Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  No further Bullpen photos were published.

  Lee started work on The Silver Surfer. He and Kirby had already attempted one solo adventure for the character, intended at first as its own comic but shuffled into a Fantastic Four annual. They’d disagreed about the direction of the character. Now, instead of hiring Jack Kirby—who’d created the Surfer on his own—Lee went to John Buscema, and continued to push the character away from the original concept of Spock-like alien coldness. Pining for the spaceways but grounded on our planet by Galactus, the Surfer was forever hurling himself in vain against the earth’s atmosphere, Sisyphus recast as a fallen angel. So he became a hyperempathetic wanderer, encountering human foibles and spouting homilies with puppy-dog eyes. (Like the X-Men and Spider-Man, he was misunderstood and feared by the citizenry; he just got tearier about it.) Buscema’s imagery was grand and imposing, with monumental panels that ran a quarter or a third of each page, but there was a lachrymose drudgery to the Surfer’s constant shoulder-hunching re-creations of Le Penseur.

  Lee didn’t know it, but Kirby, anticipating involvement in the Silver Surfer series, had worked out a very different origin story of his own for the character, which he’d even started drawing. Frustrated, Kirby put the pages aside, and wondered what his career options were. Jack Schiff, the DC editor who’d been the reason for Kirby’s departure (and continued absence) from Marvel’s chief competitor, was no longer around. DC’s new editorial director, Carmine Infantino, who had known Kirby for years, got in touch. Maybe they could work something out. Or maybe, Kirby thought, he could finally get Goodman to improve the terms of his employment at Marvel.

  Either way, he didn’t want to end up like the sixty-three-year-old proofreader working quietly at the corner desk at the Marvel offices, thrown a job because Lee couldn’t bear to see him so down on his luck, spat out by the industry he’d helped to build. Although Jerry Siegel didn’t bring it up with people, a swirl of whispers followed as he made his way in and out of the office: That guy co-created Superman. DC Comics won’t even let him in their offices anymore. Kirby refused to meet such a fate.

  In June 1968, Martin Goodman’s lawyer was approached by a hyperfocused, five-foot-eight, cigar-chomping lawyer named Martin Ackerman, who ran a Manhasset, Long Island–based concern called the Perfect Film & Chemical Corporation. Ackerman was a minor-league version of the new moguls that were beginning to gobble businesses in the 1960s, men like Gulf + Western’s Charlie Bluhdorn, ITT’s Harold Geneen, and Kinney National’s Steve Ross. But even a minor-league conglomerate was formidable: Perfect Film was itself a snowballing amalgam of photofinishing stores, pharmacies, and other smaller companies. Ackerman’s specialty was to buy properties, dismantle them, absorb what he liked, and sell off the rest. (The Gallagher Report, noting that he’d once been a major shareholder in a chain of Kansas cemeteries, nicknamed him “Marty the Mortician.”) In April, when Curtis Publishing was floundering, Perfect had swooped in with a $5 million loan—with the understanding that Ackerman would become Curtis’s president. “Good evening,” he’d addressed the Curtis staff in his first meeting with them, “I’m Marty Ackerman. I am 36 years old and I am very rich.” As president, he spun off the publishing company’s distribution arm, Curtis Circulation, and annexed it to Perfect Film. Of course, there was no better way to maximize a magazine distributor’s profits than to own some more publications to go with it, and that’s where Goodman’s Magazine Management came in. If comic books were part of the deal, well, that was fine, too.

  Martin Goodman was conflicted about selling the company, according to his son Iden. “It was a difficult thing for my dad to do. I think he felt, on one hand, extremely proud that he’d created this thing that could bring him so much money. And really pleased that he felt he could provide for a couple of generations of Goodmans through the sale of it. The business and golf and his family—that was really his life. He’d built this thing that was paying a lot of bills for a lot of people.” Once Goodman made up his mind, though, the sale happened quickly. He wanted everything in cash. Ackerman came back with an offer for just under $15 million—roughly the amount that the company pulled in annually in sales—and threw in some Perfect Film bonds. Goodman signed a contract to remain on board as Marvel’s publisher. His younger son, Chip, signed a contract as editorial director, with the idea that he’d eventually replace his retiring father as publisher. One thing, though, Ackerman said—we need to know that Stan Lee, the public face of Marvel Comics, will stay, too. So Goodman drew up a five-year contract for his star editor, with a provision for a raise. According to a member of Goodman’s legal team, Lee was disappointed. “All the employees, Stan Lee included, didn’t understand why they didn’t get a significant proportion of the sales. Martin very quickly disabused them of that notion. I was shocked—Martin had taken all the risk publishing, they had taken none of the risk, and here they thought they should profit from the sale.” But what could Lee do about it? He signed in July. The next night, after dinner at the Goodman home, Goodman put his arm around his wife’s cousin. “Stan,” he said, “I’ll see to it that you and Joanie will never have to want for anything as long as you live.”

