Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  Intending to return the Fantastic Four to the mood and style of Lee and Kirby’s first twenty issues, John Byrne was confident enough in his powers that he led off with the returns of the villains Diablo—seldom seen since 1964, and bad-mouthed even by co-creator Stan Lee—and the majestic-but-ridiculous Ego, the Living Planet. Then he worked up to Dr. Doom, the Inhumans, and Galactus. He revived the inclusion of pinups and broke his issues down into chapters, just like Lee and Kirby had. Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm started to feel like a kind of family again, like they hadn’t in years. Byrne removed the superhero bulk from their bodies, giving their costumes a baggy appearance. But the little ways in which Byrne tweaked the mythology (relocating the Inhumans from the Andes to the moon, for instance, or planning to kill Franklin Richards, the young son of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Girl) didn’t sit well with past writers, like Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, who openly criticized Byrne.*

  And the new Fantastic Four riled Jack Kirby as well, for a different reason. The title celebrated its twentieth anniversary with the triple-sized #236, which Shooter had directed Byrne to write as a grand adventure, as if it were Fantastic Four: The Movie. Stan Lee had his own idea to make the issue extra special: He’d rework some Kirby storyboards from DePatie-Freleng’s Fantastic Four cartoon series—which had itself been adapted from FF #5—into a fourteen-page backup story.

  But the repurposing was done without Kirby’s permission or remuneration. “Some friend of John Byrne’s called,” he recounted, “and asked if I would do something for the 20th anniversary issue. I said no. So they took the roughs I did for DePatie and put six inkers on it. I didn’t know anything about it until the goddamn thing was published.”*

  His lawyer knew, though, and told Marvel not to use Kirby’s name in conjunction with the project. When the issue was published, the cover blared an all-new ff blockbuster by stan (the man) and jack (king) kirby! The illustration showed the Fantastic Four surrounded by three dozen colorful Marvel characters—and Stan Lee. Between Lee and the Silver Surfer was a white space, where Byrne’s depiction of Jack Kirby had been removed.

  Steve Gerber, Kirby’s colleague at Ruby-Spears, approached the veteran artist and explained that he was having his own legal troubles with Marvel. After talking about the various injustices propagated by their former employer, Gerber told Kirby about a new project he was working on to raise money for the Howard the Duck lawsuit. It was called Destroyer Duck. Nervously, he asked Kirby if he’d be willing to draw the comic—for no pay. Kirby rubbed his chin for a minute. Then he smiled, very slightly.

  “Yeah,” he said, “sounds like fun.”

  11

  When Frank Miller took over Daredevil, he told interviewers that his interpretation was going to be more lighthearted than Roger McKenzie’s had been. But as the femme fatale Elektra became a recurring character, that vision was bound to change. “Her presence led the whole series down a very dark path,” Miller said years later. “Because I was a kid in my twenties, and making up a sexy killer woman, it was bound to get pretty grim.” Miller had also been mugged—twice—since starting the series, which further added to the title’s grittiness. “I never stopped loving the city. But having a knife in your face can really change your day. The experience filled me with anger, and that translated right into my comics.”* Daredevil became heavily concerned, and filled, with violence. After Miller read about a woman who was going into movie theaters and shoving ice picks into the necks of the patrons seated in front of her, Elektra carried out an assassination in similar style. “I like to play into very daily fears,” he said. “Why else do stories on subways?”

  The body count was high in Daredevil, with a scuzzy New York City at the flashpoint of two inherently bloody genres. There was a mob story, precipitated by the return of the old Spider-Man villain the Kingpin—suddenly a scary presence for the first time—and there was a ninja story, prompted by Elektra’s emergence. Miller had spent long hours watching martial arts films in boisterous Times Square theaters, an experience he compared to “attending a revival meeting.” He synthesized his fascination with ninja lore into comics that would add further fuel to the burgeoning craze of Japanese martial arts. The kung-fu movies of the early ’70s had already given exposure to nunchaku—two sticks connected by a chain—and just before Elektra’s debut, the Eric Van Lustbader novel The Ninja and the Chuck Norris movie The Octagon were surprise hits. But Miller, as much as anyone, was responsible for adding shuriken (throwing stars) and sai to the contraband wish lists of junior high school kids everywhere.

