Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  “He had helped build Marvel into a powerful juggernaut,” said Tom DeFalco, “and then decided that he didn’t like the way it worked anymore, and that it needed to be completely rebuilt instantly. And you know, juggernauts don’t get rebuilt instantly.”

  The New World owners liked Shooter and couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier, but they only knew how to deal with temperamental actors and film directors. Couldn’t they just send him a fruit basket, or offer him a more important-sounding title? But when a videotape of the effigy made its way to California, just before Shooter’s contract negotiations were about to begin, it was clear to New World that the commander had lost control of the soldiers.

  On April 15, Bob Layton and David Michelinie came into the Marvel offices to meet with Mark Gruenwald and Shooter about redesigns for an Iron Man costume. When they brought the pages into Shooter’s office, Shooter calmly told them his changes wouldn’t matter. He’d just gotten the news that he would no longer be the editor in chief.

  Gruenwald stopped by Macchio’s office, mimed a knife across the throat, then put a finger to his lips, signaling to be quiet. But word traveled fast, with CompuServe messages relayed quickly to Chris Claremont and Walt Simonson. “Ding-dong,” one of the messages read: “the witch is dead.”

  PART IV

  Boom and Bust

  15

  When Jim Galton and Mike Hobson had taken Tom DeFalco out to lunch to tell him they wanted him to replace Jim Shooter as editor in chief, he’d balked. “You guys are crazy,” DeFalco told them. “Find a way to make up with Shooter.” Unbeknownst to them, DeFalco was still hoping for another week or two to finish negotiating that job on the West Coast. “I always assumed that as the number-two guy, when they decided to lop off his head, mine would go too,” he said, years later. “It never once occurred to me that they would keep me.” News that DeFalco was being promoted reached his prospective employers on the West Coast, and they withdrew the job offer, sure that they wouldn’t be able to match the new salary.

  Now that he was at Marvel to stay, DeFalco’s first task was to try to restore a sense of order in an office that had divided between the pro-Shooter and anti-Shooter factions. In an angry and profane open letter to the editorial staff, veteran freelancer Vince Colletta painted the former editor in chief as an unappreciated martyr. “He gave you a title, respectability, power and even a credit card that you used and abused. He made you the highest payed Editors in the history of the business. He protected you against all that would tamper with your rights, your power and your pocketbook. . . . The roof over your head, the clothes on your back, the car you drive and the trinkets you buy for your blind wives and girlfriends you owe to the Pittsburgh kid.”

  A boom-voiced Noo Yawka, DeFalco might have seemed an unusual choice to calm the waters. But he was well liked, and the Marvel troops considered him as one of them. Slowly, the hijinks and pranks returned to the offices: One assistant’s desk drawers were lined with plastic and filled with water and goldfish. Hundred-dollar bills were cast on nearly invisible fishing lines down ten stories to tempt passersby on East Twenty-Seventh Street.

  DeFalco also managed to skirt one of the greatest thorns that had stuck in Shooter’s side: the controversy over the nonreturn of Jack Kirby’s artwork. Jim Galton had been confident of Marvel’s legal standing, thanks to agreements Kirby had signed in 1966 and 1972, and had seen no reason to kowtow to popular opinion on the matter. “Galton’s attitude was, ‘Why is anybody wasting any time with this? If Kirby’s gonna try to sue, let him try to sue!’ ” said DeFalco. Only weeks after Shooter departed, though, Marvel changed course, after Galton told the lawyers to put an end to the holdout. Within weeks, the list of eighty-eight pieces of artwork that had been dangled before Kirby grew to an inventory of more than two thousand pages—only a fraction of what he’d drawn, but a sizable, and lucrative, stash nonetheless. The long ordeal had come to a close, just like that, with a simple command.