  “We’re going to make a fortune in publishing,” Ackerman predicted. He spent $1.5 million on a corporate jet, and moved his office into a fancy Park Avenue spread that he termed “the Town House,” where he did business behind a polished antique desk. An oil painting of Ackerman clutching the Wall Street Journal hung in the foyer. Across town, though, in the cramped spaces of Marvel’s offices, where smudged pages were tacked up over yellow-painted walls, the divides between labor and management seemed greater than ever. Flo Steinberg had quit in the spring, when the Goodmans refused to raise her hourly wage. “They didn’t believe in giving raises to people in certain jobs,” she said, “because they could be so easily replaced.” In May, instead of a contract, or residuals, Jack Kirby had received a loan from Magazine Management, with a 6 percent interest rate. When Roy Thomas added a day to a vacation to elope with his girlfriend, he returned to a lecture from Lee and Brodsky and the news that they’d removed him from “Doctor Strange” and hired Archie Goodwin to replace him.

  The strain between Marvel’s freewheeling image and its business reality showed in other ways. After painstakingly cultivating a collegiate, even intellectual, audience, Lee was now faced with the uncomfortable widening of the generation gap. His beard and Sol Brodsky’s new sideburns weren’t enough to mask it. The phone calls from drug-addled Doctor Strange fans had given way to weirder visits, like the appearance at 635 Madison Avenue of two members of the Process Church. As usual, Lee was gracious, and if he had any discomfort when he figured out his guests praised both Jesus Christ and Satan, he masked it well. “He was predictably thrilled by our garb,” the Process Church’s Timothy Wylie remembered, “and, if I remember rightly, listened intently to our spiel about the reconciliation of opposites. He was both intelligent and funny and kindly agreed for us to use some Marvel material in one of our magazine cartoon pastiches.”

  Meanwhile, the letters coming in were almost evenly split between support for and opposition to the Vietnam War. It was fiscally advisable for Marvel to hedge, but there was strong criticism when the stories avoided social issues entirely. Stan Lee’s middle-of-the-road liberalism was, in its own way, unmovable. He’d happily preach tolerance, but he was not going to get caught taking an unpopular stance. “I don’t think we’ll be sending him to Vietnam,” Lee told a radio interviewer, when asked about plans for Captain America. “We treat these characters sort of tongue-in-cheek and we get a lot of laughs out of them, we have a lot of fun with them. I don’t know if it’s in good taste to take something as serious as the situation in Vietnam and put a character like Captain America . . . we would have to start treating him differently and taking the whole thing more seriously, which we’re not prepared to do.”* When makereadies of the first issue of Not Brand Echh landed on his desk, he noticed a panel in which a chara
cter wore a button that read, “All the Way With LBJ!”—and showed a mushroom cloud. He yelled for Thomas to come into his office, pointed at the illustration, and accused him of sneaking in propaganda at the last minute. But it was on the black-and-white proofs, Thomas said—it was already there when you saw them. Lee insisted it had not been. If you’re accusing me of lying, Thomas said, I quit. He stormed out.

  Lee called him back in, shut the door, and launched into a quiet apology, explaining that the downbeat portrayal of combat in Timely’s 1950s war comics, though hardly radical in their politics, had resulted in a Timely ban at the PXs on army bases, a notable source of revenue for the company. Lee had flashed back to the decade before, the decade of Frederic Wertham, of the congressional testimonies, of the layoffs that he’d administered in 1957. Those lean, cruel days all blurred together for Stan Lee, and he didn’t want them coming back. For years he’d been a master of the middle ground, crafting stories that were so ambiguous in their political subtext that Marvel was embraced by both the far left and the far right. An editorial in the New Guard, the journal of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, praised Marvel for “the fact that the heroes run to being such capitalistic types as arms manufacturers (Tony Stark, whose alter ego is Iron Man), while the villains are often Communists (and plainly labeled as such, in less than complimentary terms).” Roy Thomas responded to the New Guard in evenhanded terms worthy of his mentor, complimenting the article but stressing that the communist villains had started to fade: “We’ve preferred lately to rely on a more subtle and symbolic method of getting across any potential ‘message’ that might be read into the books, letting our readers draw their own conclusions.”*

