Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  March 6, 1970, was a Friday. The ghosts of the sixties still clung. The Beatles, publicly together but having already broken up behind closed doors, released the single “Let It Be” that morning. In Greenwich Village, a few minutes after 12 noon, members of the radical group the Weathermen accidentally detonated a bomb they were building, razing their town house headquarters. Uptown, in Marvel’s offices, Captain America #128, in which a biker gang named Satan’s Angels provided security for an Altamont-like rock festival, was in production. Shortly after Jack Kirby’s pages for Fantastic Four #102 were delivered into Lee’s hands, the phone rang at 635 Madison Avenue. “Jack’s on line two,” Stan Lee’s receptionist called out.

  A few minutes later, a stunned Lee called in Sol Brodsky, and then Roy Thomas. The just-delivered Fantastic Four pages sat on Lee’s desk, still carrying the scent of the Roi-Tan Falcon cigars that Kirby smoked at his drawing board.

  The King was leaving Marvel.

  As soon as the news reached John Romita, he walked into Lee’s office and asked if they’d be canceling the Fantastic Four. No, said Lee—you’re going to do it. “Are you crazy?” Romita asked, but finally accepted. “I did it under extreme duress because I felt inadequate,” he recalled later. “It was like trying to raise somebody else’s child.” John Buscema had an even stronger reaction. “I thought they were going to close up,” he recalled. “As far as I was concerned, Jack was the backbone of Marvel.”

  Somebody found one of the cigar butts that Kirby had left behind on his last visit to the Bullpen. “Marie Severin made a very elaborate plaque out of it,” Trimpe later recalled, “labeling it ‘Jack Kirby’s Last Cigar at Marvel,’ with fancy scroll work on it.” She hung the plaque on the wall. It read, “Kirby Was Here.”

  PART II

  The Next Generation

  4

  Nineteen seventy was a stressful year for Stan Lee—“frenzied, frantic, and frenetic,” as he put it in a letter to one friend. He was still reeling from Kirby’s departure, and in the process of moving his family from Hewlett Harbor to a midtown apartment, when Sol Brodsky sat down and told him he’d been offered the chance to lead a black-and-white comic start-up. Lee resignedly gave Brodsky his blessing and named John Verpoorten the new head of production.

  There were reminders everywhere that things had changed since the early days of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man and the Merry Marvel Marching Society. Every time that Lee walked down the corridor and into his office, he passed a life-size poster of Spider-Man from years ago, drawn by the long-departed Steve Ditko. Flo was gone; Jack was gone; Sol was gone. Stan Goldberg, who’d chosen the colors for the superheroes and drew Millie the Model for a decade, had recently left to work for DC, as had longtime artist John Severin. Only Martin Goodman still remained from those halcyon days of the early 1960s, and although he still looked at the covers, and approved new titles, he was halfway out the door already, having arranged for Chip—who was more focused on the magazine line anyway—to take his place. Even Marvel’s mysterious owner, Perfect Film & Chemical, changed its name to the still-more-ambiguous Cadence Industries and moved out to New Jersey. And sales were down.

  It wasn’t the first time Lee had watched as the people who’d helped to build Marvel left him: it had happened in 1941, when Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left; in 1949, when he’d had to fire the freelancers; in 1957, when he’d had to fire the staff. The difference now was that he had some power to determine what would happen next. Throughout 1970, as he prepared to enter his fourth decade as an employee of Marvel Comics, he started eyeing the publishing strategies more closely, and pushing for changes. He made plans with the poet Kenneth Koch to create comics about “which congressmen to vote for, who might help end the war in Vietnam a little sooner.”* He huddled with Carmine Infantino at DC to start the Academy of Comic Book Arts, in a bid to gain more widespread acceptance for the industry. “We’ll have exhibits in world-famous galleries,” he wrote, “a lecture bureau to provide speakers to interested groups here and overseas; and an annual awards ceremony in which we, the pros, will recognize and reward the finest artistic and literary contributions from within our field.” (The organization succeeded, at least, in giving out awards.) With Chip Goodman’s help, Lee campaigned for the Comics Code Authority to allow depictions of narcotics use. The measure was voted down, but when Lee later received a letter from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare asking him to address drug abuse in the comics, he convinced Martin Goodman to bypass the code—and Marvel published a Spider-Man story in which Peter Parker’s roommate Harry Osborn couldn’t stop popping pills. The newspaper coverage easily outweighed the slap on the wrist from the Code Authority.

