Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  But this was just one of many problems. Wolfman was mentally and physically exhausted, feeling like he couldn’t delegate his workload. “The assistants were all new, so you really couldn’t give them a lot of heavy work to do; you couldn’t ask them to edit the stuff, and no one person can edit 53 books.” All he could really do, he decided, was “occasionally goose the people in the right direction. I had a secretary who had a list of people—just to call. The only way I knew that I’d be able to make sure I spoke to everybody that worked at Marvel was to have a secretary have mandatory phone calls and it was on the chart. Once a month I managed to speak to everybody.” He was arguing with Production Manager John Verpoorten about deadlines; he was fighting with Cadence about ill-considered cost-cutting efforts (Marvel’s parent company wanted, for instance, to print comics with single-color covers); he was going through a separation with his wife. He was publicly predicting that the already barely surviving comic industry would face a bigger slump before things turned around—in fact, he and Len Wein were already looking at writing screenplays as a possible exit strategy. “It was a job that was just impossible,” Wolfman said. “I think it’s what finally killed everybody that’s been in the job.”

  Verpoorten asked Roy Thomas how he felt about coming back to his old job, now that Landau was gone. Thomas’s marriage had completely fallen apart, and he was restless. Maybe it would be better this time. He met with Galton, worked out his salary with Sol Brodsky, and held one-on-one meetings with editorial and production staffers.

  “I’m kind of second in command,” Jim Shooter told him, “and I completely understand if you need someone else to be your right-hand man.”

  No, no, Thomas shrugged—you’ll do. “And then,” said Shooter, “he gave me a nice chunky list of people he was going to fire.”

  Don McGregor wondered if he was going to be one of those people—he’d been told that he was going to be taken off Power Man, and to be prepared that Thomas was “totally against” his writing. When he met with Thomas, though, he was assured that wasn’t the case. In fact, Thomas told McGregor, he’d be getting even more work—it was just that Wolfman wanted to do Power Man. “It was like being caught in some political intrigue,” McGregor said. “Who can you trust? These are people I’ve known for years; somebody’s not telling the truth.”

  While McGregor tried to solve the mystery, Thomas scheduled a vacation in Los Angeles, a last breath of freedom before returning to the daily grind. The news of his return began leaking to the fanzine press.

  Wolfman waited eagerly.

  The drama wasn’t confined to the office walls. Howard the Duck artist Frank Brunner was tired of having to follow fully scripted stories by Gerber—and tired of Marvel’s refusal to raise his page rate. He left the book, and through a small mail-order company began selling poster prints of a mobster duck, titled “Scarface Duck.” It looked a lot like Howard . . . but then, hadn’t Howard looked a lot like Donald anyway? “I was filling a void left by slow-moving Marvel,” Brunner reasoned, “which did not immediately see the potential of the fan market—or of the duck.”

  The print sold quickly. Gerber wasn’t pleased. He told Brunner he wanted some of the profits from his co-creation.

  “Which part of the print,” Brunner asked Gerber, “did you write or draw? What part of the deal did you arrange?” Then he got together with Mike Friedrich, and hatched plans for Star*Reach to cash in on Howard Fever by publishing the adventures of another identically rendered character he called “The Duckateer.” The comic was called Quack!

  Mary Skrenes, meanwhile, had gone to a New York comic store and presold enough orders for howard for president buttons to cover production costs for an entire run. Although she and Gerber were unable to convince Marvel to pull the trigger on marketing Howard merchandise, they did manage to get a license to sell the buttons themselves. “We didn’t have to pay a fee,” said Skrenes, “because they didn’t believe it would work.”*

  No longer speaking with Brunner, they recruited celebrated horror-comics artist Berni Wrightson to draw the button, which they advertised for one dollar plus a quarter shipping. From the Mad Genius offices, Jim Salicrup, Mary Skrenes, and David Anthony Kraft stuffed envelopes while Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman played on the television. The orders kept rolling in.

