Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  Roy Thomas shot back at the portrayal, and at Kirby’s “near-paranoid delusions that he created all the Marvel heroes solely by himself and even wrote the stuff.” Lee kept quiet about Funky Flashman, but privately he was hurt and angry. He shaved off his beard and put a little distance between himself and his caricature.

  It was an especially inopportune time for Marvel to have PR problems. With the Marvelmania fiasco behind him, Chip Goodman had licensed the Marvel characters in the fall of 1971 to a shaggy-haired concert promoter named Steve Lemberg, who planned to adapt their adventures for stage musicals, radio plays, and films. The first part of Lemberg’s promotional campaign was turning Stan Lee into an honest-to-God celebrity. He quickly organized a Carnegie Hall event around him. “An erudite evening of cataclysmic culture with your friendly neighborhood bullpen gang!” Spider-Man shouted from a New York Times ad for the January 5, 1972, event. At a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars, even a sold-out show wouldn’t make Lemberg his money back—the show was a calculated loss leader, designed simply to enhance Lee’s notoriety beyond comic circles. Sporting a mustache and sunglasses—he couldn’t help being a little funky, and a little flashy—Stan the Man gave his best effort. But the proceedings were a directionless mess, with failed improvisations and low-rent superhero costumes crafted from Magic Markers and Lycra. The guest stars that gathered to perform dramatic readings or musical numbers could not have been a more random collection: Alain Resnais; actors René Auberjonois, Peter Boyle, and Chuck McCann; writer Tom Wolfe; Beach Boy Dennis Wilson; jazz drummer Chico Hamilton; and Eddie Carmel, holder of the Guinness Book of World Records title for the world’s tallest man. Lee’s wife and daughter recited a poem Lee had written, “God Woke.” A slide show spilled onto two screens, where crude projections clashed with the brightly colored Carnegie Hall drapes; a rock-and-roll trio of Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe, and Barry Smith covered Elvis songs; and, according to reports, bored audience members ripped up their comic books and fashioned them into paper airplanes to direct at the stage. When it was all over, Gerry Conway went backstage to congratulate Lee and saw that his boss’s face was ashen. He looked, Conway said, “like a deer in headlights.”

  Lee took a vacation shortly afterward. He visited Martin Goodman’s turquoise-carpeted condominium in Palm Beach, Florida, where they sat on the terrace overlooking the Atlantic and talked with a reporter about selling 50 million comics a year in more than a hundred countries. But all that Lee wanted to discuss, it seemed, was the Kirby-created character that he had failed to turn into a success. “While the Surfer scored highest on our college and high school polls, it left the little kids cold. Perhaps there wasn’t enough motion, or enough nonsense. Perhaps the fact that the Surfer was all white, no costume. Or that he was baldheaded. Or that he had no earthly hideout and no double identity.”

  “I think that psychologically the potential reader didn’t care enough about surfing,” Goodman wryly added. “So we got the thumbs down.”

  “The Surfer will return,” Lee insisted. “Maybe with some changes. We’re thinking about some changes. But we’ve gotten thousands of letters about his going and I can now say definitely that the Surfer will return.”

  They looked back out on the ocean. The reporter in Palm Beach didn’t know it, but Martin Goodman, at sixty-four years old, was only weeks away from retiring.

  Soon after his father left the company that he’d founded, Chip brought his wife, Roberta, to a dinner where Cadence Industries CEO Sheldon Feinberg was being honored. “He said we couldn’t leave before he did,” remembered Roberta. “And that was the first time we came to the idea that this was going to be different than working for Martin.”

  Feinberg was no expert on comic books, but even he recognized the threatening implications if Stan Lee were to jump over to DC. In a surprise twist, Feinberg gave Lee a double promotion, to president and publisher of Marvel Comics. Lee would no longer have his hands tied by the Goodmans. He could publish black-and-white comic magazines; he could have final say on covers; he could bring back the Silver Surfer.

  On the day that Lee got the news, an old friend of his came by the Marvel offices.

  “But who’s going to become the editor?” the friend asked.

  Lee shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, some guy back there.”