  But 1968 changed everything. In a span of six months, the fallout from the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and a nationwide rash of protests and riots made it virtually impossible for hip publications to remain uncommitted. The vaguely Judeo-Christian humanitarian sermons of the Silver Surfer weren’t doing the trick. After an even more breathless than usual hype campaign, and an impressive-selling, double-sized, double-priced first issue—Marvel even planted a New York Times mention that credited the title with a company-wide upturn—sales steadily dropped. Lee had a crisis of faith, unsure what direction to take.*

  A few weeks after Columbia University student protesters took over Hamilton Hall, Lee appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and rushed to qualify the depiction of longhairs in a recent issue of Thor: “We had one sequence where he meets some hippies on the street. And this was done a few months ago, quite a while ago, when hippiedom was perhaps more of a problem than it is today. But we were concerned about all the young people dropping out, and we had him deliver a little lecture in his own ridiculous way of speaking, mentioning that it is far better to plunge in than to drop out. If there are problems, the way to solve them isn’t by ignoring them. And at the time the little page was written, it was a good little sermon. Today, fortunately, I don’t think it is as necessary. Youth today seem to be so much more activist, which I think is a very healthy thing. This business of dropping out has seemed to have gone by the boards for the most part.”

  During a convention panel Q&A, a fan confronted Lee about Marvel’s waffling on social issues. “Our thinking,” Lee responded, “is that the pages of our comics magazines may not be the right place for getting too heavy handed with social messages of any sort. We may be wrong. Maybe we should come out more forcibly and maybe we will.” Shortly afterward, Marvel finally became more explicit in its incorporation of specific current events, even as the thrust of its commentary remained vague. It wasn’t an entirely comfortable mix. “Crisis on Campus!” screamed the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #68. Inside, Empire State University student Peter Parker wrestled, almost schizophrenically, with the concept of civil disobedience. As at Columbia, there was a conflict about the use of college-owned real estate. At first Parker is cautiously sympathetic with the plans of revolt he overhears: “Sounds like trouble brewing! Josh is spokesman for a lot of angry cats. . . . And I guess they’ve got a right to be. . . . Wish I had time to get more involved in this thing!” But pages later, he snaps at his peers, just like he had in the Ditko days: “Anyone can paint a sign, mister! That doesn’t make you right!” Then, in a strange collision of headlines and superheroes, Spider-Man’s enemy, the Kingpin, furiously destroys college property—and frames the students, who are carted away by police in the final panels. “They’ll all have a chance to cool off!” Spider-Man chirps as he swings off. The disconnect between Romita’s downbeat pictures and the shoehorned optimism of Lee’s words suggested that Marvel might have vacillated on what, if any, stance to take, that there was some second-guessing between the time the pages were drawn and dialogued. As Lee worked on the next two issues, the violent confrontations in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention further changed the national mood. The three-issue story arc concluded with a can’t-we-all-just-get-along rap session in which the contrite protesters learn that the ESU dean had been fighting the school’s trustees behind the scenes, on their behalf, the whole while. For his part, the dean admits, “I thought students should be seen and not heard.”

  To present one’s progressive bona fides, it was perhaps easier to simply populate the comics with black characters, usually non-super-powered civilians. To its credit, Marvel had been at the vanguard of such casual representation for a couple years now. (As early as 1963, Lee and Kirby had placed a black soldier, Gabe Jones, in Sgt. Fury’s team of Howling Commandoes, and protested when the printers tried to color him as a Caucasian.) Two months after the Black Panther debuted in 1966, black biophysicist Bill Foster started popping up in The Avengers; a year later, black newspaper editor Joe Robertson joined the Daily Bugle staff in Amazing Spider-Man. Most notably, the profile of the Black Panther (his name now gaining associations Lee and Kirby could never have guessed) had risen when he joined the cast of The Avengers in early 1968. Now the black population of the Marvel Universe started to expand. There was admittedly a clumsiness to some of the renderings—the window-washer-turned-villain Hobie Brown, the militancy-resisting Vietnam vet Billy Carver, and the martyred physicist Al B. Harper, taken all at once, provide a portrait of white-liberal cluelessness—but still there was the sense that Stan Lee was seizing an opportunity rather than just exploiting a trend.

