by Sean Howe
Todd McFarlane had no interest in helping turn Marvel into a moviemaking empire, and he couldn’t understand why anyone at Image would. “Why do you want to work for your competitor?” he wondered. “I’ve got a toy company; are you fucking out of your mind I would ever make a toy for Hasbro or Mattel? It would never happen.” Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, though, were intrigued. Negotiations began.
Calabrese, no fan of Richard Rogers or the changes that he had championed, wanted to undo the moves of the preceding two years. He began by restoring Marvel’s editorial hierarchy. “I don’t like this five editors-in-chief system,” he told the five editors in chief during a meeting in his office, hinting of things to come. After the meeting, one of the editors turned to Bob Harras. “You’re going to be my new boss,” he predicted. Harras smiled slightly.
As supervisor of the X-Men line, Harras was already responsible for fully one-third of Marvel’s sales in the direct market. “Because of X-Men revenue, Bob was exposed to a lot more corporate push and pull,” said Matt Ragone. “He was willing to sit down and say, ‘How can we grow this, how can we make it better?’ We all had to sell our souls a little bit.”
Once it was made official that Harras would be the one and only editor in chief, he told Bob Budiansky not to end the Clone Saga just yet—it would compete with the attention that Marvel hoped to gain for an upcoming X-Men crossover. Budiansky warned Harras that this move would alienate writer Dan Jurgens, who’d finally been promised a resolution to the clone madness, but Harras’s word was final. Sure enough, Jurgens was furious. After a wave of screaming matches, he quit the title and returned to DC.
By now, another wave of title cancellations had been announced. Among those who lost work was Herb Trimpe, the longtime Hulk artist who’d been a fixture in the late 1960s Bullpen and who now was writing “I’m beginning to hate drawing comics” in his journal and, at fifty-six years of age, applying to take classes at a state college. “Went down to New York yesterday,” Trimpe wrote,
All the editors either in meetings or out to lunch. Talked to human resources at Marvel today. The lady seemed embarrassed. Said maybe I should consider retiring. I told her I wasn’t going to hold the gun to my own head. They’d have to shoot me themselves. With a family, I need the health care benefits and income.
Adding insult to injury, rumors were swirling about Jerry Calabrese’s overtures to Image: was it true that everything but Spider-Man and the X-Men was going to be farmed out to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld?
Stan Lee flew to New York for the official announcement. Since Avi Arad’s ascent at Marvel Films, Lee had distracted himself with projects like Excelsior Comics, a modest-sized imprint of titles to be packaged from the company’s West Coast offices. But most of his public appearances of late—like popping up on Conan O’Brien to promote Best of the Worst, a low-budget book of trivia and one-liners—were the extraneous gestures of celebrity life, and had little to do with current Marvel Comics business. Now he returned to his old rah-rah mode: “We’re matching some of the best talent in the industry, with some of the best characters in the industry, to change the status quo and create the stuff of legends!” he beamed to the gathering of journalists at the Grand Hyatt on Park Avenue. The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Iron Man would now be created completely by the California studios of Jim Lee and Liefeld. The news that Marvel was removing control of its characters from its own staff and handing million-dollar contracts (plus profit sharing) to those who’d recently walked out on the company was, in the words of one editor, “catastrophic to morale.”
Even the fictional world of the Marvel Universe was being disassembled. For a multi-title event called “Onslaught,” the outgoing editors, writers, and artists of The Avengers, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, and Captain America were charged with implementing their own obsolescence. The heroes would be destroyed, and then re-created in a “pocket universe,” an alternate world where Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld’s reimagined versions would take over. The “Heroes Reborn” titles, as they would be called, would be renumbered as #1 issues for the first time since the 1960s. Other titles—including Thor, Doctor Strange, and Silver Surfer—would be canceled outright.
“This is a turning point,” Marvels writer Kurt Busiek told a newspaper. “The Marvel reader is essentially being told that Marvel’s long-term history is more or less irrelevant. It’s secondary to what will make the characters more popular and what will make the company more money.”
