductions continued—Steve Ditko single-handedly developed the arrogant-surgeon-turned-benevolent-magician Doctor Strange for a backup feature in Strange Tales*—the existing characters began to generate synergistic relationships with one another. A two-page sequence in Amazing Spider-Man #1 showed the web-spinner attempting to join the Fantastic Four (he was greatly disappointed to learn that group membership didn’t include a salary); the same month, the Hulk (whose own title had just been canceled)* showed up in The Fantastic Four #12. Doctor Doom battled Spider-Man; the Human Torch spoke at an assembly at Peter Parker’s high school; and Doctor Strange ended up in a hospital under the care of Dr. Don Blake, the alter ego of Thor. When Ant-Man showed up in Fantastic Four #16, accompanied by an alluring new heroine named the Wasp, a footnote explained all: “Meet the Wasp, Ant-Man’s new partner-in-peril, starting with issue #44 of Tales to Astonish!”* It was canny cross-promotion, sure, but more important, it had narrative effects that would become a Marvel Comics touchstone: the idea that these characters shared a world, that the actions of each had repercussions on the others, and that each comic was merely a thread of one Marvel-wide mega-story.

  It all set the stage for The Avengers, which gathered an all-star team of Marvel’s marquee names (except for Spider-Man, fated to remain a sulking lone wolf). Iron Man, Ant-Man, the Wasp, Thor, and Hulk joined forces to defeat Thor’s enemy Loki, and decided that they should get together more often—for an issue every month, to be precise. “The Avengers are on the march,” wrote Lee, “and a new dimension is added to the Marvel galaxy of stars!” It wasn’t just bluster. Bringing these heroes together forced Lee to further differentiate their individual personalities and voices, and allowed Kirby to show off his skill with complex visual choreography, balancing multiple characters within the confines of single panels.

  Shockingly, Lee and Kirby managed to roll out another super-team comic the same month, with all-new characters. The X-Men followed the adventures of a group of super-powered teenage mutants who were enrolled at the private school of Professor Charles Xavier, a wheelchair-bound psychic. Under Xavier’s leadership, the valiant but inexperienced X-Men—Scott Summers, the self-serious and laser-eyed Cyclops; Hank McCoy, the acrobatic, simian-shaped whiz-kid Beast; Bobby Drake, the jocky, clowny, snowball-generating Iceman; Jean Grey, the redheaded telekinetic Marvel Girl; and Warren Worthington III, the feather-winged scion Angel—used their abnormal abilities to halt the schemes of bad-apple mutants like the metal-commanding Magneto. On their downtime, the guys practiced combat maneuvers, gathered among bongos and beatniks at Greenwich Village’s Coffee A-Go-Go, or panted at an endlessly patient Jean Grey.* But despite the banter that streamed between its adolescent heroes, The X-Men was the bête noire of The Avengers—like Spider-Man, the mutants were viewed with suspicion by the very society they fought to protect, an angle that became even more pointed as time went on. “Look at the crowd! They’re livid with rage! Just like Professor X always warned us . . . normal humans fear and distrust anyone with super-mutant powers!” cried Angel in X-Men #5, which was written shortly after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by white supremacists. A few issues later, after the Beast saved the life of a young boy, a mob chased him down and tore his clothes anyway. Was it a coincidence that the nonviolence-preaching Professor Xavier and his archenemy, the by-any-means-necessary warrior Magneto, lined up so neatly as metaphors for Martin Luther King and Malcolm X? “Remember, we are homo superior,” scolded Magneto, plucking the Nietzschean term from an old science-fiction novel. “We are born to rule the earth. . . . Why should we love the homo sapiens? They hate us—fear us because of our superior power!” If the casually liberal Lee was laying out for readers where he stood on bigotry, it was also clear that he felt there were appropriate limits to the reaction to that bigotry: the hard-line Magneto and his protégés labeled themselves the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. “By any means necessary” was hardly a superhero catchphrase.

  However subtle it may have been, The X-Men’s connection to the civil rights struggle was one of Marvel’s earliest acknowledgments of the fissures in American society.* In just a few years, the very concept of patriotism would polarize the country, and the idea of reintroducing Captain America—a character known as the “Sentinel of Liberty,” and literally wrapped in the United States flag—would have been almost unthinkable for a company courting the kids of America. As it was, the Captain America that returned to comics in 1963 in the pages of The Avengers #4 was a walking anachronism, a man out of time. The newer heroes found him in the sea, unconscious and encased in a block of ice, his youth preserved. “All those years of being in a state of frozen suspended animation,” exclaimed the Captain, “must have prevented me from aging!” But it didn’t prevent him from feeling guilt over the fate of his former sidekick Bucky (who, it was explained, had died just before Captain America went into a deep freeze), or a deep longing for the simpler times of the 1940s. The revived Captain America was wholesome and admirable, just like he’d always been, but now he was prone to bouts of melancholy, and confusion about what had happened to his country.

