Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  The X-Men issues that Adams and Thomas produced, then, weren’t just sleek—they were serious, with dark brooding that replaced Lee and Kirby’s grand philosophizing. There was domestic tension between Cyclops and Marvel Girl, and a love triangle between Cyclops’s brother Havok, the beautiful, green-haired Polaris, and Iceman. Nearly every face that Adams drew looked to be on the verge of tears or paroxysms, and Thomas’s dialogue mined the drama of adults lecturing and shouting at one another.

  Adams’s unconventional page layouts and kineticized fight sequences—with action overflowing between panels—kept The X-Men from falling into gloomy melodrama; even the conversational longueurs were spiced with elegantly contrapposto figures and odd angles. When Stan Lee expressed concern about the ability of readers to decipher a story from the rampant experimentation, Thomas assured him that the final product would make sense. But after Martin Goodman, still okaying the cover of every Marvel publication, saw the front of Adams’s first issue, in which the defeated heroes were bound to the X-Men logo, he demanded that the cover be redone—and Adams quickly realized the limits of his freedom.

  One of the first to witness the reaction to the team of Adams and Thomas was a political theory major at Bard College named Chris Claremont, who was interning at Marvel. “I was there when Neal and Roy’s run on X-Men started. I thought it was wonderful, but I had to deal with the mail, a lot of which was from outraged fans of Don Heck.” The raves followed in time, but like Nick Fury, The X-Men was unable to attract more than a cult following. The series was canceled, and Adams was back at DC within a year.

  When Marvel’s distribution contract with Independent News expired, the Perfect Film & Chemical–owned Curtis Circulation took over and gave Marvel the freedom, for the first time since 1958, to publish as many titles as it liked. The only problem was that, ironically, the market would no longer bear aggressive expansion.

  Martin Goodman, confronted by flat comic sales, started talking about how to cut expenses. He didn’t want to lose rack space, but all these new stories were costing money. So he canceled Doctor Strange and had the Bullpen prepare reprints of westerns like Ringo Kid, and children’s comics like Homer the Happy Ghost and Peter the Little Pest. Stan Lee started making preparations for layoffs, wondering aloud to Roy Thomas if he should fire some of his best artists—among them Buscema, the second-highest-paid after Kirby, and John Severin—because they’d stand the best chance of landing on their feet. Jim Steranko was told that he couldn’t do a western-themed comic because his page rate was too high to make it cost-effective. Although Goodman ultimately refrained from calling for payroll cuts, he reduced the number of pages of story in each issue from twenty to nineteen—not a lot, but a noticeable difference to a freelancer depending on a steady check.

  Goodman kept handing down decrees. There was a ban on the rockets, ray guns, and robots of classic science fiction. The stories had to cease continuing from one issue to the next, lest new readers become confused by intricate story lines. “You lose the very young kids who just can’t follow the whole damn thing,” Goodman complained. “I read some stories sometimes and I can’t even understand them.” No more cosmic sagas, no more cliffhangers. For the last year or two, Lee had conveyed to his writers that Marvel’s stories should have only “the illusion of change,” that the characters should never evolve too much, lest their portrayals conflict with what licensees had planned for other media. With the ban on multi-issue epics, that illusion would be even harder to maintain, as the final page of each “adventure” saw a return to the status quo, carefully reset for the following month’s tale.

  While Goodman held back on allowing new directions, Thomas continued holding back on delivering new creations. He seemed almost gleeful in his reappropriations, his oeuvre fast becoming a metatextual commentary on ownership and copyright. From Fawcett’s old Captain Marvel character, he borrowed the teen-who-switches-places-with-a-hero shtick (Billy Batson uttered “Shazam!”) and used it in Marvel’s own Captain Marvel (the Hulk’s old sidekick Rick Jones clanged together metal wristbands). The very same month, in The Avengers, he reimagined Superman, Batman, the Green Lantern, and Flash as “The Squadron Sinister” (Hyperion, Nighthawk, Dr. Spectrum, and the Whizzer). What was intellectual property in the face of good old-fashioned entertainment?

