Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  Lee said, “We were just talking about Ant-Man!”

  “What’s that?”

  “He can shrink down like . . . this!”

  Rehme thought for a minute. Disney was about to make Teenie Weenies. If New World rushed Ant-Man into production, no one would ever know who had the idea first.

  “That’s brilliant!” Rehme said.

  Vroop! He was out of the room, and Ant-Man went into development. Teenie Weenies was eventually released as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

  Although Lee had a pleasant working relationship with Rehme, it was clearer than ever that he wasn’t going to be able to call the shots when it came to movies. Even Jim Galton, in his reserved, old-publishing-world manner, could never engage with the Hollywood aggression of Sloane, Kuppin, and Rehme. That fell to Joe “the Squid” Calamari, a longtime Cadence executive who’d been hired out of law school by Sheldon Feinberg and who had now become very interested in seeing movie deals happen. To those at New World, Calamari’s ambition and aggression made him the lead voice at Marvel.

  Stan Lee, now in his mid-sixties, had behind him twenty years of dreaming of seeing his creations on the big screen, still to no avail. “Stan’s not in the loop, because he’s not a player; he’s not a partner,” said one New World executive. “He wasn’t a vote. But he was like a pit bull. He just didn’t want to walk away.”

  Lee would outlast them all, though—New World was in trouble. “In retrospect,” said Mike Hobson, years later, “it was shocking that Marvel had sold themselves to such a fly-by-night outfit as New World.” The studio’s movies were bombing at the box office, its stock was plummeting, and, on top of that, in the aftermath of the market crash of 1987, its Wall Street investments had tanked. The company retained the junk-bond kingpin Drexel Burnham Lambert to help it restructure its staggering debt, and put on a brave face as it rebuffed purchase offers for Marvel Comics, its only profitable holding. But by the summer of 1988, the writing was on the wall. In July, as cameras in Australia were about to roll on The Punisher, New World put Marvel Comics on sale.

  The winning bidder was Revlon chairman Ronald O. Perelman, who had set up Compact Video, a former division of Technicolor, as a shell corporation.* Wall Street had wondered for months what major brand name would be swallowed by the nebulous void of Compact, which had sat quietly since the spring like an open trunk, or an empty casket. The $82.5 million paid for Marvel was, for Sloan and Kuppin, a nice return on its $46 million investment of only two years before. For Wall Street, it was a shock. Ron Perelman, the man who’d bid more than $4 billion for Gillette, was now turning his attention to . . . comic books?

  One magazine article outlined the Perelman strategy like this: “find an undervalued company, buy it with junk bond financing, sell the inessential product lines to recoup most of the purchase price, and return the core to profitability.” It was, in a way, just the steroidal 1980s version of the Perfect Film or Cadence model. But Marvel, Perelman knew, had a potential to be a “mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property,” ripe for exploitation and profit.

  Perelman himself was like some kind of Frankensteinian amalgam of past Marvel owners, sometimes to an eerie extent. Martin Goodman met his wealthy wife-to-be on a cruise ship; so had Perelman. Martin Ackerman had an East Side headquarters that he dubbed “The Townhouse”; so had Perelman. Sheldon Feinberg had made his name as CFO at Revlon; twenty years later, Perelman gained fame for his hostile takeover of Revlon. Like all the others, Perelman was a short, Jewish, cigar-chomping mogul. The difference was that Perelman owned a cigar company, only one of many holdings in his personal $300 million portfolio. His pockets were deep enough that, once he’d picked Marvel from the bones of New World, he would return months later and buy New World, too.

  Because he was the head of Revlon, the Marvel staff quickly dubbed Perelman “the lipstick guy.” When he first visited the Marvel offices, he was escorted around to different departments by a blond, masked staff member dressed as Spider-Woman. During the tour, he asked one editor to see some of the highest-selling comics that were being worked on. “I pulled out some beautiful pages of Uncanny X-Men by Barry Smith,” the editor said. “He couldn’t even look at them. I knew: This guy does not like comics.”

