Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  These fissures started to show just as Lee’s cheerleading reached fever pitch. Bard College invited him for a speaking engagement, and other schools quickly followed. Lee was so taken by this interest from the world of higher learning that when he decided to start a Marvel fan club—the Merry Marvel Marching Society, or M.M.M.S.—membership targeted college students more than ten-year-old kids. For a dollar, one could purchase an M.M.M.S. kit that included, along with stickers and a membership card, a button “designed to look great when worn next to your Phi Beta Kappa key!”

  A flexi-disc 33 rpm record was also included in the kit. For “The Voices of Marvel,” Lee wrote a script filled with corny jokes, booked time at a midtown studio, and gathered staff and freelancers at the offices to practice. “Stan treated it like he was producing the Academy Awards,” said Kirby. “He’d written it and rewritten it . . . we all went into the office, more people than there was room for. When you weren’t rehearsing your part, you had to go out in the hall and wait. No work was done that day on comics. It was all about the record. We rehearsed all morning. We were supposed to go to lunch and then over to the recording studio . . . but when lunchtime came, Stan said, ‘no, no, we’re not ready,’ so most of us skipped lunch and stayed there to rehearse more. Then we took cabs over to the recording studio and we were supposed to be in and out in an hour or two but we were there well into the evening. I don’t know how many takes we did.”*

  “The Voices of Marvel” featured nearly all of Marvel’s boldfaced names, giving charmingly inept deliveries to punch lines that perhaps could not be delivered any other way. Lee, Kirby, Ayers, Heck, Steinberg, Brodsky, Goldberg, inker Chic Stone, letterers Artie Simek and Sam Rosen, and brand-new Marvel superstar Wally Wood were all packed into the five-minute recording. Missing again was Steve Ditko. Lee made it into a gag:

  STAN: Hey, what’s all that commotion out there, Sol?

  SOL: Why, it’s shy Steve Ditko. He heard you’re making a record and he’s got mike fright! Whoops! There he goes!

  STAN: Out the window again? You know, I’m beginning to think he is Spider-Man.

  The month the record was announced, a notice ran on the first page of Amazing Spider-Man. “Many readers have asked why Stan’s name is always first on the credits! And so big-hearted Lee agreed to put Stevey’s name first this time! How about that?!!” The joke was that Lee’s name was below Ditko’s—and twice the size.

  Ditko wasn’t laughing. As an increasingly devoted adherent of the works of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand—whose Objectivist philosophy stressed self-interest, individual rights, and cold, hard logic—he was hardly the picture of a docile employee. Stan Lee, meanwhile, was a magnet for acclaim, eager to please, and beholden to Goodman’s demands—practically a made-to-order Rand villain.* “I don’t know what he did, or where he lived, or who his friends were, or what he did with himself,” Stan Lee would say years later about Steve Ditko. By the beginning of 1965, the two were no longer speaking. Ditko came up with his own plots, drew his pages, and dropped off his artwork with Sol Brodsky to pass along to Lee.

  The M.M.M.S. was an immediate smash; chapters opened at Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge. Flo Steinberg came into the office on weekends to process the orders that were pouring in. “We had to write down everybody’s name and make labels for each one, and pull out all these hundreds of dollar bills. We were throwing them at each other there were so many!” The mania wasn’t confined to the mail, either—teenage fans started calling the office, wanting to have long telephone conversations with Fabulous Flo Steinberg, the pretty young lady who’d answered their mail so kindly and whose lovely picture they’d seen in the comics. Before long, they were showing up in the dimly lit hallways of 625 Madison, wanting to meet Stan and Jack and Steve and Flo and the others.

  There was no time for that. Lee had an entire fictional universe to manage. He’d vigilantly kept a consistent continuity between all the titles, so that, for instance, when the Hulk was captured in Tales to Astonish, Reed Richards wondered about his whereabouts in a Fantastic Four Annual. If Tony Stark went missing from Tales of Suspense, he was also AWOL in the next issue of The Avengers. One issue of the World War II–set Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, which had previously been isolated from the superhero characters, featured a crossover appearance from Captain America.* Eventually, the demands of such choreography became so tangled that Lee removed Thor, Iron Man, Giant-Man, and the Wasp from The Avengers, replacing them with Hawkeye, a former Iron Man foe, and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, erstwhile X-Men nemeses.* Captain America remained in The Avengers, but his solo adventures in Tales of Suspense now exclusively covered his World War II past, which didn’t have to be so tightly synchronized.

