Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  Marvel continued to talk about the importance of attracting new readers, but appealing to younger children wasn’t part of that strategy. “I think the 8-year-old comic reader is a myth,” Joe Quesada told a reporter. “It’s not a concern to me. A year ago, when I took that job, that’s what I was concerned with. I heard comic-store owners saying, ‘Where are my 8-year-old readers?’ You know what? I don’t think they were ever really out there.” Instead, Marvel wanted to court teenagers, a demographic that had been nearly eradicated by competition from television and video games. The syndicated Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show became Jemas’s shorthand for what he was looking for—a continuing series with young, attractive stars and a rich backstory that nevertheless was accessible to a new audience. (According to one writer, at the height of Jemas’s Buffy-mania, there were three female-monster-killer series simultaneously in development at Marvel.)

  “There has been a perpetual push and pull over whether each project should target the loyal ‘core’ market of dedicated comic fans (‘fanboys’) or the broader audience of Marvel fans in the ‘mass market,’ ” Jemas wrote, and it was clear that he relished his role in antagonizing the pimply nerds of the base readership. In fact, it started to seem like chasing away die-hard customers was a primary goal. After a series of public debates between Quesada and writer Peter David about the low-selling Captain Marvel, Jemas stepped in with a challenge. “Peter is a talented writer maybe two or three issues of the year,” Jemas announced to the press, “but the rest is just inside jokes for fans who have been reading his stuff for 20 years. He’s just feeding off his old work. I feel that he needs to make his stories accessible to new readers or it’s doomed.” In a contest dubbed “U-Decide,” sales of David’s Captain Marvel would be judged against a new title called Marville, which Jemas himself would write. Whichever title sold least would be canceled.*

  Politically incorrect, attention-getting trash talk was business as usual for Jemas and Quesada. (“They have Batman and Superman, and they don’t know what to do with them,” Quesada once said to a reporter about DC Comics. “That’s like being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can’t get it up. What the fuck?”) The difference was that, with Marville, the dog-and-pony show seemed to dictate the content of the comics. It had been trumpeted as a demonstration of the storytelling techniques Peter David had failed to learn, but its first issue perpetrated precisely the crimes Jemas had denounced. Marville was a directionless string of satirical set pieces so filled with inside jokes that a text feature on the first page of each issue was necessary to spell out each reference. In the first issue, the Superboy-like KalAOL, son of Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, is sent back in time from 5002 A.D., where he meets a sexy redheaded cab driver named Mickey and a sexy brunette cop named Lucy. There were jabs at Ron Perelman, but also at Peter David. Iron Man showed up and, after bloodying a few bystanders, spouted, “I know, I destroyed the local economy. But you can pay Mexicans a dollar an hour and they still work like N—” at which point he was interrupted by the Black Panther: “People would think poorly of you if you said a bad word.” Spider-Man and Daredevil’s old enemy the Kingpin turned out to be Spike Lee in a Malcolm X cap. The politics of Marville #1 might have been deemed offensively incendiary, if only they weren’t so bewildering. At its most coherent, Marville #1 simply came off as an extended screed against superhero comics and the culture that had grown around them.*

  Worst of all was the cover, which uncomfortably melded Marvel’s post–Comics Code embrace of prurience with its interest in the teen market. The front of the first issue prominently featured Mickey’s crotch, as she sat in the driver’s seat of her taxi, clad in a bikini and high heels. (She was a dead ringer for Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar.) On the next issue’s cover, she appeared at a front door, smiling at the reader, her nakedness barely hidden by the housewarming gifts that filled her arms: pizza, a six-pack, video games, and porn on VHS.

  Meanwhile, within the actual pages of Marville, a godlike being towed KalAOL, Mickey, and Lucy through the ages, leading Platonic dialogues about the relative merits of creationism and evolution. During parts of these lectures, they all skinny-dipped. In the sixth issue, KalAOL returned to the twenty-first century and pitched a comic-book executive on the series itself. “This thing,” the executive finally said, “will never sell.”