  “Why are you taking the job again?” Gerry Conway asked his old friend Roy Thomas—and while Thomas was on the West Coast, that question kept ringing in his ears. It turned out that he really liked being in California. He liked it so much, in fact, that he rented an apartment at a singles complex in Toluca Lake and soon informed Lee that he was not going to return after all. But, he said, he had a solution: Conway, who’d been so unceremoniously passed over in 1974 and departed for DC, should be the new editor in chief.

  “Gerry swooped in the day before he took over,” said Jim Shooter, “and there was terror and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. There was panic everywhere.” Conway didn’t like what he saw at 575 Madison. “A handful of writers had what amounted to their own fiefdoms. They ran their five or six titles as if they were editors themselves. So you ended up with this informal and dysfunctional setup with no lines of authority. There were a lot of egos running rampant, because no one was telling anyone what to do.

  “Len and Marv’s primary interest was in being creators, not bosses. When your basic group was Roy and me and Marv and Len as primary writers, and Englehart and Gerber, you have no problems. But once the company started expanding to forty or fifty titles, you had to bring in other people who needed more guidance, and they weren’t getting it. So when I came back, it was chaos. They were missing shipping deadlines all over the place, penalized by the printers, almost to the point of losing the profit margin. And nobody was responsible.”

  Conway was ready to shake things up, to root out the freelancers who were not making deadline. He immediately called the writers he anticipated having trouble with, including Steve Englehart, Wein, and Wolfman, and laid down the rules. Don McGregor, no longer protected by Wolfman’s promise, was immediately removed from the Black Panther strip in Jungle Action. Conway insisted that the decision was purely financial, that poor sales had combined with blown deadlines (and subsequent late fees charged by the printer) to create a money-losing endeavor. “Maybe the Panther would have done equally well with a minuscule print-run and no color,” Conway said, “but that’s not the kind of book we were publishing, and Don just couldn’t sell the kind of book the Panther was.” So Jungle Action was canceled and the Black Panther was given his own title, with Jack Kirby assigned as writer and artist.*

  But Shooter was himself clashing with writers whose scripts he was proofreading—many of whom had been given free rein for years. To his mind, the line was 5 percent magnificence, 95 percent trash. He thought Gerber, McGregor, and Englehart’s stories were indulgent. “I tried to read the ‘good’ stuff,” he said, “and it was complicated and convoluted and didn’t make any sense and wasn’t written in English.”

  He told Tony Isabella to rewrite the climax to a two-year Ghost Rider story line, in which the hero was saved by Jesus Christ, on the grounds that it would be seen as religious propaganda. When Shooter and Englehart had a blowup over a plot inconsistency on finished pages, Englehart mailed circled copies of the original script, pointing out that he’d had it right all along. Conway and Shooter both apologized to Englehart, but the environment had turned inescapably toxic.

  “It was a cesspool of politics and personality issues,” said Conway. “I was not ready for it—just twenty-three years old, and thrust into this morass that had built up in the previous year and a half of chaos.”

  Conway spelled out the protocol in a staff-wide memo dated March 12: “There’s been a problem in the past with communications between the writers and the editorial staff. It should be understood that all the assistant editors are surrogates for the editor, and that my authority is delegated to them on a day to day basis . . . assume that their decis
ions are my decisions.”

  That was it, then. Shooter’s word was final.

  To much of the staff, Conway was an outsider, a DC guy who’d come barreling back into their clubhouse and tried to make up new rules. They stuck together, in their weird way. When a young writer was removed from his book, a member of the production team came to Conway and insisted the writer not be fired.

  “What are you talking about?” Conway demanded. “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a member of our coven!”

  The writer was not given his job back, and Conway’s relationship with the production department was never the same.

  Meanwhile, Conway’s secretary—inherited from Wolfman—refused to do anything but answer fan mail. Conway told her to change her ways or she’d be gone. Then he received a visit from one of his top writers, who happened to be dating the secretary.

  “Gee,” the writer said in measured tones, “my girlfriend’s really unhappy. I really hope you can keep her . . .”

  She stayed.

