by Sean Howe
The Fantastic Four nervously brandished the exotic weapon, and the conscience-stricken Silver Surfer turned against his master, but Galactus was more annoyed than intimidated. He agreed to spare the planet in exchange for the surrender of the Ultimate Nullifier and casually sentenced his former messenger to imprisonment on Earth. (“I remove your space-time powers! Henceforth, the Silver Surfer shall roam the galaxies no more!”) The devourer of planets finally departed, but it didn’t feel like a clean triumph for the heroes, just a loss of innocence. Letter-writers wiped their brows, caught their breath, tried to reason it out: clearly the Galactus saga was a justification for Vietnam, with Galactus as the Viet Cong, the Fantastic Four as South Vietnam, and the Silver Surfer as America . . . right? Lee responded with wry, expert deflection: “Two’ll getcha ten that our next mail contains a whole kaboodle of letters from equally imaginative fans who are utterly convinced that Galactus represented Robert McNamara, while the Silver Surfer was Wayne Morse—with Alicia symbolizing Lady Bird!”
He had a point: it was beyond metaphor. And it wasn’t just Fantastic Four that could no longer be reduced to Joseph Campbell schematics or English Lit 101 symbolisms. Suddenly almost everything in the Marvel Universe was reaching some kind of critical juncture, a point of no return. Nick Fury’s modern-day S.H.I.E.L.D. adventures in Strange Tales merged with Captain America’s missions in Tales of Suspense as the heroes teamed against high-tech organizations like A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) and HYDRA* for a kind of sci-fi paramilitary feedback loop. Here, too, science bounded forward at a dizzying, almost alarming rate—even the flurry of good-guy gadgets like Life Model Decoys carried disconcerting post-atomic associations of that which humanity is not ready to harness. A.I.M.—which consisted of shady industrialists outfitted like futuristic beekeepers—created the Super-Adaptoid and brandished a talisman known as the Cosmic Cube (“The ultimate weapon! The ultimate source of power! The only such artifact known to man—which can convert thought waves—into material action!”), which fell into the hands of the Red Skull, who’d just reemerged from the rubble of the Führerbunker after two decades. All you could pray for was to have the Orion Missile, or the Matter Transmitter, on your side.
Thor encountered a simultaneous crisis. The thunder god’s own name finally replaced Journey into Mystery as the title of his comic, but—as if in ironic commemoration—the “Tales of Asgard” story tucked in the back of the latest issue featured a nightmare vision of Ragnarok, the end of the world. Ragnarok was presented in a sort of premonition-daydream sequence, but it was assuredly an outcome that could not be avoided, a fait accompli: “As chaos and carnage envelop the realm; as a fury akin to madness sweeps the very soul of Asgard; there are those who crumble beneath the strain—who join the ranks of the forces of evil. . . .” Fire and devastation unfolded over two issues, depopulated panels given over to fallen swords, steel-beam crosses, and smoking debris. The prophecy was staved off, but there was the nagging knowledge that this was only a temporary stall from “that which no force in all the universe can prevent.” Galactus, the Cosmic Cube, and Ragnarok were all closing in on the skies, a conspiracy of doom. Armageddon was nigh.
It was at this eschatological juncture that Steve Ditko’s last Amazing Spider-Man and “Doctor Strange” stories were finally published, months after Ditko’s actual departure and thus carrying the import of a last will and testament. A conflict between Strange and his rival Dormammu, which had extended over an unprecedented seventeen issues, came to an apocalyptic climax of its own, as Dormammu held hostage a cosmic entity known as . . . Eternity. Once again, planets shook, stars screamed, and our hero narrowly avoided insanity. “No human mind can retain the things I have seen!” Strange proclaimed. “Already, the memories begin to fade. . . .” In the final panel, the Sorcerer Supreme turns his back and takes leave of the extradimensional battle site to return home, “his greatest battle won.” With that, Ditko was gone from Marvel.
Carl Burgos and Joe Simon, now in their fifties, watched from the sidelines. As the initial twenty-eight-year terms of Marvel’s initial copyrights on the Human Torch and Captain America approached expiration, creators Burgos and Simon consulted lawyers and prepared to wrest back ownership of the heroes upon which Marvel had built its comics empire.* While the paperwork was completed, they also saw another way to stick it to Goodman: they’d roll out pointedly competing comic books.
