Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  It had been forty-three years since Martin Goodman made him fire the Timely staff, leaving Lee alone to build from scratch. Now, half a lifetime later, he had to suffer the additional blow of betrayal. Peter Paul was gone, on his way to São Paulo, Brazil, along with $250,000 that Lee had loaned him personally. “He is like a grandfather. He is sweet and unassuming—and easily taken advantage of,” said a friend. “But not anymore; he’s jaded. He said to me, ‘Now the only people I know I can trust are my wife and my daughter.’ ”

  Across the country, several members of Perlmutter’s team were gathered in a meeting with Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada. “A guy stuck his head in the door,” recalled one attendee, “and said, ‘Great news, guys! Stan Lee Media is going under!’ Joe had the good sense to put his head down and not say anything. Bill made some kind of comment like he was playing along, but I don’t think even he was comfortable with that. But everybody else in the room was having a good laugh about this. That was the mentality. They hated him. It was bizarre.”

  Bill Jemas was the kind of guy who cared more about the New York Knicks than about Nick Fury. He was proud to slay the sacred cows of the geeky world he’d entered—no more hang-ups about continuity, he liked to say, no more writing “comics about comics.” He took pride in challenging the staff on what kinds of stories were off-limits: in one early meeting he suggested revealing the origin of Wolverine, which, despite the popularity of the character, had remained shrouded in mystery. The editors were aghast at his impiety.

  Marvel suddenly pushed for commonsense changes that might seem blindingly obvious to anyone who wasn’t entrenched in industry tradition: first pages were given to story recaps of previous issues, freeing writers from having to shoehorn clumsy exposition into the dialogue or captions. The all-capital-letters word balloons, a holdover from a time in which poor printing technology necessitated the extra clarity, were replaced by proper English. Sensing that trade paperback collections could be a vital part of the company business—and a beachhead into bookstore chains—Marvel began clearly demarcating beginnings and endings of story arcs, so that a half-dozen “episodes” could easily be packaged into a single paperback volume. When another writer-artist team came along, to continue the television show analogy, a new “season” began.

  How many of these changes involved input from Joe Quesada was difficult to say, because Jemas was the strongest personality in Marvel editorial since Jim Shooter—and Jemas wasn’t even technically in editorial. But Jemas and Quesada jumped with both feet into the world of online comics fandom, becoming a two-headed public persona for the Marvel Comics of the twenty-first century. Before long, they’d perfected a good-cop, bad-cop routine. Jemas had little interest in diplomacy, blaming “bad, bad books” for Marvel’s late 1990s slump, and implying a network of cronyism. “In 1995, a typical Marvel X-Men book was selling a million copies a month,” Jemas told an interviewer. “We could have afforded to hire just about any writer in the world—from John Irving to Scott Turow—but the editors hired each other, and they hired their friends.”

  He was no more polite to Marvel’s readership. Questioned about plans to launch a category of titles he called “Bad Girls for Fanboys,” Jemas shot back, “We have quite a few male readers who live in the basement of their parents’ house in Queens. For them, an evening with Elektra is as good as it gets.” To another interviewer, he delicately clarified what he meant by “Bad Girls”: “Elektra is so bad you are going to want to spank her.” Frank Miller’s tragic heroine was not only back from the dead; now she was a cheesecake ninja pinup.

  Thankfully, not all of Marvel’s forays into more “adult” content catered so embarrassingly to one-dimensional titillation. At the end of an all-night bender, editor Axel Alonso recruited British writer Peter Milligan for a drastically reimagined version of X-Force, the X-Men spinoff that had once been Rob Liefeld’s playground. The brand-new, college-aged characters resembled nothing more than spoiled members of a professional sports team, juggling talk shows, limousine rides, and endorsement deals; the group was funded by a venture capitalist. X-Force’s dim view of youth culture—there were characters based on Allen Iverson and Eminem, and a grisly execution scene involving a teenage boy band—made it the most gleefully acerbic title Marvel had published. In the first scene of Milligan’s tenure, a character named Zeitgeist pauses from a ménage-à-trois with two supermodels to watch the “game tape” of the graphically violent super-battle he’d fought the night before; by issue’s end, all but two of the team’s original members are dead. The Kirbyish primitiveness of Mike Allred’s art, and the primary-color palette, only accentuated the ironic corruption of old-fashioned Marvel innocence. When the issue came back from the Comics Code with a slew of objections, Jemas shrugged. Not only did Marvel publish X-Force without the Comics Code seal, it boasted about it: “Hey Kids!” shouted one corner of the cover. “Look! No Code!”