  Steve Englehart’s latest idea for Doctor Strange was appropriately zany: Strange and his lover/apprentice Clea would be whisked back in time to explore “The Occult History of America,” an adventure that would put them in contact with notable Freemasons like Francis Bacon, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Clea and Benjamin Franklin would have a torrid affair—cuckolding Strange—as they sailed from England to bear witness to the occult-influenced drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Finally, they’d return to the present, where the evil sorcerer Stygro was vampirically feeding off the energy of American patriotism. “It seemed like the thing to do for the bicentennial,” Englehart said.

  But he only made it through two issues. When he missed a deadline on an issue of The Avengers, Conway called to remove him from an assignment, and he snapped. “I found myself in a real sort of schizophrenic thing,” Englehart said, “sitting there sort of watching myself saying, ‘well, then fuck you, I quit.’ And part of me was thinking, ‘Do you realize what you’re doing?’ ”

  Englehart wrote the last eight pages of the delinquent comic in five minutes. “I just said, ‘I’m going to get this out of here,’ and wrote just silly shit. It wasn’t a real Avengers comic book, it was just dialogue for the sake of dialogue.” When the Avengers pages arrived at the Marvel offices, the last panel read, “Dear bullpen: stick it in your ear.—Steve.”

  After half a decade at Marvel, Englehart began writing for DC Comics; his Marvel titles were divvied up between Conway, Wolfman, and Claremont. All three titles suffered from Englehart’s loss.

  Then Jim Starlin called, upset about art corrections on an issue of Warlock, and demanded the opportunity to make changes. Conway refused, on the grounds that the corrections would incur late penalties. Starlin, too, quit.

  Starlin, Englehart, and Alan Weiss got on the phone together and called Stan Lee from California, insisting that he do something about Conway. It shouldn’t have come as too great a surprise to the writers who’d taken such a stance against conformity that Lee would back his editor.

  But Conway was exhausted. “It was like the worst high school dysfunctional mishegoss,” Conway said. “Artists were unhappy, and I had this angry editorial staff. Every decision was fraught. I was nauseous all the time. I couldn’t see my way out of it short of firing everybody. At one point I was ready to do it. ‘Let’s get rid of this entire staff and start over.’ ”

  Instead, he turned in his own resignation. He’d been in the position for less than a month. “It hadn’t occurred to me,” Conway later said, “it would be as horrific as it was.”

  8

  Amid a flat market and an exodus of talent, Archie Goodwin, editor of Marvel’s black-and-white magazines, was drafted to be the fourth editor in chief since Roy Thomas had left twenty months before. Thirty-eight years old, Goodwin was experienced, respected, and beloved by nearly everyone in the industry. Unfortunately, he didn’t really want the job—he’d been perfectly happy working on the magazines—and only accepted it, he said later, because he was afraid to turn down a promotion.

  “Archie was never great in an executive position,” recalled one of his assistants. “He loved to write more than anything, and he loved to edit books, but he did not like doing the business part. Everybody who got that job thought that meant they could do the comics they wanted. They didn’t understand it also involved advertising space, printing bills, and keeping the businessmen who owned the company happy. You had to answer questions about personnel.”

  And managing the personnel was an increasing challenge. In one of his first tasks in the new position, Goodwin helped Stan Lee negotiate Gerry Conway’s outgoing freelance arrangement. Conway would now write and edit a substantial number of comics from home: the pointedly wholesome new projects Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel, plus The Avengers and Captain Marvel (both vacated by an angry Steve Englehart), Ghost Rider (vacated by an angry Tony Isabella), Iron Man (vacated by Goodwin), and The Defenders.*

  Gerber, removed from The Defenders specifically so that Conway could meet his quota, was angry, too; an item in a fanzine even leaked the news that he was leaving Howard the Duck. But he resolved his differences with Marvel—greased by the offer of a writer-editor title of his own—and for Marvel Treasury Edition #12 wrote a final adventure for the Defenders, in which they teamed with Howard. Gerber supplied those who were paying attention with plenty of chewy subtext: the story featured a team of second-rate ne’er-do-wells (“we’re too derivative—too stereotypical—even to make names for ourselves as supervillains!”) whose greatest motivation was, in a nod to the perpetually starstruck Stan Lee, to be “on the cover of next month’s issue of Celebrity.”

