Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  With extra time on his hands in the months before he made the leap to writing the new Spider-Man title, McFarlane pitched in and inked a few New Mutants covers over the pencils of Marvel’s latest discovery, a twenty-one-year-old Anaheim, California, native named Rob Liefeld. Liefeld’s father was a Baptist minister; his grandfather had been a Baptist minister; all that young Liefeld had ever wanted to do was draw Star Wars characters, ride his bike to the comic shop, and hide his stacks of X-Men from his mother. Although he’d quickly gotten work doing pinups and covers at DC Comics, his narrative instincts were shakier than McFarlane’s. But he was hardly timid: one editor was surprised to receive an entire story drawn sideways. Bob Harras liked the audacity, though, and after giving him fill-in assignments on X-Factor and Uncanny X-Men, he told Liefeld he wanted a new look for New Mutants, and a new character to replace Professor X as the leader of the team. Liefeld shot off pages and pages of costume designs and brand-new characters: Bob—some future friends and/or foes for the Muties! If ya don’t like ’em, trash ’em! ’s okay with me—but if you’re interested—give me a call! One of the characters was submitted to be the new leader: a half-cyborg “man of mystery” with a glowing “cybernetic eye.” His name, the notes said, should be either Cybrid or Cable.

  When Harras and writer Louise Simonson suggested other names, Liefeld took a page from the playbook of his new friend McFarlane, and stood his ground. “Bob said, ‘Let’s call him Quentin,’ ” Liefeld recalled. “I said, ‘Yucch!’ I had already put ‘Cable’ down as his name on the sketches. Then, in Louise’s plot, after being told his name was Cable, he was called Commander X throughout. I said, ‘If this guy is called Commander X, I want nothing to do with it.’ That seemed ridiculous to me.” Harras gave Liefeld his way.

  The issue of New Mutants that introduced Cable—he wielded a giant gun; the New Mutants were depicted in crosshairs—was an instant hit, and marked a sudden turnaround for the title’s sales. But it was the beginning of the end for Simonson, who suddenly felt expendable. As Liefeld’s illustrations of muscles and artillery became more outrageous, as backgrounds disappeared and reappeared, as he discarded 180-degree rules, the readership only grew. Liefeld “would do square windows on the outside of the building, but round ones when you cut inside the building,” complained Simonson. “It took me about six months to figure out that Rob really wasn’t interested in the stories at all. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do, which was cool drawings of people posing in their costumes that would then sell for lots of money.” And management, she felt, was uninterested in addressing her complaints. “The books were suddenly being used to make Marvel a lot of money in the short term, with no concern for the long run or the characters,” she said. “Immediate cash appeared to be what Marvel was bought for—to be milked and milked and milked. I think that at that point anyone who looked like they could produce lots of instant cash for Marvel was likened to a god, and Rob Liefeld looked like he could do just that.”

  While Simonson struggled with Liefeld and Harras, Marvel threw itself into promotional planning for Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1. Eager to please the comic shops, Carol Kalish pushed for a special edition of the issue to be sold exclusively to the direct market, one that would include silver ink on a black background. In all other respects but the cover, the comic would be exactly the same.

  Meanwhile, the director of Marvel’s newsstand sales noticed that Sail magazine’s highest-selling issue was the one that came sealed in a plastic bag with its annual calendar. It wasn’t just the added value of the calendar—the poly bag made it stand out on the racks. Maybe that strategy could help Spider-Man on the newsstands, too.

  “The direct-market retailers freaked,” said Kurt Busiek, who worked in Carol Kalish’s department. “ ‘You’re gonna put out a bag for the newsstand, and we can’t have the bag?’ ” The release of Spider-Man #1 had become a multiplication problem.

  McFarlane’s comic itself was nothing special—twenty-two pages of a bare-bones plot in which Spider-Man battled a few criminals and visited with Mary Jane, while the Lizard bloodily dispatched three thugs and an innocent bystander, all of it delivered with overwrought narration and constant sound effects. But more than a million copies of the issue—a silver-ink edition, a regular-ink edition, and bagged versions of each—were sold at comic shops in late June 1990. One Los Angeles store rented footlights to welcome flocks of news media (and hundreds of customers) to its Midnight Madness sale. Before the issue even reached newsstands (800,000 unbagged copies; 125,000 bagged copies), Marvel already had a record-breaker on its hands. Collectors tried to figure out if they should remove the bag or not, then realized they’d better buy two if they wanted to read one.

