Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  He failed at his Ditko impression. But Romita’s experience with romance comics had advantages. Peter Parker’s jaw strengthened, his hair moved into place, and he bulked up slightly. His next-door neighbor, Mary Jane Watson—whom Lee and Ditko had been coyly hiding in shadows for a year and a half—finally showed her face, and she was a gorgeous, sassy, raven-haired party girl. Gwen Stacy got even prettier; she and Mary Jane began competing for Peter’s attentions like they were go-go versions of Betty and Veronica. And everyone, even Flash Thompson, started smiling more. According to Romita, at first Lee admonished him for his glamorous-looking characters, for extinguishing Ditko’s moodiness. But before long, Lee himself was asking for changes to soften Peter Parker: longer hair, less of a square, jeans, boots, miniskirted girls all around him. He began dropping copies of Women’s Wear Daily on Romita’s drawing table, instructing him to incorporate the latest fashions. Any temporary concerns he had must have been assuaged by the sales figures—Spider-Man was selling better than ever.

  Daredevil now belonged to Atlas alumnus Gene Colan, an anxious blond movie buff whom Lee lured back from a soul-crushing job making educational filmstrips. Colan’s moody chiaroscuro renderings gave the character a weight that hadn’t existed with Wood or Romita, and, more important, finally differentiated him from Spider-Man. Pacing wasn’t Colan’s strong suit—he had a dangerous habit of drawing breathtaking large-panel scenes, only to realize that he needed to cram the second half of the story into the final few pages—but for Lee, the gain in dramatic range outweighed the logistical headaches. In Tales of Suspense, Colan even managed to lend emotional heft to Iron Man, subtly changing the angles of the metal helmet’s eye and mouth openings into something resembling facial expressions.

  Another Atlas veteran rejoining Marvel was John Buscema, who was gruff, fortyish, with a Robert Mitchum vibe. Like Colan and Romita, Buscema had thoroughly hated the Madison Avenue job he’d had in recent years. But he couldn’t help expressing, to almost comic effect, his indifference toward superheroes. He was more concerned with the human form and open landscapes than with colored costumes and gadgetry. He wanted to channel the ancient and fantastic, and hated “goddamn automobiles and skyscrapers”—fixtures, of course, in Marvel Comics. Roy Thomas, who collaborated with him on The Avengers, was so taken with Buscema’s richly illustrative style that he tailored his scripts accordingly, resulting in a succession of mythological adventures for the Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Hawkeye, and Goliath.

  Unfortunately, Colan’s “Iron Man” assignment and Buscema’s Avengers had once belonged to Don Heck, one of the core artists of the early superhero titles. Heck was slowly eased from both, and shifted over to the mediocre-selling X-Men. Work was work, and he didn’t have strong feelings about which character he was drawing, but he could sense that something was changing. Heck, a longtime pro and illustrator of the prettiest women of anyone at Marvel, now sheepishly visited Jack Kirby at home and asked for drawing advice.* It was becoming clear that Marvel Comics could move ahead with or without any one individual.

  Meanwhile, Jim Steranko enjoyed a luxury that Heck (and Kirby, and Ditko, and Wood, and everyone else at Marvel, for that matter) never did: he was already pulling down a lucrative full-time job outside of comics. Making comics essentially as a hobby meant that the financial compensation didn’t loom as large. He had no family to support, no children to spend time with. The work, and his romantic notions of the artist’s life, were everything. “I believe that happiness is nothing,” he told an interviewer. “I don’t think people were put here to be happy. I think if you decide to be an artist or a writer, you automatically accept the responsibility of being alone. However, after your 50 or 60 years are up you’ll be able to look back and see this output that you’ve done that will endure long after you’re gone, and will continue to fill the minds of millions of people.”