  Captain America picked an especially disconcerting moment in history to reemerge. Avenge
rs #4 was still in production on November 22, when news came that President Kennedy had been shot. “We were coming back from lunch, and people were listening to their car radios with the doors open,” Flo Steinberg remembered. “We didn’t have a television in the office, so everyone just sort of gravitated to a big room and sat around listening to the radio until they announced that he had died. We all left . . . just wandered.”

  Everyone, that is, but Stan Lee. “He was still working on the comic books,” noted Mario Puzo. “Like that was the most important thing in the world.”

  Lee, once again scripting virtually the entire Marvel line, got his own office—with a door, and a rug—for the first time in seven years. Brodsky and Steinberg shared a desk nearby and were soon joined by another former Atlas bullpenner, Marie Severin. At Atlas, Severin worked in the coloring department under Stan Goldberg, but she was an extremely skilled artist in her own right, and able to harness her wicked sense of humor into withering caricatures. She might have been a star at Mad magazine, had her luck lined up differently. Instead, she was making filmstrips for the Federal Reserve Bank when she decided to drop off her illustration portfolio to Lee. He never looked at her samples, though; he sent her straight to Brodsky for a production job.

  He should have hired her to draw comics. Kirby was at his drawing board seven days a week. Even at his uncanny speed—he could burn through three pages in a day—something had to give, and Lee was casting around for reinforcements. As he had with writers, he first looked to the old hands of Atlas. He’d started making phone calls to Syd Shores, the Captain America artist of the late 1940s, but Shores was busy doing illustration work for magazines. He’d called John Romita, the Captain America artist of the 1950s, but DC was paying him more than Marvel could. It wasn’t just a matter of recruiting people who could draw. The “Marvel method,” as it would come to be known, required that the artists could break down a basic plot into a finely paced, visually clear story over which Lee would write his dialogue. He wanted the panels to function like silent movies, to minimize the need for verbal exposition. Ideally, the artists would also contribute their own narrative ideas—characters, subplots—to the stories, just as Kirby and Ditko did.

  Lee moved around the artists that he did have like chess pieces, trying them out on different titles until things clicked. Dick Ayers settled into comfortable stints on Sgt. Fury and Strange Tales’ Human Torch stories; Don Heck inherited The X-Men and The Avengers and Giant Man from Kirby; and Ditko briefly took over Tales of Suspense’s Iron Man from Heck. The Hulk was brought back in Tales to Astonish, reimagined by Ditko so that Bruce Banner’s transformation into the Hulk was caused by Banner’s fits of rage.* Artists were regularly asked to emulate Jack Kirby’s style. When new artists started on a title, Lee would ask Kirby to draw basic layouts for the first issue, providing the rookies with visual training wheels. “Stan wanted Kirby to be Kirby, Ditko to be Ditko . . . and everyone else to be Kirby,” said Don Heck; indeed, when Heck took over The Avengers, Lee wasn’t shy about touting what he considered the Platonic ideal. “Don Heck drew this one with Dick Ayers helping out on the inks,” he roared in the letters pages, “and you’ll be amazed how closely it parallels King Kirby’s great style!”

  During story conferences, Lee repeatedly drilled home the idea of dynamism. Every word, he insisted, should move the story forward. All action should be emphatic; when a fist came down on a desk, it should be thunderous, and when someone was punched, they should be sent through the air. Speaking characters should be drawn with mouths wide open. Discussing a fight scene, he’d act out the action for artists, standing on his desk, or jumping on the couch, or making voices, as they craned their necks up in disbelief at the balding, exuberant, forty-two-year-old human action figure. Despite Lee’s enthusiastic calisthenics, some of the artists agonized at the sparseness of the plot outlines, which required them to conjure scene-settings and determine pacing (working in the Marvel Method was “like digging into my insides and pulling it out,” one of them groaned, years later). The obvious solution, Lee figured, would be to find artists with writing experience who were used to heavy creative lifting and didn’t need everything spelled out for them.

  He quickly ran through his options. An attempt to collaborate with original Human Torch creator Carl Burgos on solo adventures of the new, teenage incarnation of the character ended quickly. Lee next enlisted Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, now forty-six years old and working as an art director in Massachusetts, to see what he could do with the name “Daredevil,” which was once another company’s trademark but had since fallen out of use. The concept for the new “Daredevil” was not remarkable: Matt Murdock, the hard-studying son of a down-and-out single-father boxer, saves a blind man from an oncoming Ajax Atomic Labs delivery truck—and is then blinded himself by a radioactive cylinder. This being Marvel, however, the radiation also heightens his other senses, which come in handy later when he has to avenge his father’s murder. Murdock grows up to be a defense lawyer, satisfying Lee’s somewhat forced “justice is blind” hook and providing Daredevil with easy access to criminal happenings.

