Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  It was true that the Secret Wars creative team—it would be personally written by Jim Shooter, and illustrated by Mike Zeck and John Beatty—was not a superstar lineup. Zeck and Beatty’s work on Captain America had been popular, but they lacked the hard-core following that John Byrne or Frank Miller had—a following that would guarantee sales. The truth was, Marvel was running low on King Midas writers and artists who could, on name alone, get customers to line up for any old comic. Byrne, once regularly penciling three titles or more, was tied up as both writer and artist on Fantastic Four and now Alpha Flight, the debut issue of which sold terrifically and put a record-breaking thirty thousand dollars in his pocket. Byrne was also writing—but not illustrating—The Thing, but that wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, and it quickly became clear that it wasn’t his typewriter that moved copies. Miller had gradually ceded duties on Daredevil to Klaus Janson, and then finally departed Marvel altogether, as he focused entirely on Ronin for DC. (After a few months, an overwhelmed Janson departed, too.)

  Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart, turning out work for Archie Goodwin and Jo Duffy at Marvel’s Epic subsidiary, had been joined by Don McGregor and—once the Howard the Duck lawsuit was finally settled out of court—Steve Gerber. Even Doug Moench, not on speaking terms with Shooter, and Paul Gulacy, who’d walked away from Marvel long ago, signed up for Epic. But none of those titles, hermetically sealed from the narrative of the Marvel Universe, approached the commercial successes of the mainstream superhero titles. Marvel simply wasn’t turning out superstar creators anymore.

  And then, in mid–1983, Walter Simonson took over Thor, which was on the verge of cancellation. Simonson was a respected and well-liked ten-year veteran of the comics industry—he was married to Louise Jones, and shared studio space with Frank Miller. But despite his wildly imaginative page designs, he’d remained more of an “artist’s artist,” never exactly a star. Mark Gruenwald gave Simonson carte blanche, although he also handed him a list of possible directions in which to take the book, suggestions very similar to the ones Doug Moench claimed to have been given, including one in which Thor died and a new hero wielded the hammer.

  In Simonson’s interpretation, it was a horse-headed alien warrior with the unlikely name of Beta Ray Bill who took possession of Thor’s weapon. The cover to Thor #337 featured the horrifying sight of Beta Ray Bill in full Thor regalia, smashing Mjolnir through the logo, coming toward the reader. Inside, Simonson’s exploding stars, giant spaceships, and carefully researched Norse architecture conveyed more exuberance than anyone had brought to Thor since Kirby. It sold out in days, a surprise that made dealers scramble like they hadn’t since Howard the Duck #1. What Frank Miller had done for Daredevil, Simonson had done for Thor, instantly.

  It was, in a way, a vindication of Shooter’s plan to push for drastic changes on stagnant titles. Shang-Chi had been retired, and Tony Stark and Don Blake had been replaced by a new Iron Man and a new Thor. There was a new Captain Marvel, too, and Ghost Rider and Spider-Woman were dead. In the pages of Doctor Strange, Roger Stern put a stake through Marvel’s Dracula, which Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan had developed for the better part of a decade. And nobody seemed to mind any of it.

  Shooter could even laugh about it now. He asked cartoonist Fred Hembeck if he’d like to do a follow-up to his gag-a-minute Fantastic Four Roast, and when Hembeck wondered if Shooter had anything particular in mind, he said, “Why don’t you do something about this Big Bang controversy that’s been going on? Maybe you can make something funny about that?” Hembeck began work on Jim Shooter Destroys the Marvel Universe.

  There was a time, not long before, when Marvel was so in need of capital that it would have bent over backward to work out a big-event character crossover with DC Comics—especially if it was drawn by George Perez, whose star had risen impressively since leaving Marvel and embarking on The New Teen Titans. But throughout 1983, the two companies engaged in a sniping match about a Justice League of America/Avengers team-up, a conflict that stretched over numerous editorial pages and spilled into fan-magazine interviews and convention panels. The crux of the disagreement was the speed at which Jim Shooter exercised his right of approval over the plot of the proposed series; eventually, Marvel just walked away.