  So he threw himself into experimenting with the form—slowly, at first, and then relentlessly. He followed Kirby’s lead with collage work, which he supplemented with the strobing and shimmying effects of cutting-edge Op Art. He approached his pages more like a designer than an illustrator, paying special attention to the functions of the panel grids and spatial shifts. Concentric circles, perspective-plane diagrams, and other geometric trickery conspired to make Nick Fury Marvel’s most psychedelic comic since Ditko’s Doctor Strange. Steranko reached back to Will Eisner’s Spirit and Johnny Craig’s EC horror comics for inspiration, and the futurist bent of the series allowed for high-tech toys on every page, rendered in the intensively elaborate Kirby style. But where Kirby had full-page drawings, Steranko had double-page spreads—and then quadruple-page spreads, for which you’d have to buy two copies and lay them together if you wanted to take in the full vista. There were nods to Salvador Dali, Eadweard Muybridge, Richard Avedon, and the films of Robert Siodmak and Michael Curtiz, and contemporary commercial artists like Richard M. Powers and Bob Peak. It was Positively Postmodernism, in the Merry Marvel Way.

  The combination of knowing winks and dazzling, nearly mathematically perfect artwork betrayed a certain emotional distance, but Steranko’s work never devolved into camp. Nor did it sell tremendously. To a dedicated readership of gearheads, pot smokers, and art students, “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” was the apex of an art form. But despite a few token guest appearances from Captain America early on, Steranko’s world existed mostly on the side, sealed away from everything else.

  Increasingly, that was how Jack Kirby felt he existed, too—“a lonely sort of guy.” No one would suspect this, of course. Every week he’d come into the office, enjoy a hero’s welcome, and chat up the newer Bullpen employees—Herb Trimpe, Stu Schwartzberg, Linda Fite—who gushed with admiration. He told the Merry Marvel Messenger that he and that “rascal” Stan Lee liked to “share ideas, laughs, and stubby cigars.” “Marvel’s been very kind to me and I like the people,” he told an audience at the 1966 New York comics convention. “I’ve been working there seven years and I’ve been very happy at it.” But privately, he was growing irritated that Lee was spending so much time on the college circuit while he was spending seven days a week at the desk in the one-window basement of his home, which he’d taken to calling “the Dungeon.” When new artists came to Marvel, they were handed a stack of Kirby’s books or, better yet, a stack of Kirby’s rough layouts over which to draw. He was, in effect, training others to keep him from becoming too valuable to the company. Kirby waited for Goodman to give him a piece of the earnings that his creations were generating. Lee threw up his hands and said that he couldn’t make those decisions. Goodman stalled.

  “In the minds and hearts of those of us who have come of age intellectually in the psychedelic sixties,” William David Sherman and Leon Lewis rhapsodized in their 1967 survey Landscape of Contemporary Cinema, “SNCC supersedes the NAACP, Ramparts supersedes The New Republic, Sun Ra supersedes Duke Ellington, and all forms of expression from a comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to a performance by the Fugs become accessible as works of art.” Lee and Kirby continued turning out breathtakingly imaginative work, expanding the scope of the Marvel Universe and resonating with the zeitgeist via a menu of token liberal signifiers and general trippiness. Shortly before Fantastic Four #52 went into production, The New York Times ran an article about the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a political party that had formed in Alabama under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The LCFO’s logo, a black panther, was so striking that reports began calling the group the Black Panther party. When Fantastic Four #52 hit the stands, the Coal Tiger—the African adventurer whom Lee and Kirby had kept in cold storage for months—had a new name.* Even with the delay, the Black Panther still managed to make history as the first black superhero to reach a wide audience.