  But Everett didn’t come through on the deadline, even after getting a hand from Kirby on the character design. “I was putting in 14 or 15 hours a day,” he said later, “and then to come home and try to do comics at night was just too much.” He delivered the two-thirds of Daredevil #1 that he’d completed to a panicked Sol Brodsky; as luck would have it, Steve Ditko was in the Marvel offices, and Brodsky corralled him into finishing the issue at an available desk. It would be another year before Everett would work for Marvel again.

  The second issue of Daredevil was given to Joe Orlando, who’d done impressive science-fiction and horror comics for EC. “The problem,” admitted Orlando, “was that I wasn’t Jack Kirby. Jack—or Ditko, or just a couple of others—could take a couple sentences of plot and bring in 20 pages that Stan could dialogue in an afternoon or two. When I drew out the story my way, Stan would go over it and say, ‘this panel needs to be changed’ and ‘this whole page needs to be changed’ and on and on. I didn’t plot it out the way he wanted the story told so I wound up drawing at least half of every story twice. They weren’t paying enough for that so I quit.”

  Now Daredevil went to Orlando’s mentor, the brilliant but mercurial Wally Wood. His slick space tales in Weird Science and parodies in Mad had made him one of the brightest lights of the EC Comics stable, and Jack Kirby had personally chosen him to ink his work on the Sky Masters comic strip. Like Kirby, he was a workhorse. But it wasn’t just a punishing schedule that was wearing on Wood. He suffered from a chronic migraine, battled depression, drank heavily, and pulled all-nighters in his studio, subsisting on caffeine and cigarettes.

  Shortly before Marvel came calling, Wood had angrily quit Mad for good after an editor rejected one of his stories. He needed the money, and he’d quit drinking, but that didn’t mean he would just fall into line for the company. He was stubborn, and given to playing little games. “Even though there were ashtrays in Stan’s office,” said Flo Steinberg, “he’d always drop ashes on Stan’s carpet. And that would drive Stan bananas. So when Woody would go into Stan’s office, I would walk with him and then very deftly take away his cigarette at the last minute. And it worked a few times. But as soon as he was in Stan’s office, he’d light up another one.”

  Lee trumpeted his new star with a cover blurb, something that even Kirby and Ditko weren’t afforded. “Under the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood, Daredevil reaches new heights of glory!” screamed the front of Daredevil #5. The cover itself, though, was drawn by Jack Kirby. Lee could always count on Kirby.

  Stan had been ramping up his hip, alliterative, carnival-barker-as-beatnik style for a couple of years now, assigning nicknames to everyone who worked on the comics and delivering letters-page news updates in a voice that was a unique cocktail of impossible bluster and blushing self-deprecation. In 1964’s Marvel Tales Annu
al #1, he’d run black-and-white photos of “Merry Marty Goodman,” “Smilin’ Stan Lee,” “Sparkling Solly Brodsky,” “Jolly ol’ Jack Kirby,” and sixteen others. There was one particularly notable absence: “Sturdy” Steve Ditko was nowhere to be seen. “A few of our bullpen buddies were out of town when these pix were taken,” the text cheerily explained, “so we’ll try to print their pans later on.”

  In fact, Ditko was quietly distancing himself from the Marvel pep rally. On July 27, 1964, a group of fans rented out a meeting hall near Union Square and invited writers, artists, and collectors (and one dealer) of old comic books to meet. Ditko showed up at this, the first comic-book convention, but he was hardly an ambassador of good cheer. One fan, Ethan Roberts, called it “the most depressing exchange I ever had with a comics pro.” Ditko—“tall, thin, balding, dour, with glasses”—responded to Roberts’s pursuit of a career in comics by telling him “how hard the job was, and that it paid too little and had few lasting rewards. It was a real downer.” Ditko never appeared at another convention. When drawings he’d given to fans were published on the covers of their mimeographed fanzines, he responded with angry letters (“This isn’t the first time I’ve been treated inconsiderately by members of fandom”) and stopped giving away his artwork.

  Two weeks after the convention, Amazing Spider-Man #18 appeared. It was entirely plotted by Ditko, who’d been having disagreements with Lee about the direction of the comic and gradually taking more control of story lines. Ditko thought Lee was afraid to go with his instincts, too eager to please the letter-writing fans, with “the tendency to take write-in complaints too literally.” Ditko resisted Lee’s requests to soften the harsh edges of the supporting characters that surrounded Spider-Man. He also argued against overwhelming the title with fantastic or mystical elements, preferring to keep the stories “grounded more in a teenager’s credible world.” Lee called for a maximum of costumed fight scenes; Ditko pushed for more scenes of Peter Parker. The eighteenth issue brought their conflict to a head: there were a few panels of the Sandman swinging at Spider-Man, but for the most part, it was a superhero comic without an adventure, just a broke, picked-on, lovelorn teenager and his crummy problems. Lee’s letters-page description in other Marvel comics that month threw Ditko under the bus even as it made its sales pitch. “A lot of readers are sure to hate it,” he promised of the issue, “so if you want to know what all the criticism is about, be sure to buy a copy!”