  When Ultimate Spider-Man writer Brian Michael Bendis pitched Alias, a series about a heavy-drinking, swearing, down-on-her-luck, ex-superheroine-turned-private detective, Bendis clarified, before Quesada responded, that he was prepared to tone it down. But Jemas went for it, without hesitation, in all its profane glory. Marvel wouldn’t just publish it without a Comics Code seal—it would create a whole new line of “Adults Only” superhero comics, called MAX. The first issue leaped in with both feet. “Fuck! This is—fuck! “God Fucking Dammit!” comprised the entirety of the first page’s dialogue. As it turned out, though, the obscenities were just a bit of throat-clearing before the comic settled into complex, sympathetic characterization and the smart, rat-a-tat dialogue that marked David Mamet screenplays or Richard Price novels. Bendis retrofitted his bruised underdog heroine, Jessica Jones, into Marvel’s history, making her an aging alumnus of the early 1980s Avengers (code name: Jewel), and her emotional interactions with Marvel fixtures like Luke Cage, Matt Murdock, and Steve Rogers simultaneously satisfied fanboys’ desires for in-jokes and added dimensionality to decades-old characters. Despite its achievements, it was the reference to rough sex (between Jessica and Luke “Power Man” Cage) that got all the attention. After a printer in Alabama refused to handle the first issue, Marvel had to take it elsewhere for publication.

  Jemas had no patience for moral watchdogs. He withdrew Marvel’s membership from the Comics Code Authority, just like that, after nearly fifty years. The other dues-paying companies protested, but the feeling within Marvel was electric. Seemingly no one had questioned before why a publisher would continue to underwrite an outdated third-party entity that limited the content of its product.

  There were other changes. Suddenly the quality of the coloring and printing improved. The practice of overprinting—through which retailers could always reorder fast-selling product, but which stuck Marvel with mounds of unsold inventory—ceased. “Bill was absolutely fearless in the way a man who does not understand the consequences of his actions can be,” said Tom Brevoort, “and he bulldozed through obstacles that could not be moved beforehand, because he was heedless—courageous, insightful, and oblivious to the fact that things couldn’t be done. That was very valuable to knocking out some of the calcification that had been built up.”

  The MAX line sent the message that Marvel was a creative haven once again. Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy returned, after twenty years, to Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu. Gail Simone, a former hairdresser who wrote feminist critiques of comics on websites, got the green light to revive Night Nurse as a former “wild chick” who was “part Elvira and part Mother Teresa.” Even Steve Gerber returned, to do a Howard the Duck series for the MAX line, and because he didn’t like the Howard redesign that had been in place ever since Disney’s lawyers came calling in the early 1980s, Howard the Duck was rendered as a mouse. There was a thrilling sense of danger at Marvel once again, a sense that the creative forces of Marvel didn’t have anyone to answer to.

  But unhinged flights of the imagination were the exception—capturing an audience was
front-and-center of the editorial strategy. No one articulated this balance of experimentation and crowd-pleasing better than Grant Morrison, whose X-Men pitch had read like a call to arms, a manifesto for calculated rule-breaking. “This is a pop book,” Morrison wrote, “as essential as the new Eminem release or the latest Keanu movie. We can rejoin the culture here and the only way to do it is to drop ’80s and ’90s notions of who our audience should be. The only way to get back in there is to deliver the stuff the movies and the games can’t. And what the mainstream audience wants from us (and I’ve asked a lot of ’em) is raw imagination, ready-made characters, outrageous spectacle, storming angst and emotional drama. Beautiful people with incredible powers doing startling, diverting things!” Taking a cue from the movie version, Morrison replaced the X-Men’s spandex costumes with standardized team uniforms, but uniforms with a sense of fashion that could only come from an ex-raver: Day-Glo yellow biker jackets, military pants, and heavy boots. As he’d promised in his pitch, he revamped and reintroduced classic concepts like the Sentinels, the Shi’Ar Empire, and the Phoenix Force, “in such a way that it will seem as though we’re seeing these concepts for the first time.”

