Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  “Why are we talking about giving benefits and royalties to these people?” one of the executives asked Goodwin. “These aren’t employees on the books—they’re people we hire for piecework. They have no loyalty to us.” Goodwin, furious, threw up his hands. After continued conference talks between editorial and Cadence, the most that Marvel could offer its freelancers was royalty payments for reprinted stories—a practice that DC had already instituted, months earlier.

  Cadence wasn’t about to sink more money than it had into keeping freelancers happy. After a letter from Sheldon Feinberg to stockholders cited cover-price increases and lower rates of returned product—but conspicuously omitted mention of newsstand sales—Galton shut down the company’s men’s magazines. The increasingly Playboy-like publications had been in Galton’s sights the moment he arrived on the job—“I’m not a pornographer,” he said—but the threat of unionization from the other magazines was the final nail in the coffin. Celebrity shut down. Stag and Male were sold off to Chip Goodman. After half a century, Magazine Management was nothing but a name.

  Marvel’s handling of the Kiss negotiations was another distressing signal. Skrenes remembered Gerber returning home one evening, devastated by the corporate attitude toward the band’s trademarks. “Kiss just looked like wild and crazy superheroes to them. So Marvel was going to do its own book of characters like the Kiss guys. Like, ‘We have the trademark on weird-looking guys, and these guys are stealing the idea by painting their faces. We’ll just do it ourselves.’ It made no sense.”

  Gerber, ashamed of Marvel, informed Kiss of the scheme; the band threatened the publisher with a lawsuit unless the book proceeded as planned—with Gerber on board. By the time the matter was settled, Gerber had negotiated for himself something unheard-of at Marvel, something not even Jack Kirby—nor Stan Lee—had managed: a royalty.

  Gerber, of course, had gotten none of the residuals or merchandising action on Howard the Duck. “I’m the most famous duck writer in the world, and I’m going broke,” Gerber told a magazine interviewer, who pointed out that anyone who’d invested in twenty copies of Howard #1 made more than the four hundred dollars that Gerber (“who lives in Manhattan’s unglamourous Hell’s Kitchen and sublets a shabbily furnished office in a dreary midtown building”) had been paid to write it.

  A royalty was more than just a symbolic victory for Gerber, but the thrill was gone. He couldn’t believe that Marvel would be so stupid as to try to duplicate Kiss, and squander the advantage of the publicity of one of the most popular acts in the country. Even worse was the disillusionment he now felt toward Lee, his boss and hero. “I don’t know if Stan knew about this, or was forced into it,” said Skrenes. “But I knew Steve’s life was never going to be the same.”

  While Gerber finished the Kiss project, Lee and the band flew in a DC9 to Buffalo, where they got a police escort to a printing plant. Lee smiled as they mixed samples of their blood into the ink supply and cameras flashed. (Bill Aucoin later claimed that the blood mistakenly ended up in an issue of Sports Illustrated.)

  Gerber was simultaneously at work on a syndicated Howard the Duck newspaper strip, and trying to keep up with deadlines on the monthly Howard book, and a Howard annual, and packing up his Hell’s Kitchen apartment and preparing a move to Skrenes’s hometown of Las Vegas. It proved to be more than he could handle. Howard the Duck #16, conceived in desperation as he drove cross-country, was seventeen pages of Howard illustrations by various artists, set to thousands of words of text by Gerber about the difficulty of his deadlines. There were imaginary conversations between Gerber and Howard, a downbeat short story about domesticity (followed by a negative self-critique of the story), and a scenario in which “outraged Marvelites” forced Howard and Gerber into a whirring machine that produced jars of “Gerber Strained Brains”; pictures of production manager and deadline taskmaster John Verpoorten lurked on various pages. At the conclusion was a typed letter of comment on the issue: “What I did not like was your self-conscious self-effacement throughout the story,” the third paragraph began. “Okay, so maybe you’ll never grow up to be another Tom Robbins or Thomas Pynchon . . . your material may always consist more of invective than inventiveness. . . . Come on, Gerber! Get with it!”

  The letter was signed, “Steve Gerber.”