  Lee was also still trying to plug holes in the workforce. Throughout 1965, more Atlas veterans returned: George Tuska started drawing Captain America in Tales of Suspense over Kirby’s layouts; Gene Colan started a Sub-Mariner feature in Tales to Astonish; John Severin (Marie’s older brother) penciled “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” for Strange Tales. Kirby briefly reclaimed the Hulk from the incommunicado Ditko before turning it over to a merry-go-round of trial-basis artists who’d eventually include the still-deadline-resistant Bill Everett.

  Lee continued to court John Romita, who’d been unceremoniously laid off in 1957. Romita had resisted Lee’s persistent overtures throughout the early 1960s, doubting claims about Marvel’s changed fortunes. He’d seen enough boom-and-bust cycles to know to stick with the sure thing: DC still paid higher rates. Why take the risk?

  In 1965, Romita finally told Lee he was leaving the comic business altogether, and taking a job doing storyboards for the ad agency BBDO. “After eight years of penciling romance comics, I was burned out,” Romita said. “I couldn’t pencil another thing.” Lee insisted they get together and talk.

  “You have no idea how popular these guys are,” Lee said over lunch, pulling out issues of Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man. Romita thought Spider-Man looked terrible, but Lee insisted that the superheroes were connecting with readers, that this was the future. Romita hesitantly agreed to work with Marvel again, on the condition that he would only be inking work that had been already penciled.

  Three weeks later, Lee asked Romita for a sample illustration of Daredevil. He didn’t mention that the current Daredevil artist, Wally Wood, was headed out the door. To Wood, the so-called Marvel Method—drawing an issue before there was a script—meant that he was plotting the story without being paid or credited. So for the tenth issue of Daredevil, Lee turned over the reins completely, and provided a setup for the reader that had a familiarly insinuating ring. “Wally Wood has always wanted to try his hand at writing a story as well as drawing it, and big-hearted Stan (who wanted a rest anyway) said okay! So, what follows next is anybody’s guess! You may like it or not, but you can be sure of this . . . it’s gonna be different!”

  A frustrated Wood immediately decamped to the fledgling Tower Comics to edit a line of superhero titles, and Lee assigned Romita to Daredevil, based on his illustration of the hero swinging through the air. When Romita turned in his pages, though, Lee told him his style still betrayed too much of his romance-comics background. Lee told Romita he’d get another artist to break down the story into rough layouts, to show him how it was done. Then he called Jack Kirby.

  Wood was already working at Tower Comics when he saw Lee’s letters-page remarks for Daredevil #10: “Wonderful Wally decided he doesn’t have time to write the conclusion next ish, and he’s forgotten most of the answers we’ll be needing! So, Sorrowful Stan has inherited the job of tying the whole yarn together and finding a way to make it all come out in the wash! And you think you’ve got troubles!” Wood turned to his Tower colleagues and fumed about Stan Lee. He’d hold on to his rage for years to come.

  The truth was that Lee—writing at home in Hewlett Harbor all day on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and coming into the midtown offices the other t
hree days—was still desperate for help with the writing workload. When Steve Skeates, an Iron Man fan preparing to graduate from Alfred University in upstate New York, wrote Marvel a letter in comic-book form, Lee called him personally and hired him, over the phone, as an assistant editor. When Skeates arrived at the offices, he was moved around from desk to desk, where he looked over scripts and tried to help with the production process. But Lee quickly realized that the nervous college graduate knew nothing about how comic books were made and was more adept at bumming cigarettes from Marie Severin than correcting scripts. Asked to redirect word balloon pointers, Skeates could only respond with shakily drawn lines.