  Shortly afterward, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Jack Kirby was a telephone guest on the New York radio station WBAI. After the interviewer asked about working as part of the apparently fervent and joyous “Merry Marvel Marching Society” era Bullpen, Kirby responded flatly: “I didn’t consider it merry. In those days, it was a professional-type thing, you turned in your ideas and you got your wages and you took them home. It was a very simple affair. It’s nothing that could be dramatized, or glorified, or glamorized in any way. . . . I created the situation, and I analyzed them, I did them panel by panel, and I did everything but put the words in the balloons.” But, Jack, said the interviewer, what about those legendary story conferences with you and Stan, livening up the office? “It wasn’t like that at all,” he said. “It may have been like that after I shut the door and went home.”

  And then the radio host introduced a surprise call-in guest: Stan Lee. “I want to wish Jack a happy birthday!” the familiar voice sounded over the airwaves. “This is a hell of a coincidence, I’m in New York, and I was tuning in the radio and there I hear him, talking about Marvel, and I said I might as well call him and not let this occasion go by without saying, many happy returns, Jack!”

  Kirby jumped right in: “Well, Stanley, I want to thank you for calling, and I hope you’re in good health and I hope you stay in good health.”

  Lee praised Kirby’s artwork. “Nobody could convey emotion and drama the way you did.”

  “Well, thank you for helping me keep that style, and helping me to evolve all that,” Kirby said. “I was never sorry for it, Stanley. It was a great experience for me.” And then, after five years of not speaking, Kirby told Lee that he respected him.

  After ten more minutes of reminiscences and niceties, Stan slipped in an “I’ll say this: every word of dialogue in those scripts was mine.” Uncomfortable laughter from the studio. “Every story.”

  KIRBY: I can tell you that I wrote a few lines myself above every panel.

  LEE: They weren’t printed in the book! Jack isn’t wrong by his own lights, because, answer me truthfully—

  KIRBY: I wasn’t allowed to write—

  LEE:—Did you ever read one of the stories after it was finished? I don’t think you did! I don’t think you ever read one of my stories. I think you were always busy drawing the next one. You never read the book when it was finished. . . .

  KIRBY:—my own dialogue, Stanley. And I think that’s the way people are. Whatever was written, it was the action I was interested in.

  LEE: I know, and look, Jack, nobody has more respect for you than I do, and you know that, but I don’t think you ever felt that the dialogue was very important. And I think you felt, anybody can put the dialogue together, it’s what I’m drawing that matters. And maybe you’re right, I don’t agree with it, but maybe you’re right.

  KIRBY: I’m only trying to say, I think that the human being is very important. If one man is writing and drawing and doing a strip, it should come from an individual. I believe you should have the opportunity to do the entire thing yourself.

  When asked to make closing statements, Lee went first: “Jack has made a tremendous mark on American culture, if not on world culture, and I think he should be incredibly proud and pleased with himself, and I want to wish him all the best, him and his wife Roz, and his family, and I hope that ten years from now, I’ll be in some town somewhere listening to a tribute to his eightieth birthday, and I hope I’ll have an opportunity to call at that time and wish him well then, too. Jack, I love ya.”

  “Well, the same here, Stan,” said Kirby. “But, uh . . . uh . . . yeah. Thank you very much, Stan.”

  Dead air, for a moment.

  “Warren, are you there?” Kirby asked the cohost. “Uh . . . you can understand now, what it was really like back then.”

  Tom DeFalco, flailing at first, had urged Mark Gruenwald to accept the editor in chief position instead, but Gruenwald begged off. So Gruenwald was appointed as DeFalco’s executive editor, and the two
of them sat down and made a five-year plan for Marvel’s expansion: just as there had been a whole line of X-Men titles, soon there would be an expanded line of Avengers titles, and Spider-Man titles, and so on. If someone thought four Spider-Man titles was too many, DeFalco had a quick answer: Not for someone who really likes Spider-Man, it’s not. Now, every time a new super-team was introduced, its individual members would spin off into their own solo titles.