  Stan Lee’s own initial impressions of Perelman and his firm, the Andrews Group, were undoubtedly boosted by a meeting with Perelman’s number two, Bill Bevins. Bevins was all business—a well-groomed, impeccably dressed workaholic who’d met Perelman at the Predator’s Ball junk-bond conferences hosted by Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert. “We exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes,” Lee recalled, “and then, unexpectedly, he asked what my annual income was at Marvel. After I told him, he looked at me thoughtfully for a minute or two and then, in the calmest, most matter-of-fact way, he told me that henceforth I’d be earning approximately triple that amount.”

  Marvel’s publishing business was booming, and expanding ever more rapidly; not only were new titles continually popping up, but the best-selling The Uncanny X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man had each moved to a twice-a-month summer schedule. DeFalco and Gruenwald began looking back into Marvel’s past for new-series fodder; the economics of the direct market, they reasoned, would allow room for titles that appealed to a dedicated, if smaller, audience. They’d initiate the returns of 1970s-vintage characters like Guardians of the Galaxy, Ghost Rider, Deathlok, and Nova—the last of which was reintroduced as a member of New Warriors, a market-research-generated comic about teenage superheroes.

  Incentive checks were growing for writers, artists, and now editors, many of whom were enjoying a renewed sense of power now that Shooter had departed. There were still, occasionally, conflicts over control of characters: Steve Englehart was fired from West Coast Avengers (for refusing to include Iron Man in the title); months later, he was fired from the Fantastic Four (for refusing to include Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl) and Silver Surfer. Englehart claimed that DeFalco was instituting a “plan to end innovation across the line.” DeFalco said he was just backing his editors.

  DeFalco had seen firsthand what happened to morale when the editorial staff was divested of responsibility. But his management style was about more than just taking their side in an argument; he felt that the editors needed to be accountable caretakers, protecting the legacy of the grand narrative and keeping the company’s best interests in mind.

  Because Marvel still had the characters that everyone clamored to write and draw, and the royalties that everyone wanted to enjoy, there was no shortage of big-name talents to keep the wheels in motion. After Englehart’s departure, Walter Simonson took over Fantastic Four, John Byrne took over West Coast Avengers, and Jim Starlin took over Silver Surfer—until they, too, each had problems, at which point the rotation would begin again. When Byrne said he would quit She-Hulk unless DeFalco removed an editor he didn’t like, DeFalco repeated his mantra: I back my editors. Byrne was fired from the book, and She-Hulk was given to Steve Gerber. Byrne didn’t go far, though—he began work on Namor, a new series that cast the Sub-Mariner as a venture capitalist.

  Less than a decade earlier, it had seemed as though publishers like Pacific and Eclipse were going to pull all the big names away from Marvel and DC. But the smaller companies had fallen on hard times, especially after market gluts in 1986 and 1987. Comic-store owners, faced with a flood of product, played it safe and stocked shelves with perennial bestsellers from Marvel and DC. For all the qualms that Starlin, Gerber, and even Steve Ditko had voiced over the years, it seemed that it was only at “the Big Two” that there would always be work.

  Although Marvel’s Epic imprint had yielded some interesting projects, it had failed to launch any breakout characters, and its original mission of providing a venue for creator-owned concepts had been diluted over the years. After the more “mature” content of Miller and Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin found a home there, Epic had begun to serve a second role, that of a high-production-value vanity press for pre
viously existing, Marvel-owned characters. Because Elektra: Assassin and Havok & Wolverine were, by far, the most successful of Epic’s releases, an effort was made to create an interconnected line of superhero comics within Epic. Although Archie Goodwin, Epic’s editor, conceived of the characters, Marvel would retain all copyrights. By the middle of 1989, Goodwin saw the writing on the wall for Epic, and he departed for DC Comics.

  Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar, Steve Englehart’s Coyote, Steve Gerber’s Void Indigo, Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy’s Six from Sirius—none of these properties had lasted at Epic, and the rabble-rousers behind them now had families to worry about. Frank Miller was still making noise, snubbing Marvel and DC for the independent start-up Dark Horse, but he was a special case—still soaring from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, still possessing the juice to sell comics on his name alone, and nearly a decade younger than the rest. This generation had pushed for changes in the industry, and they’d made a difference. But someone else would have to come along to take the torch.