  Marvel won the battle. Within a matter of months the authority, sensing that it was on the wrong side of history, not only began to allow depictions of drug abuse, but also lifted some of its horror-content bans.* Marvel acted quickly to capitalize on the new guidelines, developing Werewolf by Night, The Tomb of Dracula, and almost—Lee was talked out of it—a title called The Mark of Satan, which would follow the adventures of the devil himself.

  But Lee had not worked this long and hard just to return to crank out monster comics in a repeatedly endangered industry. For all his campaigning to improve the standing of comic books in the eyes of the world, he wasn’t willing to go down with the ship. Rumors swirled that Lee was just waiting out his contract;* such speculation only gained traction when his frustrations surfaced in public. “The comic book market is the worst market that there is on the face of the earth for creative talent and the reasons are numberless and legion,” he told a gathering of industry colleagues.

  I have had many talented people ask me how to get into the comic book business. If they were talented enough the first answer I would give them is, “Why would you want to get into the comic book business?” Because even if you succeed, even if you reach what might be considered the pinnacle of success in comics, you will be less successful, less secure and less effective than if you are just an average practitioner of your art in television, radio, movies or what have you. It is a business in which the creator . . . owns nothing of his creation. The publisher owns it. . . . Isn’t it pathetic to be in a business where the most you can say for the creative person in the business is that he’s serving an apprenticeship to enter a better field? Why not go to the other field directly?

  “I would tell any cartoonist who has an idea,” Lee concluded, “think twice before you give it to a publisher.”

  He looked for a way to sample life outside the confines of not just Goodman’s rule, but of comic books entirely. He’d solidified his friendship with Alain Resnais, the director of acclaimed art-house films like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, who was, like Fellini before him, an avowed Marvel Comics fan. Unlike Fellini, Resnais wanted more than to just pay his respects. He wanted to collaborate on a screenplay.

  “The Monster Maker is a realistic fantasy about a frustrated movie producer who overcomes his frustrations through trying to solve the problems of pollution,” Lee told The New York Times about the ecologically focused film. “There will be lots of symbolism—and garbage.” With a junk-culture-toiling protagonist nudged into a higher calling on the advice of his wife, it would be difficult not to see The Monster Maker as autobiographical. This, perhaps, was how Lee saw his own journey, as a man who’d gone from churning out schlocky product to taking an honorable place in the world and speaking against societal ills. In order to devote more time to working on The Monster Maker, Stan Lee took a sabbatical from writing comic books for the first time in his life.

  At first it was hard for Lee to let go of the flagship titles, the ones he’d never entrusted to anyone else. Just as no one’s artwork seemed to please him like Jack Kirby’s did, no one’s scripts seemed to please him like his own. But he’d poured everything he had into the Silver Surfer series, just to see it canceled. What did it matter anymore? So he handed over the keys to those who’d mo
st thoroughly absorbed his style and could most seamlessly generate simulacra of past glories: The Amazing Spider-Man went to Roy Thomas, Fantastic Four to Archie Goodwin, Captain America to Gary Friedrich. And, most surprising to Marvel fans, Thor went to a teenager named Gerry Conway.

  Born in Brooklyn, Conway was eight years old when Fantastic Four #1 hit the stands. By the time he was sixteen, he was writing scripts for DC Comics; soon after, he met Roy Thomas, who assigned him a Marvel writers’ test. But Lee was, as usual, less than impressed with the way another writer handled the characters he shepherded.

  “He writes really well for a seventeen-year-old kid,” Thomas reasoned.

  Lee, who himself had first walked into Marvel’s offices at that age, paused. “Well, can’t we get someone who writes really well for a twenty-five-year-old kid?”