  The realities of business were shaping everything about Marvel Comics. The Spider-Man and Fantastic Four cartoons, airing as the Batman craze was sputtering to an end, had been only mild successes.* Looking to squeeze residuals from the company’s holdings, Chip Goodman deactivated the Merry Marvel Marching Society, the fan club that had excited the most dedicated segment of the audience, and sold the licensing of Marvel merchandise for ten thousand dollars to a mail-order businessman in California named Don Wallace. Wallace called his enterprise Marvelmania, and although he advertised in the backs of the comics, he operated independently of the publisher. From a post office box in Culver City, Marvelmania rolled out a line of posters, buttons, stickers, stationery, and art portfolios. The vast majority of these images were drawn by Jack Kirby. He wasn’t paid for them.

  Still, Kirby remained a team player. When Jim Steranko “killed” Captain America for a cliffhanger, and then missed the deadline for the following issue, Lee called Kirby in a panic. He needed a whole comic produced over the weekend. “You want me to bring him back to life?” Kirby asked. “No, keep him dead!” Lee said. Kirby complied, and turned in Captain America #112, minus its title hero, that Monday.

  In the beginning of 1969, Kirby relocated his family, and his drawing board, to Irvine, California. His youngest daughter had asthma, and the warm air was a big reason for the move. But Kirby was also happy to put more distance between himself and his employer. He had no more luck negotiating with Marvel now that Perfect Film owned it and so, his financial requests ignored by Marvel, he tried to find other ways to supplement his income. When he’d finish a particularly impressive page, he’d have Roz set it aside to sell, and dash off a substitute page to send to Marvel. He began drawing images for use by Marvelmania, which was already reproducing his work from original art provided by Marvel. According to Mark Evanier, who worked as an assistant at Marvelmania, Wallace would use Kirby’s original art as payment to people who helped in the offices. Evanier repossessed as many pages as he could and returned them to Kirby.

  Meanwhile, Kirby waited to start work on an Inhumans comic. He’d begun drawing their solo adventures two years earlier, only to see them cut into ten-page featurettes and shunted into the back of Thor. Now there was talk once again of giving them their own title. Stan Lee teased it in nearly every edition of his “Bullpen Bulletins,” and then kept explaining that it would be just a little bit longer. While Goodman kept delaying the green light on The Inhumans, Kirby kept throwing drawings of new characters into a pile by his desk. He’d been doing this for months now: variations on Captain America and Thor and other Asgardians, as well as brand-new heroes. These were the next Silver Surfers, not to be given away so lightly. When Carmine Infantino came to visit in April, Jack and Roz invited him over for a Passover dinner, after which Jack showed him the drawings and floated the idea of bringing the characters to DC in exchange for a three-year contract. Infantino liked the sound of that.

  Infantino had trouble convincing DC to go along with the plan, however. A decade after the Sky Masters fiasco, Jack Schiff’s friends still held a grudge. Infantino would have to keep working on them.

  Kirby was getting increasingly restless with his new creations, eager to exert more power over these new stories than he did working with Stan Lee. He addressed a group of convention attendees about his vision for the future of comics. “You fellas think of comics in terms of comic books, but you’re wrong. I think you fellas should think of comics in terms of drugs, in terms of war, in terms of journalism, in terms of selling, in terms of business. And if you have a viewpoint on drugs, or if you have a viewpoint on war, or if you have a viewpoint on the economy, I think y
ou can tell it more effectively in comics than you can in words. I think nobody is doing it. Comics is journalism. But now it’s restricted to soap opera.”

  Back in New York, Stan Lee was feeling restless, too. “I can’t understand people who read comics! I wouldn’t read them if I had the time and wasn’t in the business,” he told the French film director Alain Resnais over dinner and cocktails one night. He complained about how much of his salary went to taxes, and, worse, the fact that he didn’t own any of his creations. “Everything I’ve written, nothing belongs to me.” The five-year contract he’d signed the previous summer was easily broken, though, and with Goodman gone, he didn’t have a sense of familial loyalty to keep him there.