  Gruenwald would be left to sort out the ways that all the stories wove together. In the 1970s, before he’d even worked at Marvel, Gruenwald obsessively catalogued the continuity of Marvel’s story lines in pseudo-academic self-published journals. Now he kept lists and charts on his walls to manage the traffic of the overarching Marvel Universe narrative. “If you wanted a Spider-Man villain, you had to check with the Spider-Man office,” DeFalco said. “They were supposed to pull out a chart on the next bunch of issues and say, ‘We have no plans for Electro.’ Or, ‘We have a plan for him in our May issue, and he’s allergic to hamburgers. If you’re going to have him come out in your April issue, you should at least show a sensitivity to hamburgers.’ ”

  DeFalco was not immediately given a vice president title, which Jim Shooter had held, and which would limit the amount of clout he’d have in any disagreements about publishing strategy. But DeFalco was happy to expand anyway; he’d never had much use for precious worries about brand dilution. He was a throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks kind of guy, determined to push the limits of both the marketplace and the creative staff. “Retailers will always tell you you’re publishing too much; wholesalers will tell you there’s no room on the racks, you can’t publish anything more,” he said. “You’ve got to force everybody to do the work.”

  Editors were put on a royalty plan, which helped to ease their pain—and helped to encourage commercial thinking. Three-part stories, continued between the three different Spider-Man titles, began to crop up, with the intention of testing the market limits. Yet another X-Men title was needed, so Chris Claremont pitched the idea of moving Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde to England, where they would become part of a new team called Excalibur. Multi-title crossovers, which had popped up here and there since Secret Wars II, would soon begin to take place every several months.*

  There was one notable instance of belt-tightening—in the spring of 1987, the mediocre-selling New Universe, Shooter’s one-year-old baby, was unceremoniously cut in half. One of the surviving four titles was Jim Shooter’s Star Brand; editor Howard Mackie called John Byrne and asked him if he’d want to take it over. It was an inspired choice: only months earlier, in an issue of DC Comics’ Legends, Byrne had drawn a remarkably Shooter-like character named Sunspot. “From this day forward,” Sunspot declared, “I will show you all how power is meant to be used! I will remake this sorry world in my own image!” Then, just in case anyone missed the reference to Shooter, the character boasted, “I wield the ultimate power—the power to create a New Universe!”* before shooting himself in the foot.

  Star Brand was one of the company’s lowest-selling books, but Byrne agreed to return to Marvel for the chance to put his own stamp on Shooter’s most autobiographical creation. Immediately, he conceived a story line in which the Shooter stand-in character, Ken Connell, destroyed the city of Pittsburgh—Shooter’s hometown.

  Other exiled freelancers made their returns to the company. Editor Mike Higgins, a Deadhead who’d been a fan of Marvel’s 1970s head trips, reached out to as many Shooter enemies as he could—including Steve Gerber, Doug Moench, and Gene Colan—and offered them work on a new title called Marvel Weekly. By late 1987, everyone from Marv Wolfman to Paul Gulacy to Don McGregor to Don Heck was getting the first calls they’d had from Marvel in years. The idea was that each issue would feature a rotation of four serials that revived cult characters like Man-Thing and Shang-Chi. They’d be staggered so that if one character’s story line concluded in an issue, the other three would end with cliffhangers—so that at no time would a reader feel a sense of closure.

  By the time the first issue was published—almost a year later—the title had changed to Marvel Comics Presents, the publication schedule had been scaled back to every other week, and Higgins had left the company. The front covers featured not Shang-Chi or Man-Thing but Wolverine, whose ever-growing popularity guaranteed brisk sales.