  Now, it could afford to. Marvel’s sales on newsstands, quite miraculously, had stopped falling. But the real success story was at comic shops, where tremendous growth was taking place. Direct-market sales increased 46 percent in 1982, then another 32 percent in 1983. A rash of miniseries not only provided a constant stream of “collectible” number-one issues, but also served as a convenient way to test the market waters for a regular series. Now in the works were miniseries starring Hawkeye, Cloak and Dagger, Black Panther, Falcon, and a second Avengers team, made up of all the characters who couldn’t fit into the main one (eventually it was decided to set them up in Los Angeles, naturally, and call them the West Coast Avengers). Also in the planning stages were miniseries starring Machine Man and the Eternals, neither of which had been given much respect when Jack Kirby created them. Of course, the real cash cows were all those X-Men spin-offs that would fly on and off the shelves: X-Men and Micronauts; Illyana and Storm; Beauty and the Beast (which costarred the Dazzler, in a remarkable testimony to Marvel’s stubbornness, and former X-Man the Beast); Kitty Pryde and Wolverine. The Beast joined the lineup of The Defenders, which now also included two other former X-Men, the Angel and Iceman.

  Carol Kalish, not yet thirty years old, had a lot to do with Marvel’s sales success. She’d lobbied for various policies that benefited retailers—an advertising co-op program, a comics rack program, and a cash register program—realizing that the publisher’s continued growth depended on their health. She distributed copies of Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerrilla Marketing to shop owners, and persuaded Marvel to accept returns on last-minute fill-in issues. She pushed for distribution in Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, too.

  She loved selling as much as she loved comics, and the retailers loved her. Regarded by many as the smartest person in the comics industry, she dressed the part of the Young Urban Professional and regularly communicated in well-polished corporatespeak, but she could also talk the language of a hard-core comics fan—she was a hard-core comics fan. “Carol would come visit shops, take people out to dinner, ask what was selling, what fans wanted to see,” said Diana Schutz. “And after dinner, the Marvel plastic would pay for dinner, and when somebody would say, ‘Are you sure? Can you pay for this whole table?’ Carol always had the rationale that the money she spent on taking retailers out to dinner was another nail in the coffin of some book she despised, like Dazzler. That was one of the ones she was eager to get rid of.”

  Kalish, hyperarticulate and strong-willed, earned the fierce loyalty of her boss, Ed Shukin, and her assistant, Peter David. But she was not so beloved elsewhere in the Marvel offices. “There was a good deal of hostility and suspicion,” David said of the relationship between the editorial and sales departments. “Editorial did not understand what the need for sales was at all. They were afraid that sales would become the tail wagging the dog. They didn’t want their stories to be sales driven, they wanted to be purely creatively driven.”

  Shooter was given to repeating what Stan Lee had told him, after he’d called in a panic to ask about the rumors that Marvel was killing off its characters. “If the comics are good, sales will take care of themselves.” It was not a philosophy the sales and marketing staff was fond of.

  Peter David—a former journalist who’d been unsuccessfully pitching Moon Knight ideas to Denny O’Neil—found himself at the center of one particularly public clash between editorial and marketing. David, charged with regularly distributing preview pages of upcoming material at events, was given photocopies of future Alpha Flight pages. The problem was that Marvel had been hyping that one Alpha Flight member would die in the still-upcoming issue #12, and the photocopies, from issue #13, included a dream sequence in which that dead hero
rose from the grave. When Byrne saw the spoiler-heavy photocopies, he found where David was stationed and screamed at him, before knocking over furniture and storming out. (A quarter century later, the two men were still debating the specifics of the story on online message boards.)

  The truth was, though, that Shooter’s goals and Kalish’s goals were overlapping quite nicely, and nothing demonstrated their lockstep better than Secret Wars, which finally came out in January 1984. Mattel wasn’t much help—their toys were lagging months behind, and they weren’t going to put much marketing muscle into them anyway. But Shooter’s “Bullpen Bulletins” column and the articles in Marvel Age hammered it through the minds of readers and retailers alike: this is going to change everything about these characters, and you are going to buy it.

