Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  For those who weren’t central to Marvel’s story-planning committee, the misdirections and interdependencies of the Marvel Universe could be daunting. “Everything is so connected that I can’t get my head around it,” Joss Whedon said, when he decided to leave Astonishing X-Men. “I kind of like it when the Hulk’s doing his thing, and Cap’s doing his thing, and you buy it once a month and get excited. . . . There are definitely characters I like, but I have no idea if they’re going to be dead, rebooted, Ultimated or be wearing a black costume by the time I get to them.”

  During a conference call in April 2005, Marvel Studios announced that it had settled the lawsuit with Stan Lee. Lee received $10 million and would continue to collect his yearly salary. “Our settlement with Stan terminated all rights to future profits,” Peter Cuneo told investors. “Both sides felt that we wanted to settle not only the past, but the future.”

  That future was the real reason for the call. For the past year, Avi Arad and Chief Operating Officer David Maisel had been working on a plan for Marvel to produce its own movies, through a unique deal structure in which Merrill Lynch would put up $525 million for Marvel to make its own films of ten characters. Budgets would range from $45 million to $165 million, and Marvel would put up its own movie rights as collateral. To some, it looked like a big risk.

  Arad felt differently. In the past seven years, the company had become a virtual IP farm club for Columbia (Ghost Rider and the two Spider-Man films), Fox (three X-Men films, Daredevil, Elektra, and the upcoming Fantastic Four), and New Line (three Blade sequels), with studios raking in $3.6 billion worldwide. For Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 alone, Columbia pulled in nearly $1.6 billion; Marvel saw only $75 million, and nothing from DVD releases. “Nobody knows better than us how to make our characters come alive for audiences,” Arad said. “We just want to get paid for it.”

  The strategy was to corner the market on films about the individual members of the Avengers: they’d get back the rights to Iron Man from New Line; roll out Captain America and Thor; they’d even redo The Hulk, which had been a disappointment for Universal in 2003. And then, for the coup de grace, they could build on brand familiarity with the Avengers and combine the franchises into a monster-sized team-up movie.

  But after the deal was in place, Arad and Maisel clashed about how quickly to produce the films, how to allot the budgets, and which characters to use. Just as Ike Perlmutter had once favored Arad over Stan Lee and Bill Jemas, now he put his faith in Maisel. Less than a year after Marvel Studios had gained its independence, Arad quit. He cashed out his stock and walked away with $59 million.

  Iron Man, the first self-financed film from Marvel Studios, took in nearly $100 million in its opening weekend. After the credits rolled, there was a preview of what was to come: Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, just like The Ultimates had imagined) showed up in Tony Stark’s apartment to talk about “the Avengers Initiative.” The circle was closing. The interweaving intricacies of the Marvel Universe, in all their glory, would be replicated as synergistic Hollywood franchises.

  On the first weekend of May 2012, The Avengers broke the record for the biggest box-office debut in movie history. A week later, it had grossed more than $1 billion worldwide.

  “When kids were creating comics, they were happy to get their job,” Arad mused in 2012. “A movie is made, it’s successful, and all of the sudden they say, ‘Wait a minute, what’s in it for me?’ It’s human nature. If a creator wants to create a book, and self-publish it, and make a big success of it, which is what McFarlane did, that’s their prerogative. If they want to work for a company and be guaranteed so many pages a month and so on, that’s a different business. So there are people who feel that they did this, therefore they deserve that, and . . . I don’t remember any of them on a journey to try and make a movie out of these things. And believe me, it’s far tougher to make a movie than publish a comic book.”

  Some of the journeys of those happy kids, who were now middle-aged men, were tougher than others. When former X-Men artist Dave Cockrum wound up in a Bronx veterans’ hospital with pneumonia, Neal Adams approached Marvel and suggested they do something to help the creator of Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus, and writer Clifford Meth brought attention to the matter on a comics website. Marvel’s lawyers were nervous about setting a precedent. “They wanted to get Dave to sign a piece of paper and not show anyone what was on that piece of paper,” Adams told the Comics Journal, which reported that Cockrum would receive $200,000. Cockrum said he was “very happy that so many people cared about my work and about me. It feels like one big family again.”* Cockrum died in November 2006, due to complications from diabetes.