The day after the press conference, Trimpe made another journal entry:
No matter what I say or who I call or write at Marvel, I can’t get assigned to another book. I’ve tried reason, outrage, guilt trips and begging. Nada. I haven’t been able to scrounge together enough work to meet my monthly quota. The place is a shambles. When I press, they admit sales are down and so is morale. The scuttlebutt is that more layoffs are coming.
Pictures of the smiling old Marvel Bullpen now carried the weight of irony. Don Heck, who’d died of lung cancer earlier in the year, had been ignored by the company for years; when one employer asked him if he had any work lined up with Marvel, Heck barked, “You think they want their fucking grandpa working on their goddamn books?” Marie Severin, who’d given Marvel decades of service, couldn’t get regular assignments as a colorist; her contract was soon terminated. Fabulous Flo Steinberg, Trimpe’s old pal from the 1960s Bullpen, summed up the feeling among the veterans: “Herb, they just don’t care. Don’t you get it?”
John Romita and his wife, Virginia, still worked in the offices, but over the past year found the workplace turning intolerable. “Virginia had about thirty people in the bullpen working under her; I had five people working under me,” he said. “We were coached by outside consultants on how to let people go. You know that movie with George Clooney? We lived that. It was the most horrible time of our life, to have to lay off people we had just given a raise to six months before, because they were doing so well. We would get them in a room and tell them, ‘We hate to do this, but the company is cutting back, and we have to let you go.’ And to see their faces—friends of ours, people we had worked with for years—Virginia and I just dreaded going into work.” The first day after Christmas vacation, the sixty-four-year-old Romita—who’d drawn Captain America in the 1950s, whose artistry had delivered Spider-Man to a mass audience, who’d co-created Mary Jane Watson—put in three weeks’ notice for himself and his wife.
A week later, after Marvel tallied a loss of $48 million for the year, word came that 40 percent of the workforce was going to be eliminated. On January 3 and 4, 275 Marvel employees—including Carl Potts and Bob Budiansky, who only months earlier held editor in chief titles—lost their jobs. One by one, editorial staffers were called in to Bob Harras’s office, where Harras gave them the bad news. One even fainted. As Carl Potts walked back to his desk to call his wife, he passed Mark Gruenwald’s open door. The perpetually upbeat and cheerleading Gruenwald had, only weeks earlier, been forced to break the news to the creative teams of The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Iron Man that Lee and Liefeld would soon be taking over. Although Gruenwald had kept his job, Potts recalled, “He looked like he was taking it harder than any of those getting the axe.”
Over the next few days, as two feet of snowfall closed businesses and schools, the departing Marvel employees made their ways back into the office to gather the detritus of years of faithful service from their cubicles and offices. Unworn “Marvelution” T-shirts, handed out after the miserable slide show, went into trash cans. Mary McPherran, who’d been with the company since arriving as a hot-pants-and-sandals-wearing receptionist a quarter-century earlier, unpacked her desk and found, stowed away, a stack of old envelopes. She’d once mailed these envelopes from 635 Madison, where she worked beside Stan Lee and Herb Trimpe and Marie Severin and John Romita, to True Believers all over the world. “Congratulations!” they read. “This envelope contains a genuine Marvel Comics NO-PRIZE which you have just won!�
�� The joke, of course, was that they were empty.
She put the box under her arm and walked out the door.
PART V
A New Marvel
20
Bob Harras had simply inherited “Heroes Reborn,” just as he’d inherited the layoffs, and just as he’d inherited a bruised and battered Marvel Comics, where surviving employees doubted the security of their jobs even as they struggled with increased workloads. But the scapegoating of the new editor in chief was nearly unanimous. Burgeoning Internet message boards buzzed that Harras—who’d given Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld so much latitude in the early 1990s—was responsible for yanking the carpet from underneath loyal employees and rolling it out for Those Image Traitors. “I don’t know if anybody from Marvel ever called me and said that I wasn’t working on Captain America anymore,” recalled one writer who’d been replaced by Liefeld.