Burgos teamed up with Myron Fass, who’d drawn stories for Timely in the early 1950s and was now a publisher of sleazy magazines, in a gambit to snatch the Captain Marvel trademark. To Goodman’s chagrin, the name Captain Marvel had never been his property—it had belonged to Fawcett in the 1940s and 1950s, until the settlement of a DC Comics suit that claimed that the caped and flying character of Captain Marvel infringed on its Superman. The Captain Marvel name had been abandoned along with the character, and now Fass pounced, knowing he’d get a reaction from Goodman. Burgos’s new version of Captain Marvel was, like his old creation the Human Torch, a red-costumed android; if Marvel didn’t get the message, Burgos also soon introduced a villain named Dr. Doom. The comic, launched in early 1966, bombed, but when an irritated Goodman offered six thousand dollars for the copyright in July, Fass refused.
Burgos was also at that time pursuing legal action against Marvel Comics over the Human Torch copyright. Then, one day in the summer of 1966, his daughter, Susan, watched as he destroyed every trace of his Marvel Comics career—which had to that point been hidden away from her. “I never saw his collection until the day he threw it all out. I just happened to be in the backyard this summer day and there was a whole pile of stuff in the yard. I took as many of the comics as I could carry back to my room, like they were some treasure. He came in and demanded that I give him my comics. . . . I got the impression that he either lost the case or something else had happened pertaining to it.” Again Burgos withheld details from his daughter, but over the years she learned the source of his ire. “I grew up believing that he came up with this fabulous idea,” she said, “and that Stan Lee took it from him.”
In fact, Burgos’s claims may have never made it to court; his dark ritual on that summer day may have instead been reaction to a new Marvel comic book. In early August, Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four Annual #4 featured Burgos’s original Human Torch, battling the new teenage Human Torch and the rest of the Fantastic Four. Cover-dated October 1968, it appeared exactly twenty-eight years after Marvel Comics #1—in other words, exactly as the initial twenty-eight-year copyright was expiring. The original Torch had been revived just long enough to ensure their copyright claim—only to be killed again, pages later. “Well, let’s face it,” mused the Thing when Burgos’s creation had been extinguished, “ya win a few . . .’n ya lose a few!” Lee had Johnny Storm, the last Human Torch standing, eulogizing his fallen predecessor this way: “He tried to defeat me . . . and yet, I can’t find it in my heart to hate him!”
Burgos quietly registered some copyright claims in 1967 that went nowhere, and then disappeared from Marvel’s radar entirely. In the early 1970s, artist Batton Lash tracked down Burgos and asked the veteran for advice. But Burgos had left comics behind for good, and advised Lash to stay away from that “terrible field” as well, citing his own disappointment over the Human Torch. “If I’d known how much trouble and heartbreak the Torch would bring me,” he told the young artist, “I would never have created him.”
Joe Simon, meanwhile, was about to pursue a copyright claim of his own, on Captain America. Captain America had been—along with Iron Man, Thor, Sub-Mariner, and the Hulk—one of five characters announced for the Marvel Super Heroes animated show.* By the spring of 1966, as the series began production, there was already a bonanza of licensing in place: paperbacks, LPs, model kits, costumes, buttons, pins, trading cards, board games, T-shirts and sweatshirts, toys, and stickers. “We’ve had movie offers for just about all our characters,” Lee bragged. Simon would file suit against not only Goodman’s Magazine M
anagement, but also Krantz Films (distributor of the cartoon show) and Weston Merchandising (which had developed Captain Action, a figure that included Captain America paraphernalia).* Simon, a businessman as well as an artist, was a greater legal threat than Burgos. He’d kept extensive records—including the original sketches he’d done of Captain America in 1940.
As he had with the Human Torch, Goodman took measures to reestablish Marvel’s ownership of Captain America. Fantasy Masterpieces, a double-sized title that had run reprints of 1950s Atlas stories, suddenly shifted gears and re-presented Golden Age Captain America. But the credits—“art and editorial by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby”—were removed.