  Miller quickly discovered one of the benefits of taking control of an under-the-radar title with minimal merchandising tie-ins: he could get away with a lot. By the time sales were approaching those of The X-Men, no one—not even Daredevil’s vocally pacifist editor, Denny O’Neil—was going to pull him back now. And so Daredevil wondered if he should let the murderous Bullseye die on subway tracks; he went from dive bar to dive bar, Popeye Doyleing the unlucky bottom-feeders of the underworld; he tracked down a rapist at an S&M club and beat on leather-outfitted bondage fans. He teamed up with reformed supervillain the Gladiator, only to find that the Gladiator’s loss of a killer instinct was a detriment. On the other hand, there was always the sense that Daredevil—“probably the most Christian of heroes,” to Miller’s mind—operated out of a sense of compassion for victims, and that Matt Murdock believed in the goodness of the legal system. If the comic’s stance on vigilantism was confusing, Daredevil’s dastardly supporting cast allowed Miller to have it both ways by making Daredevil’s barrage of kicks and punches look reasonable in comparison. The psychotic Bullseye and the poor-little-rich-girl Elektra were both unrepentant assassins; the Kingpin was an elegant, bald, 450-pound mobster who wore ascots and plotted crimes from a skyscraper. Even the antihero Punisher, who’d been popping up in various comics for years, showed up to provide contrast to Daredevil’s relatively innocuous beatdowns.

  Miller played Matt Murdock’s law partner, Foggy Nelson, for klutzy comic relief, and portrayed Murdock’s girlfriend, Heather Glenn, as a slightly unhinged party girl. If there was a moral center of the comic, it was Ben Urich, a coffee-guzzling, chain-smoking beat reporter for the Daily Bugle who’d learned that Matt Murdock was Daredevil—but who decided he’d rather have a guardian for his city than a Pulitzer for his mantel. Urich was frail, potbellied, and wore big, square glasses that gave him a Larry King quality; a scene in which he lovingly leaned over his frumpy wife and tickled her, ready for making love, may have been the most jarringly human in Marvel’s history.

  But it was Elektra who gripped Daredevil’s readers. Miller had used Lisa Lyon, a professional bodybuilder and Robert Mapplethorpe muse, as a model for Elektra; like her inspiration, Elektra blended athleticism and sex in a way that young men couldn’t resist. Miller knew how popular Elektra was—and how catastrophic it would be for his audience if something happened to her.

  “When I told Denny that Elektra was going to get killed,” Miller said, “he was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how Jim is going to feel about that. She’s more popular than Daredevil now.’ And I went down to Jim’s office—he was working on some papers—and I said, ‘I have a story, and I need to kill Elektra.’ And he sort of sunk his face in his hands and said, ‘Tell me the story, Frank.’ And I told him what I had in mind, and he said, ‘That’s great. Do it.’ ”

  When the 1981 San Diego Comic-Con kicked off in the last week of July, Miller had just put the finishing touches on an issue that devoted four pages to nearly wordless fighting between Elektra and Bullseye on Sixth Avenue. Their confrontation ended when he impaled her with her own weapon; she crawled to Matt Murdock and died in his arms.

  With no idea what was in store, the blissfully unaware audience at the Comic-Con instead celebrated Elektra’s triumph in the latest, all-ninja-battle issue of Daredevil, obsessed over the marital strife of Yellowjacket and the Wasp in The Avengers, and pored over Magneto’s
return in the new double-sized issue of The X-Men. The shocking revelation that the X-Men’s silver-haired archenemy had been a child prisoner at Auschwitz ramped up the title’s long-present themes of bigotry and persecution and pointed to the direction that The X-Men would take for the decades to come, in which discrimination toward mutant characters was put explicitly in the contexts of racism and homophobia. In the Marvel Universe, “Mutie” became a regularly uttered epithet, bigotry bloomed, and the X-Men became increasingly paranoid about their place in the world.

