Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  An even more important transaction took place in March, when the rights to the Spider-Man film were finally, miraculously, extricated. After MGM’s claims were rejected in a summary judgment, a series of settlements—which included Columbia Pictures waiving the rights to a James Bond series—freed the way for Marvel to resell the license to Sony, for approximately $10 million. After nearly fifteen years and countless “Tangled Web” newspaper headlines, the resolution seemed almost sudden. (Eric Ellenbogen got to announce the legal victory, and then he too was gone, after seven months, with a $2.5 million severance package. The New York Post reported that he’d been fired for failing to turn around and sell Marvel once the Spider-Man mess had been cleared. Others simply said he’d crossed Perlmutter one time too many, or rented one too many Porsches on business trips.)

  But even as things were falling into place for the Spider-Man movie, more battles were under way. After Stan Lee reminisced in Comic Book Marketplace about his inspirations for writing an acclaimed late 1965 issue of Amazing Spider-Man, Steve Ditko broke his long silence. “Stan never knew what was in my plotted stories,” the artist wrote to the magazine’s editors, “until I took in the penciled story, the cover, my script and Sol Brodsky took the material from me and took it all into Stan’s office, so I had to leave without seeing or talking to Stan.” A few months later, after Lee was identified in Time as the creator of Spider-Man, Ditko popped up on that magazine’s letters page, too: “Spider-Man’s existence needed a visual concrete entity,” Ditko wrote. “It was a collaboration of writer-editor Stan Lee and Steve Ditko as co-creators.” This time Lee picked up the phone and called Ditko, for the first time in more than thirty years.

  “Steve said, ‘Having an idea is nothing, because until it becomes a physical thing, it’s just an idea,’ ” Lee recalled. “And he said it took him to draw the strip, and to give it life, so to speak, or to make it actually something tangible. Otherwise, all I had was an idea. So I said to him, ‘Well, I think the person who has the idea is the person who creates it. And he said, ‘No, because I drew it.’ Anyway, Steve definitely felt that he was the co-creator of Spider-Man. And that was really, after he said it, I saw it meant a lot to him that was fine with me. So I said fine, I’ll tell everybody you’re the co-creator. That didn’t quite satisfy him. So I sent him a letter.”

  But the wording of the open letter that Lee sent out in August 1999 was a stumbling block. “I have always considered Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s co-creator,” it read, and Ditko quickly pointed out that “ ‘Considered’ means to ponder, look at closely, examine, etc. and does not admit, or claim, or state that Steve Ditko is Spider-Man’s co-creator.”

  “At that point,” Lee said, “I gave up.”

  Marv Wolfman had filed a suit when the Blade movie was released, contesting the ownership of more than seventy characters, including the titular hero, which he claimed to have created before his employment at Marvel. The trial began in November. Unfortunately for Wolfman, he did not have the backing of his peers. “My assumption for my work was that Marvel owned it,” Roy Thomas said in a deposition. “I sort of thought that Marv, coming from DC, would know that.” Gene Colan contended that the Blade character had only been fleshed out after he and Wolfman were collaborating on the Tomb of Dracula issue in which he first appeared. And John Byrne—still proud to be a company man—testified that Wolfman and Len Wein had warned him, at a 1975 Thanksgiving dinner, that the “companies own everything you do.” Wolfman and Wein had expressed surprise, Byrne claimed, when Steve Gerber had sued over Howard the Duck. “How could he have a case?” Byrne said they wondered aloud. “The companies own everything!”* Ultimately, the court ruled that Wolfman had insufficient evidence of creating Blade before his Marvel employment, and that all characters he created while on staff fell under the category of work-for-hire.

  Soon afterward, Joe Simon began actions to terminate Marvel’s copyright transfer for the first ten issues of Captain America. He’d already settled with the company once, in 1969, but in the interim, the courts had redefined the rules of work-for-hire, and an April 1999 claim by the widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel paved the way. When Marvel’s Captain America copyright was up for renewal in December, the eighty-six-year-old Simon leaped at his chance.

  “Christ, I’m doing this for my children and other creative people who should have their rights,” Simon told a reporter. “I’m not doing it for myself. I’m too old to be doing this for myself, but I’m not going to quit by any means. They’ve spent so much money on this. Marvel must have spent a million bucks on this. I think some people would get together and back me on this.”

