Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  If you wanted to find out, you’d have to read a lot of comic books. In ten years, the price of a single issue had tripled to seventy-five cents, which meant that the nine parts of Secret Wars II, plus the flood of its tie-in crossovers, added up to more than thirty dollars of allowance money. In fact, Marvel in 1985 was in the business of breaking piggy banks—suddenly, it seemed, no series stood alone. In the midst of the Secret Wars II run, John Byrne gave up on writing Alpha Flight and decided to switch jobs with Hulk writer Bill Mantlo; they engineered a crossover between those titles, so you were obliged to read both or neither. Claremont’s X-Men and New Mutants titles became increasingly intertwined, even as the steady stream of spin-off miniseries continued. Spider-Man was now a franchise in itself, as Web of Spider-Man joined Amazing Spider-Man and Spectacular Spider-Man, and each of their stories figured into one another, too.

  Specialty comic-book stores now accounted for as much of Marvel’s sales as newsstands. The company’s audience was growing more dedicated, and flush with disposable income, and older. Were you in or out?

  The ideal Marvel Comics fan bought all these crossovers, and bought the maybe-they’ll-be-collectible number-one issues, and didn’t necessarily have much in common with the dope-smoking chin-scratchers who’d rallied behind Jim Starlin’s Warlock and Steve Englehart’s Doctor Strange and Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck. In Secret Wars II, Shooter had reserved his harshest measures for a character named Stewart Cadwell, a former comic-book writer, who hurled brickbats at trash culture even as he profited from it by writing for animated television. “I’m sick of the violence, the mediocrity, the idiocy—Reaganomics, for Pete’s sake,” shouted the angry liberal Cadwell, who subsisted on McDonald’s and cigarettes. When the Beyonder offered him super powers, Cadwell used them to lash out—but after he destroyed the NBC studio that employed him, the X-Men and Avengers quickly defeated him, reducing him to a simpering fool. Not coincidentally, Stewart Cadwell looked exactly like Steve Gerber.

  Gerber had, in fact, recently quit animation, and worked on a Wonder Woman pitch for DC Comics. When he and Frank Miller, who was working on a Batman miniseries, heard about each other’s projects, they got together and pitched a Superman project. Talks fell apart, though, after DC wouldn’t give them 20 percent of a new Supergirl they created for the project. Gerber then shopped around a series he’d created with Val Mayerik called Void Indigo. The independent publishers passed, DC showed interest but wouldn’t agree to let Gerber and Mayerik retain copyright, and Gerber found himself talking to Archie Goodwin at Marvel’s creator-owned Epic Comics line. Gerber took some heat from the comics press for returning to Marvel—the target of several issues of Destroyer Duck—but what could he do? They had promotional muscle, and they were interested. Two issues of Void Indigo were published before, amid controversy surrounding its violence, it was canceled.

  Shortly afterward, Marvel made plans to revive the Howard the Duck comic series in order to capitalize on a big-budget movie adaptation that George Lucas was producing. In accordance with the terms of his settlement with Marvel, Gerber was offered the chance to write it. In April 1985, shortly after reading himself satirized in Secret Wars II, Gerber turned in a script of what was to be the first issue of the new Howard. It was a parody of multi-issue, multi-character crossovers, called “Howard the Duck’s Secret Crisis.” But after Jim Shooter requested editorial changes to the script, the plans fell apart.* Gerber went off to work as a creative consultant on a Howard the Duck movie.

  Meanwhile, Jim Starlin, who’d been happily chugging along on Dreadstar for Epic for a few years, began having trouble getting paychecks on time. “I’m of the opinion at this point, though people up at Marvel deny it, that Marvel is less than enthusiastic about continuing creator-owned characters and wouldn’t be sad to see them all go,” he said. Proving that Marvel had indeed allowed him to retain all rights to Dreadstar, he took his property and departed for the independent First Comics.

  Steve Englehart fared better in his reunion with Marvel. Like Gerber, he’d come to miss the benefits of working for an established company, and was ready to return to the land of work-for-hire, which now offered the added lure of incentives. “I got tired of writing stories and not having them come out,” he explained. “It’s something that you always could and can count on at the two majors, that they’ll publish the stuff.” Returning to Marvel, Englehart immediately wove together a story about Wonder Man, Black Talon, and the Grim Reaper—the very story he’d been working on in the Avengers, nearly a decade earlier, when he’d told off Gerry Conway. But the story had turned into melodrama now, more ponderous even than Claremont’s X-Men. It wound through double-sized, higher-priced issues of West Coast Avengers and The Vision and Scarlet Witch, one more multivolume narrative event.