  “Stan tried to give me the job in a kind of half-assed way,” Roy Thomas remembered years later. “He didn’t really want to relinquish his major claim to fame, which of course was being the creative force behind Marvel Comics.” At first, Lee wanted his old job divided between production manager John Verpoorten, Frank Giacoia (as assistant art director), and Thomas, who’d get a mere “story editor” title. Only after Lee realized that the ambiguous hierarchy of such a triangulated structure would cause him management headaches did he yield the editor in chief title to Thomas.

  Meanwhile, Chip Goodman, who’d been preparing to take over his father’s business since leaving grad school in the mid–1960s, would remain ensconced with the men’s magazines—out of sight and out of mind, as far as Lee was concerned.

  Of course, Chip had already left a legacy at Marvel—he’d sold nearly all of the film rights. Steve Lemberg was, like Robert Lawrence (Marvel Super Heroes) and Don Wallace (Marvelmania) before him, amazed at how much he’d been given for a minimal cost. “I owned more rights to Marvel than Marvel had,” Lemberg mused. After an initial price of $2,500, he could renew indefinitely, with full, exclusive creative control of all characters. “The only decision that Chip ever made was to give me all the rights to his comic books. They gave me a twenty-page contract with interlocking rights and options; I could do anything I wanted. I could make movies, records, anything. It was really a trip.” There was talk of a Thor radio series, to run in sixty-five, five-minute installments, a $2.5 million arena-rock show based on various characters, and a Silver Surfer film starring Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. But all of this went on the back burner while Lemberg put together a rock musical LP called Spider-Man: From Beyond the Grave, featuring the former lead singer of the Archies. Marvel’s world domination would have to wait a little longer.

  “It’s time for Phase Two to begin,” Lee proclaimed in his “Bullpen Bulletins” column. “No man, no group of men, no publishing company can rest on its laurels—and Marvel’s still much too young, too zingy, too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to settle back and bask in the sun of yesterday’s success. . . . If you think we turned you on before, the best is yet to be—wait’ll you see what’s coming! Hang loose! Face front! Marvel’s on the move again!” Restless from all the time spent in Martin Goodman’s shadow, Lee quickly began casting around for new, more sophisticated ventures. He started to line up luminaries like Anthony Burgess, Kurt Vonnegut, and Vaclav Havel to write a line of adult comic books (Tom Stoppard expressed interest as well). He asked former Mad editor (and father figure to the underground comix scene) Harvey Kurtzman to edit a satirical magazine called Bedlam.* Lee also turned to the legendary Will Eisner, who wrote to prospective contributors that he’d be publishing a Marvel-funded magazine that was “neither sophomoric, nor foul-mouthed or tasteless.” Lee invited underground publisher Denis Kitchen to New York to discuss packaging an anthology title that would feature left-of-center artists like Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman, and Basil Wolverton. Kitchen demanded that artists would retain trademarks to their characters and their original artwork.

  Lee decided that he needed to play along with Kitchen’s rules if Marvel was going to hold sway with hipper audiences. “One of Marvel’s major assets,” read an internal marketing memo, “has always been the large number of high school and college students who read our publications. However, each day a new crop of sexy movies and raunchy underground comix, as well as a proliferation of nudie magazines vies with us for this fickle audience.” The memo went on to suggest that the company’s product should be available in gas stations, record shops, bookstores, and “youth boutiques.” Marvel had lost its edge, though—it didn’t even reali
ze that even the underground scene had peaked.

  Of all Lee’s attempts to reach a “sophisticated” audience, only the Kitchen project would reach fruition, but when Comix Book #1 was finally published, it was without Marvel’s logo. The final product, which allowed for partial nudity and a negotiated selection of profanities, occupied an uncomfortable limbo between its artists’ usual sex-and-drug hijinks and the relatively innocuous Marvel style. Lee canceled it after three issues, citing poor sales, but Kitchen wondered if it had also rocked the corporate boat too much. One underground cartoonist who visited the Marvel offices heard employees asking why “the hippies” were getting special treatment. “All the other people who worked for Marvel—in the bullpen and the freelancers—all started giving him a lot of shit about it,” said Denis Kitchen, “because they resented that these newcomers had a different deal than they did.”