  Even Simon could see that it was movies, not publishing, where the future lay—comics, he said, were for the “masturbation generation,” a parade of big guns and big breasts. “The business is going to hell in the first place, but the characters are more valuable than ever. So, we’ll do the best we can.”*

  Peter Cuneo, the third Marvel CEO to work for Perlmutter inside of a year, was a renowned turnaround king. He didn’t follow comic books any more than Perelman had. Did it matter? “Whether you’re selling deodorant or a wrench,” he said, “you’re always trying to find a way to emotionally bond to the consumer.” Like Joe Simon, Cuneo had no doubt what the future held for Marvel: not just Hollywood, but the cross-marketing of video games, fast-food restaurants, and soft-drink companies. A new division, the Marvel Characters Group, was created solely to manage synergistic opportunities. “The Marvel Characters Group will be running the superheroes as brands,” said Cuneo. “Think of them as agents for the characters. An agent for the X-Men says, ‘I have an X-Men movie coming out in July. What special things are we going to be doing in the publishing division? What integrated promotions are we planning?’ ”

  Coordinating all that with the comic books was easier said than done. Although the X-Men titles remained at the top of the charts, they were as much a creative battleground as ever, as a half-dozen successive writers complained of editorial micromanaging and rewriting. The editors, meanwhile, insisted that they were only listening to the fans, that letter-writing campaigns determined which characters stayed or departed. “What do the fans want?” one writer grumbled. “They want change. What happens when you give them change? It’s not the change they wanted, and everybody wants things back the way they were.”

  It wasn’t just a matter of populist rule. Within the offices, a full-fledged bureaucracy had taken root. Editor in Chief Bob Harras and Editorial Director Chris Claremont, who’d once fought for custody of the mutant characters, were now both part of the chain of command, and neither was ready to cede control. “Bob definitely stood over my shoulder a lot,” said one editor. “I don’t think it was good for the books, for me, or for him.” Scripts were turned in, second-guessed by Harras, and then triple-guessed by Claremont, who still had emotional ties to the characters and stories. “Technically, Chris was not supposed to be involved in the X-Men books, but there was no way to keep them away from him,” the editor said. “I would often say to my assistant, ‘I don’t think Chris really wants to write the books, but I don’t think he wants anyone else to write them either.’ ” By the end of 1999, Chris Claremont was, once again, writing The X-Men.

  As the pillars of Marvel’s publishing business, the X-Men titles had long carried a heavy weight. Now, during an industry-wide slump, the burden was tremendous, and everyone on the creative side felt it. Perhaps Harras summed it up best. “There seems to be a perception that there’s this evil corporation of Marvel dictating changes and so on, but that’s not reality. It’s just that everyone is watching you, inside and outside the company.”

  Shortly afterward, when Peter Cuneo appointed a new president of the company, it meant there was one more person to watch the X-Men franchise. Bill Jemas, a Harvard Law graduate and NBA executive, had gained experience with the Marvel brand in the 1990s, when he worked for Fleer. Now he took a look at the company’s biggest propertie
s and made his disapproval clear. There were sixty titles a month, Jemas said, and he didn’t like any of them. And The X-Men, with its complicated story lines and overpopulation of characters, was at the top of his list. “I went to Harvard Law,” he told a room of editors. “If I can’t understand it, it’s not because of me.”

  Fox’s X-Men movie was coming out that summer, and the Spider-Man movie was scheduled for the following year. Each could potentially bring in a whole new audience, but only, Jemas felt, if the comics’ serpentine plots were made accessible. He also blanched at how the Marvel heroes had aged, complaining that “characters who were envisioned as teenagers were walking around with goatees, beards, and children.” The quickest solution was to start over from scratch. Jemas actually toyed with destroying the Marvel Universe and building it back up from scratch, but finally settled on the idea of adding a parallel “Ultimate” line of comics, filled with younger counterparts to the Marvel heroes.

