Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  “We said, ‘Why would you do this?’

  “Shooter said, ‘A lot of the stuff we’re producing today really isn’t of the high quality we want it to be.’

  “We said, ‘Yeah, but we’re gonna be using the same people! It’s not like we can do a big bang for our creative staff.’ At that point we had twenty years of continuity, so we’d start fresh—but in four or five years it would be just as complicated anyway. You’d have to be constantly rebooting everything. Why bother?”

  Doug Moench heard it this way: “Donald Blake would be killed, but someone else would find the walking stick and become the new Thor. So instead of Thor being a doctor, now Thor would be a plumber or whatever. Steve Rogers would die, but an investment banker would become the new Captain America. I said, ‘This is crazy! We can’t do this!’ And Shooter insisted that it was going to be done. Peter Parker would be killed, and someone else would get bitten by another spider, and so on. I kept ignoring it; Shooter kept pushing it. It got to the point where the editors were calling me, assistant editors, including Ralph Macchio and Mark Gruenwald. But all of them were afraid of Shooter. They’d seen me in the Marvel offices having epic battles, in which I would just bellow at the guy. I was, I guess, the only one who fought back against him. Everybody else felt cowed and didn’t want to risk getting fired or whatever. I just didn’t give a shit and I hated the guy so much.”

  In August 1982, Moench was writing Thor, Moon Knight, and Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu. Thor was mediocre—he’d later grumble that Gruenwald hadn’t allowed him to handle it the way he wanted to—but Moon Knight and Master of Kung Fu were exceptional. After years with a reputation as a Neal Adams clone, Moon Knight artist Bill Sienkiewicz had hit his stride, seemingly every issue displaying a wider range of influences and styles: Ralph Steadman was in there, and Bob Peak, and Gustav Klimt. Editor Denny O’Neil kept trying to bring Moon Knight closer to Batman territory, but Moench and Sienkiewicz kept delivering delicious psychodrama. Master of Kung Fu was also reaching new heights. Over the past decade writing the title, Moench had fruitful collaborations with artists Paul Gulacy and Mike Zeck, each of them helping him nudge the title from chop-socky hokum to sleek espionage adventure, each providing exciting page designs in the tradition of Steranko and Starlin. But the third time was the charm. Moench found his dream partner in Gene Day.

  Renowned for his unconventional page layouts and for his punishing work habits (“He works eight hours,” reported inker Joe Rubinstein, “never leaves the table, has his brother there to bring him coffee, eats, gets back to work for eight hours”), Day was by all accounts a wholly dedicated Marvel employee who held no grudges about work-for-hire terms. He and Moench threw themselves fully into their work on Master of Kung Fu, resulting in the title’s artistic ascendancy.

  Unfortunately, Master of Kung Fu wasn’t selling terrifically. It was still making a profit—just about everything Marvel published was, now—but it was on the lower rungs, and Shooter felt that it had fallen into a rut. He was unhappy with Day’s atypical approach to visual storytelling and regularly ordered pages redrawn. Soon, even the committed Day couldn’t hack it anymore. In what he called “one of the most traumatic experiences in my life,” he quit the title. Shooter phoned Moench and said that sales had been piddling for a long time, and that he wanted “drastic, sweeping changes” to the title.

  The Comics Buyer’s Guide ran an interview with Moench, explaining why he’d quit Marvel Comics after eight years of continuous service. Jim Shooter, he said, had told him to kill the cast of Thor—Thor’s alter ego Don Blake, and all the inhabitants of Asgard. That didn’t sound like a good idea, Moench said in the interview, but that wasn’t the deal-breaker. Shooter had also offered him a number of ways to handle Master of Kung Fu. Fu Manchu, the villain, would be removed. So would the hero. “I could kill off Shang-Chi, or replace him with a ninja, or turn him into a villain like Fu Manchu, and perhaps have a ninja hero try to bring him to justice. . . . Jim also suggested that I kill off the entire supporting cast. . . . I have spent years with these characters. I love them. I told Jim I couldn’t kill them. He told me I could go ahead and try to give the book a new direction without killing them, but he said, ‘I doubt it will work.’ ” By the end of the phone call, Moench’s eight years of service to Marvel Comics had come to an end. When Bill Sienkiewicz got the news, he decided it was time for him to leave Moon Knight, too.