  In 2007, Gary Friedrich, who’d been a Marvel editor with Roy Thomas in the mid–1960s, sued Marvel over the copyright renewal rights of Ghost Rider. Although Roy Thomas and artist Mike Ploog also claimed credit for aspects of the character’s creation, it was Friedrich who’d been given a “conceived and written by” acknowledgment on the opening page of the first Ghost Rider story, and who’d been named in the “Bullpen Bulletin” as having “dreamed the whole thing up.” But Marvel maintained that Friedrich had signed away his rights, first on the back of a check, and again on the 1978 work-for-hire agreement; the company also filed a countersuit against Friedrich for selling unauthorized autographed Ghost Rider merchandise. A U.S. district judge ruled for Marvel. The destitute Friedrich—unemployed and suffering from a liver ailment—agreed to pay Marvel $17,000 in punitive damages.

  Roy Thomas wrote occasionally for Marvel Comics through 2007 but spends most of his time as editor of Alter Ego, a glossy update of the comics fanzine he edited before he became a professional writer.

  Steve Gerber died in February 2008, of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. “There were some people who could only write, that’s all they could do,” said Mary Skrenes, his former writing partner and girlfriend. “Steve, unfortunately, was one. And people should know comics are a place to start and then move on. But he didn’t like animation, and he didn’t like television. He liked comic books.”

  Steve Ditko continues to create low-budget black-and-white comic books from his Manhattan studio. In 2008, the original artwork for Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man, was anonymously donated to the Library of Congress. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune reached Ditko by telephone. “I couldn’t care less” was his only comment.

  In early 2009, Len Wein, who created Wolverine with John Romita, attended the premiere of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, starring Hugh Jackman. “I have not seen a dime off of any Marvel stuff, nor do I have a credit on the Wolverine film,” said Wein. “Hugh Jackman is a lovely man, and at the premiere he told the audience that he owed his career to me and had me take a bow. It was very gratifying and very nice. I would have preferred a check.”

  Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, and Jim Valentino continued as partners in Image Comics. McFarlane, the onetime major-league baseball prospect, acquired the home-run balls of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds, for a total of $3.7 million.

  Jim Lee sold his studio, Wildstorm, to DC Comics, and continued to oversee the studio’s line of comics. In 2010, he was named co-publisher of DC Comics.

  Chris Claremont continued, off and on, to write various X-Men related series. Recalling his days as a Marvel intern in the late 1960s, he said, “I remember seeing Jerry Siegel, then working as a proofreader, hustling around the office and trying to get writing jobs. I said to myself, I’m never going to be one of those guys. Now I look on the stands and see comics of all these characters I created, and Marvel won’t let me write them.” In 2009, Claremont began writing a series called X-Men Forever, an alternate-universe story with the conceit that the characters were exactly as he’d left them in 1991. It was canceled in 2010.

  Marv Wolfman, Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Jim Shooter, Frank Miller, and John Byrne continue to write and draw comics for various publishers—but not Marvel.

  On Augus
t 31, 2009, after months of negotiations, the Walt Disney Company announced that it was purchasing Marvel Entertainment for approximately $4 billion. Isaac Perlmutter was set to receive nearly a third of that.

  Within weeks, Jack Kirby’s son and daughters served forty-five notices of copyright termination to Marvel, as well as to Disney, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, and others, for concepts that Kirby had created between 1958 and 1963. The lawyer for the Kirby heirs collected declarations from Jim Steranko, Joe Sinnott, Dick Ayers, and Neal Adams; Marvel called Roy Thomas, John Romita, Larry Lieber, and Stan Lee to testify. Among the documents produced was a contract that Jack Kirby signed in 1972, which granted copyrights for all his works. (Why Kirby would have signed such an agreement two years after he left Marvel remains unclear.)

  “It is important to state what this motion is not about,” U.S. district judge Colleen McMahon of New York wrote in her 2011 decision. “Contrary to recent press accounts . . . this case is not about whether Jack Kirby or Stan Lee is the real ‘creator’ of Marvel characters, or whether Kirby (and other freelance artists who created culturally iconic comic book characters for Marvel and other publishers) were treated ‘fairly’ by companies that grew rich off the fruit of their labor.”

  It is about whether Kirby’s work qualifies as work-for-hire under the Copyright Act of 1909, as interpreted by the courts, notably the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. If it does, then Marvel owns the copyright in the Kirby Works, whether that is “fair” or not. If it does not, then the Kirby Heirs have a statutory right to take back those copyrights, no matter the impact on recent corporate acquisition or on earnings from blockbuster movies made and yet to be made.

  The judge, however, ruled “that there are no genuine issues of material fact, and that the Kirby Works were indeed works for hire within the meaning of the Copyright Act of 1909.” The lawyer for the Kirby family announced that they would file for an appeal.