  Marvel’s comics were steadily dropping in circulation along with those of every other publisher. Marvel maintained its number-one position through a war of attrition, continuing to expand its line of titles despite weak sales, taking up more rack space at the newsstand and attempting to crowd out DC. Stan Lee plotted the return of black-and-white magazines, which had been on his mind since Goodman’s cancellation of Savage Tales. Because recent changes to the Comics Code allowed for vampires and werewolves, Dracula Lives, Monsters Unleashed, Tales of the Zombie, and Vampire Tales, each with seventy-six pages of content per month, started rolling off presses.

  Along with an ever-growing lineup of reprints of Lee and Kirby’s 1960s work, a number of new superhero concepts, most of them delegated by Lee, also began rolling out steadily, ending the R&D drought of the last few years. But these new titles were more transparently tied to trends and business strategies (and loosened Comics Code restrictions) than, say, Thor and Iron Man had been. “Wherever there is a trend that has been spotted,” read a marketing objectives plan, “wherever there is a reading need to be satisfied amongst the ‘now-generation’ readership, Marvel will make every effort to capture such trends and to fill such needs.” Public-domain monsters were recast as trademark-ready supervillains and antiheroes (Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night); even the former X-Men member the Beast was reimagined as a furry, monster-like character. Shortly after Evel Knievel announced plans to jump the Snake River Canyon, Roy Thomas, Gary Friedrich, and artist Mike Ploog developed Ghost Rider, a motorcycle daredevil with a flaming skull. Luke Cage, Hero for Hire chronicled the exploits of a jive-talking, Shaft-inspired ex-con from Harlem who charged a fee for good deeds.

  There were now about forty titles coming out monthly. “If we even talked about an idea for a book,” Thomas said, “it immediately had to go onto a schedule and be out a few months later.” Marvel quickly moved into bigger offices down the street, at 575 Madison Avenue. One visitor described the space as it was still being finished: “The waiting room was frigid modern, pastel plush furniture and not a hint of the comic book source. The home of Spiderman, Thor, and the Fantastic Four might just as well have been the reception room of an accounting firm.”

  But corporate sterility had its limits: there was a real bullpen again, a space where the production team could stretch out, with comics tacked up on walls and spilling off bookshelves. John Romita was made the official art director, a title that Lee had kept for himself until now. The staffers and freelancers who swarmed around Romita and John Verpoorten in the Bullpen—Frank Giacoia, Mike Esposito, Jack Abel, Danny Crespi, Morrie Kuramoto, Vince Colletta, George Roussos—had, between them, about two centuries of comic book experience; many of them had worked for Atlas in the 1950s. They were the remaining links to the comic industry of the past, a world of Pall Malls and neckties and corned beef sandwiches and baseball on the radio. Onto their desks came a steady stream of pages from veteran freelancers, who, thanks to Marvel’s expansion, found themselves in greater demand than they’d been in decades.

  Increasingly, though, comics were becoming a young man’s game. Lee had returned to writing Amazing Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four after his sabbatical, but with his promotion to publisher and president, he left them again, this time for good. Gerry Conway, not yet twenty years old, took over Spider-Man, Marvel’s most popular title. After a few months under Roy Thomas, Fantastic Four also passed to Conway.

  Thomas was busy recruiting new talent from the world of fanzines and conventions. He knew a whole network of guys who’d grown up absorbing Lee’s style and who were now out of college and eager for work. What did Marvel have to lose by letting them take a crack at turning sales around? It was, in a more modest way, a repeat of what Hollywood had been experiencing for a few years, after a conflation of big-budget disasters and the successes of Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde convinced the studios that they might as well throw money at scrappy film school graduates and hope for the best. The hard-core comic readers came from all over the country, although there were certain pockets—St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit—where organized fandom had most effectively incubated their obsessions. They’d move to New York and come to one of the monthly “First Friday” industry gatherings held at Roy Thomas’s apartment. Bill Everett might be there, or Neal Adams, or Denny O’Neil, or Archie Goodwin, ready with advice and contacts.