  Before leaving New York for Los Angeles, Roy Thomas had been approached by a marketing consultant who’d tried, and failed, to convince Stan Lee that Marvel should adapt an upcoming science-fiction film that was in production in Algeria. After looking at pre-production sketches, Thomas agreed to appeal to Lee.

  Ed Shukin, the circulation director, was skeptical. It was a cast of mostly unknowns, and the deal called for a six-issue adaptation; the third issue would be on stands before the movie even opened. It was, he thought, an unnecessary risk at a time when Marvel’s sales were in free fall. But there was one recent shift in the company’s strategy that worked in Thomas’s favor: what seemed to most interest Lee and Jim Galton lately was shoring up copyrights and brand names (hence the creations of Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel) and creating relationships with Hollywood. In the span of months, Marvel licensed the rights for Hanna-Barbera cartoons, science-fiction films (Logan’s Run; 2001), Godzilla, Edgar Rice Burroughs characters (Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars), and even a real-life costumed stuntman from Montreal (The Human Fly). Maybe they could take a chance on this, too. After all, Thomas had been right about Conan the Barbarian.

  Thomas won his argument, and Marvel prepared its adaptation of Star Wars.

  Meanwhile, titles with original characters, like Iron Fist, The Inhumans, Black Goliath, and Omega the Unknown, were canceled. Gerber and Skrenes had planned ahead the next two years of Omega the Unknown, in which the extraterrestrial hero experienced various human weaknesses—addictions to alcohol, gambling, and women—and which would reveal his link to James-Michael Starling. The final issue before cancellation brought Omega to Las Vegas and ended with the announcement that the story would be continued in an issue of The Defenders. It never happened. “They said they wanted new ideas,” Skrenes recalled. “But when you gave them something new they said, ‘but what is it like?’ ”

  Jack Kirby—who recognized similarities between his Fourth World creations (Mark Moonrider, Darkseid, and the Source) and elements of Star Wars (Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and the Force)—also had ideas to spare. The contract he’d signed with Marvel called for him to essentially package entire comic books independently, choosing who would ink his work, and getting no interference from the New York office. “Once Jack came in,” said Gerry Conway, “the attitude Stan had was, ‘If Jack wants to be his own boss, that’s what he’s going to be. Just leave him to himself.’ So that was Jack’s own corner.”

  Kirby’s The Eternals was another variation on the ancient-aliens-visited-earth themes that had also informed his creations of the Kree in Fantastic Four and the New Gods for DC. But Marvel was more interested in Kirby building on his old ideas, and there was editorial pressure for Kirby to include references to S.H.I.E.L.D., and the Thing and the Hulk. “We felt, or maybe Stan felt, it should have been connecting more with other books,” Archie Goodwin said of Kirby’s Captain America. “We wanted Jack to use some of the villains that were current in other books so the kids reading this book would read Avengers, and the kids reading Avengers would read this book. . . . I guess we figured it could only help sales. But Jack said he didn’t want to do it.” Kirby roundly ignored the story lines that directly preceded his own; he made almost no reference, in fact, to anything that had happened in Marvel’s history.

  The hermetic distance that Kirby tried to keep from the rest of the Marvel Universe caused some problems. In Captain America, assistant editor Roger Stern had to rewrite a Kirby reference to a flying saucer being “the first alien space craft ever to visit the Earth,” a description that would discount scores of Marvel adventures and not a few of the characters. Rumors circulated that the Captain America lette
rs pages, which were edited in the New York office, had been intentionally tilted toward negative feedback—some of it fabricated by members of the staff.*

  Steve Lemberg, the music-biz entrepreneur who’d secured exclusive television and movie rights for the Marvel characters, never got further than the Carnegie Hall show and the Spider-Man rock record. Out in California, Motown’s Berry Gordy took an interest in Lemberg’s plans and set up several meetings with movie studios, but there was one problem that everyone kept stumbling over: budgets. “They did not have the technology to make the film we wanted to make,” Lemberg said. “It would have cost a fortune.”

  Cadence Industries’ legal team eventually managed to extricate Marvel from Lemberg’s open-ended options. “There are still companies . . . which have rights of first refusal,” read one strategic memo, “but we won’t let that delay us any longer.” Marvel sold Steve Krantz the rights to film live-action Spider-Man and Hulk movies, and a former Hollywood executive named Dan Goodman bought the rights for television in 1976. As the low-budget pilot was prepared for CBS with independent producer Chuck Fries, Lee found that his input was not encouraged. “I was supposedly the consultant,” he said, “but they really didn’t listen to me very much.”