  By and large, the X-Men stories in the year since the “Dark Phoenix Saga” had paled in comparison to what had come before. The old hands who weren’t writing The X-Men were all too happy to point out that its sales had surpassed its aesthetic achievement, and that it benefited from a lack of other exciting options. If The X-Men had been published in the mid–1970s, Steve Englehart insisted in interviews, it wouldn’t have been such a phenomenon. “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” sniffed Roy Thomas. It was a dedicated kingdom, though: according to Diana Schutz, a manager at the now-closed Comics & Comix store in Berkeley, California, “People were buying case lots of X-Men. Two, three hundred copies. Some people were buying two lots, for investment purposes.” Appearances by Man-Thing, Spider-Woman, Dazzler, and Doctor Doom reestablished the X-Men’s ties with the rest of the Marvel Universe, but there was also the nagging feeling that those crossovers were just meant to jump-start sales of less popular characters. Or maybe something was just being held back. Dave Cockrum created an amphibious heroine named Silkie, and then retracted the character when he couldn’t negotiate to retain partial ownership. He had a whole group of new heroes, he said—but they’d remain his now.

  At the weekend’s end, on the way back to Los Angeles from San Diego, Miller and Claremont were stuck in traffic for two hours. A conversation about Wolverine—a character about whom Miller had previously expressed disinterest—shifted into talk about their mutual appreciation of samurai movies and manga. By the time they’d reached their destination, they’d begun plotting a story for a four-issue Wolverine series.

  Shortly after Claremont got back to New York, he learned that someone else wanted to use idle X-Men characters. Tom DeFalco, noticing that the multiple Spider-Man titles had sustained strong sales, had pitched Shooter on a sort of West Coast X-Men comic, which would include original members like Angel, Iceman, and Beast. Claremont and Louise Jones headed it off at the pass. “I wanted to handle it. I didn’t want anybody else poaching,” Claremont said. “[We] basically said, ‘Screw that, we’ll do our own X-title.’ ” It would return the focus to Lee and Kirby’s vision of a school for young mutants. They said, only half-jokingly, that it would be called The X-Babies.

  Now Claremont was operating a virtual X-Men franchise: in addition to the Wolverine and X-Babies projects, there were two graphic novels in the works, and a one-issue X-Men/Teen Titans joint venture between Marvel and DC, to be drawn by Louise Jones’s husband, Walter Simonson. There was one corner of the X-universe he wouldn’t be handling, though: Jim Shooter was pressuring John Byrne to launch a series starring the Canadian super-team Alpha Flight.

  By the time Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends hit Saturday morning TV in the fall, it seemed like it was going to be leading a parade of shows and movies. Thor had joined Silver Surfer in development at Universal Pictures; Ghost Rider and Man-Wolf were optioned by Dino De Laurentiis, Daredevil and Howard the Duck by Selluloid Productions. A Fantastic Four film was in talks, as were Black Widow and X-Men television series. Now that Urban Cowboy had replaced Saturday Night Fever as the zeitgeist soundtrack of choice, Marvel Productions was trying to sell Hollywood on a country singer named “Denim Blue.” There was a Spider-Man musical in the works, and a Captain America musical, in which a paunchy, balding, middle-aged man was transformed by the “Spirit of Liberty” into Captain America. Galton didn’t mind the changes. “We poke fun at ourselves all the time,” he reasoned.

  Captain America’s co-creator, Jack Kirby, was doing some poking himself. As he finished work on Destroyer Duck, the comic that would raise money for Steve Gerber’s legal battle with Marvel, he gave an interview in which the full extent of his vitriol toward the industry came to light. He dismissed Marvel’s and DC’s comics as “ads for toys,” characterized work-for-hire as “everything that comes out of you, they own,” and gave his surprising account of the early 1960s Marvel Comics: “I wrote them all.”

  “I never wrote the credits. Let’s put it that way, all right?” he said. “I would never call myself ‘Jolly Jack.’ I would never say the books were written by Lee. I did a mess of things. The only book I didn’t work on was Spider-Man, which was my creation. The Hulk was my creation.”

  For many in the comics community, it was a fiercely worded affirmation of what they’d heard murmurs of for years—that Stan Lee had hogged the credit, and that Jack Kirby had been hung out to dry. But creating Spider-Man? Even Kirby’s staunchest supporters were perplexed. Had he been bottling up so much anger that he was exploding beyond reason?