  The plot for Secret Wars was simple: an otherworldly, ethereal force known as the Beyonder transports a few dozen superheroes and supervillains to a planet called Battleworld, where they are told to fight it out. “I am from beyond!” shouts the cosmic voice. “Slay your enemies and all that you desire shall be yours!” One could argue that the fight-filled Secret Wars went against everything that made Marvel Comics special—although there were the usual squabbles and misunderstandings between the good guys, there was a minimum of moral shading, other than a few pages where Mister Fantastic flirted with (and decided against) pacifism.* In recent X-Men story lines, Chris Claremont had taken great pains to transform Magneto into a compelling, possibly noble Auschwitz survivor who’d made peace with the X-Men; in Secret Wars, he was again reduced to a violent ideologue who would slay all who stood in the way of his dream of peace. The bad guys were all either thugs or megalomaniacs, with one exception.

  The Molecule Man was clearly the character that most fascinated Shooter. A throwaway Lee and Kirby villain from the early days of the Fantastic Four, the Molecule Man had been just another nebbish named Owen Reece when an accident at an atomic plant gave him the power to rearrange physical matter. He’d been dusted off a few times by Steve Gerber and Len Wein in the 1970s, but it was Shooter who had played up the revenge-of-the-nerd angle in a couple of Avengers issues, and made Owen Reece a strangely sympathetic sociopath. “When I got my power,” Reece explained, “I wanted to get even with the whole world ’cause I’ve been picked on all my life—but I couldn’t figure out a way to do it . . . till now!” At the end of that story, Reece had agreed to go see a therapist. Now, in Secret Wars, Shooter had Reece preaching enlightenment to the criminal goons around him, who grew only angrier when they realized he could incinerate them at will.

  But the Molecule Man’s story was abandoned without resolution, in favor of explosions and speeches about never giving up. It would be Mister Fantastic’s words that would echo most strongly in the minds of readers. “Why would a being so far removed from us and so powerful as the Beyonder bring us across the universe for a stupid, simplistic ‘good-versus-evil’ gladiatorial contest? Is he a mad god? A cosmic idiot? . . . There must be more to this . . . but what possible purpose could there be?” It was better not to think too hard. As Shooter would later say, the comic was simply a way to “teach the kids how to play with the toys.”

  Secret Wars never transcended its awkward mix of exposition and cliché. Characters constantly restated their motivations. To please Mattel, there were three new female characters introduced, but one was just a new Spider-Woman, and the other two were in the statuesque female-wrestler mode. The dynamism in Mike Zeck’s artwork began to slip away as Shooter continually ordered pages redrawn, insisting on more establishing shots, and more eye-level long shots. They fell behind schedule, and Bob Layton stepped in for a few issues; upon his return Zeck’s contribution was limited to workmanlike renderings of Shooter’s stick-figure layouts, the natural visual analog of the straight-ahead storytelling rules he espoused. When the final issue was completed at last, the emotionally strained Zeck received from Shooter a bottle of Dom Perignon, with an attached card that read, “The War Is Over.” Zeck opened it and downed the entire bottle immediately.

  In the end, there were signs that remnants of Shooter’s Big Bang plans had worked their way into the series: Secret Wars #11 ended with the “bolt from the blue” that was mentioned in those earlier meetings, and the cover copy of #12, the final issue, read “After the Big Bang!” But apart from a few new costumes, and a new Spider-Woman, nothing much had really changed in the Marvel Universe. Which, maybe, was what the fans wanted all along.

  The first signs of Secret Wars’ commercial prospects came a month into 1984, with a tie-in issue of Amazing Spider-Man. Tom DeFalco and artist Ron Frenz had taken over the title just as Secret Wars was solidifying, and one of their welcome presents was an issue that Roger Stern had already plotted, in which Spider-Man’s new, black costume would first appear. Because the word around the office was that this new-costume stunt would be a disaster, DeFalco stepped in to write other Spider-Man titles while regular writers backed away, wanting nothing to do with it, especially after news of the costume leaked. “We got a ton of mail saying what a bad idea it was,” DeFalco remembered. “To the point where Shooter came to me and said, ‘What issue does Spider-Man get his black costume?’ And I said, ‘252,’ and he said, ‘Get rid of it by 253. Sales are going to plummet; everybody hates it.’ I had a long discussion with him and convinced him we had to keep it for at least eight issues. He wasn’t gonna get it in Secret Wars until issue 8. I said, ‘We have to introduce it before we get rid of it.’ ”