  “Because I’m president of Marvel,” Jemas wrote in an open letter on the issue’s last page, “I could ignore the bean counters and publish Marville without regard for minimum sales projections and margin requirements. But that’s just me. Let’s talk about you.” With this, he announced he was bringing back the Epic line, not as a creator-owned imprint, but as “Marvel’s Project Greenlight,” an open-submission contest for novices. A seventh issue of Marville was published, but there wasn’t a story, just twenty-five pages of text: Jemas’s storytelling advice and rules for submissions.

  Marville only lasted six months, but the dreadful and bizarre legacy of its front covers continued. A cover for Thunderbolts, which featured a Fight Club–like network of villainous wrestlers, depicted a young woman, glistening, covered in bruises and smiling, sitting on the floor of a gym shower. Along the top ran the words “Bling-Bling • Booty • Boxing • Bars” (Jemas pushed his editors to adopt the attention-grabbing cover lines of magazines like Cosmopolitan and Maxim). Another series, NYX, was about young mutants on the street, in the tradition of Larry Clark’s Kids; the young teenage girl on the cover of the first issue fingered her bikini strap, a pacifier hanging from her parted lips. And Trouble, which relaunched the Epic line, made a bid to revive romance comics—by imagining adolescent, sexually active versions of Peter Parker’s Aunt May and Uncle Ben.

  To the outside eye, it may have seemed that Bill Jemas had a free hand to do whatever he liked—but that would be discounting Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad. Perlmutter was the most hands-on owner Marvel ever had, as the employees were reminded repeatedly. A conference-calling executive might be interrupted from his negotiations by an angry Perlmutter, waving a thirty-dollar invoice in his face, asking why so much money was being spent. “He used to wander the hallways and stand in your doorway,” recalled one editor, “and stare at you until you got uncomfortable and then he’d leave. He always had a notebook in his hand, like he was writing notes about you.” Once, when Perlmutter heard that some employees were involved in a Fantasy Football league, the staff returned from a meeting to find all computers confiscated. Social, frivolous lunchtime activities—a half hour of watching television, or playing Dungeons & Dragons—were banned from the offices.

  For a while, Jemas held sway with the Israeli boss, even bypassing the CEO in the chain of command. “Bill reported to Peter Cuneo,” recalled one observer, “but it was just a façade for the investors. Bill really reported to Ike. They screamed at each other, but Ike listened to him for some reason. ‘He’s smart,’ Ike would say to me, maybe because he stood up to him.”

  But Perlmutter’s longtime ally Avi Arad, who was trying to put together movie deals on the West Coast, had an agenda that was often at cross-purposes with Jemas’s chance-taking. Arad felt like he was stuck on damage-control duty with Hollywood stars who’d gotten eyefuls of over-the-top blood and guts. Michelle Pfeiffer walked into his office and told him she wouldn’t take her son, an X-Men fan, into comic-book stores because of the gratuitous violence. George Clooney pulled out of talks to portray Nick Fury after he laid his hands on the issue in which the hero choked an enemy soldier with his own intestines.

  Arad began paying closer attention to the comic books; he and Jemas were increasingly at each other’s throats. Occasionally, when a MAX series about an old character—Deathlok, say, or Shanna the She-Devil—was scrapped at the last moment, the scuttlebutt would be that the envelope-pushing content had been deemed a threat to already-in-the-works movie deals. Marvel’s plans to feature a back-from-the-dead Princess Di in X-Statix caused outrage in the British press, but some claimed that it was Arad�
�s displeased Hollywood friends who ultimately nixed the issue.

  “Publishing was where it all started, and it was great source,” Arad said. “You had readymade storyboards to look at, to understand how to lay out stories. But the big deal for the company was merchandising—everything from cereals to shirts to videogames to shoes, you name it. That’s where the serious revenues were coming from.”

  If the comic books damaged the brand, it would all come crashing down.