  “Dead characters always return,” Morrison complained of the X-Men comics of the preceding decade. “Nothing that happens really matters ultimately. The stage is never cleared for new creations to develop and grow.” In a neat metafictional trick, Morrison wanted to use the well-worn elements of the X-Men mythos to explore what he saw as the central metaphor of the humans-versus-mutants theme: the ways in which older species try to stifle their newer, evolutional replacements. But even as he introduced the most off-the-wall new characters anyone had seen in a Marvel comic for years—a clumsy, virginal, straight-edge, hard-core mutant with a beak and talons; a chain-smoking, problem-drinking teenage Latina with insect wings; a creepy set of psychically linked quintuplets named the Stepford Cuckoos; Xorn, a Chinese meditator whose iron skull contained a powerful star—he built up everything to climax with the death of Phoenix. Everything new was old again.

  When it was time to hit the reset button and roll out the “Ultimate” version of The Avengers, Jemas and Quesada hired Morrison protégé Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch, who had pushed the boundaries of DC’s corporate patience with The Authority, a pitch-black comic that imagined superheroes as part of the military-industrial complex. They brought a similar sensibility to the assured—and, some would say, cynical—The Ultimates. In this version of the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Nick Fury allied with Stark Industries to organize a team of super-powered living weapons for the United States. Thor was no longer the alter ego of Dr. Donald Blake, but rather a long-haired WTO protester with delusions of godhood. Tony Stark was no longer just a rich industrialist who had different dates to every fund-raiser—he was a nihilistic, wisecracking louche. Psychodrama abounded, from Bruce Banner’s suppressed rage to Henry Pym’s feelings of inadequacy. It was realism in ways that only comics readers defined the term: pessimistic, violent, and more concerned with repercussions than with moments of transcendence.

  Hitch’s artwork—smooth and polished, filled with photographic references, and often organized in horizontal grids that approximated CinemaScope grandeur—gave readers the sense that they were peeking at beautiful storyboards for an unproduced blockbuster. Where Busiek and Ross’s similarly lifelike Marvels had reserved its full-page big moments for tableaux of wonder, the Millar-Hitch synthesis gave the widescreen treatment to spectacles of destruction.

  Its cinematic qualities were, of course, no accident—The Ultimates was intended as a demonstration of how The Avengers franchise could be transmogrified into a megaplex attraction, a floppy comic book that could be handed over to a Hollywood producer as an all-in-one pitch souvenir. Captain America’s likeness was based on Brad Pitt; Iron Man’s on Johnny Depp. And Nick Fury, no longer a greatest-generation relic, was transformed into a dead ringer, visually and verbally, for Samuel L. Jackson in his monologue-inclined Tarantino mode. If The Ultimates were ever made into a movie, the casting précis was already complete.

  “I’d much rather be an actor than a writer,” Stan Lee once told French auteur Alain Resnais. He’d had a brief moment onscreen as a hot-dog vendor in the X-Men movie; when cameras rolled on Sam Raimi’s $140 million Spider-Man, he was assigned a role as a curbside vendor of cheap sunglasses. He even got some dialogue: “Hey,” he shouted to a potential customer, “how about these? They wore ’em in the X-Men!” The week before Spider-Man’s release, he appeared, as himself, in a guest spot on The Simpsons.