  After writing a single Ka-Zar story in Astonishing Tales, though, Conway earned a gig writing Daredevil. He soon became Marvel’s new utility player. Just as Thomas had been picking up slack on titles Lee didn’t have time for, Conway swooped in and covered Iron Man, The Sub-Mariner, and The Incredible Hulk. Conway managed to shake up Daredevil by partnering him with the Black Widow, whom Gene Colan rendered as something like an acrobatic Ann-Margret, a skintight-suited siren with long, red hair.* (“There seemed to be some natural chemistry between them,” Conway said. “I think Gene’s Black Widow was comics’ first empowered sexy babe.”)

  But Conway’s Thor, illustrated by John Buscema and his younger brother Sal in a faux-Kirby style, faced the same uphill climb as Thomas’s Amazing Spider-Man and Goodwin’s Fantastic Four. There were not just the long shadows cast by Lee and Kirby, but also the mandates to preserve status quo; character development was replaced by dramatized public service announcements. The low-selling Captain America became Captain America and the Falcon, and the new African-American costar began warily dating, and debating, a shrill black militant named Leila. The Avengers tackled women’s lib, the Sub-Mariner addressed ecological concerns, and the Incredible Hulk, Thor, and the Inhumans visited the ghetto. Where was the fun in that?*

  There hadn’t been any new superhero titles in a year or two now—launches were limited to low-cost genre-dabbling like Western Gunfighters, Lil’ Kids, Our Love Story, Spoof, Harvey, and Fear. There was a growing sense, among the letter-writers and fanzine publishers, that Marvel was simply becoming a copy of itself. An issue of The Fantastic Four included art appropriated from an unpublished Kirby story. In an attempt to encourage Marvel’s writers and artists to keep creating new characters while he was away, Lee suggested new anthology titles like Marvel Feature, Marvel Spotlight, and Marvel Premiere. But Marvel Feature’s the Defenders, the first super-team in eight years, included no new characters—it simply threw together Doctor Strange, the Sub-Mariner, and the Hulk. Marvel Premiere starred a character named Adam Warlock—but he was a renamed version of a character that Kirby had introduced in 1967, updated by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane as a kind of cosmic-peacenik Jesus Christ Superstar who wandered around with zany longhairs, fighting authority figures of every stripe. The most exciting Marvel comic of 1971, by fan consensus, was an Avengers story arc called “The Kree-Skrull War,” in which Thomas and Neal Adams reteamed for a welcome return to the tradition of multi-issue space epics. It was an ambitious, often thrilling tour through various Marvel mythologies, featuring not just the two battling alien races, and the Negative Zone, and Captain Marvel, and the Inhumans, but also appearances by Timely-era heroes like the Angel, the Blazing Skull, the Fin, the Patriot, and the original Vision. Paying tribute to what had come before him, with “The Kree-Skrull War” Thomas seemed to be touring disparate corners of the Marvel universe with a dustbin and craft glue, picking up the detritus left in Lee and Kirby’s wake and fitting it all together. You could argue that it reached new levels of intertextual ecstasy, or you could wonder if it was just a final, grand echo of past glories, intoxicating fumes from an empty tank.

  As the comics coasted along without Lee and Kirby, Martin Goodman hatched a devious plan to conquer DC once and for all. When Marvel and DC agreed to hike the price of comics (which had previously been raised from 10 to 12 cents in 1962, and to 15 cents in 1969), their handshake deal called for the books to expand from 36 to 52 pages—but at a whopping 25 cents apiece. But after a month, Goodman immediately cut back to fewer pages at 20 cents, and offered newsstand proprietors a bigger cut of the profits, ensuring that Marvel would get better rack space. The slow-footed DC tried to make a go of their higher-price, thicker comics, but they took a bath on the maneuver, and by the time they crawled back to the 20-cent price point, they’d lost the battle and the war. For the first time in its history, Marvel Comics was the number-one comic book company in the world. When Goodman got the news, he took the Marvel staff out to dinner at the after-work hangout of DC Comics employees, whose offices were directly across the street.

  Unfortunately, leading the comic-book industry was a dubious distinction. Both Marvel and DC had managed to attract media coverage because of the so-called relevance of their social-issues coverage—a New York magazine cover story trumpeted, somewhat misleadingly, “The Radicalization of the Superheroes”—but the impact on the bottom line was minimal. Marvel had lost even its underdog status now. In industry circles, the grumblings of Ditko and Wally Wood had been common knowledge for a while, and many others objected to the lack of creative control that DC and Marvel afforded. But with Kirby’s departure—and the growth of an organized network of fandom, rife with zines and conventions—gossip and accusations began to spread like wildfire.