  Jemas, dissatisfied with the initial pitches that came through Bob Harras’s office, asked Quesada to sit in on an end-of-the-day meeting about the Ultimates line and explain why it was failing. “That was one of my most uncomfortable meetings at Marvel,” remembered Quesada, “because politically I’m trying to make sure everything runs smooth and there are no snags between Marvel Knights and the editor-in-chief of the Marvel staff, and Bill sort of brought me in as his hammer.” Eventually charged with scouting talent for the project, Quesada called Brian Michael Bendis, a writer of crime comics who’d filled in when Kevin Smith didn’t make his Daredevil deadlines. Bendis would bring Spider-Man into the twenty-first century.

  The Peter Parker in Ultimate Spider-Man was a backpack-toting computer whiz with a skater haircut and an internship at eBugle, the Daily Bugle website. Aunt May and Uncle Ben were former commune dwellers, the same kind of baby boomers who might have been holding picket signs in the background of Amazing Spider-Man circa 1968. But these changes were mostly cosmetic. Ultimate Spider-Man recovered the angsty essence of the original Lee and Ditko stories, and livened the tug of Parker’s ego and conscience—the struggles of great power and great responsibility—in a way that hadn’t been done in decades.

  Jemas got free samples of the comic in Wal-Marts, KB Toys, and Buster Brown shoe boxes. When the marketing blitz was done, eight million copies of Ultimate Spider-Man were circulating.

  But the script for Ultimate X-Men, assigned to another writer, was rejected, and when Fox moved up the release date of The X-Men movie by six months, Marvel had missed its synergistic opportunity. The X-Men made $75 million its opening week, but sales on the comic didn’t budge. “I think at the time it was the third-biggest opening weekend of all time for a non-sequel,” said Jemas. “Crazy numbers. But the comic books were based on the ’60s continuity. So there was no graphic novel, no TV promo. The movie was for 20-year-olds and the toys were for 10-year-olds and the toys didn’t sell. We had a TV show that was from hell that didn’t tie into anything and we had merchandise that was from hell that didn’t tie into anything, too. So, we had a movie success and a god awful financial failure and we were broke—like, can’t-make-payroll broke.”

  Jemas turned his attention back to streamlining the Marvel Universe proper, hammering away in meetings at the importance of stripping each character to its “central metaphor.” That week, a New York magazine story on the X-Men began with Chris Claremont’s editors shooting down his plot ideas. Bob Harras was among those challenging Claremont, but Jemas wanted to clean house entirely.

  It wasn’t a difficult mission to carry out. Perlmutter and Harras had their own tensions, owing in part to Perlmutter’s draconian cost-cutting. At the end of August, Bill Jemas asked Joe Quesada if he’d be interested in the job of editor in chief.

  Quesada immediately began shaking things up at Marvel. Grant Morrison, fresh from the critical success of the Marvel Knights title Marvel Boy, was recruited to take over X-Men from Chris Claremont; Claremont left his staff job as well. Quesada then recruited editor Axel Alonso from DC Comics’ edgy “Vertigo” line, and Alonso in turn hired J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the television show Babylon 5, to take over Amazing Spider-Man. Howard Mackie, who’d been regularly writing the web-spinner’s adventures for most of the decade, was out.

  It was not surprising, then, when Quesada’s arrival caused friction with two of the more contentious Marvel veterans. Steve Englehart, working on a Fantastic Four series, complained publicly that changes to his script were made without his input; he and Quesada issued a series of competing press releases. A week later, Quesada canceled John Byrne’s X-Men: The Hidden Years, a series set in the past, and Byrne took up the matter on his website. “Joe Quesada was not able to give me any sort of reason that made sense—killing profitable books in a failing market?—so, since I have no interest in devoting my time and effort to a company apparently intent on committing suicide, my relationship with Marvel is over.”* Nearly every remnant of the old guard was gone.

  Stan Lee was gone, too, except for his scant duties as a well-paid Marvel figurehead. Two years earlier, during the lapse in his Marvel contract, Lee began working with a lawyer and businessman named Peter Paul on an Internet venture called Stan Lee Media. They’d met through fund-raising events, and before long Paul was introducing Lee to A-list celebrities like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Ali. “I was looking for ways to liberate him,” Paul said of Lee. “He was lying fallow at Marvel.”