  Marvel addressed the controversy surrounding the “Big Bang” proposal at a September press conference. According to Moench, Shooter got up in front of a group of reporters and dismissed his claim as “an allegation by a disgruntled former employee.” But the twist of the knife, Moench said, was that “sitting right next to him were Ralph Macchio and Mark Gruenwald and all the other editors—and not one of them said a peep. They’d been calling me, begging me: ‘You’ve got to stop him from doing this!’ They let Jim Shooter lie, and call me a liar in the process.”

  Although articles reported that freelancers as well as editorial staff members had confirmed, off the record, the existence of a “Bang List” that included low-selling titles like Master of Kung Fu, Thor, and the Defenders, the official Marvel response remained adamant and definite. “I never told anyone to kill anyone,” said Shooter. “Not Tony Stark, not Don Blake, not anyone else.” Mark Gruenwald, reached for comment by Comics Feature, promised that Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America were safe. “None of them or their supporting characters are going to die,” he said. “It’s not true. I can firmly say that Shooter never said to kill the characters. He said to be creative, do things that people won’t expect. Doug Moench and Jim Shooter always had creative differences.”

  Everyone passed the buck. “Jim had an idea that he wanted to make some changes in some of the books with Kung-Fu and Spider-Woman being the first two,” Comics Scene quoted Ralph Macchio as saying. “Jim wanted to make changes and as the editor it was my job to carry them through.” Shooter, meanwhile, emphasized that Macchio’s displeasure with the comics’ direction had opened the discussion. He also slightly revised his claim about never telling Moench to kill characters. “When I was talking about ‘wholesale slaughter,’ ” he said, “I was having trouble making myself clear to Doug. I said, ‘I’m trying to tell you there are no limits. . . . Get rid of them, keep them all . . . I don’t care, just do something different.’ ”

  While the back-and-forth played out in the press, Moench began working, like so many before him, for DC Comics. “The only thing that stopped this thing from happening,” Moench said later, “was when Stan Lee read this stuff. And Stan put the brakes on it. To this day, a lot of people still think I’m crazy and made the whole thing up.”*

  Chris Claremont understood Moench’s struggle. “He had been writing Master of Kung Fu for eight or nine years, and had come to view the characters as very real people—as friends. And he was being asked to do something to them that would have disoriented the whole concept of the book and the characters. It would have destroyed them for him. It would have destroyed these people within whom Doug had invested, I think, time, effort, friendship, and caring. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t step back and be this emotionless god; he was part of the book, rather than being apart from it.”

  Maybe turning Captain America into an investment banker really was, as Shooter told one interviewer, “a rhetorical example.” And anyway, according to Tom DeFalco, the idea had been abandoned by the time the fanzines got wind of it. But all the elements of the controversy—the idea that someone would even consider sabotaging Marvel’s sacred characters; the reminder that tension still existed behind the curtain of the creative process; the obvious fact that someone was lying—provided something for every armchair prognosticator, every self-appointed expert, every fan, to channel into outrage. And the situation was about to get worse.

  On the morning of September 22, Gene Day died of a heart attack at age thirty-one, only a few months after leaving Master of Kung Fu under duress. His death
may have been caused by any of a number of factors. “Gene was a creature of bizarre working habit,” Doug Moench wrote in a eulogy. “A gonzo session of 42 hours at the board, then collapse, then up for another 28 hours and collapse again. Lopsided cycles. Cigarettes and coffee every waking moment. A bad back from the artist’s perpetual hunch. No exercise.” Still, stories began to circulate about a trip Day had taken to New York City, to do emergency last-minute work finishing a story for Marvel, about how Day had no choice but to spend the night in the unheated offices overnight, about how that’s what had really killed him. So what if the stories were filled with half-truths and exaggerations? Marvel Comics was starting to look like the bad guy—the Evil Empire—to more and more people. As the employees got more defensive, they started looking even worse. Tom DeFalco appeared at a press conference and said, “Gene Day left Master of Kung Fu, in which his incentives were about twenty bucks a month, and went over to Star Wars, in which his incentives were about $1,400 a month. If that’s persecution, I hope to hell I get on Jim Shooter’s hate list.”