  It was at this moment that Lee got a note from letters-column regular Roy Thomas, announcing that he’d just moved to New York and would like to meet in person. Thomas was twenty-four years old. He’d spent the last few years teaching high school English in his native Missouri, but he lived and breathed comic books, writing letters to DC and Marvel and editing the fanzine Alter Ego. He’d come to New York to work for Mort Weisinger at DC—the same editor who had made Jerry Siegel’s life so miserable. But when Thomas arrived, Weisinger promptly shaved 10 percent from the promised salary, and informed him that he was on staff for a trial period of two weeks. Then Weisinger introduced Thomas to his previous assistant, explaining that he’d already been fired but was going to train Thomas. When Weisinger needed Thomas for something, he summoned him into his office with a buzzer, then muttered profanities under his breath. Within two weeks, Thomas was tearing up in his lonely Twenty-Third Street hotel, wondering if pursuing a career in comic books had been a terrible mistake.

  Lee called Thomas’s hotel and asked him to take a writing test, adding dialogue and captions to pages of Fantastic Four Annual #2. On July 9, just two weeks after moving to the city, Thomas was in Stan Lee’s office. Lee, tired of conducting his young-talent search and impressed by Thomas, did not want to let him get away. He swiveled away in his chair, gazed out the window, and asked, “What it would take to hire you away from DC?”

  Lee sent Thomas home that weekend with instructions to script an issue’s worth of Millie and the Model pages; when Thomas returned on Monday, he was shoehorned into Brodsky and Steinberg’s office, a typewriter atop his corrugated metal desk. He’d been hired to sit there and write for forty hours a week—“staff writer” was his title—but with the phone ringing, freelancers coming and going, and Sol and Flo and Marie hurrying around, he couldn’t concentrate, and, before long, he was staying at work until 8 or 9 p.m., clicking off the last lights in the darkened building. Lee revised the terms of the job so that Thomas could work as an editorial assistant during the day and write scripts at home. There was frenzied rewriting from Lee at first, but before long, Thomas’s uncanny ability to mimic the boss’s style earned him a free hand in his collaborations with the artists of Sgt. Fury and The X-Men. Finally, after nearly three years of searching, there was someone that Lee trusted to not only script, but also co-plot, Marvel’s superhero comics. Lee could devote more time to his secondary position—comics’ ambassador to the world.*

  By now, Marvel’s newsprint masterpieces were being referenced in Cornell physics classes and Colgate student newspapers, and Lee was fielding regular requests for campus speaking. Newspapers, slowly at first, sat up and took notice: the Wall Street Journal noted the sales increases, while the Village Voice pointed out beatniks’ embrace of the kooky, hip stories. “Marvel Comics are the first comic books in history in which a post-adolescent escapist can get involved,” the Voice gushed. “For Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World.” Lee’s snappy, self-conscious patter was singled out, as was the verisimilitude of the New York City settings. “There are approximately 15 superheroes in the Marvel Group, and nearly all of them live in the New York area. Midtown Manhattan is full of their landmarks. On Madison Avenue the Baxter building houses the Fantastic Four and their various self-protective devices. . . . Doctor Strange is a master of occult knowledge and often walks around in ectoplasmic form; his creators imply that he lives in the Village because no one there is likely to become alarmed at being jostled by a wraith.”* Meanwhile, in San Francisco, poet Michael McClure featured a Doctor Strange monologue from Strange Tales #130 as a centerpiece in his controversial 1965 play The Beard.

  A similar infatuation gripped the art world. Roy Lichtenstein appropriated one of Kirby’s X-Men panels for his painting Image Duplicator, and future Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey made a ten-minute experimental film, The Origin of Captain America, in which an actor read from Tales of Suspense #63. There were scattered other comics in the background of Morrissey’s film—and all of them were from Marvel. Lee seized the opportunity and slapped a “Marvel Pop Art Productions” logo on the corners of the covers. Kirby found resonances with modern art as well: he experimented with grisaille photocollages in his Fantastic Four stories, lending grandiosity to outer-space (and interdimensional) sequences.