  This kind of networking had been going on for a couple of years already, and the results were showing up in Jim Warren’s black-and-white horror magazines and DC’s color horror comics. But by 1972, the influx had reached a critical mass. Artist Jeff Jones had taken over, and expanded, the First Friday parties, and Neal Adams and Dick Giordano had started their own studio, Continuity, providing many an aspiring professional with early experience. The fledgling Skywald had begun hiring for its publications. And, finally, Marvel opened its gates. In the five years since Steranko and Adams, hardly anyone had managed to break in at the House of Ideas, and those who did so, struggled—Barry Smith arrived from England and lived out of a suitcase; Rich Buckler, from Detroit, subsisted on graham crackers and grilled-cheese sandwiches. But in the months after Roy Thomas’s promotion to editor in chief, as Marvel’s line expanded, pages were filled with the work of more than a dozen new artists who synthesized their forerunners’ visual trademarks into ever more intricate styles.

  There was a new crop of writers as well, many of whom came up through a revolving door of staff positions. After Steve Englehart, a bearded and bespectacled conscientious objector from Indianapolis, took over Gary Friedrich’s assistant editor job,* he became the scripter for The Defenders, and then the floundering Captain America. When he landed The Avengers as well, he convinced Thomas to let him continue an eight-part story, back and forth, between that title and The Defenders. It was the first Marvel crossover. Englehart decided to write full-time.

  Steve Gerber, a quick-witted, chain-smoking Camus obsessive who’d known Roy Thomas in Missouri, took Englehart’s place on staff. Gerber had worked as a salesman for his uncle’s used-car lot in St. Louis, but his compulsive honesty, he claimed, got him fired. He and his young family lived on food stamps until he got a job as DJ, and then at an ad agency, where he toiled under fluorescent lights writing copy for savings-and-loan commercials. “You must help me. I am dying,” he wrote to Thomas. Six months later he was in New York, and on the Marvel staff for $125 a month. He supplemented this salary by writing Adventure into Fear, which starred the Savage Tales castoff Man-Thing.

  Marv Wolfman, a native New Yorker, came in next. Wolfman and his childhood best friend, Len Wein, were so inseparable, and so much alike, that other fans had taken to calling them “LenMarv.” They’d made a pact to break into the industry together, and starting in junior high, they dutifully checked off every box on the fan-to-pro trajectory list: they’d taken tours of the DC Comics offices, made mimeographed zines (Wolfman published Stephen King’s first story in one of them), organized conventions, even visited Jack Kirby’s house after school and watched him draw while Roz brought them sandwiches and milk. When they showed up at Marvel, Flo Stei
nberg said, “I’d wish them well and tell them to finish high school.” After graduation, they did sporadic work for DC, including the creation of a black superhero that editor Carmine Infantino nixed at the eleventh hour. Now they’d decided to strike out on their own: Wein lived with Gerry Conway and wrote horror comics for DC, and Wolfman, who’d been working at Warren, came on staff at Marvel to help them launch their black-and-white magazines.

  Don McGregor—a diminutive, fast-talking, aspiring filmmaker from Rhode Island whose commentary had appeared regularly in Marvel’s letter pages, and whose stories had run in Warren magazines—sold his house, moved his wife and baby daughter to the Bronx, started proofreading, and waited for his shot at writing.

  Tony Isabella, a devout Catholic and a copyboy at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, moved to New York to assist Sol Brodsky, who’d returned to Marvel and was overseeing repackaging comics for the British market. Isabella also began helping out with the monster magazines.

  “It felt like when you watch a movie from thirty years ago,” recalled Jim Salicrup, who at fifteen years of age became an unofficial Marvel intern in 1972, “and it has an old star from decades earlier, and in small supporting parts it has these new people who would become big stars years later. I remember being starstruck by people like Bill Everett, who would be back in the office working with Steve Gerber on a very odd bunch of issues of The Sub-Mariner. It was these strange combinations of people coming in and out.”