  Destroyer Duck fed off Kirby’s anger, and Gerber’s. It told the story of Duke, a war veteran whose drinking buddy (an unnamed but thinly disguised Howard the Duck) disappears, only to return on his doorstep years later, bloody and dying. He’d been transported “into another space-time continuum . . . where ducks can’t talk . . . and pink primates call all the shots . . . I was broke, starving . . . I signed on with this company . . . Entertainment Concepts, Ltd! Division of GodCorp . . . that world’s biggest corporation . . . they said they’d make me a star . . . exploit my curiosity value . . . but all they did was humiliate me.” Duke travels to the faraway world, and exacts revenge on GodCorp, whose motto is “GRAB IT ALL OWN IT ALL DRAIN IT ALL.” It wasn’t hard to see that GodCorp was a stand-in.

  When Stan Lee was asked about the controversy over creator ownership, he pointed to his own contributions. “I’ve created a number of characters for Marvel that have been successful, but when I created them, I knew they were the property of the company. That was the understanding; that had always been the procedure. For me to suddenly start saying, ‘Wait a minute, I wrote that, I’m going to sue,’ to my way of thinking, that would be dishonest. I had the right to leave at any time and if I felt I was so good I could create characters and make a fortune, I had every right to do it. And I think any artist or writer who doesn’t want to work for us doesn’t have to sign the contract, he’s perfectly welcome to, with no hard feelings.” He offered his own disclaimer. “I’m probably the quintessential, ultimate company man,” he said. “I think it is very hard for me to separate my own feelings from those of the company.”

  John Byrne went a step further, in an infamous editorial published in the same magazine as Jack Kirby’s interview: “I have, of late, taken on the mantle of a ‘company man,’ and in many ways I am deserving of the title. Even proud. I am a cog in the machine which is Marvel Comics, and I rejoice in that.” He even criticized Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for suing DC over Superman. “I’m all in favor of campaigning for changing the rules, but let’s live within the rules while they’re around.” Gerber and Kirby promptly paid tribute in the second issue of Destroyer Duck: the character of Booster Cogburn—as in “Cog-Byrne”—had a removable spine and declared, “I’m a company man . . . I’m not paid to have opinions.”

  While Marvel was making deals with Hollywood, though, DC had beaten them to the punch by introducing a royalty plan for comic creators: after 100,000 copies of a title were sold, DC’s policy stated, 4 percent of profits would be split between artist and writer. Marvel scrambled to match the terms, rolling out a similar announcement in the final days of 1981. The company was careful to avoid the word royalty; as internal communication between its lawyers stated, “most definitions of that word contain language which indicated that it is a payment to an ‘owner’ or ‘author’ for use of his work. Indeed, the derivation of the word is that of royal status or the p
rivilege of a monarch or sovereign.” Thus, in future company correspondence, such monies were always referred to as “incentives.”

  Still, with The X-Men selling over 300,000 copies a month, several other titles selling over 200,000, and almost everything else selling over the 100,000 mark, champagne spilled at typewriters and drawing boards. Marvel had to renege on a few raises it had just given to the most successful writers and artists, but the creators didn’t mind. They’d hit paydirt.

  Meanwhile, Elektra’s demise, in Daredevil #181, provoked fulminations and death threats from fans—Miller, scared for his life, marched into an FBI office with a selection of mail from angry readers—and, just as Phoenix’s death had, record-breaking sales. The issue was on newsstands just as the new incentives policy kicked in. Two weeks later, Marvel’s first graphic novel—Starlin’s The Death of Captain Marvel—was finally published; ten times more expensive than a regular monthly comic, it quickly sold out of three printings, and Jim Starlin made a tidy sum and bought himself a new Camaro Z28. (Marvel would hold on to its trademark, though—there were already plans to bring back a new character named Captain Marvel.) Shortly after that, Chris Claremont was asked about the Wolverine series. “It’s me and Frank Miller and [inker] Josef Rubinstein,” he said, “and we’re going to make lots of money.”