  The comics also caught the attention of Robert Lawrence, a partner in Grantray-Lawrence Animation, who spied them on the newsstands and made the connection to the Pop Art movement. He contacted Martin Goodman, who by now was teaching his younger son, Chip, the ins and outs of the family business. Grantray-Lawrence made a sweetheart deal to produce an animated series, The Marvel Super Heroes, taking all its images directly from published comic panels. The studio secured a continuing interest in merchandising profits related to the show. “We wrote an unbelievable contract with the Goodmans,” Lawrence boasted, “because they didn’t know what they had and where to go.”*

  None of this impressed the guys at Magazine Management, who couldn’t understand all the sudden attention being paid to so much kids’ stuff. When Marvel fan Federico Fellini, in New York to promote Juliet of the Spirits, swept into 625 Madison Avenue to meet Stan Lee, Men magazine editor Mel Shestack scoffed that Lee didn’t even know who Fellini was; years later, Shestack insisted that the director had quickly lost interest in Lee and cottoned instead to the more colorful magazine editors, who were themselves like “living comic books.”

  Such condescension was the norm. “They were always making jokes about us. They’d come in and giggle,” remembered Flo Steinberg. “Mario Puzo would look in and would see us all working on his way to the office and he would say, ‘Work faster, little elves. Christmas is coming.’ ”

  In truth, the magazines were still Martin Goodman’s bread and butter. “The big sellers were the men’s magazines,” said Ivan Prashker, another editor. “It wasn’t the comic books. The guys who worked at the men’s magazines all thought Stan Lee was a schmuck.” In the fall of 1965, Roy Thomas recruited fellow Missourian Dennis O’Neil to work as Marvel’s second editorial assistant; within a matter of weeks, one of the magazine editors tried to enlist O’Neil in a scheme to dose Stan Lee with LSD. “He was going to supply a sugar cube of acid,” said O’Neil. “My mission, should I have chosen to accept it, would have been to drop it into his coffee.” O’Neil, a self-described “hippie liberal rebel” who had been lectured by Lee for wearing a T-shirt depicting a cannabis plant to the office, nonetheless declined.

  In Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker graduated from high school, and broke up with the Daily Bugle’s Betty Brant, the first girl who’d been kind to him—he realized she could never be happy living with a constantly endangered crime-fighter. He went to college, where he met Gwen Stacy, Harry Osborn, and Professor Miles Warren—all of whom would become significant characters.

  All of this happened without Steve Ditko and Stan Lee speaking to each other.

  The communication gap was one of the first things that Roy Thomas learned at his new job. After Ditko dropped off an issue and announced that he was headed home to work on the next one, Thomas made a joke: Oh, really? There’s going to be another one?

  “I was just kidding him, but Sol pulled me aside and said, ‘Listen, you have to be careful what you say to a guy like Steve, because he’
ll be going home on the subway and suddenly start thinking if you meant anything by that, or know something he didn’t.’ Everyone was walking on eggshells about the situation. How Stan always knew never to be out there when Steve was there, I don’t know.”

  Even when they weren’t speaking, they managed to disagree. When Lee added a caption to Strange Tales trumpeting, “This series was voted ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ (By Stan and Steve),” Ditko objected that he hadn’t been part of any voting process, and so Lee changed it to “(By Stan and Baron Mordo).”* Ditko’s continued devotion to the principles of Ayn Rand, and his desire to fill his comics with references to those principles, didn’t make things any smoother. Ditko took the Randian term looter and named a villain after it; he took the idea that men “must deal by trade and give value for value” and had Peter Parker demand “equal value trade” from J. Jonah Jameson. It was a relief to see Parker stick up for himself, but he also began acting like a bit of a creep. He used passive-aggressive behavior to end his relationship with Betty Brant, and when he came upon campus protesters in Amazing Spider-Man #38, he told them off. “Another student protest! What are they after THIS time?” he seethed. When a letter-writer from Students for a Democratic Society called Lee out on it, he scrambled to make nice. “We never in a million years thought anyone was gonna take our silly protest-marchers seriously!”