  16

  For years, there had been a dearth of popular new artists making their names at Marvel Comics. The biggest names of the 1980s—John Byrne, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walter Simonson—had all been with the company since the previous decade. The exception to this trend was the self-taught Art Adams, who after high school had washed dishes at a pizza parlor and spent all his spare time drawing submissions for Marvel. Five years later, when Marvel finally showcased his heavily detailed work—in the 1985 miniseries Longshot—he was an instant hit with fans. The title character had a fashion style that leaped out from the parade of standard primary-color capes—a mullet haircut, leather jacket, bandolier, and a side pouch—and an otherworldly origin that showcased Adams’s talent for strange alien creatures. But his extensive cross-hatching took time, and Adams never took on a regular monthly assignment—instead, he became a perpetual guest-star artist, a surprise flash of excitement on the comic racks.

  Still, Adams had an immediate impact on his aspiring peers, the young men who’d been weaned on Claremont and Byrne’s X-Men and Frank Miller’s Daredevil and who’d seen the visual style of Marvel Comics settle into staid functionality. In the last days of the Jim Shooter reign, there emerged a clutch of young artists who determinedly rendered every strand of hair, every stretch of clothing, every tooth in their characters’ mouths. If there was a scene with a brick wall destroyed, you could bet that every single brick would be delineated.

  The inker on Adams’s Longshot was a Filipino art school dropout named Whilce Portacio. Portacio was great at rendering details but needed improvement when it came to anatomy and perspective, so editor Carl Potts had him work over Adams’s pencils, hoping he could learn a thing or two along the way. In the meantime, Potts fed Portacio books like The Five C’s of Cinematography and kept him busy with work inking Alpha Flight. Shortly afterward, when Potts hired Jim Lee, an excessively polite, South Korean Ivy Leaguer, to draw Alpha Flight, the two artists meshed artistically and personally. Now Lee, too, got a copy of the cinematography book, and Potts drilled him on storytelling fundamentals, much like Denny O’Neil had with Frank Miller a decade earlier. Then Lee moved to San Diego and into a studio with Portacio. Their lives and careers were now entwined for good.

  After a while, Portacio figured out a way to campaign for his own penciling job. After inking Lee’s Alpha Flight pages, he’d draw his own pictures of the Punisher on the backs before sending them back to Marvel. Potts hired Portacio to pencil The Punisher just as the movie adaptation went into pre-production. When a second title starring the character was launched—Punisher War Journal—it went to Jim Lee.

  Within a year, Uncanny X-Men editor Bob Harras—always on the lookout for the latest, hottest artists—asked Portacio if he’d like to fill in for a few issues of Marvel’s number-one title. When Portacio passed, the job went to Jim Lee, and his popularity went through the stratosphere. Before long, Lee was made the regular X-Men artist.

  While Lee and Portacio were first impressing Potts on Alpha Flight, Todd McFarlane, a cocky and foulmouthed Canadian jock, was making a splash on The Incredible Hulk. Back in 1980, in the summer of Dark Phoenix and Elektra, McFarlane was on a baseball college scholarship, soon to be recruited by a Seattle Mariners scout. But he’d attended the San Diego Comic-Con, and stood mesmerized as he watched Jack Kirby graciously speaking to the fans who swarmed around him. If he didn’t make the majors, he told himself, he’d be a comic book artist. Sure enough, when an ankle injury dashed his big-league hopes, McFarlane began spending more and more time practicing at the drawing table, and reading with interest about Kirby’s and Gerber’s struggles, and the soapbox speeches of Neal Adams and Frank Miller, in the pages of the Comics Journal. Racking up rejection letters, the self-taught McFarlane finally got his breakthrough assignment just before graduation: a backup story in Steve Englehart’s Coyote. He landed the Hulk assignment at the end of 1986; a year later, his editor was bringing pages around to other offices at Marvel, explaining that McFarlane was growing restless, and looking for new challenges. The thin-lined, detail-fetishizing samples spoke for themselves. He was hired as the new artist on The Amazing Spider-Man.

  McFarlane and writer David Michelinie reintroduced Spider-Man’s thirty-year-old rogues’ gallery—Sandman, the Prowler, Mysterio, the Lizard—but it was a new villain that sealed the success of this freakier, darker version of Amazing Spider-Man. Spider-Man’s discarded black costume was revealed to be a sentient alien being; when it took as its host body a disgruntled former journalist named Eddie Brock, it called itself Venom. McFarlane gave the bloodthirsty Venom a hulking figure and an enormous grin of razor-sharp teeth. Now that Spider-Man had fierce iconography to match Wolverine’s claws and the Punisher’s arsenal, the title began putting up the kind of numbers it hadn’t seen for twenty years, and climbed the sales charts toward The X-Men’s number-one spot.