  Retailers wanted more. “They wanted to be able to sell everything,” said Busiek, “even if it was a stupid thing, like, oh, this one’s in a bag.” A gold-ink reprint edition was produced, and then, in an attempt to reward shop owners, Marvel produced a complimentary “platinum” version—their version of the record industry’s presentation of platinum records—which would be mailed out to each retailer. After various cover formats were experimented with, the platinum edition ultimately had to be printed on a heavier card stock to properly retain its special combination of inks. Estimated as an $8,000 promotion, it wound up costing more than $35,000. At first it seemed like a disaster—not just the cost, but the ways in which it failed to please retailers, who started begging for just one more copy of the instant collectible.

  Marvel, meanwhile, had just opened a gateway to its future. The manufacturing department’s five months of experiments on the platinum edition had yielded various prototypes—foil stamp covers, embossed covers—that would be perfected and utilized on future titles in the months to come, and not just in limited editions, but for print runs of hundreds of thousands. Was it just Todd McFarlane that sold Spider-Man #1, or was it the covers? An issue of The Incredible Hulk was quickly produced with Day-Glo inks; sales spiked an astonishing 300 percent, and the issue was quickly reprinted. A shiny, metallic Silver Surfer cover and a glow-in-the-dark Ghost Rider cover followed, to equal success.

  In retrospect, some would view this moment as the opening of a Pandora’s box. “I was taking advantage of the desires of the market and fueling speculator greed,” the sales director who’d developed the platinum edition Spider-Man wrote contritely, years later. “There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with creating product to fill demand; but taking advantage of the condition of a consumer base is akin to date rape, as far as I’m now concerned.”

  Since Ron Perelman’s purchase of the company, new faces had gradually been showing up in the Marvel offices: corporate delegates focused on maximizing profit while maintaining a distance from the creative process. But Perelman and his right-hand man, Bill Bevins, couldn’t help but take notice of the publishing division’s recent triumphs, and soon that distance disappeared as executives began keeping a closer eye on their investment. The Andrews Group prepared to take Marvel Comics public. Vice presidents and consultants populated the halls more and more, and in October 1990, when Jim Galton—the quiet, reserved head of Marvel since 1975—retired at the age of sixty-five, Perelman had already groomed a successor.

  Terry Stewart came from a mergers-and-acquisitions background, but another way in which he differed from Galton served to make him more palatable to suspicious comic cognoscenti: he was a fan. “Beneath this cloak of smokestack America that I wear beats the heart of a collector,” he told Fortune magazine, shortly before he was appointed president of Marvel. In the context of the Perelman regime, Stewart easily played the role of rock-and-roll rebel, wearing black T-shirts under his sport jackets.

  Stewart had told the press that he would focus on getting movies made, and appointed longtime Cadence suit Joe Calamari as chief executive of Marvel Productions. The studio had, in fact, been noticeably quiet since New World had sold it to Perelman. President Margaret Loesch, growing restless under the new management, had o
nly been let out of her contract after Fox’s Barry Diller convinced Perelman at a cocktail party that the sooner she started at Fox, the sooner she could work to bring The X-Men to television. Now Calamari would benefit from Loesch’s cooperation at Fox, but he would also be stuck trying to sort out the continuing legal tangles of the Spider-Man film rights.

  There were other changes: Barry Kaplan, Marvel’s longtime CFO, was shuffled to the side. Kaplan had already discovered a difference in philosophies between old-guard Marvel and the Andrews Group. “I had these arguments with Perelman’s people, because they believed in full absorption accounting. I’d say, ‘Well, great, Captain America is losing money. Should I discontinue Captain America?’ Their attitude was, ‘Yeah! If you publish something else, it may make money!’ But it’s not like lipstick, where you come up with another color. You can’t just come up with another character. In the meantime, while you’re not publishing Captain America, you have writers, pencilers, inkers, and colorists who may not have enough work.”