  DeFalco and Shooter needn’t have worried—when Mattel heard about the new Spider-Man costume, they were thrilled. Now they could sell two versions of the toy. “The day we’re sending the issue out,” DeFalco said, “Shooter comes in and says, ‘Oh, by the way, keep the black costume.’ ”

  On February 1, the day after Amazing Spider-Man #252 hit stands, Eliot Brown and Tom DeFalco arrived in California for a signing tour of comic stores. It turned out that Spider-Man #252 was an instant record-breaker, even more of a surprise than Walt Simonson’s first issue of Thor had been. By the time they arrived at the first shop, there was nothing left for DeFalco to sign—the store was already out of stock. Meanwhile, at a signing in Canada, Ron Frenz saw the issue going for fifty dollars. “The Fire Marshal shut it down because too many people had shown up,” he said. “It was like Soylent Green. . . . The crowd was pushing the table back and back, because it was huge and it didn’t have any direction, so the table kept migrating on me. It was like Beatles time, and nobody was expecting it.”

  A week later, DeFalco flew to the Atlanta Comics Festival, where Jim Shooter, basking in the glow of Secret Wars #1, laughed sportingly as some of his most trusted friends and employees—including John Byrne, Mark Gruenwald, Mike Carlin, and Tom DeFalco—provided a comics version of a celebrity roast. When they returned to New York, things looked like they were only going to get better: in an astonishing turn of events, Bill Sarnoff at Warner Publishing, DC’s parent company, had called Shooter to say that although DC’s superheroes were making a killing in licensing, the comics were losing money. Sarnoff asked if Marvel would be interested in licensing and publishing seven of DC’s titles. Marvel began negotiating for the rights to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, New Teen Titans, The Legion of Superheroes, and Justice League of America. Shooter projected that Marvel’s acquisition would result in an additional 39 million copies sold over the first two years, at a pretax profit of $3.5 million. It wasn’t just a lucrative opportunity that was falling into Marvel’s lap; the removal of its chief competitor would be the “elimination of an irritation,” as Shooter put it in one memo.

  But the timing was off. One week later, on February 28, First Comics filed a suit against Marvel and World Color Printing—the press that serviced nearly the entire industry—for “anti-trust and anti-competitive activities.” The suit claimed not only that Marvel was getting preferential pricing from World Color, but also that the publisher was intentionally flooding the market with product, in an
attempt to drown its fledgling competitors. Marvel wasn’t about to cut down on the barrage of new titles, but the company quickly decided that taking over the reins of the major properties of the DC universe might not be wise at this point.

  Shooter was disappointed, but it wasn’t a devastating loss. Marvel, he figured, could always create a new universe of its own.

  14

  Noting that the twentieth anniversary of Fantastic Four #1—and thus, of the Marvel Universe—was approaching, Jim Galton gathered executives and VPs to talk about what kinds of special publishing events might be scheduled. Shooter’s first idea had familiar elements. “I proposed that we do a Big Bang—that is, bring the Marvel Universe to an end, with every single title concluding, forever, in dramatic fashion,” he later told an interviewer. At this point, he said, the titles and characters would all be relaunched, and royalties would be paid to the creators of the classic heroes, like Kirby and Ditko, for whom there’d been no systemic incentives a quarter century ago. “We could just include them from that point on in the standard creator participation programs that I’d installed, as each of the characters they had created long ago were re-introduced.” When this idea was shot down, Shooter suggested a new, separate fictional universe that would have no relation to the current Marvel one. He got the green light, and a $120,000 budget, to launch a series of titles in two years, for the 1986 anniversary.

  In the meantime, now that Secret Wars was up and running, Jim Shooter already had an entire universe to fix. He seemed a little less than pleased with how other writers were handling their titles. “I think Shooter felt some of the characters were no longer being portrayed properly,” said Tom DeFalco. “Y’know: their essence. He wanted to use this as an opportunity to show us how it should be done.”