  Shortly afterward, Frank Price, the new head of Universal television, asked his son about the green monster on his sweatshirt, and decided that the Incredible Hulk would make good television. For $12,500, he secured the live-action television rights to twelve Marvel characters of his choice; as both Dan Goodman and Chuck Fries had done, Price took his pitch to CBS, preparing life-sized cardboard cutouts of the characters—including Doctor Strange, Captain America, the Human Torch, Ms. Marvel, and the Sub-Mariner—and arranging them around the network’s conference room. CBS agreed to finance two-hour pilots of eight of them, and in a matter of months The Incredible Hulk joined Spider-Man in production. For the first time in a decade, Marvel would be transmitted into American living rooms. Hopefully, the children in those living rooms would then buy some comic books.

  Just in time, lifelines were being thrown to Marvel. The phenomenal success of the Star Wars movie translated into a sales bonanza for the tie-in comics, which went into multiple printings and pulled the company out of its immediate financial straits. On the heels of that triumph, the Kiss special sold more than half a million copies—unprecedented for a $1.50 comic publication. “For a while,” Gerber said, “they had one drawer for Kiss mail, and another drawer for all the fan mail on all the other Marvel books.”

  There was also a lot of mail for The X-Men, for the first time in years. Claremont and Cockrum had carved out a corner of the Marvel Universe that was perfect for the blockbuster age, filled with plane, boat, and rocket ship crashes, and gleaming high-tech space odysseys that fell into place just as Star Wars fever started. But The X-Men had something else that played against the spectacle: intimacy. In their two years of collaboration, Claremont and Cockrum had already carefully defined their characters with familiar catchphrases, nicknames, and sound effects that would eventually turn into something like secret passwords for fans: “Mein Gott,” “fastball special,” “bub,” “muties,” “Elf,” “Bamf,” “Snikt!” Although the members of the X-Men were hardheaded individualists with diverse backgrounds, many of them flummoxed by American culture, they slowly came together as a surrogate family for one another. If Gerber’s Defenders were, as he’d said, an encounter group, Claremont and Cockrum’s X-Men were the members of a halfway house, where everyone tried to figure out how to live in close quarters without letting their emotional baggage get in the way.

  It seemed that every issue brought major changes in the X-Men: death, departure, reunions, new costumes. But the biggest transformation was that of Jean Grey, aka Marvel Girl, who under Lee and Thomas had been a girly goof, the weak link of the team. “I don’t want to say anything bad against Stan,” Cockrum said, “but when he was creating the characters of the early ’60s, all the girl characters he created were simps—the housewife heroes . . . they were there to be looked at and rescued, mostly.”

  And so Claremont and Cockrum proceeded to turn Marvel Girl into Phoenix, the most powerful female superhero in comics. After Jean Grey was believed dead in a plane crash, she reemerged with more power than she knew what to do with.* She had tapped into “the phoenix-force . . . a manifestation of a primal force of the universe which derives from the psyches of all living beings in the universe, and which therefore has limitless power.” Pretty soon she’d be blasting foes twelve miles away and opening portals into other worlds.

  Claremont began drawing on his own interest in the occult and religion*—when an insane space emperor attempted to destroy the universe with something called the M’Kraan Crystal,* Phoenix partook in cosmic kabbalah tree-of-life rituals to defeat him. The X-Men was now the closest thing Marvel Comics had to the glorious mind-fryings of Englehart’s Doctor Strange or Starlin’s Warlock, only a year in the past but worlds away from the new, kid-friendly Marvel of Nova and Godzilla and Dynomutt.

  Cockrum loved working on the book—and especially on the swashbuckling Nightcrawler, whom he considered an alter ego of sorts—but once he joined the Marvel staff as a cover designer, even the bimonthly pace of The X-Men was a struggle to maintain. When Marvel decided that the title was selling well enough to go on a monthly schedule, Claremont’s friend John Byrne began licking his chops: “I made it known at Marvel,” he said, “that men would die if Cockrum ever left it and it didn’t come to me.”