  In the sales department, Carol Kalish found herself reporting to a newly appointed executive with monogrammed shirts and zero interest in comic books, a calculated buffer between her and upper management. She bristled at the direction of the company’s latest sales strategies, which favored aggression over long-term success. Marvel giddily noted that a 33 percent hike in cover prices had not significantly reduced sales, and started planning another price increase. As the chief liaison between Marvel and comics retailers, Kalish was a crucial player—in 1990, comic stores accounted for 73 percent of Marvel’s sales—but following the other October management changes, she was quickly promoted out of the department and into a new position, vice president of new product development, where she would be less of an impediment. Lou Bank, a twenty-five-year-old from the sales department, took her place. “I think it was a lot easier to strip-mine a company underneath a naïve 25-year-old than it would have been underneath someone like Carol,” Bank said years later. “And I was much easier to manipulate.”

  Shortly after the reshuffling, as executives crunched sales numbers and strategized Marvel’s public offering, Tom DeFalco submitted his budget for the following year. The response from upstairs was that 1990 was terrific, and now they needed to top it. DeFalco met with his editors. “How the hell,” he asked, “are we gonna do better than that?”

  DeFalco went to editor Bob Harras and told him it was time to expand the X-Men line. “I thought it was the worst idea on the face of the Earth,” said Harras. “I remember thinking, ‘How much more can we expand this thing? We have four X-books already: Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine, New Mutants and X-Factor.’ I thought that if we went to five, we were going to kill the golden goose.” Nonetheless, Harras and Claremont worked to differentiate the new title—simply called X-Men—from Uncanny X-Men. They’d merge the original 1960s lineup, now appearing in the pages of X-Factor, with the current cast of Uncanny X-Men, and then redistribute them into two rosters. Uncanny would feature the Gold Team; X-Men would feature the Blue Team. X-Factor, meanwhile, would feature a group of peripheral younger mutant characters who’d been introduced over the last few years.

  If that wasn’t confusing enough, there was now the matter of New Mutants. As Louise Simonson reached the end of her rope, Liefeld had campaigned for a new writer—Fabian Nicieza, who also worked as Marvel’s advertising manager. When he was still a teenager, Liefeld had acquired Nicieza’s phone number, and called him up to compliment his script on the New Universe title Psi-Force. “I’m going to make it as an artist in the industry real soon,” Liefeld told Nicieza, and suggested they might work together in the future. Now, three years later, that time had come. “Rob had a million ideas, and no filter, and no maturity to know how to best present those ideas,” Nicieza said. “So he started to flood ideas to the point where, I guess it was starting to choke Louise’s ability to create the book. He wanted it to be muscle and power—and she wanted it to be about a group of kids growing up. And those two things are hard to reconcile.”

  Louise Simonson finally quit, after ten years at Marvel. “She got fucked out of a job by Rob,” said Chris Claremont, but Simonson herself laid most of the blame at Harras’s feet. “He would change plots, and blame it on the artist. He would change dialogue, and then say, ‘I’m sorry, but I tried to call you and you weren’t home’ or ‘I’ll be sure and tell you the next time.’ He would change some of the dialogue, but not other parts, so the things people said wouldn’t make sense. It was his way of letting you know he was wishing you’d go away.”

  With Simonson gone, Liefeld had told Nicieza and Director of Marketing Sven Larsen that he wanted New Mutants to relaunch under a new title, and the three of them began campaigning DeFalco for the change—perfect timing, since DeFalco needed a second big book for 1991. Canceling a Top 10–selling comic and relaunching it under a new name went against everything Marvel knew about brand strategy, and some worried that yet another number-one X-issue would look like a cash grab, but Liefeld was insistent. How long could you go on calling something “New” Mutants? “I guarantee you we will sell more,” he promised, and DeFalco finally went along with the plan. X-Force #1 went on the schedule, to be published two months before X-Men #1. The summer of 1991 would be the summer of X.

  INTERVIEWER, 1988: What would you do if Chris Claremont walked in and said he was off “The X-Men”?