  Frank Miller had returned to working for Marvel, too, even as he used his celebrity to speak, at every turn, against the company’s treatment of Jack Kirby. Fed up with New York City—“one Bernhard Goetz is enough,” he explained—Miller had taken off for downtown Los Angeles, holing up in an industrial space loft, across the street from a dive bar where one had to step over hypodermic needles. In addition to a gritty, futuristic reimagining of Batman, he began working on two dark, ambitious graphic novels for Marvel: one about the late Elektra, which he was illustrating himself, and one about Daredevil, on which he was collaborating with Bill Sienkiewicz.* That collaboration would lead, in turn, to the nine-issue Elektra: Assassin series for Epic, fully painted by Sienkiewicz.

  But these were all in the future. Miller’s move to California had cost more than he expected, and he was in debt, with all his committed projects many months from completion. Sitting in his bathtub, broke, three thousand miles from New York, he had an idea. “I thought, what if this happened to Matt Murdock? What if he lost everything?” Shortly afterward, Ralph Macchio called, telling him that Denny O’Neil, no longer getting along with Shooter, had left Daredevil. Miller told him his idea, and it was settled: he’d write Daredevil once again.

  Chris Claremont was a decade into his X-Men tenure—not even Stan Lee had stayed on a title for ten years—and had seen artists come and go, but each departure and arrival had noticeable effects on his writing. After Dave Cockrum left to work on The Futurians—characters he would finally retain rights to, even if they’d never catch on—Paul Smith, a former animation artist, gave the X-Men an uncluttered, airy look that brought out Claremont’s warmer, more playful side.* And so even as Claremont began shaking up the characters (Storm lost her powers, gave herself a Mohawk, and started to dress in leather; Cyclops quit; Wolverine was engaged and then jilted), Smith’s sleek work made the soap-opera moments more palatable.

  Once John Romita Jr. replaced Smith, though, the darker elements of X-Men gradually came to the fore. Lectures and debates between characters began to spill over pages. Kitty Pryde traveled to Japan and returned as a ninja assassin. Rachel Summers—the daughter of an alternate-timeline Scott Summers and Jean Grey—appeared from a dystopian future, an escaped slave burdened with a spiked collar and psychological problems. The fear and loathing that bombarded mutants became a central theme; the X-Men’s old archenemies, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, became the National Security Council–sanctioned Freedom Force, charged with bringing renegade mutants into government custody. In one issue, Professor X was even the victim of a hate crime, attacked and left for dead by a group of college students. (When he woke up in the care of the subway-dwelling Morlocks, he found that he’d been dressed in bondage gear.)*

  If X-Men was noticeably bleaker than ever before, it only proved that Chris Claremont, more than any other writer, had managed to retain control of the way his characters were portrayed, had refused to tailor his comics for an audience of eight-year-olds. If there was a mandate for a new mutant-related spin-off, the notoriously proprietary Claremont would take a deep breath, look at his schedule, and figure out a way to do it himself.

  By the spring of 1985, though,
Chris Claremont finally had to face the cracks in his kingdom. Artists Bob Layton and Jackson Guice, noticing that original X-Men members Angel, Iceman, and Beast were languishing in the low-selling New Defenders, and that Claremont had married off Cyclops and sent him to Alaska, had suggested to Jim Shooter that the original team be reunited. Since Jean Grey was no longer alive, they’d need a different woman to balance things out—how about Dazzler, whose own title was about to be canceled? Together, in X-Factor, the five heroes would pose as freelance mutant-hunters—kind of a spin on Ghostbusters—with the aim of secretly aiding those very mutants.

  And then John Byrne heard about the plan, and remembered an idea a fan had pitched to his old friend Roger Stern at a convention two years ago: a way to bring back Jean Grey. She had become Phoenix when the X-Men had crash-landed a space shuttle near Long Island; what if the woman who’d emerged from Jamaica Bay all those years ago—who’d been possessed by Mastermind, who’d committed cosmic genocide, who’d been incinerated on the moon—had not, in fact, been Jean Grey? What if the “Phoenix Force” had taken her shape, while Grey remained alive, in a kind of cocoon? What if somebody found that cocoon?