  In recent years, Stan Lee has appeared as himself on episodes of The Big Bang Theory and Entourage, and in 2006 he hosted a reality show called Who Wants to Be a Superhero? He has also filmed cameos for nearly every theatrical release from Marvel Studios. In 2011, at the age of eighty-eight, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On the eve of the Avengers release, he was asked if he felt the comic book industry had been fair to its creators. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I haven’t had reason to think about it that much.”

  After a pause, he continued. “I think, if somebody creates something, and it becomes highly successful, whoever is reaping the rewards should let the person who created it share in it, certainly. But so much of it is . . . it goes beyond creating. A lot of people put something together, and nobody knows who really created it, they’re just working on it, you know?”

  The writing and art work of Marvel’s line is, across the board, more sophisticated than ever before, an especially impressive feat considering that it is overseen by a relatively small group of editors, working from a smaller office space than in the past. The Marvel “Bullpen” is a series of small cubicles with glass partitions, from which employees shepherd computer files through the production process. Visitors to the office must sign a nondisclosure agreement before passing the reception area.

  Comic books have reentered the public consciousness, and trade paperbacks and deluxe hardcover reprints finally fill bookstore shelves. But the publishing industry grows increasingly endangered, and Marvel Comics has yet to find a solution to the long-standing challenge of capturing a wider audience. In 2011, the company’s two best-selling issues were those featuring the death of the Ultimate version of Spider-Man (167,000 copies) and the death of the Human Torch (144,000). The attendant media coverage of such events is likely to have diminishing returns if Marvel continues to cry wolf with its characters’ demises.

  The average age of the monthly Marvel comic consumer now hovers at around thirty, which means that most readers have watched the narrative cycles repeat multiple times. Fans complain about the deaths and rebirths and crossovers, but in collective fits of repetition compulsion, they vote affirmatively with their dollars (the cheapest titles are priced at $2.99 each). This points to the central challenge of a narrative-driven commercial franchise, a challenge that existed long before Stan Lee told his editors and writers that he only wanted the “illusion” of change: Stories that are told with freely wandering imaginations jeopardize not only the integrity of corporate trademarks, but, in the eyes of dedicated readers, the sacred tapestry that has been woven over the decades, by hundreds of hands. Comics that exist independently of the overarching framework, of crossovers, are at an economic disadvantage. To the hard-core Marvel reader, those stories don’t count; they’re “imaginary” diversions from the canonical saga. “I wish it weren’t the case,” said Axel Alonso, who succeeded Joe Quesada as editor in chief in 2010, “but the fact of the matter is, the surefire way to spike a monthly title is to tie it in. The zeitgeist of the day is determined by the man or woman who goes into the comics store on Wednesday, and they want to know [the story] counts. And the only way they know it counts is for other people to say it counts because it’s tied in to the bigger title.”

  At a certain point—it’s impossible to locate precisely—decades of continuity exceed the capacity of the human brain. So the Marvel Universe chugs forward, and backtracks, and takes detours. The movie adaptations mix and match from various past interpretations of the Marvel characters, add their own inventions, and, in reaching larger audiences, ultimately supplant the “official” versions of the mythologies. Multiple manifestations of Captain America and Spider-Man and the X-Men float in elastic realities, passed from one temporary custodian to the next, and their heroic journeys are, forever, denied an end.

  Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1965.

  Acknowledgments

  Much of this book is based on the personal recollections of more than 150 individuals, and relatives of individuals, who worked at or with Marvel Comics and its various parent companies between 1939 and the present day. I’m deeply grateful for the generosity of the following people, as well as those who chose to speak with me on the condition of anonymity.