  Although its primary concern was online animation, SLM had other, ambitious plans—feature films, amusement park rides, a line of clothing featuring famous Stan Lee catchphrases—and with the power of Lee’s name, it quickly attracted investors. Within a year of the company’s creation, Peter Paul engineered a reverse merger with a shell company, and Wall Street money started flowing in. Six months later, when its website finally launched, stocks were changing hands at $31 a share, and SLM was capitalized in the neighborhood of $300 million. For a while, Lee continued to write his “Stan’s Soapbox” column for Marvel. “Nothing short of an H-bomb could tear me from the company I love,” he wrote in 1999. “I’m just setting up my own website, in my spare time, for the fun of it. Come and visit when we officially open in August, but no matter what—Marvel rules!”

  But most of his time was spent breathing in drywall dust at the SLM headquarters, where he’d arrive at nine thirty each morning to find an ever-expanding office space. Even Marvel had never grown at the pace of an Internet start-up, but it suited Lee’s energy. Although his level of technology savvy topped out at replying to email messages, at nearly eighty years old Lee was giving speeches at technology conferences.

  To the SLM creative staff, he lived up to his legend, bouncing around and acting out scenes for new characters, even if some of those creations seemed suspiciously like pastiches of Marvel heroes; one, the Accuser, managed to incorporate a wheelchair (like Professor X), a law-practicing alter ego (like Daredevil), and an armored suit (like Iron Man). And Lee had generated a tremendous amount of goodwill among the entertainment industry over the past decades. There were partnerships on the table with Burger King, Fox Kids, the Backstreet Boys, and RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. Michael Jackson toured the offices and pondered a team-up of mammoth proportions. “If I buy Marvel,” the King of Pop asked Stan the Man, “you’ll help me run it, won’t you?” Lee assured him that he would.

  By the summer of 2000, Lee would have certainly enjoyed putting Marvel in its place. “I was very surprised that Stan Lee was, on the inside, considered to be an outsider,” recalled a Marvel executive. “Somebody to take care of—somebody we’ve gotta pay attention to.” The “Stan’s Soapbox” column, a regular feature since 1967, was discontinued; Marvel explained that it took up potentially valuable advertising space. Perlmutter had also been campaigning to remove the “Stan Lee Presents” banner from the comics, and had even insisted that Lee be scratched from the list of those who received complimentary copies of new comics. “Ike had it in for Stan
like you wouldn’t believe,” said one editor. “Ike hated him.”

  Lee could afford to buy his own comics—his Stan Lee Media stock was, by now, valued at $35 million. But there were signals that he ultimately wielded no more power at SLM than he did at Marvel in the 1960s. “Stan once had a big lunch with all the artists,” recalled SLM artist Scott Koblish, “and we all steered it toward our ideas for making money: CD-ROMs, publishing—we had a fistful of ideas, and Stan was jazzed about all of them, but he warned us before he left the lunch that as soon as he’d show these ideas to the execs they’d get shot down.”

  At the very least, Lee was not in the loop when it came to the inner workings of the business. “He would sit in business meetings and occasionally say something,” one friend reported. “But mainly he’d sit there and doodle, or fall asleep.” He didn’t yet know that his business partner, Peter Paul, had served jail time in the 1970s for cocaine possession and defrauding Fidel Castro for $8.7 million in a bizarre coffee shipment scheme that involved plans to sink a Panamanian freighter. (Paul would later claim he was working as a CIA operative.) Paul had not put his checkered past behind him: Stan Lee Media was outspending its revenues 20 to 1, and falling behind on its bills, as Peter Paul manipulated the stock prices.

  No one knew why the stocks were falling. But in a matter of weeks, the SLM staff braced for the end, backing up portfolio samples and removing valuable items from their offices. On December 15, a Spider-Man statue arrived from Germany, a birthday gift the staff had collectively purchased for Lee’s birthday. As they waited for an ominous 4 p.m. meeting, they pieced together the seven-foot statue and signed a card.

  When the layoffs were announced, Stan Lee collapsed. “I think of that old James Brown trick in ‘Please, Please, Please,’ where they gather him up because he can’t go on,” Koblish recalled. “They gathered Stan up and led him out, and then they gathered the rest of us up in the big room, room 145, and told us that that was it.”