  “Now I figure, for the first time, at my age, it’s time I started thinking of other things,” he confided. “I’ve been thinking of trying to write a play, or—I know some producers in this country—trying to do a movie scenario. I was even thinking of writing some poems, like Rod McKuen and people like that, with some philosophy and some satire in them. The type of thing I put in the comics, like the Silver Surfer, you know, or Spider-Man. I think my name may be well-known enough that maybe these poems would sell. The only problem is, as long as I’m here I don’t have the time to write them. And if I leave I don’t get the income, which I need to keep living! So I’ve got to figure out how to do this.”

  But what about the artists, Resnais asked. What about Jack Kirby and John Buscema?

  “Well, I thought of that,” Lee said. “The thing is, these men are so talented that I think if I do movie work, I could take them with me. Jack is great at set design and things like that. And they’re good at storyboards.” Lee showed Resnais a package he’d just received, of production designs Kirby had done for a staging of Julius Caesar at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Kirby and Buscema could probably get by even if they stayed in the comics industry, Lee told Resnais. “But I would like to take them.”

  Perfect Film’s Marty Ackerman, facing lawsuits and impatient lenders, resigned from the presidency of Curtis. “I’m out,” he told The New York Times. “Who needs the aggravation?” In June, eager to leave the executive life completely behind, he stepped down from Perfect Film & Chemical, set himself up with a $750,000 consultancy contract, and went off to write a book about his perceived mistreatment at the hands of Curtis.

  The Perfect Film board named thirty-eight-year-old Sheldon Feinberg, the former CFO of Revlon, as Ackerman’s replacement. Feinberg was, like Ackerman, a brash cigar chomper. He’d been born into poverty, put himself through law school night classes, and learned from Revlon founder Charles Revson how to run a business: with an iron fist and zero guilt. Brought in with the goal of paying off debt to banks, Feinberg announced his arrival at Perfect by relieving Ackerman of the jet plane, multiple automobiles, and personal staff that he’d retained for his town house office. Unable to afford more experienced executives, Feinberg then surrounded himself with young, ambitious advisors—and cultivated an environment of trepidation for everyone else at the company. “With Shelly, you only spoke when spoken to,” said one former employee. “My first week on the job, he wanted to meet me, so he called me up said, ‘Can you stop by my office?’ The suite I was a part of was next door to his huge suite. I said, ‘I’ll be there in five minutes, I’m just finishing something up.’ Within thirty seconds, my direct boss, the VP of Marketing, came in and said, ‘Are you an asshole? You do not tell him one second. You’re there by the time he hangs up the phone.’ ” Another longtime associate described Feinberg’s management style this way: “ ‘Pit your executives against each other, make them fight each other, and then, somehow they should do better. And try to humiliate your subordinates.’ He was a real piece of work.”

  Feinberg was not thrilled with what he’d inherited. It was a “messy conglomerate,” he grumbled, hardly the business he’d been led to believe it was. When The New York Times asked if he’d have taken the job had he known what he was getting into, Feinberg refused to answer. He began selling off pieces of Perfect Film, an action not unnoticed at Marvel. “Magazines were dying, and we thought comics were next, and we were always disturbed by those kind of things,” said John Romita. “They destroyed Saturday Evening Post, didn’t they? It was terrible. They had nobody with taste in that whole organization.”

  It was in this climate that Jack Kirby decided to press for a contract. He’d been cheated out of money by Marvelmania, was frustrated with Stan Lee, and felt ignored by both Goodman and Ackerman—even after he’d agreed to take Marvel’s side in the Captain America dispute with Joe Simon. When Simon received a settlement on November 20, Kirby waited for Marvel to pay him a matching amount (according to one report, a mere $7,500), as had been promised. Kirby and his lawyer flew to New York in December 1969, hoping for a satisfying sit-down with Perfect Film. But who was Jack Kirby to Sheldon Feinberg or his young executives? Stan Lee, they’d heard of. Still, if Kirby wanted a contract, they would send him a contract.