Kirby protested, but he was in a tough spot. “Simon said he created Captain America,” Goodman told him. “He wants the copyright and it looks like you’re out.” Goodman offered a deal: if Kirby would side with Marvel in the dispute, the company would pay him an amount to match any future settlement with Simon. On July 12, 1966, Kirby signed a deposition describing the creation of Captain America. “I felt that whatever I did for Timely belonged to Timely as was the practice in those days. When I left Timely, all of my work was left with them.”
As Simon plotted his next legal move, he continued editing superhero books for Harvey Comics, best known for such little-kid fare as Casper the Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich. Happy to poach from Martin Goodman, he commissioned work from Marvel artists Dick Ayers and George Tuska; he also hired Wally Wood.* He recruited newer talent as well: at a Manhattan comic convention, he approached an artist with James Dean hair and a million-dollar smile and invited him to Long Island to help create characters. I want to compete with Marvel, Simon told the artist.
The artist’s name was Jim Steranko, and he was the twenty-seven-year-old art director at a Shillington, Pennsylvania, ad agency. If there weren’t a trail of newspaper clippings to confirm it, one would never believe what Steranko had packed into his early years. He was born into poverty, with a father who struggled to support his family by gathering bootleg coal, digging homemade mines, and taking serious risks in unsafe, rickety shafts. The young Steranko, obsessed with the danger and claustrophobia of his father’s daily routine, dedicated himself to the art of escape. By the age of sixteen, he was putting on Houdini-like public performances, showing off to local police that he could escape from their jails. He also slipped out of straitjackets, leg irons, handcuffs, safes, and vaults.
Other performances were less thrilling to the local authorities: The teenaged Steranko began stealing an arsenal’s worth of guns and a small parking lot’s worth of motor vehicles. In February 1956, Steranko and a partner were arrested for the thefts, committed throughout eastern Pennsylvania, of twenty-five cars and two trucks. (He was careful to avoid criminal activity in his hometown. “None of the things we did were done in Reading, maybe one or two. I stole a submachine gun in Reading, but that was all.”) They burglarized gas stations, but a sole, thwarted attempt at armed robbery—the victim sized up Steranko, realized he wouldn’t shoot the gun, and refused to hand over any money—showed the limits of his transgressive inclinations. By the early 1960s, Steranko had moved on to playing rock-and-roll guitar (his band shared bills with Bill Haley and His Comets), card tricks (he was nationally ranked and published a book), and fire-eating, before he finally settled into advertising.
Through it all, Steranko found constant inspiration in comic books. But for once, it seemed like instant mastery of a craft was beyond his grasp. He’d been turned away by Marvel in the summer of 1965, and now he regaled Simon with silly-named heroes like Spyman and Magicmaster. Steranko not only wrote the scripts and designed the characters; he also included elaborate diagrams that delineated the heroes’ powers. But Simon told him that he didn’t have the proper artistic skills to draw the stories. And so the prodigy went across town, to the very company that Simon had hired him to challenge.
When Steranko entered the Marvel offices in the summer of 1966, he’d just sold a pitch that very day for an animated series to Paramount Pictures, and had even more swagger than usual. He needed that swagger to get through all the proper channels: he didn’t have an appointment. Flo Steinberg called back to Sol Brodsky, who in turn sent Roy Thomas out to the reception area for the formality of humoring yet another amateur comic-book artist. The expected brush-off never happened. Thomas, impressed with what he saw, sent Steranko into Lee’s office. Lee was in his usual high-octane mode—as Steranko described it, “equal parts actor, editor, charmer, and showman.” The samples, he said, were crude. But there was something he liked about them.
“What’s that?” asked Steranko.
“Raw energy!” Lee practically shouted. He pointed to a rack of comics. “What would you like to do for us?” he said. “Pick one!”
Steranko walked out with an art assignment on “Nick Fury.” After a few months of drawing over Kirby’s layouts, Steranko was handed the reins—solely generating not just the art, but the scripts as well. For the first time since Wally Wood’s Daredevil #10 fiasco, Lee allowed someone else to write and draw everything in a comic. Jack Kirby, unsatisfied with his own lack of writing credits, took notice.