  BOB HARRAS: That is almost an unrealistic question. I can’t even contemplate Chris doing that. I think if he did I’d have a nervous breakdown. (Laughter.)

  With the franchise-wide changes, Harras now had an opportunity to solve a problem that had been nagging at him: Claremont’s stories about aliens and magic just weren’t pleasing him; they didn’t seem like the kind of tales that The Uncanny X-Men did best. In the five years since the return of Jean Grey had ruined Claremont’s happy ending for Cyclops, the book had gone through radical changes: Dazzler and Longshot had joined; the X-Men had been presumed killed in battle and spent time in Australia, where they depended on a mute Aborigine to teleport them from adventure to adventure; Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde, its most playful and bighearted members, had left. Professor X and Magneto, the opposing poles of the title’s philosophical quandaries, were nowhere to be found. “Times have changed since Charles Xavier founded this school and created the X-Men,” Storm declared in one issue. “Changed even since he brought in myself and my companions to be the team’s second generation. Now there is a third, and we must answer, my friends—are we fit caretakers any longer, for Xavier’s school and his dream? Or has the time come to turn that role over to others . . . ?”

  Some wondered if Chris Claremont was asking those questions of himself. The Uncanny X-Men was still, of course, the number-one-selling title in the entire industry, but retailers—who were, by and large, aging fans themselves—had complained to Marvel’s sales representatives about the dangling plot lines, wondering when Claremont was going to get back on track. With constant whisperings in his ear, Harras made his move.

  He’d held brainstorming sessions while out to dinner with Rob Liefeld, Whilce Portacio, and Jim Lee, and found that they were on the same page as to the direction that should be taken. “It just happened that Bob hated anything that Chris said,” recalled Portacio, “and anything that we said, fifty percent of the time, was a match-up with what Bob was thinking.” Portacio and Lee would now plot the X-Men stories together, with Chris Claremont writing the dialogue over their artwork—Portacio on Uncanny X-Men, and Lee on X-Men. After shepherding the characters from throwaway sales gimmick to international stardom over the course of sixteen years, Claremont’s role would be reduced to typing dialogue fit to order. Aghast, he tried to get control of just one of the two titles, much like how Byrne had been handed Fantastic Four when he’d come to loggerheads with Claremont a decade earlier. No dice. “It wasn’t even a case of ‘Jim will handle X-Men, you can take Uncanny,’ ” Claremont said. “No one on the editorial side wanted to talk about it, it wa
s just a take it or leave it situation.”

  Claremont tried to go along with the plan but found that even his limited role was compromised by blown art deadlines. “Jim was not a consistent producer,” he said. “I’d get seven pages; a week or two would go by, and I’d get fourteen pages. There were cases where I’d get the pages and I’d have to script them and send them to the printer a day later. It was a panic.”

  Portacio, meanwhile, wanted to make a splash by killing off older characters in Uncanny. Claremont complained vociferously to Harras while he tried to juggle the interlocking plots of three titles. “At the same time we’re arguing back and forth,” said Claremont, “I’m trying to do this four-issue run on X-Factor tidying up all the loose ends left over from Weezie, asking her ‘Is it okay if I do this?’ She said, ‘I don’t care.’ At that point I was just like, fuck.” As they approached the big launch of X-Men, Claremont said, the battle with Harras became “an outright knock-down drag-out fight.” Harras wanted to bring Professor X back into the stories; Claremont wanted to kill Wolverine and complete Magneto’s transformation from villain to hero.

  At Marvel, some felt that Claremont had put Harras into a difficult position, that he’d overstayed his welcome on the titles. “Chris wasn’t prepared for the level of imposition that was going to be placed on those titles,” said Nicieza. “He wasn’t ready for the budgetary needs that those titles were going to demand from him—the expectation of multiple crossovers, the expectation of story events that were not going to be what he wanted to do or how he wanted to do it. It was going to be a different book than the book he created.” Claremont and Harras began communicating exclusively via fax machine so that there would be a paper trail of the increasingly tense exchanges. Claremont appealed to DeFalco and delivered ultimatums to Terry Stewart.