Jerry Calabrese was getting an earful from critics, too—when he submitted to a CompuServe chat, retailers and readers grilled him about why Marvel had ruined the distribution network, and why there weren’t movie adaptations. Calabrese just wanted to talk about the bright future with Lee and Liefeld. “Marvel has a lot of unfinished business with guys who came up through Marvel and are no longer associated with us. The door is open and will remain open with any of them whom we can make common cause to make excellent editorial product.” A message from Steve Gerber, whose Malibu title had just been canceled by Marvel, popped up on the screen. “As someone with whom you might like to make ‘common cause,’ ” Gerber wrote, “I’ve shied away from working with the company because it seems Marvel is unwilling to publish anything more potentially offensive than a Jell-O commercial.”
Things would get worse for Marvel. In March 1996, Bullpen fixture Jack Abel, who’d drawn for Timely Comics since 1952 and had worked hard to recover from a stroke in the early 1980s, suffered another stroke while working at his desk. An editor attempted CPR while the ambulances arrived, but Abel was pronounced dead at the hospital. He was sixty-nine.
The same month, sixty-year-old Sal Buscema was informed that, due to falling sales, he was being relieved of his art duties on Spectacular Spider-Man—his only title. “My career was essentially behind me,” recalled the man who’d regularly provided the visuals for Steve Gerber’s The Defenders, Steve Englehart’s Captain America, and countless others. “I’d been working for Marvel for over 30 years, and here I was just shoved aside.” His older brother John Buscema, who’d begun drawing for Timely in the 1940s, coauthored How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, and remained in high demand, immediately decided that it was time for him to retire, too. “I think 48 years in any business is enough,” he said. “If I can help it, I never want to do another comic.”
Stan Lee’s Excelsior line had been in the preparation stages for a year and a half. Complete issues were finished and sitting in a drawer, awaiting the go-ahead from the sales team back east. Now, finally, it was abandoned.
The other major focus of Stan Lee’s efforts, Marvel Films, was in the same position: everything was always in development, never on the release schedule. And Lee was feeling more and more like he’d been pushed to the sidelines by Avi Arad, invited to fewer meetings, his commentary less welcome. Lee turned his attention to taping intros for the Marvel Action Universe cartoons. Except for a doomed TV pilot for an adaptation of the X-Men spin-off Generation X, the closest he’d come to seeing cameras roll was when he played himself in a cameo for Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, talking up the creations of Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men. Those were just three of the dozens of Marvel projects currently with various studios, and they weren’t looking good. Over the last few years, a number of X-Men and Hulk scripts had been rejected by rights-holders Fox and Universal, and Spider-Man . . . well, the problems with Spider-Man were by now legendary.
Over the decade that movie producer Menahem Golan had retained the rights for Spider-Man, he’d managed to involve half a dozen different corporate entities. Golan had originally bought the Spider-Man rights for his Cannon Films; after leaving Cannon, he transferred them to 21st Century Films. Next, he raised money by preselling television rights to Viacom, and home video rights to Columbia Tri-Star; then he signed a $5 million deal with Carolco that guaranteed his role as producer. But after Carolco assigned the film to James Cameron, Cameron refused to give Golan the producer credit, and the lawsuits began. By the end of 1994, Carolco was suing Viacom and Tri-Star; Viacom and Tri-Star were countersuing Carolco, 21st Century, and Marvel; and MGM—which had swallowed Cannon—was suing Viacom, Tri-Star, 21st Century, and Marvel.
Toy Biz’s Isaac Perlmutter, who stood to profit from the impact that Marvel-related films would have on the action figures, pushed Perelman to start investing in Hollywood. “Right now, you’re dying,” Perlmutter said, in his heavy Israeli accent. “And if you don’t do anything, I tell you again, Marvel is a bankruptcy.”