  The hired hands, given a platform at last, were happy to have the curtain pulled back. Neal Adams, currently working on DC’s Green Lantern and Marvel’s Avengers, was a rarity, an artist popular enough to refuse to work exclusively for either company. To a New York convention audience, he candidly offered his take on his employers’ business strategies. DC’s goal, he said, “probably has more to do with raising the prices even a bit higher, trying to build a market of 50-cent books. Marvel feels it can flood the market with 20-cent books and therefore take over the whole market, and they may be right. They are two very large companies and there is a very heavy competition. I hope neither of them wins.”

  Lee and Resnais’s Monster Maker script sold for $25,000, although it would never be filmed. Lee returned from his sabbatical to find Marvel on top and profiled in Rolling Stone, where an illustration of the Hulk graced the cover. Lee’s former secretary Robin Green, who wrote the feature, found him in a somewhat sensitive state when she approached him. He asked if she would be “nice,” noting that “the world is a hostile place.” There were rumors that he was unhappy at Marvel, even entertaining offers to move to DC when his contract expired. “Stan’s alone in the corner, still Facing Front and smiling, but a little down sometimes,” Green wrote. He was manic, nervous: “I asked him where he’d like to sit,” she wrote, “and he said, ‘You do what’s best for you! Have a sourball! You’re my guest!’ We talked for a while, then played back the tape recorder to see if we were picking everything up, and Stan said, ‘You know, that sounds so icky, I wouldn’t like me if I met me and I sounded like that. I’ve gotta try to sound more rugged.’ ” Lee talked about the loneliness of writing and his wife and daughter’s disinterest in comic books, and adjusted his toupee.

  Over at DC, Kirby’s new creations—The New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People, which constituted a so-called Fourth World mythology—had begun appearing. These were the next-generation heroes with which Kirby wanted to replace Thor and the other “old gods” after that story about Ragnarok five years ago; this was the direction that Lee had not allowed him to take. To many readers, Kirby’s new work was all overgeared: the figures were even blockier than before, and the dialogue was stilted. But unlike Marvel, he was trying something new.

  The Marvel staff awaited Kirby’s DC work with bated breath. They loved Kirby but guiltily prayed for his new projects to fail. If DC was able
to capitalize on Kirby’s talent like Marvel had . . . well, the results were unthinkable. Marvel would never survive such competition. Inker Vince Colletta photocopied Kirby pages at the DC offices and carted them over to Marvel, where they went up on the walls. Marvel summoned in its own cover artists for meetings, holding up Kirby’s work for analysis.

  Kirby wasn’t shy about comparing his new employer to his old one. “I don’t have the feeling of repression that I had at Marvel,” he told an interviewer. “I was never given credit for the writing I did. Most of the writing at Marvel is done by the artist from the script.” The Fantastic Four, he said, “was my idea. It was my idea to do it the way it was; my idea to develop it the way it was. I’m not saying that Stan had nothing to do with it. Of course he did. We talked things out. As things went on, I began to work at home and I no longer came up to the office. I developed all the stuff at home and just sent it in. I had to come up with new ideas to help the strip sell. I was faced with the frustration of having to come up with new ideas and then having them taken from me.”

  The harshest barbs, though, were soon to come. In Mister Miracle #6, Kirby introduced Funky Flashman, a smooth-talking, fast-hustling promoter who bore more than a passing resemblance to Stan Lee. Funky Flashman, clean-shaven and bald, began his day by donning a toupee-and-beard mask, and then jumped around speaking in alliterative phrases and making promises he didn’t intend to keep. “All the great words and quotations and clichés ever written are at my beck and call!! Even if I say them sideways, the little people will listen!—in wonder! In awe! In reverence!!!—to their Funky!” Tailing him closely was Houseroy, a simpering assistant (“Master Funky! My leader!”) who looked suspiciously like Roy Thomas. At story’s end, Funky Flashman blithely sacrificed Houseroy to a quartet of angry warriors and made his slippery escape.