  By the summer of 1988, the majority of Marvel’s most popular artists—including Art Adams, Portacio, Lee, McFarlane, and X-Men penciler Marc Silvestri—were once again under the age of thirty. As Marvel editors began to loosen the Draconian storytelling rules that Shooter had imposed, this new wave of artists began to embrace the visual language of postnarrative music videos, moving away from establishing shots and two-shots and toward frantic nonlinearity. And, in the wake of Adams’s success, there was detail, always detail, in the faces and machinery and architecture. The pages started to blacken with it.

  In these artists there was also a restlessness, or at least a lack of docility, that hadn’t been seen since the days when Jim Starlin turned down John Romita on The Fantastic Four. Maybe it was youth; maybe it was the fact that none of them was close to Marvel’s New York headquarters, that none of them had moved to the city and paid their dues on-site. Or maybe it was just that they’d seen what had happened to Kirby and Ditko, and vowed not to let it happen to them. McFarlane pestered other artists about starting a union, a notion that had hardly been considered by anyone since the 1978 guild plans fell apart. If Marvel could screw Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, McFarlane thought, they could screw anybody.

  McFarlane felt a particular debt to Steve Ditko. He restored the original underarm webbing to Spider-Man’s costume, accentuated the black borders around the eyes, and contorted the hero’s body into odd poses, just like Ditko had done. But McFarlane went further: the webbing that shot from Spider-Man’s hands now looked like intricate rope (or spaghetti, as Tom DeFalco said); the whites of the eyes doubled in size; the contortions no longer exactly obeyed anatomical rules. McFarlane said he wanted to bring out the character’s spiderlike qualities; the editorial department got nervous. Pages were brought to the Bullpen, to John Romita himself, so that Peter Parker could be made to look like himself. “That’s all you want me to change?” Romita would ask, looking down at the distortion of the character that hardly resembled the near-official interpretation he’d forged in 1966. McFarlane’s Peter Parker looked like a bodybuild
er, and his Mary Jane like a Playmate. Before long, McFarlane’s version was the house style, and the artists on Spectacular Spider-Man and Web of Spider-Man were told to conform to this new vision.

  But McFarlane still had to draw whatever the writer told him to draw, and in 1989, after a second summer in which Amazing ramped up to a punishing every-other-week schedule, he’d had enough. He told his editor, Jim Salicrup, that he wanted off the title, that he wanted a project on which he could call all the shots. McFarlane expected that he’d quickly be given a low-selling comic on which to learn the craft of writing. To his surprise, Salicrup asked him if he wanted his very own Spider-Man title. “It wouldn’t have been my choice to bring in a fourth Spider-Man book,” McFarlane said, “but I wasn’t fool enough to say no to it.”

  It was a sweet deal: in a break with Marvel policy, McFarlane wouldn’t even have to worry about keeping continuity straight with the other Spider-Man titles. If the company’s other writers had any hard feelings about the special treatment afforded the hot artist, they were hardly comforted by what he said in interviews. He only read the sports page, couldn’t remember the last book that he read. “Uh . . . I don’t really consider myself a writer, so I don’t pay attention to writing. Now I’m sure the people at Marvel won’t be too impressed with that statement, but by the time they read it, it’ll be too late.” He was going into the project, he said, assuming “that it’s going to be a piece of shit.”*

  What made Todd McFarlane stand out was that he really didn’t seem to need Marvel Comics. He’d already sunk his earnings into starting a sports card company and opening a comic shop in Washington; he sorted through cases of hockey cards while he coasted through phone interviews. The candor of his answers was either unbearably crass or refreshingly unpretentious, depending on your perspective. “As long as I get Spider-Man in the right pose, and I’ve got a cool shot of him coming at you in the splash page, it’s not that important what’s behind him,” he told one journalist used to long-winded discussions about craft. “If I can fill up the space with stuff that kind of sort of, looks right—or at least fill it with linework—the kids figure there’s more detail put in than there really is.”