  Lee took full advantage of the publicity machine surrounding the movie. In countless newspaper, magazine, radio, and television interviews, which always included mention of his teeming seventy-nine-year-old energy, he not only told his familiar tales—about coming up with the idea for Spider-Man, about his years toiling for Martin Goodman—but he looked to the future. Avoiding conversation about Peter Paul or Stan Lee Media, he announced yet another start-up, POW! Entertainment, for which he’d already created an animated Pamela Anderson vehicle called Stripperella. He promoted a biographical DVD called Stan Lee’s Mutants, Monsters & Marvels, and, a quarter-century after he’d signed a contract to write his memoirs, proudly mentioned that Simon & Schuster was finally publishing Excelsior: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee. (The introductions to each chapter in his autobiography, worded in the third person, gave an idea of how he felt about the recent successes of the Marvel films: “Stan thought Avi did quite well in his new task. Of course, he had a great ballpark to play in. It would be difficult not to do well when you controlled characters like The X-Men, Spider-Man, The Hulk, Daredevil, and so many additional heroes who had been popular for decades, and were offering them to studios that were hungry for proven characters that could be franchised.”)

  This was Lee’s moment in the spotlight, and he wasn’t going to let any opportunity go to waste. On April 23, a press release announced that he was taking his file copies of Marvel publications out of storage and putting them up for sale. The auction house predicted they would take in about $4 million.

  Six days later, at the Spider-Man premiere party in Westwood, Los Angeles, Adam Sandler, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Will Smith were Lee’s red-carpet compatriots, along with stars Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. The film grossed $39 million on opening day—a new world record.

  Spider-Man ran 121 minutes. Both of Stan Lee’s lines were cut.

  21

  “I Haven’t Made a Penny from Spider-Man,” read a London Times headline in June 2002, for an article in which Stan Lee good-naturedly explained that he wasn’t seeing any profits from the movie. “People naturally assume that I have. They read that the movie will make half a billion dollars so they figure I’ll get about a third of that, but no.” When the journalist expressed his surprise, Lee waved it aside. “But I’ve had a great life,” he assured him. “I’ve enjoyed it and I have formed a new company and things look very promising.”

  Still, it seemed that there were subtle ways in which he was distancing himself from his old company. “If I had done that movie there would have been less destruction,” he said of the myriad explosions that ripped across the screen in Spider-Man. When another reporter informed him of a Nick Fury series—part of Marvel’s adult-readers MAX line—in which the crusty colonel strangled an enemy with his own entrails, Lee responded, “I don’t know why they’re doing that. I don’t think that I would do those kinds of stories.”

  Lee had long outgrown an interest in keeping up with new superhero adventures, and now he’d even sold his comic book collection. Even as he insisted that he held no regrets, in conversation he returned to the idea of what might have been. “I wish I had come to Hollywood and been a screenwriter,” he mused. “I wish I had the time to be a novelist. I think I could have done better. I mean, I would have loved to have written a great novel. I would have loved to have written a great bunch of screenplays. I would have loved to have written a Broadway show. I did
n’t have any big compulsion to write comics. It was a way of making a living.”

  On November 12, 2002, citing the provision in his 1998 contract that called for “participation equal to 10% of the profits derived during your life by Marvel (including subsidiaries and affiliates) from the profits of any live action or animation television or movie (including ancillary rights) production utilizing Marvel characters,” Stan Lee filed a $10 million lawsuit against Marvel Enterprises and Marvel Characters.

  By the time of Spider-Man’s release, Avi Arad and Peter Cuneo had renegotiated Marvel’s Hollywood deals so that the company would receive a percentage of gross, rather than net, profits. It was an impressive feat, and fortuitously timed, since the company’s heroes were now hot property. Blade 2, which opened at number one at the box office on Easter, was still in theaters when Spider-Man was released, and by then big-budget adaptations of Hulk and Daredevil were already in production, and Fox had given X-Men 2 a release date.

  Almost overnight, superheroes were the apple of the public’s eye. The weekend that Spider-Man opened, thousands of comic shops around the country participated in Free Comic Book Day, an idea hatched by a California retailer who’d noticed the long lines at Baskin-Robbins Free Scoop Night. Timed to piggyback on the movie’s buzz, the event included giveaways from all the major publishers, who hoped to lure new audiences to the endangered art form.

  After seven straight years of decline, Marvel had finally stopped the bleeding, with a combination of Hollywood hype and the influx of fresh ideas. But even as direct-market sales began to turn around—and they were still only a quarter of what they’d been a decade earlier—publishers watched helplessly as newsstand exposure shrank. A whopping 85 percent of sales now came from comic stores, and nobody was likely to wander into a comic store unless they were already looking for comics.