  “It would really be a cheat to the readers to bring her back,” Byrne had told an interviewer in the wake of Jean Grey’s death, but now he’d changed his mind. He and Roger Stern passed the idea to Shooter, and plans for this new title, X-Factor, were adjusted. Byrne and Stern would lay the groundwork of Jean Grey’s return in issues of Fantastic Four and The Avengers, respectively. Another tie-in event.

  X-Men editor Ann Nocenti broke the news to Claremont on a Friday night, during a restaurant plotting session with artist Barry Smith. Claremont, in high dudgeon, raced for a pay phone, only to realize he couldn’t remember Shooter’s direct line. Nocenti refused to give him the number, though, and when he considered going back to the office to confront his editor in chief, she told him to sit down, order another drink, and relax. “If I had actually gone to see Shooter on Friday night,” Claremont recalled, “I would have quit.” X-Factor mangled Claremont’s ride-into-the-sunset plans for Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor, his Jean Grey–lookalike bride—instead, Summers deserted his wife and infant son to be with Jean Grey. Claremont would spend the entire weekend coming up with counterproposals for Monday, but Shooter would shoot them all down. The marketing potential far outweighed Claremont’s artistic concerns. “By then,” he said, “it had become too commercial, and the desire to make a buck had become paramount.” Around the office, people began referring to X-Factor as Chris-busters.

  Commerciality, though, had its rewards. Claremont spent May 1985 with Romita Jr. and Nocenti, doing a promotional tour through France, England, Spain, and Holland, conducting research for X-Men #200, which would be set in Paris and The Hague. They signed comics at events, but mostly enjoyed the fruits of expense accounts—visiting fancy restaurants, strip clubs, and museums.

  And Claremont wrote at a furious clip. He’d come up with such a complicated narrative that a scorecard had to be printed on the “Bullpen Bulletins” page. “How to Read the X-Men and the New Mutants” directed fans in which order they should consume New Mutants #34, X-Men #199, X-Men/Alpha-Flight Team-Up #1 and #2, New Mutants Special #1, X-Men Annual #9, X-Men #200, and New Mutants #35. Since they didn’t necessarily hit stands in that chronology, the complicated reading assignment was one more trying scavenger hunt in the Year of the Crossover. Claremont’s best-selling corner of the Marvel Universe, stretching as fast as Marvel executives could read a balance sheet, had grown almost as complicated as Secret Wars II.

  After returning to the States, Claremont took a look at how Byrne was handling the backstory of Jean Grey in Fantastic Four and petitioned Shooter for a chance to rewrite Byrne’s two-page flashback sequence, which X-Factor penciler Jackson Guice then drew in his best faux John Byrne style. This was Shooter’s chance to appease his star writer, still stinging from the way Jean Grey’s return had been commanded, and even John Byrne didn’t have enough clout to stop it.

  The revocation bothered Byrne, a lot, especially since the plot had already been green-lighted by Shooter. If he couldn’t call the shots in Fantastic Four, if Claremont was still making last-minute changes on a title he wasn’t even writing, Byrne thought, perhaps it was time to reconsider his contract as an exclusive Marvel writer.

  The relationship between Byrne and Shooter became increasingly tense. Recalled John Romita, “Shooter would come in and ask me, ‘Do we want to take John Byrne off Fantastic Four’? I was very diplomatic with him; I wouldn’t say ‘You’re crazy’ or anything like that. I would just tell him ‘Fantastic Four is selling very well, why would we change artists?’ And then he would leave him on there. But if it wasn’t the way he wanted things done, he would start to run it down and make changes.” By the fall, word had leaked out: John Byrne, the most popular artist in the industry, was going over to DC to relaunch Superman. He planned to continue on Incredible Hulk and Fantastic Four for Marvel, too, but the story on everyone’s lips was that the most eagerly awaited superhero comics of 1986 were John Byrne’s Superman and Frank Miller’s Batman, iconic DC characters as interpreted by once-loyal Marvel superstars.