  Leonard Ackerman, Marcia Amsterdam, Avi Arad, Lou Bank, Marcia Ben-Eli, Irwin E. Billman, Charles Brainard, Tom Brevoort, Eliot R. Brown, Frank Brunner, Steve Buccellato, Rich Buckler, Bob Budiansky, Paul Burke, Roger Burlage, Kurt Busiek, Mary Mac Candalerio, Mike Carlin, Rusty Citron, Chris Claremont, Gene Colan, Gerry Conway, Peter David, Tom DeFalco, J.M. DeMatteis, David DePatie, Buzz Dixon, Jo Duffy, Matt Edelman, Scott Edelman, Steve Englehart, Lloyd Feinstein, Danny Fingeroth, Linda Fite, Frank Fochetta, Matt Fraction, Stuart Freedman, Bruce Jay Friedman, Josh Alan Friedman, Mike Friedrich, Chuck Fries, Jim Galton, Peter Gillis, Stan Goldberg, Iden Goodman, Roberta Goodman, Alan Gordon, Bert Gould, Steven Grant, Robin Green, Glenn Greenberg, Bob Hall, Larry Hama, Ed Hannigan, Arnold Hano, Bonnie Hano, Dean Haspiel, Glenn Herdling, Michael Z. Hobson, Henry Homes, Richard Howell, Donald Hudson, Nanette Jacovitz, Al Jaffee, Marie Javins, Bill Jemas, Arvell Jones, Barry Kaplan, Nancy Shores Karlebach, Terry Kavanagh, David Anthony Kraft, Tony Krantz, Alan Kupperburg, Tina Landau, Sven Larsen, Batton Lash, Stan Lee, Steve Lemberg, Jason Liebig, Irwin Linker, Margaret Loesch, Lavere Lund, Ralph Macchio, David Mack, Howard Mackie, Arthur Marblestone, Elaine Markson, Frances McBain, Don McGregor, Mary McPherran, Will Meugniot, David Michelinie, Al Milgrom, Bobby Miller, Frank Miller, Michael Minick, Doug Moench, Bobby Moore, Stuart Moore, Nancy Murphy, Fabian Nicieza, Annie Nocenti, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Denny O’Neil, Patrick Daniel O’Neill, Jimmy Palmiotti, Rick Parker, Ann Picardo, Nancy Poletti, Carl Potts, Mark Powers, Ivan Prashker, Joe Quesada, Devon Quinn, Benjamin Raab, William Rabkin, Matt Ragone, Shirrel Rhoades, Diane Robbens, Jean Robbins, Mike Rockwitz, John Romita, Bob Rosen, Steve Saffel, Jim Salicrup, Mary-Jane Salk, Peter Sanderson, Mike Sangiacomo, Andy Schmidt, Diana Schutz, Stu Schwartzberg, Jim Shooter, Ed Shukin, Ca
rl Sifakis, Steve Skeates, Evan Skolnick, Mary Skrenes, Roger Slifer, Ivan Snyder, Jim Starlin, Flo Steinberg, Jim Steranko, Amy Goodman Sullivan, Sheri Sunabe, Roy Thomas, Rob Tokar, Herb Trimpe, Chris Ulm, Ellen Vartanoff, Irene Vartanoff, Mark Waid, Len Wein, Alan Weiss, Marv Wolfman, Gregory Wright, Nel Yomtov, Ron Zalme.

  For sharing documents, research, and/or advice, I’d like to thank the following:

  Jim Amash, Vinnie Bartilucci, Robert Beerbohm, Blake Bell, Daniel Best, Nick Bowler, Massimiliano Brighel, Scott Brown, Norris Burroughs, Nick Caputo, Thom Carnell, Todd Casey, Clark Collis, Caleb Crain, Sloane Crosley, Bill Dineen, Brad Elliott, Michael Feldman, Stephen Fishler, David Folkman, Nikki Frakes, David Gaddis, Aileen Gallagher, Thom Geier, Jason Geyer, Ian Gittler, Glen David Gold, Aaron Goodman, Gary Groth, David Hajdu, Jim Hanley, Mark Harris, John Hilgart, Gina Hirsch, Timothy Hodler, Erin Howe, Gary Howe, Valerie Howe, David Hyde, Christopher Irving, Dave Itzkoff, Nat Ives, Steve Kandell, Arie Kaplan, George Khoury, Wook Kim, Carrie Klein, Jeff Klein, Chuck Klosterman, Ernie Knowles, Peggy Knowles, Claudine Ko, Seth Kushner, Batton Lash, Edgar Loftin, Heidi MacDonald, Melissa Maerz, Clifford Meth, John Jackson Miller, Greg Milner, John Morrow, Frank Motler, Noel Murray, Will Murray, Dan Nadel, Evie Nagy, Sean O’Heir, Vince Oliva, Barry Pearl, Leonard Pitts Jr., Ken Quattro, Jordan Raphael, Phoebe Reilly, Eric Reynolds, Steven Rowe, Chris Ryan, Marc Schuricht, Mark Schwartzbard, Rob Sheffield, Nancy Sidewater, Gabe Soria, Alexis Sottile, Matthew Specktor, Tom Spurgeon, Tucker Stone, Tim Stroup, Peter Terzian, Maggie Thompson, Stephen Thompson, Steven Thompson, Derek Van Gieson, Dr. Michael J. Vassallo, Lou Vogel, Michael Weinreb, Douglas Wolk, and Josh Wolk.

  Kira Garcia, Joe Quigley, Cat Tyc, and Shawn Wen provided transcription assistance. Thanks to Cheryl’s Global Soul for the use of the office space, and to Roger’s Time Machine for the use of the library.