  As with so many other totems of the late 1960s counterculture, Marvel trafficked in mind-bending sci-fi grandiosity. Out of costume, the Black Panther was an African prince
named T’Challa who led the fictional country of Wakanda, not a Dark Continent noble savage but a scientific genius who impressed even the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards. Forget gamma blasts and radioactive spiders; Marvel’s creations now reflected a growing interest in the collision of ancient civilizations and futuristic technologies. “As a preliminary to understanding the present, one must be capable of projecting one’s intelligence far into the past and far into the future,” Jacques Bergier wrote in The Morning of the Magicians, a million-selling volume of pseudoscience that kicked off a 1960s fascination with the idea that aliens had visited our planet and bestowed advanced technology. Given Kirby’s later dedication to exploring this idea, it’s likely that he was the one most responsible for threading it through Marvel’s adventures in the mid- and late 1960s. Thor arrived in the old-fashioned Eastern European country of Wundagore and met the High Evolutionary, a genetic scientist with a Faust complex who’d tried to create his own race (later, he’d clone life on a larger scale, fabricating an entire planet in the image of Earth). The Fantastic Four discovered an alien warrior race known as the Kree—who’d communed with the Incas in Peru, just like the ancient astronauts in The Morning of the Magicians—and confronted a golden Golem-like being named Him, artificially created by the mysterious enclave at the Citadel of Science. The Negative Zone kept opening up to reveal new psychedelic horrors, rendered by Kirby with rainbow prisms, hectagonal globes, and masses of black dots, sometimes accompanied by his increasingly experimental collage work. Every time a Marvel hero turned over a stone, it seemed, a new, energy-crackling mythology awaited.

  But even as Kirby’s Promethean concepts spun in all directions, he was, by the summer of 1967, all but finished creating new Marvel heroes. “I’m not going to give them another Silver Surfer” was the oft-repeated reasoning he gave to friends. When Goodman decided to challenge Myron Fass’s Captain Marvel trademark by launching a character with that name, Gene Colan drew it—but the origin story of this new Captain Marvel drew on the Kree mythology Kirby had established in Fantastic Four. Marvel quickly crashed this Captain Marvel story into the next issue of Fantasy Masterpieces, along with the usual Captain America, Human Torch, and Sub-Mariner reprints. For good measure, Goodman renamed the comic Marvel Super Heroes, and just in case anyone missed the point, it was all there on the cover: Marvel Super Heroes featuring Captain Marvel, published by the Marvel Comics Group. After that, the title began spotlighting other characters for potential stardom and spin-off titles. But Kirby was not involved, even when his characters, such as Doctor Doom and Medusa, were involved. The work fell to Colan, or George Tuska, or Larry Lieber, or bullpenner Herb Trimpe, who was outgrowing a staff job of making corrections and starting to make his own mark as an artist.

  The one new title that Kirby did contribute to was Not Brand Echh, in which Marvel, showing just how hip it was, satirized its very own characters. Five of the first seven issues of Not Brand Echh provided a rare showcase for Kirby’s surprisingly daffy sense of humor. By the end of 1967, though, he’d done the last of his wacky cartooning for Marvel. Maybe things just didn’t seem so funny anymore.

  No one could have known it at the time, but the first flush of the Marvel Age was coming to an end. That winter, leaving a Christmas party, Stan Lee jumped up and clicked his heels in the air—and then fell, breaking his ankle. He spent the last weeks of 1967 in bed.

  The popularity of the Batman TV show had faded, and with it the idea that publishers could cash in on a comic-book craze. Harvey’s Thriller line and Archie’s Mighty Comics both fell by the wayside. The American Comics Group folded entirely. Most of Charlton’s best talent followed editor Dick Giordano when he was hired at DC Comics. Tower Comics started to crumble, plagued by poor distribution that was, according to Wally Wood, a result of Independent News’ bullying tactics toward wholesalers. (Wood would commemorate the company’s demise with a fanzine cover that depicted Marvel’s Daredevil throwing Tower Comics’ Dynamo off the side of a building.) Myron Fass, who’d so proudly refused a $6,000 settlement the previous year, now agreed to drop the Captain Marvel suit for $4,500. It was still a good deal. “He was selling lousy, anyway,” Fass said.

  DC Comics was going through its own changes. In the summer of 1967, president Jack Liebowitz had begun negotiations to merge with the Kinney National conglomerate, a business-gobbling behemoth that was eyeing not just Superman and Batman, but also DC’s lucrative Independent News, which distributed Playboy and Family Circle. By the time the deal was completed, nearly a year later, the editorial staff at DC had been thoroughly upended. While DC’s forty-eight titles had a monthly circulation of 7 million, Marvel, limited to a third of the output, was pulling in 6 million. DC set out on a mission to compete with Marvel for the hip-youth dollar. Work started drying up for older longtime writers and artists, a process that accelerated when a clutch of veteran writers started piping up about profit-sharing and health benefits. (Ironically, one of those outgoing writers had written a seven-page memo excoriating DC’s antiquated, by-the-numbers comics, and warning that Stan Lee would “eventually outstrip us.”) Carmine Infantino, the artist who’d been coaching DC on how to liven up its covers, became editorial director and replaced most of the editors under him. Now many of their comics were being written by Denny O’Neil and Steve Skeates—both of whom had been fired by Stan Lee. Skeates sneaked drug references into Aquaman, and briefly collaborated on Hawk & Dove with Steve Ditko (now also at DC) until their political beliefs proved irreconcilable.