Of course, one of the reasons that Marvel struggled to sell studios on its movies was that Toy Biz had already sewn up the lucrative product licenses for itself. But in July 1996, Marvel sold a chunk of its 46 percent ownership in Toy Biz to raise money to create Marvel Studios. Now Jerry Calabrese and Avi Arad (with the help, presumably, of Stan Lee) would assemble pre-production packages—commissioning scripts, hiring directors, casting actors—and then turn them over to studio partners for completion. No longer would Hollywood’s whims hold Marvel hostage. “We are finally on the verge of breaking out,” Arad told Variety. “This is our bar mitzvah year in a sense.”
Those in New York, where a post-layoff bunker mentality had taken root, might have disagreed. Office doors stayed shut throughout the day, opening briefly only to facilitate micromanaging. (“We see writer-driven comics as an experiment that has failed,” Bob Harras’s assistant told one X-Men writer). The Spider-Man titles, mired in the Clone Saga, continued to cause headaches. At Harras’s insistence, the team of editors and writers was supposed to explain that Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin, was behind the entire villainous plot; this twist was complicated by the fact that Norman Osborn had been quite memorably impaled in a 1973 issue. There was also the difficulty of eliminating Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson’s baby. In the end, Mary Jane was told by a nurse that she’d had a miscarriage, while a suspicious-looking hospital worker was shown delivering a package on seaside docks. In subsequent years, no writer has been eager to revisit the morbid question of whether Spider-Man’s infant daughter was miscarried or permanently kidnapped.
Originally conceived as a four-month story, the Clone Saga lumbered on for two years, as the monthly circulation of Amazing Spider-Man dropped 50 percent. Now the most vital moments in the Spider-Man comics were sly references to Marvel’s financial struggles. In an issue of Spider-Man Unlimited, a criminal businessman advises publisher J. Jonah Jameson to make a public offering. “I’d never take the Bugle public, Kingsley,” Jameson spits, “because I know that its long-term integrity would suffer under corporate connivers like you, who dream up ridiculous little schemes which only produce short-term goals!” The Daily Bugle newspaper downsized. “They’re laying off nearly a hundred people! I heard one poor kid fainted when he was terminated!” a secretary tells Peter Parker, before he is called in to his editor’s office. “You’ll still have plenty of freelance work,” the editor assures Parker, in language that intentionally echoed what outgoing Marvel employees had been told, “probably more than ever!” Even Spider-Man had been put out on the street.
For the newly launched Spider-Man Team-Up comic, Harras told editor Tom Brevoort to bring back Howard the Duck. But when Brevoort and his assistant called potential writers, they all voiced the same concern: I’d love to read that, but I’d hate to be the one to write it. Call Steve Gerber.
They braced themselves, and reached out to Gerber.
After thinking it over for a few days, Gerber called back and explained that he was at work on a comic that teamed his Destroyer Duck character with Savage Dragon, a cr
eation of Image cofounder Erik Larsen. “I want to do an unofficial crossover,” Gerber said, “where we’ll do these two stories—the one in that book and the one in your Marvel book—and we’ll set them in the same location, but the characters won’t really run into one another, they’ll just kind of run back and forth across the same landscape. But if you have the two books together, you can see the larger tapestry.” Brevoort, intrigued, approved the idea, on the condition that nothing in Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck—over which he’d have no editorial control—was going to get him in trouble.
But when Gerber learned that Harras had been campaigning to bring back Howard the Duck not just for this specil issue but in issues of Ghost Rider and Generation X as well, he called his lawyer. There was no contesting Marvel’s ownership of Howard the Duck anymore—that had been settled out of court—but Gerber was damned if he was going to unwittingly endorse a full-blown Howard revival. Gerber’s lawyer called Marvel and raged. Brevoort called Gerber and told him there were no hard feelings if he wanted to walk away from writing the issue.
Gerber paused. “No. I said I was going to do this story and I’m going to do it.”
Spider-Man Team-Up #5 featured not only the returns of Howard the Duck and Beverly Switzler, but also long-absent, off-the-wall Gerber creations like the Kidney Lady and the Elf with a Gun. The crossover, as it were, was only a matter of a few panels that overlapped with Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck, in which Howard and Beverly find themselves in a crowded scrum of duck clones.