  Kirby finally got the go-ahead for an Inhumans series—and because Lee didn’t have time to add dialogue, Kirby would write as well as draw it. He was also given an assignment for a new series starring the old Timely pulp character Ka-Zar. But there was a catch: with comic sales down, Goodman figured this was not an ideal time to suddenly expand the line—in fact, he’d just canceled the low-selling X-Men, which joined Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel in the scrap heap. So in a cautious waters-testing return to the early 1960s, the Inhumans and Ka-Zar would be parsed out in ten-page segments, each in new anthology titles. The Inhumans would share Amazing Adventures with Black Widow, a reformed Iron Man villainess; Ka-Zar would share Astonishing Tales with Dr. Doom. If sales merited it, maybe one of those characters would get their own book.

  Kirby headed home and waited for his contract. While he began figuring out how to chop in half the Inhumans stories he’d already drawn, Lee called him to ask if he’d fill in for an issue of the floundering Silver Surfer, in which the title character would be recast as an angry vindicator. It would be called The Savage Silver Surfer. (Ironically, this was how Kirby had intended to portray the character all along, ever since he added him to the pages of Fantastic Four #48 just before deadline.) Kirby took the assignment, although it was salt in the wound to pinch-hit on the character he’d created himself but been denied control of.

  And then the contract arrived. Kirby’s heart sank as he read the terms. He could take it or leave it. Kirby’s mood came through on the final, frighteningly intense pages of Silver Surfer #18. The Surfer flew away from a fight, streaked to a mountaintop, and briefly kneeled down before turning to directly address the reader, his face boiling with rage. “Too long have I displayed restraint! Too long have I refused to flaunt my power!” screamed the Surfer. “I’ll have done with reason—and with love—or mercy! To men they’re only words—to be uttered and ignored!”*

  The next time Carmine Infantino visited California, he brought a contract with him. Kirby went over to Infantino’s hotel room and signed a three-year deal with DC Comics.

  Through all of this, the atmosphere in the cramped Bullpen had remained, by and large, playful. Maybe it was never quite the utopian elves’ workshop depicted in the letter columns, but the Sorry, No Visitors sign outside the unlocked front office door was really just to ward off the creepier fans. According to Robin Green, who replaced Flo Steinberg as Marvel’s secretary, “the bullpen had become a kind of men’s den, with pictures of naked women, some playboy types and some drawings of comic book characters as they will never appear in Spider-Man. Some of them were downright pornographic, and you couldn’t talk to [inker] Tony Mortellaro without a tit or an ass staring you in the face.” The key to the bathroom was called “the shithouse pass.”

  The short New York University student film We Love You Herb Trimpe, shot at the office at the time, provides visual evidence of this men’s den: Trimpe, an Alan Alda lookalike, has decorated his station with a poster of General George
S. Patton (World War II biplane models linger just above the shot). John Verpoorten and Marie Severin chat and tease as they work but never look up, the desks pushed together so tightly that everyone would have to stop working in order for anyone to squeeze out of the room. They lament what’s happened to their audience, which was once made up of thrilled children and is now dominated by increasingly one-track-minded teenagers: “That word fan is just that,” says Trimpe. “They’re fanatics.”

  Marie Severin, wide brown eyes hidden behind her glasses, dressed in what Robin Green described as “very Peck & Peck,” held her own against both the boys’ club and the fans, all of whom she targeted in brilliant, wicked caricatures that were pinned up all around the office. Her cartooning had been given a chance to shine in Not Brand Echh; now that it had been canceled, most of her best work was privately circulated, excoriating in-jokes about her coworkers. But behind the cigarette smoke and the wisecracks, there was a familial softness to the Bullpen as well. Kuramoto would paint nature watercolors during his lunch hour. Freelancers would regularly stop in, pull up a chair, and work. When artist Barry Smith visited the Bullpen, he witnessed a spontaneous, collaborative rendition of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” which was playing on the radio: “As it came into the long, chanting coda, one by one each person began singing along—Herb, John Romita, Morrie Kuramoto, Tony Mortellaro, Marie and a few others—all singing at the top of their lungs.”