  As his conflicts with Arad mounted, Jemas also increasingly sparred with staffers, who complained that he was quick-tempered and prone to shifting mandates. “Bill was the smartest guy in the room in most rooms he went into,” said Tom Brevoort. “But as the success got greater, Bill started to think he was the smartest guy in every room.” When the writer of The Fantastic Four resisted the idea of moving the group to the suburbs and giving them day jobs, Jemas took him, and the artist, off the title. Then he typed up a two-page treatment and hired a playwright to take over.

  Grant Morrison grew frustrated with Jemas’s lack of interest in his proposals for new series, which he wanted to load with complex ideas about religion and mind-melting imagery—a revisiting of the “cosmic comics” of Starlin and Englehart. A sequel to Marvel Boy would devote an entire issue to the Kree bible “in full-on Prog Comics style”; Silver Surfer: Year Zero would depict the character in the way that Jack Kirby had always intended, he said: not as a Christ figure, but as an avenging angel, screaming through the starways. “I decided that movies were doing comics so well, there was no point in doing comics to look like movies any more,” Morrison said. “Let’s make this stuff really crazy . . . so that special effects have to keep up with us. I foresaw a new demand for intricate bizarre psychedelic comics and was eager to oblige. Cycles whip and twist faster all the time and pop culture’s threshing tentacles are flailing into an ultraviolet magic goth phase for a little while before the lights come on and the kids all look really weird in the sunshine. Time for the comic books to get crazier again.”

  But tensions between Jemas and Morrison rose, climaxing with an angry phone call in which Jemas’s top-of-lungs screaming rattled nearby Marvel staffers. Quesada called Morrison to smooth the ruffled feathers. Morrison assured him it was water under the bridge.

  Morrison had given up on the idea of winning over Jemas, though, and during the San Diego Comic Convention that summer, DC Comics announced that it had signed Morrison to an exclusive contract. Shortly after the announcement, a blindsided Joe Quesada cornered Morrison on the convention floor, where, according to one account, Morrison briefly fell into a panicky trance before railing against Jemas, whom he called “the biggest arsehole I’ve ever met.”

  “It’s over, it’s over!” Morrison spat. “The Marvel era is done!”

  With no Marvel booth to return to—Perlmutter had refused to pay for one that year—a shaken Quesada headed over to sign comics at the Wizard magazine setup. Just as he was wondering how to replace Morrison, Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon walked into view. Whedon was an avowed Marvel Comics fan—Buffy, in fact, had been largely based on the character of the X-Men’s Kitty Pryde. Quesada offered Whedon the job writing The X-Men on the spot.

  Enlisting Whedon was exactly the kind of coup for which Bill Jemas was always advocating. But Jemas left before Whedon turned in his first script. “We were having a lot less fun,” Jemas said when asked about the reasons for his departure. “The money started piling up and the heads started swelling.”

  Grant Morrison’s remaining issues of X-Men, published after he’d departed for DC, played out like a white flag, waving resignedly to the status quo. In “Planet X,” Morrison revealed Xorn, whom he’d introduced two years earlier as an iconoclastic hero, to be just another of Magneto’s disguises. The other characters’ mixed reactions might have stood in for those of fans old and new. “What’s wrong with you these days? What happened to the brilliant, charismatic mutant outlaw I fell in love with?” asked one. Another muttered, “I miss Mister Xorn . . . when is he coming back?” (“He was a fiction,” Magneto snapped. “How often must I explain?”) Magneto murdered Jean Grey, and then Wolverine beheaded Magneto. Was there any doubt that everyone would come back?

  “The ‘Planet X’ story,” Morrison said later, “was partially intended as a comment on the exhausted, circular nature of the X-Men’s ever-popular battle with Magneto and by extension, the equally cyclical nature of superhero franchise re-inventions. I ended the book exactly where I came on board. . . . ‘Planet X’ is steeped in an exhausted, world-weary, ‘middle-aged’ ennui that spoke directly of both my own and Magneto’s frustrations, disillusionment and disconnection, as well as the endless everything-is-not-enough frustrations of a certain segment of comics’ aging readership.” For Morrison, whose early manifesto for The X-Men trumpeted the necessity of evolution, this was a strange kind of climax.