  Jim Shooter had seen how well Byrne worked with Claremont and pushed them together on the Spider-Man-plus-a-monthly-guest comic Marvel Team-Up. When Iron Fist was canceled and combined with Power Man (the new name for black badass Luke Cage) in the black-and-white-buddies book Power Man and Iron Fist, Byrne and Claremont took over the art on that as well.

  The speedy Byrne added The Champions and a few issues of The Avengers to his workload (Marvel Team-Up and Power Man) while he circled around an irritated Cockrum, who’d gotten wind of his intentions. “John was the heir apparent to that book and he was panting to take it over,” Cockrum said. “But every time he came to the Marvel offices, he pissed everybody off. I stayed on a little longer just to aggravate him.” Even after he left the book, Cockrum continued drawing X-Men covers, just to annoy Byrne.

  After introducing the Shi’ar Imperial Army and the Starjammers—he later estimated drawing more than fifty individual characters in his final issue—Cockrum finally left in the middle of 1977, exhausted and behind deadline. John Byrne was happy to step in.

  As the writer and editor of Amazing Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, and Thor, four of Marvel’s biggest titles, Len Wein should have felt on top of the world. But he was quibbling with John Verpoorten, going into a rage over such minor details as, say, which letterers were being hired. He was challenging Chris Claremont and Tony Isabella on the way they used characters borrowed from his titles. “I had become obsessively involved with the books,” Wein recalled. “I was watching my books with such a hawk-like eye that I had no sense of perspective on this stuff anymore.” He arranged to write Detective Comics for DC. It wasn’t expressly forbidden in his contract; still, when Archie Goodwin and Stan Lee found out, they told him he’d have to write Detective under a pseudonym. DC begrudgingly agreed. But after a long weekend of thought, Wein decided “it was a lot simpler to make a clean break of it, and start all over, than to sit there working for both companies and have nobody like me. My emotional make-up is just fragile enough that I couldn’t cope with that for very long. So I came back to Marvel the following day and told Archie that I was going to leave.”

  Stan Lee didn’t take the news well. He told Wein that he would never again work for Marvel.

  If Kiss could sell, thought David Anthony Kraft, why not the Beatles? “Everyone was for it,” Kraft said, “except for Jim Galton, who had to approve it, because it was such a high-profile, expensive project, and he just didn’t get that the Beatles
were the Beatles.”

  Lee called Kraft into a meeting in Galton’s office and instructed him to make the pitch. “I had long hair and I wore a black leather motorcycle jacket,” Kraft recalled, “and my knees hung out of my jeans. Even though there were three of us in that meeting, Galton would say to Stan, ‘Weren’t the Beatles sort of like the Monkees?’ and Stan would say to me, ‘Dave, explain that.’ And I’d respond, and then Stan would respond, and then Galton would respond to what I said to Stan without ever making eye contact or addressing me.”

  Kraft stopped by Lee’s office afterward and announced that he was going to give himself a makeover to see if he could penetrate Galton’s corporate filters. By Monday, he declared, he’d be wearing a three-piece suit and a new haircut. With characteristic enthusiasm, Lee cheerily told Kraft where to shop: Saks, Barneys, Bloomingdale’s. “Lo and behold, when I had meetings following that, I just had meetings with Galton, not even Stan, and he could see and hear me, and everything. It made such a sensation. I remember Marie Severin following me around the office, effusive: ‘If only more people would do this . . .’ ”

  Jim Shooter, who as associate editor regularly met with Lee to review makereadies, also started dressing up. Gone were short-sleeve shirts with T-shirts showing from underneath, replaced by long sleeves and ties. Although Lee appreciated the wardrobe upgrade, his relationship with Shooter was rocky at first, owing to the problems he kept finding in the flood of comic product.

  “The fourth or fifth time around,” Shooter said, “we’re still seeing the same kinds of problems, and now he’s starting to think I’m a moron, and explaining it to me in one syllable words. Don’t. Let. Them. Do. This. I’m like, ‘Stan, there’s just so much I can do. I’m doing everything I can.’ And I’m trying not to throw Archie under the bus—because he won’t fire these people.”