by Sean Howe
ISBN 978-0-06-199210-0
1. Marvel Comics Group. 2. Comic books, strips, etc.—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN6725.H69 2012
741.5'973—dc23 2012015058
Epub Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062218117
12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Footnotes
* Even more than other comics, the delicate line work and ambitious coloring of early Sub-Mariner strips were compromised by cheap printing, which muddled everything into a purple sludge.
* In a 1966 deposition, Jack Kirby recalled a different origin: “In the course of the discussions we first evolved a main character and then began to build around him.”
* “He didn’t like them very much,” Simon claimed. “He was also part owner of Archie Comics, then known as MLJ. Maurice was the ‘M’ in ‘MLJ.’ [Goodman’s former boss, Louis Silberkleit, was the ‘L.’] It was his idea that we arrange some kind of 25% royalty for me.”
* In 1953, a Chicago entrepreneur borrowed from family and friends to launch a new magazine called Stag Party. Goodman objected, and the young entrepreneur, Hugh Hefner, changed the name of his magazine to Playboy.
* In the case of romance comics, Simon and Kirby actually invented the genre.
* “We were, of course, I’ll say bitter, about not owning Captain America,” said Simon. “We thought we’d show them how to do Captain America.”
* Stephen Strange was part of a Ditko tradition that carried back to the 1950s: the glory-craving bastard whose journeys in a snowcapped East lead him to a comeuppance from a wise and ancient mystic.
* Early fandom had unkind words for the Hulk: “It stinks. A comic-book-length rendition of one of their hack monster stories with a continuing character modeled more or less on The Thing,” wrote Don and Maggie Thompson in Comic Art #3.
*After spoiled socialite Janet Van Dyne found her father murdered, she turned to Henry Pym (Ant-Man) for help. Pym, obsessed with Van Dyne’s resemblance to his late wife (“So much like Maria! If she were not such a child!”), asked her to become his crime-fighting partner. He shared with her his shrinking gas, and implanted cells in her skin tissue: “It will leave no scar, but when you are reduced to the size of a wasp you will grow wings and tiny antennae!” Child or no, the two would soon become lovers.
* Eventually, Jean Grey and Scott Summers began to date. The trajectory of their relationship was impossible to gauge; they were never shown embracing until they shared a good-bye kiss in 1975’s X-Men #94.
* Although in its early years The X-Men seldom met the standards set by other Lee and Kirby creations, occasionally it would realize its potential for powerful metaphor. In the spring of 1965, immediately after Alabama state troopers attacked civil rights demonstrators in Selma, the X-Men battled the Sentinels, an army of giant mutant-hunting robots created by a zealous anthropologist. “Beware the fanatic!” Lee wrote at the story’s end. “Too often his cure is deadlier by far than the evil he denounces!”
* Ditko was called into Lee’s office and given his choice of three characters to revive for a series of solo adventures: the Hulk, Ka-Zar, and Sub-Mariner. Ditko chose the Hulk because he wanted to draw the New Mexico locales.
* In his autobiography, Lee remembered it this way: “In a moment of inspiration, I marched the whole gang out of the office one day to a recording studio about five blocks away . . . we made a record for our fans, ad-libbing the whole thing.”
* “The creator stands on his own judgment,” Rand wrote in The Fountainhead. “The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks, the parasite copies. The creator produces, the parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of Man. The creator requires independence—he neither serves nor rules. He deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice. The parasite seeks power. He wants to bind all men together in common action and common slavery.”
* Soon afterward, Kirby conceived a contemporary, superspy version of Nick Fury. Fury’s existence in two different time frames was considerately explained by giving him a super-serum that kept him young. He thus joined Captain America in the ranks of World War II veterans who’d found a way to battle the aging process, a gimmick that allowed Greatest Generation heroism to carry on into the 1960s; the years of experience lent the characters an additional gravitas.
* This sent a message of unlimited possibility: in the Marvel Universe, team lineups could change, and criminals could reform.
* Lee was hardly blowing off the writing. Roy Thomas saw him the Monday morning after the November 9, 1965, blackout and learned that he’d typed ten pages of Thor by candlelight. Lee hadn’t been able to get to scripting Sgt. Fury that weekend, though—which is how Thomas ended up taking over the title.
* The Voice’s Sally Kempton packed in an impressive amount of Psych 101 jargon, a sure sign that the characters were matters of serious discussion. “Spiderman has a terrible identity problem, a marked inferiority complex, and a fear of women,” she wrote. “He is anti-social, castration-ridden, racked with Oedipal guilt, and accident-prone.” Mention was also made of “phallic-looking skyscraper towers” and Peter Parker’s submission toward Aunt May.