  Of course, Lee was also happy to play to an audience. When the East Village Other ran an article bemoaning the lack of black characters in both DC and Marvel publications, Lee had an assistant editor write a letter pointing out the scant examples, in a delicate mix of backpedaling and time-buying:

  You implied that the Panther was a token Negro. When we became aware of the lack of Negroes in our magazines, and decided to introduce them in our stories, don’t you think it would have looked rather foolish to suddenly have fifteen colored personalities appear and barnstorm through the books? As it is, we have T’Challa (the Panther), Joe Robertson and his son, Willie Lincoln, Sam Wilson (The Falcon), Gabe Jones, Dr. Noah Black (Centurius), and even a super-villain—The Man-Ape. In short, we think that we have approached a decent start with these characters.

  Marvel stood on shaky ground: Willie Lincoln was a blind Vietnam vet, Centurius was a villain who’d turned himself into “protoplasmic slime” while trying to make himself a “superior being,” and . . . Man-Ape? And no character named the Falcon had, in fact, yet appeared. Lee huddled with Gene Colan, who based the Falcon’s look on college football star O. J. Simpson; they quickly stuck him in the pages of Captain America. Three months after the Other article appeared, the first African-American superhero appeared in a major comic book. The Falcon maintained a rooftop pigeon coop in Harlem, seemingly unemployed, and had no super powers. It was hardly the stuff of revolution—“sort of a Sidney Poitier in supergarb,” in the words of one academic observer—but it was a start.

  Another way to maintain credibility was by employing whatever artists were exciting fandom. N
eal Adams heard from Jim Steranko that Marvel was giving its artists free rein, and arranged a meeting with Stan Lee. “You can do any title you want,” Lee told him, just like he’d told Steranko two years earlier. Adams picked X-Men, figuring he would be completely left alone to overhaul the company’s lowest-selling title as he saw fit. Sure, sure, he was told—just work it out with the title’s writer, Roy Thomas.

  While Lee was attempting to navigate the social and aesthetic trends of the late 1960s, Thomas was closely following the template of his boss’s work, fleshing out the narrative tapestries, building on and sometimes improving on what had come before him. Still in his twenties, he had not just Lee’s love for the classics, but also a feel for the cultural touchstones of the younger generation; he peppered his stories with references to everything from Aeschylus to Wonder Wart Hog. Instead of creating new characters, Thomas filled in the backstories of what already existed. While working on The Avengers, Lee asked Thomas to add a new member. Thomas wanted to resurrect the Timely character the Vision, unused since Kirby had drawn it in the early 1940s. When Lee insisted that the character had to be an android, Thomas simply sent John Buscema an old picture of the Vision and suggested they appropriate the name and elements of the costume, and describe him as an android. Furthermore, this new Vision would contain circuits that possessed the “brain patterns” of Lee and Kirby’s Wonder Man, who’d died in Avengers #9. Thus Thomas was able to efficiently recycle two earlier castoffs into a popular “new” member of the Avengers.

  Part of this secondhand tendency was just Thomas’s sentimental inclination toward the heroes of his youth, and part of it was an awareness of the way the comic business worked, especially after the problems Siegel and Shuster—and Simon and Burgos and Ditko—had with ownership. He knew Marvel would own whatever character he generated. “I started thinking about how someday they might make a movie or TV show out of one of these characters and how I’d hate the hell out of it if I didn’t get money or credit out of it.” Instead, what Thomas offered was a more straight-faced take on Lee’s characters. The heroes of The Avengers, for instance, had begun moving further into adult relationships, although sometimes in odd ways. Henry Pym, who’d already donned costumes as both Ant-Man and Giant-Man, now changed his identity to Yellowjacket after a lab accident caused his id to take over; only through this subconscious transformation was he able to trade his workaholic ways for a long-promised marriage to the Wasp. (Thomas may have invested some of his own grown-up dilemmas into the proceedings; he finished writing the story on his honeymoon.)