  Shortly after Day’s death, the Canadian fanzine Orion published an interview that painted him as a model employee. “I’m a big Marvel supporter,” Day had beamed. “My home is the house that Marvel built. It’s their money that gives me all the pleasures in life that I have now.” One could interpret his words in either of two ways: to cast him as a martyr, or to let Marvel off the hook.

  In the weeks following Moench’s departure, Marvel announced that assistant editor Ralph Macchio had been promoted to editor, and that Spider-Woman, Ghost Rider, and Master of Kung-Fu were being canceled. The characters themselves were canceled, too. Spider-Woman died. Johnny Blaze exorcised the Ghost Rider demon. Jim Shooter asked Starlin, who’d already killed Warlock and Captain Marvel, if he’d be interested in doing another bit of housecleaning: How about killing Shang-Chi? This time, Starlin passed.

  13

  Out in Sherman Oaks, California, Stan Lee presided in Marvel Productions’ ranch-style building on Van Nuys Boulevard, taking meetings at a glass-top table that occupied the sunny courtyard just outside his dark-paneled, high-ceilinged, leather-filled office. Things were cooking. The Academy Award–winning writer Stirling Silliphant had completed a draft of a live-action Daredevil pilot for ABC. There was talk of getting Tom Selleck for a Doctor Strange movie; Carl Weathers, fresh off the success of Rocky III, was eyeing a Power Man film; and disaster-movie mogul Irwin Allen wanted to put The Human Torch in theaters. Although CBS Theatrical Films had placed Fantastic Four in turnaround, now Roger Corman was taking out an option for a Spider-Man movie, and the Canadian animation company Nelvana had obtained the rights for a live-action film of The X-Men.

  Lee had a lot to feel good about, then, when he visited New York in January 1983. The editorial staff was at the peak of its yuk-yuk, hand-buzzer giddiness. They’d been shooting photos of each other in superhero costumes for some of the covers—several staff members appeared on the cover of the last issue of Spider-Woman—and now they were putting together a comic that consisted wholly of photos of intra-office hijinks, and they wanted to include Stan the Man. Lee, the original ringmaster, jumped at the chance to pose for the centerfold. “I got Stan to agree to do it naked,” said Ann Nocenti. “We photographed him with a comic book covering his private parts, and then I got a call from his assistant or something in L.A., who said, ‘Stan’s wild. He should not have been naked for your centerfold. Please don’t.’ But he was going for it. He got to rip his clothes off and lay down on the couch.” (A Hulk costume was later superimposed over Lee’s body in postproduction.)

  But if one thing was sure to puncture Lee’s good mood, it was what Jack Kirby was saying about Marvel—and Lee personally—in the new issue of Will Eisner’s Spirit magazine. The previous July, Kirby had taken a break from Comic-Con engagements to sit in a San Diego hotel lobby and give an unsparing interview to Eisner; now the bomb he’d set was going off. Of Marvel’s rejuvenation after the 1957 layoffs, he said, “I came back the afternoon they were going to close up. Stan Lee was already the editor there and things were in a bad way. I remember telling him not to close because I had some ideas. . . . I felt I had to regenerate things. I began to build a new line of superheroes.”

  Kirby gathered steam. It wasn’t Lee and Kirby who came up with the ideas for superheroes—it was Kirby alone, fighting against Goodman’s resistance. “Stan Lee was not writing. I was doing the writing,” he insisted. “Stan Lee wouldn’t let me fill the balloons. Stan Lee wouldn’t let me put in the dialogue. But I wrote the entire story under the panels.” Again, he took credit for creating Spider-Man.