  By now, Marvel determined to introduce a regular Wolverine solo title as well. Chris Claremont had just launched Excalibur when he was informed of the plans. He complained to DeFalco about the integrity of the character, and about the threat of dilution, but the editor in chief would have none of it. Wolverine was his own franchise now, one that had become too big to contain. The series would happen with or without Claremont. After twelve years, the idea of someone else determining the character’s fate was unthinkable, so once again Claremont rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

  “New World didn’t want to be in the comic book business,” said one former employee, “but you couldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” What the company really hoped to do was capitalize on the multiple-platform potential of intellectual property. A luncheon was held at the ‘21’ Club to promote the idea of a Spider-Man cartoon; plans began for a $300,000 Spider-Man Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float; and the media was alerted that Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson would be married in a ceremony at Shea Stadium, just before the world-champion New York Mets took the field.*

  Officiating at home plate on that Saturday night was Stan Lee, pleased to be at the center of a sellout crowd of 55,000, for an event that was covered by Good Morning America and Entertainment Tonight. Lee was thrilled that New World was exploiting the Marvel characters in ways that Cadence never had.

  After New World tried, and failed, to purchase the Spider-Man film rights from Cannon, the company shifted to a strategy of producing sixty-five half-hours of X-Men animation, which could be sold as first run or syndication, and then exploited through licensing and merchandising. For New World, the Marvel characters provided an opportunity to expand in ways never possible with low-budget horror movies like Hellraiser. “Marvel represented a beachhead into that younger market that Clive Barker didn’t have,” said Rusty Citron, then the vice president of marketing. “You’re not going to put Pinhead onto Saturday morning television.”

  Plans commenced for a Marvel retail venture at shopping centers across the country, developed in consultation with the team behind Canada’s colossal West Edmonton Mall, and modeled after the recently launched Disney Store: every muraled store space would include back rooms for birthday parties; merchandise was on wheels, to create “different spatial representations” for various products and characters; a comic book rack would sell every Marvel title.

  But the ambition and aggression of the company—which changed its name from New World Pictures to the more sweeping New World Entertainment—soon hit the limits of reality. Its film revenues were down, and money was tied up in television production just as the syndication market was collapsing. New World sought synergy within the marketplace of children’s entertainment, but bids to take over Kenner and Mattel were both unsuccessful. After six months of planning, the New World board voted down the $1 million budget necessary to move ahead with the Marvel Store project.

  New World continued its attempts to develop films based on Marvel characters, although the company’s understanding of the properties was haphazard at best. A flood of scripts that had been developed at other studios and died—Doctor Strange by Bob Gale, The X-Men by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway—were optimistically resubmitted to New World, but the executives who’d confused Spider-Man and Superman still weren’t sure what they were looking at. “They tended to look down on the titles, gravitating toward projects that made fun of the medium,” said William Rabkin, a former comic-store clerk who was evaluating scripts for the company. Rabkin boldly fired off a note to his boss. (“You’ve just bought Alaska. You need to dig below the surface and find out what’s there.”) Within
days, New World’s head of production asked him to make a list of B- and C-level Marvel properties that could be fast-tracked and made on the cheap in South America.* Boaz Yakin, a twenty-one-year-old NYU graduate, called up New World personally, set up a meeting with a New World executive, and pitched a movie about the Punisher, who had by now emerged in the action-movie 1980s as a fan favorite. “He didn’t know what the fuck the Punisher was,” Yakin said, even though the character was by now the star of two ongoing comic titles. Nonetheless, Yakin’s script, written in ten days, zoomed into production.

  Lee continued pitching characters he’d co-created a quarter-century earlier. “Stan Lee loved Ant-Man beyond all reason, and nobody ever gave a damn,” said Rabkin. “He was always on about Ant-Man; he wanted an Ant-Man script in the worst way. I had been arguing against Ant-Man because, let’s face it, he can shrink down, go through a keyhole, and look at secret papers in a desk drawer and that’s it. It’s pretty boring. But we’re sitting around the table, and Stan is pitching Ant-Man, and Bob Rehme, who ran all New World, comes in. Bob was this energetic wild guy. He never actually opened a door; he would just vroop! through it like the Tasmanian Devil. He comes into the room, and says, ‘Marvel meeting! What’s going on?’ ”