  The most notable new arrival at DC was Neal Adams, whose painstaking renderings were the closest thing to photo-realism that comics had ever seen. Like Jim Steranko (virtually the only other comic artist under the age of forty), Adams was a confident young man who utilized his background in commercial illustration to create innovative page layouts. Adams’s focus on hyperarticulated anatomy and facial expressions—furrowed brows, curled lips in mid-sentence expressions, foreshortened, pointing fingers—was the flip side to Steranko’s streamlined design.* Adams was the most visible break from tradition at DC, and his influence—and Infantino’s mandates—soon changed the look of just about everyone’s art at the company. The hard-core fans—the letters-column regulars, the fanzine writers, the burgeoning conventioneers—were ecstatic.

  Although this hubbub did not have much impact on DC’s bottom line, it didn’t go unnoticed at Marvel, where more time was now spent meeting about cover designs. DC was still the biggest fish, and Marvel was the fastest-growing fish, but the pond was running out of water, and every splash counted. Even as Marvel’s sales gained on DC’s, even as it continued turning a profit, its rate of increase was slowing.

  Martin Goodman kept a close watch on every trend. He had seen bubbles burst before. As ABC prepared the premiere of Saturday morning cartoons of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, Goodman took out ads in news dealer trades trumpeting Marvel’s success with don’t-miss-out exclamations:

  THE HOUSE OF MARVEL CONTINUES TO GROW . . .

  . . . And we do mean GROW! Like, from 22,530,000 copies sold in 1963—to 27,709,000 in 1964—to 34,000,000 in 1965—to a mind-staggering 40,500,000 in 1965! But that’s just for OPENERS! We’re on our way to over 50,000,000 circulation!

  Goodman’s magazines, single copy sales: 25 million

  +

  Marvel Comics, single copy sales: 40 million

  =

  65 million single copy sales every year

  OVER 175,000 GOODMAN PUBLICATIONS SOLD EVERY DAY

  Independent News—under Kinney ownership, and with a new perspective on exploiting profits—finally allowed Marvel to begin to expand its line. After years being held hostage to the distributor’s limitations, the superheroes still ghettoized as ten-page features in Tales of Suspense, Strange Tales, and Tales to Astonish would finally get their own full-length titles. Captain America; Iron Man; Doctor Strange; Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.; The Incredible Hulk; and Prince Namor, The Sub-Mariner began rolling onto rac
ks in the early months of 1968, joined by Captain Marvel and even a new, conspicuously derivative war title, Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders. The Silver Surfer, Ka-Zar, and Dr. Doom, it was announced, would soon follow.

  Of these titles, Lee would script only Captain America and The Silver Surfer. Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich had taken on more responsibilities as associate editor and assistant editor, respectively, and while Lee was still a very hands-on boss for three days a week, the roles of showman and emissary increasingly dominated his time. He’d taken to writing half-serious editorials on the “Bullpen Bulletins” page, for something he called “Stan’s Soapbox.” Aside from a handful of generalized denunciations of bigotry, it mostly served as one more platform to hype the goods. “I guess I treated the whole thing like a big advertising campaign,” he said later. “I wanted to give the product—which was Marvel Comics, and myself in a way—a certain personality.” He grew a beard to complement the toupee he’d starting wearing. He posed for a snapshot in his office; eight-by-ten glossies—“Excelsior!” he signed at the bottom—were printed and sold from the classified ads in the backs of the comics. “Collect an entire series of Bullpen blow-ups,” the ad shouted. “Watch for our next nutty announcement!”