  With Starlin and Englehart and McGregor gone, Steve Gerber was the last renegade standing. “I think in most cases,” a stung McGregor told an interviewer, “they’ve weeded out all the mavericks.” Maybe that’s why Stan Lee went to Gerber when a rock manager named Bill Aucoin approached Marvel about producing a comic book starring the band Kiss.

  Kiss frontman Gene Simmons was a lifelong comics fan. He’d known Marv Wolfman through fanzine circles, and based part of his onstage costume on Jack Kirby’s Black Bolt. With a spectacular live act that included pyrotechnics and simulated blood-spitting and fire-breathing, Kiss had finally climbed the album charts after three years of struggling. Now they wanted to be comic-book stars.*

  Gerber didn’t know their music, but after attending a concert with a nonplussed, ear-holding Lee, he agreed to chronicle their adventures. It was a rocky road. At one early meeting, Aucoin’s VP went ballistic when he saw that Kiss were being depicted not as superheroes but as mere musicians. “What the fuck is this?” he shouted as he ripped the pages in half. “If you’re gonna be doing a story, they’re not musicians, they’re superheroes!”

  As negotiations dragged on over the following months, Gerber found himself allied with Kiss management in the pursuit of a higher-quality product than the usual floppy newsprint pamphlet. They demanded that Marvel publish the story in a 1.50 magazine format with hand-separated color; Gerber pushed to use metallic ink for the cover logo, and for Marvel to exchange advertising with rock magazines like Rolling Stone. He involved himself in the design, the typography, the paper stock, the photo selection. As he saw it, high-quality color comic magazines were a way out of the industry free fall—getting Marvel out of the advertising ghetto of Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Spex and You Too Can Draw Timmy the Turtle, appealing to real Madison Avenue advertisers like respectable periodicals did. To draw in Kiss fans not familiar with the Marvel line, he wrote an ad for the inside front cover that shouted, “Welcome to the Marvel Universe!” It was, he proudly pointed out afterward, “the first bit of sophisticated ad copy for itself that the company has ever put before the public.”

  Stan Lee was also interested in ads. At the end of March, he shot a thirty-second television commercial for the Personna Double II twin-blade razor (“Here
at Marvel, I’ve got Spider-Man and all these characters and super villains like Dr. Doom to worry about . . . I can’t waste time worrying about things like shaving!”). Pleased with the results, he dashed off a letter to Marvel’s licensing agent. “I wonder if the basic idea mightn’t be expanded for some other sponsor who might have a big enough budget to really get the most mileage out of it,” Lee wrote. “Additionally, I could mention the ads in our ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ pages, which are printed in more than 75 million Marvel Comics annually. Needless to say, I’d be happy to personally promote the product any way I could. . . . Considering the vast influence and appeal Marvel and I seem to have with today’s so-called ‘youth market,’ it seems a shame not to be harnessing this tremendous asset in areas other than the sale of comic books alone.”

  Lee’s editorial input by now largely consisted of last-minute second-guessing, in which he would grab a pile of makereadies and sit down with Archie Goodwin. With more than a decade of editorial experience, Goodwin had little use for a tedious page-by-page review of which word balloons had crooked pointers. “You know,” Goodwin finally said, “Jim Shooter is actually the guy who does the hands-on editing. You should talk to him.” (Shooter, the perpetual second in command, had briefly quit after Goodwin was named as Conway’s successor, but retracted the resignation before it took effect.)

  Goodwin found the other aspects of the job no more rewarding. Conversations with the executives upstairs were fruitless. In one meeting, the businessmen wondered how to hang on to Marvel’s freelance writers and artists, more and more of whom had been migrating to DC (even Conway had bolted to the competition, only six months into his freelance arrangement). Goodwin suggested profit sharing, health insurance, and the return of artwork. After a three-hour conference about this, the response was not encouraging.