  Shooter was also making a lot of demands on Bob Layton and Jackson Guice, the creative team on X-Factor. They drew seven covers for the first issue, each rejected by Jim Shooter, until finally Walt Simonson came in to pinch-hit. Then, in September 1985, two weeks before the shipping date, Layton and Guice were told to redo the entire contents of the double-sized issue, or else Shooter would find someone who could. Unfortunately for them, Hurricane Gloria was headed for New York City. They holed up in a Manhattan hotel room, working day and night even as the rest of the city shut down. As the hotel staff evacuated, a concierge placed a roll of masking tape in Guice’s hands, asked him to tape up the windows of his room, and wished him luck.

  Forty-five years earlier, Bill Everett, Carl Burgos, and a handful of other writers and artists had holed up at Everett’s apartment for several days, setting up on tables, on floors, even in the bathtub, leaving only for food and liquor, so that they could deliver a huge, blowout Human Torch and Sub-Mariner battle issue. But where that sixty-four-page monster had been delivered in a spirit of celebration, X-Factor #1 felt more like a detention assignment.

  Despite the hurricane, they made the deadline, but weeks later more problems arose. Shooter proved impossible to please. “We gave him the second issue,” said X-Factor editor Mike Carlin, “and he wanted us to redo that one from scratch. I said, ‘You know what, I’m not quitting Marvel, but I’m quitting this book. You should edit this yourself. You’re the only one that knows what you want to have happen here.’ And he goes, ‘Alright, alright,’ and he gave it to Bob Harras to do after that, and for the next six months, I edited books, but I was given things like Chuck Norris comics. I think by quitting X-Factor I got on his radar pretty heavily.” A few months after Carlin’s departure, Layton also left X-Factor, and Guice followed shortly afterward.

  There were tensions elsewhere, too. John Byrne surprised Denny O’Neil, his Incredible Hulk editor, by submitting an issue consisting entirely of twenty-two full-page illustrations; O’Neil rejected it. Byrne, believing that it was Shooter’s doing, contacted Jim Galton and protested. (“Who the hell is John Byrne?” an annoyed Galton asked Shooter, annoyed to be contacted by the company’s number-one artist.)

  Soon after that, O’Neil and Shooter’s own conflicts came to a head, and O’Neil, the longest-tenured Marvel editor, requested a meeting with publisher Mike Hobson. “When Shooter heard about that meeting,” said Bob Budiansky, “he dismissed Denny from staff.”

  Byrne, the self-described “company man” who was once regularly turning out three comics a month, was now only doing Fantastic Four—edited by Carlin, who had remained on the title even as he was saddled with assignments on low-prestige licensed comics like Thundercats and He-Man. Carlin now found himself unfortunately positioned between Byrne and Sh
ooter, whose relationship had deteriorated since DC’s Superman announcement. Byrne had felt that Claremont’s rewriting of the Jean Grey flashback had been a way for Shooter to punish him for taking the Superman job. For months, according to Byrne, Shooter “continued to snipe at the FF, so I ultimately left the book just to spare Mike Carlin the constant barrage of nitpicks.” With that final tie severed, Byrne’s defection was complete. (Within months, Shooter would fire Mike Carlin. Carlin called up Denny O’Neil, now working at DC, and got a job as an assistant editor on John Byrne’s Superman.)

  And then, just as news about Byrne’s departure got out, Frank Miller left Daredevil once again, along with artist David Mazzucchelli. They’d continue collaborating . . . at DC, for another Batman project.

  In the course of a year, as Marvel watched its founding fathers Jack Kirby and Stan Lee feud in public, as John Byrne, Frank Miller, and Jim Starlin—the company’s three most valued writer-artists—abruptly ceased work on projects, and as two editors stormed out of the building and over to the competition, morale hit an all-time low.

  Jim Shooter, meanwhile, was busy creating something new.

  The New Universe was the twenty-fifth anniversary launch that Shooter had proposed a few years back, and for which he’d been allotted $120,000. But now, as Sheldon Feinberg started shopping Marvel, the higher-ups repeatedly cut the start-up budget: first halved, then quartered, and finally eliminated altogether. By November 1985, Shooter had conscripted a motley crew of staffers and rookies to begin work on eight titles under the New Universe umbrella, the details of which were closely guarded. “The world outside your window” was the unofficial motto. These stories were to be about a world just like ours, in which the sudden ability to fly would truly carry a sense of wonder. Shooter himself called it “the Shooter-verse.”