  Kirby’s relationship with Lee and Marvel corroded further. Lee insisted that he himself came up with the notion of doing a character called Spider-Man, but that Kirby’s rendition wasn’t up to snuff. “I don’t know whether this is the case or not, but maybe when Ditko did the story, he used the costume that Jack created. I don’t remember. I guess Ditko and Jack are the only two guys who know that. If Ditko is still around, I’d appreciate it if you would ask him . . . but in no way, shape, manner or means did Jack Kirby create Spider-Man. I don’t even know how he can dare to say that. It is the one strip that we did that he had virtually nothing to do with at all, except for a few pages that we never used.”*

  As for the notion that Kirby had been responsible for Marvel’s early 1960s foray into superheroes? “Well, I think that Jack has taken leave of his senses. . . . Jack was at home drawing these monster stories, until the day I called him and said: ‘Let’s do the Fantastic Four.’ ” Lee also took credit for providing the initial sparks for the Hulk and Thor. “I said, ‘I want to do a god. Let’s do the god of thunder—Thor. Nobody has ever done Norse mythology before. . . .’ So, if that doesn’t give me the right to say I created it, I don’t know what does.”*

  For fans, the bad blood between Kirby and Marvel was impossible to ignore, and thrown into stark relief by the generous (or, at the very least, publicity-savvy) overtures of DC Comics, which, by the time the rift was news, had given Kirby more work. Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz took Jack and Roz out to dinner in Los Angeles, and gave them news that Kenner—the manufacturer of the Star Wars line of action figures—was going to do a series of figures based on DC Comics characters. If Kirby wanted to draw up designs for his New Gods characters, DC would give him the same royalty that was now being given to creators—even though Kirby had signed away his rights on the New Gods years ago. Furthermore, the publisher wanted to reprint his 1970s New Gods stories in a deluxe series, on nice paper. Would Kirby like to finally have a chance to conclude the saga?

  Kenner’s deal to produce action figures of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and others instigated its panicked competitor Mattel—which had bid, and lost, on the DC characters—to hammer out a similar deal with Marvel, thus preventing Kenner from having a superhero monopoly. Mattel’s “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” toys were already a tremendous success, however, so the company didn’t want to pour too much money or effort into a similar product. All Mattel required of Marvel was that a big-event comic be launched to coincide with the toy line—and that the comic carry the title of Secret Wars, which, according to its market research, were two words that made kids go wild.

  So Jim Shooter had the assignment of coming up with ideas for a series that would include the slew of heroes that Mattel had licensed: Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, plus more than a dozen villains. It was serendipitous, the perfect wide-scale project on which to hang an idea that he’d been kicking around for a while—a multi-character adventure called Cosmic Champions—and an opportunity for Shooter to finally try out some more changes to characters. The previous summer, he’d paid $220 for an unsolicited story idea from a Chicago fan; now he would put that idea—in which Spider-Man gets a new, black, high-tech costume—into action.

  Marvel had been ramping up the interconnectedness of its characters in the last few years,
realizing that the shared fictional world was a big part of the draw. Now they’d all be thrown together in one giant battle. “In essence,” Shooter would say, “I was fulfilling the destiny of the Marvel Universe from its inception.”

  One could argue that Cosmic Champions was, more specifically, fulfilling the destiny of Marvel Comics Group, a division of Cadence Industries Corporation. For more than a year, investor Mario Gabelli had been aggressively buying stock in Cadence, a move that caused no small alarm in the hearts of its directors. In August 1983, Sheldon Feinberg and six long-term Cadence executives—including Marvel president Jim Galton and Marvel VP of business affairs Joe Calamari—took the company private, as Cadence Management, Inc., to avoid a takeover. But having taken out short-term debt to buy back a substantial number of open shares of stock, CMI was suddenly looking for a dramatic increase in profits. It was at this time that the name of Cosmic Champions was changed to Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, and rushed into production, accompanied by a flood of in-house ads.

  “Secret Wars was the first of the many, many event comics that didn’t have star creators behind it, but threw all the characters in one pot,” said Diana Schutz, at the time a manager for the Comics & Comix store in Berkeley. “We read Marvel in the ’60s because of both the characters and the guys who created them. They never would have had that pull without Stan and Jack, or Stan and Steve, behind them. As we got into the ’70s, that equation began to weigh more heavily on the side of the creators, and that spawned the independent companies and the direct market—driven by the creators, not the characters, and not the companies that published those specific characters. By the mid-’80s and the advent of Secret Wars, it seems to me Marvel was trying to redress that balance and pull things back in favor of the characters, not the creators.”