Stan Lee’s mind was elsewhere that summer. The Marvel Super Heroes cartoon was getting ready to air on dozens of television stations across the country, five nights a week, and so the show’s producer, Robert Lawrence, put Lee up in a midtown penthouse apartment, where after hours he scribbled extensive notes in blue pencil: We’ve got to let viewer know who Bucky IS! . . . Shapanka is a scientist—doesn’t use slang! . . . The final frame is weak! It was Lee’s first taste of showbiz, and he wasn’t going to let it slide.
When the show began airing, Lawrence accompanied Lee on a tour of college campuses. “The kids were unbelievable,” Lawrence marveled. “I think we spent three days at Chapel Hill with them. They’d stay up all night drinking beers, speaking to Stan Lee.” Esquire’s annual college issue featured the Marvel characters in a full-color, six-page spread, and reported that the company had already “sold 50,000 printed t-shirts and 30,000 sweat shirts, and it has run out of adult sizes of both.” College student fans weighed in for the magazine, proving they were digging what Lee and Co. were laying down: “Marvel often stretches the pseudoscientific imagination far into the phantasmagoria of other dimensions, problems of time and space, and even the semi-technological concept of creation. They are brilliantly illustrated, to a nearly hallucinogenic extent.” Before long, Marvel Comics was selling ads for shaving cream and cars. Lee had even earned the respect of Goodman’s magazine editors. “For Stan Lee,” Mario Puzo inscribed in a copy of his latest novel, “Whose imagination I cannot hope to equal.”
Even as he was tending to the animated show, visiting campuses, and scripting a big chunk of the comics line, Lee was also, with Sol Brodsky, spending a lot of his energy shifting writers and artists around—this was the biggest stable of talent they’d had since the 1950s. (A nice side effect of the competition from Tower, Harvey, and Archie superhero lines was that Lee convinced Goodman that Marvel needed to raise page rates to keep their creative edge.) Roy Thomas—goateed now, with a Russian hat, alligator shoes, and a Nehru jacket—offered more writer recommendations, helping to relieve some of Lee’s burden. Thomas’s high school pal Gary Friedrich scripted westerns and war titles, and bumped the quality level of Sgt. Fury above anything Lee had done on the title. It quickly became, ironically, the book with the most explicit criticism of foreign wars, at a time when Lee’s characters were occasionally still spouting exclamations like “No one has the right to defy the wishes of his government! Not even Iron Man!”
Before long, Lee handed “Iron Man” over to another Thomas recommendation. Archie Goodwin, a bespectacled EC Comics fan, had graduated from cartooning school just in time for the collapsed comic-book economy of the late 1950s. He’d toiled in the art department of Redbook (where he’d rejected Andy Warhol’s portfolio, and then lectured Warhol about tracing other people’s work), and edited EC
-like black-and-white horror publications for the infamously cheap and hot-tempered publisher Jim Warren. At Marvel, Goodwin scaled back the hawkishness of “Iron Man,” moving Tony Stark further away from Cold War antagonism and into the spy/technology milieu that had come to define Captain America and Nick Fury.
Thomas’s nose for talent helped enormously. But Lee remained the de facto art director, and maintaining the look of Marvel comics fell on his shoulders alone. Near the end of 1965, Lee had asked John Romita to feature Spider-Man in a two-part Daredevil story. Romita didn’t realize it at the time, but it was an audition to replace Steve Ditko on Amazing Spider-Man. When Ditko’s inevitable departure finally happened, the new team hit the ground running. Their very first issue together featured the shocking revelation that the Green Goblin’s secret identity was Norman Osborn, the wealthy industrialist father of Peter Parker’s classmate Harry Osborn. (Rumors circulated that Ditko’s refusal to go along with this dramatic plot twist had been the final point of contention between Lee and Ditko.)
Romita had preferred working on Daredevil. But he was a team player, a consummate professional happily wearing a crisp white shirt and tie every time he stepped into the office, and anyway he figured the stint was temporary. “I couldn’t believe that a guy would walk away from a successful book that was the second-highest seller at Marvel,” Romita explained to Thomas years later. “I didn’t know Ditko. I assumed he’d do what I would have done—he’d think about how he had given up a top character, and he’d be back. And I was sort of counting the days until I could get back on Daredevil.” Romita was conscientious about making it a smooth transition, copying Ditko’s style as best he could, even using a technical pen for the most faithful mimicry possible.