  A new title, Astonishing X-Men, was launched to commemorate Joss Whedon’s participation. Whedon brought his longtime favorite, Kitty Pryde, back to the fold, and returned Colossus to life. “Nothing has changed,” were Kitty Pryde’s first words when she arrived at Charles Xavier’s mansion in Astonishing X-Men #1. “The place was destroyed, and now it looks like nothing happened. No time has passed. Of course the professor would have it rebuilt this way. Give everyone a sense of stability. Continuity.” At Marvel’s request, the uniforms that Morrison had designed were retired, and the X-Men returned to their old costumes.

  By 2004, Marvel was employing statistical analysts to feed information about creator and character performances into algorithms that determined launches, cancellations, and frequencies of publication. The company embraced the concept of crossovers as never before, with a relentless chain of big-event story lines that determined the course of multiple other titles. In turn, each of these massive arcs—which included prologues, epilogues, and entire spin-off series—fed into the one that followed. Major characters were torn in half, died in explosions, sacrificed themselves, lost their memories, regained their memories, lost their powers, or were revealed as shape-shifting Skrull aliens who’d posed as the real thing for years while the original hero was kidnapped on a spaceship.

  These stories were conceived at “creator summits,” periodic conferences at which a core brain trust of writers (including Hollywood screenwriting veterans Jeph Loeb and J. Michael Straczynski) gathered with Marvel editors and hammered out the next six months of the company’s publishing strategy, comics’ version of the writers’ room of a television series. The level of craftsmanship was high, with special attention paid to the beats of every story pitched. And none of the new breed of writers—Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, and, later, Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction—complained publicly about editorial interference, or about a lack of equity. They’d made their names with odd, ambitious projects for smaller publishers, but at Marvel they knew the game going in. In the twenty-first-century comics industry, those who fared best were those who held no illusions about the relative priorities of commercial viability and personal expression. (For their contributions, they were each rewarded with the opportunity to publish creator-owned material through Marvel, under a new imprint called Icon. Promoting these titles was left entirely to them.)

  The heavily photo-referenced look of The Ultimates became au courant as the Marvel Universe moved closer to real life, or at least to what could be imagined as a CGI adaptation. And, in a kind of return to Stan Lee’s early 1970s stories about campus riots and LSD, many of Marvel’s big events nodded at headlines without getting too caught up in taking a political stand.

  INTERVIEWER: Were you looking to have the story be a forum for the discussion of capital punishment or . . . preemptive capital punishment?

  BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS: It’s a discussion among the characters, but nothing is being preached, because I don’t have an opinion about it, myself.

  In Secret War (whose very name acknowledged the granddaddy of Marvel crossovers), Man
hattan was attacked in retaliation for covert operations that S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury had undertaken in Doctor Doom’s homeland of Latveria. In Civil War, the U.S. government responded to potential dangers by passing the Superhuman Registration Act, which led to a rift between those supporting heightened security (such as Iron Man) and those supporting civil liberties (such as Captain America).

  By the end of Civil War—which, when it was finally collected into paperback reprints, spread over two dozen books—Iron Man was the new director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Captain America had been assassinated, and Spider-Man had revealed his identity to the world. None of those developments would last.

  “There is an old joke about death in the comic-book world,” noted the Wall Street Journal editorial page upon learning of Captain America’s death. “No one stays dead except Bucky, [DC’s] Jason Todd and Uncle Ben.” But the so-called Bucky Clause no longer held—all of those characters had, in recent years, returned. It was revealed, in fact, that Bucky Barnes had been a bionic-armed Soviet assassin in the decades since World War II. Now he became the new Captain America, and Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, was out of the picture—for a while, until it turned out he’d been shot with a gun that simply “froze him within space and time.”

  And when Spider-Man unmasked himself, it wasn’t much of a threat to the status quo, because Marvel’s creative summits had already hatched a diabolus ex machina to get out of it. To save the life of his Aunt May, Spider-Man made a deal with the demon Mephisto, which also erased the public’s memory of his identity and undid his albatross marriage to Mary Jane. For a while, the idea of bringing Gwen Stacy back from the dead was once again batted around.