* Steve Krantz, who sold the syndication rights to television stations (and foreign markets such as Japan, South America, and Australia), also claimed credit for coming across the comics on newsstands. Krantz told Stan Lee biographer Tom Spurgeon that the Goodmans secured a percentage of profits, and that “Marvel made a great deal of money on the basis of the shows I produced.”
* “Baron Mordo” was an enemy of Doctor Strange.
* Ditko now had a free hand to insert Randian platitudes in his comics without Goodman and Lee’s interference. A sample, from Mysterious Suspense #1: “The greatest battle a person must constantly fight is to uphold proper principles, known truths, against everyone he deals with! A truth cannot be defeated!”
* “Cut off a limb, and two more shall take its place” was HYDRA’s pledge, a concise summary of guerrilla terrorism’s chilling power.
* In 1966 Bill Everett, who hadn’t worked for Marvel since the Daredevil #1 fiasco, was suddenly flush with work from Martin Goodman. He was first sated with a regular assignment on the Hulk (in Tales to Astonish); when Ditko departed Marvel, Everett was immediately offered work on Dr. Strange (in Strange Tales) and received a loan from Goodman that, according to Roy Thomas, “wasn’t going to have to be paid back, so he wouldn’t sue.”
* The rights to the Fantastic Four had been otherwise secured. Spider-Man was originally going to be a part of Marvel Super Heroes, but apparently Marvel and Grantay-Lawrence decided to save him for bigger things—after storyboards were drawn up, he was replaced by the Sub-Mariner.
* The side-by-side pictures of Sgt. Fury and Captain America on the back of Captain Action’s toy packaging were soon appropriated as anti-imperialist images in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film, La Chinoise.
* Syd Shores, the onetime Captain America artist, was supposed to relieve Kirby on the title in 1967, after a brief period of inking over Kirby’s pencils. But Lee was unsatisfied with Shores’s Marvel Method attempts, and Kirby was once again put in the role of pep talker and mentor to his own peers.
* There may have been some internal hand-wringing about the Black Panther. The first version of the cover had shown the Panther’s black skin; the published version did not. Previews in other titles that month suggest Marvel couldn’t decide how much of him to show—or how to characterize him. “Don’t miss the mystery villain of the month!” read the ads, which blocked out the cover art. (Once Marvel committed to a policy of representing black characters, however, change came quickly. The cover of the following month’s romance comic Modeling with Millie proudly introduced a black British model named Jill Jerold to its cast.)
* In one issue of Strange Adventures, Adams tweaked his peer in a panel of outrageous wavy lines that spelled out, when the comic was tilted, Hey! A Jim Steranko effect!
* The question about Captain America in Vietnam had actually been posed to Kirby, during a March 3, 1967, joint interview with Mike Hodel on New York radio station WBAI. “That’s Stan Lee’s department, and he can answer that,” Kirby deferred. “The editor always has the last word on that.”
* The author of the New Guard article, twenty-two-year-old David Nolan, would go on to cofound the Libertarian Party.
* Lee’s panic was contagious. John Buscema decided to break from the Kirby style for Silver Surfer #4, and swelled with pride when he turned in the pages. “People were congratulating me on this particular issue. Stan tore the book to pieces! He started with the first page: ‘Well, okay, not bad.’ On and on and on. Every second page he ripped to shreds. ‘This is not good, this should be done this way . . .’ I walked out of that damn office of his; I didn’t know which way was up or down.” Demoralized, Buscema wandered into John Romita’s office and asked, “John, how the hell do you do comics?”
* “Everything we felt made Marvel Marvel were the things that they felt made the stories not really suitable for the very immature television audiences,” Lee said in 1968. “We just moved away from it, said, ‘You’ve got the show; put it out any way you want,’ so they’ve been writing their own stories, which I don’t watch.”
* The irony, of course, is that the dialogue was by Lee and not by the voiceless Kirby.
* This project was ultimately abandoned when the Marvel higher-ups deemed its politics too radical.
* Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, who’d been shoving every kind of social commentary into Green Lantern/Green Arrow for the past year, responded by giving Green Lantern’s former sidekick, Speedy, a heroin habit. At the New York Creation Con that year, Gerry Conway promised an upcoming Sub-Mariner story in which the hero “meets up with a New Orleans hooker, goes into a New Orleans cathouse, and does the whole routine with the pimp there. We felt that that was a little strong, so we changed that into something that’s cleaner . . . they’re all drug addicts now. The Comics Code accepted that.”
* The mimeographed fanzine Newfangles reported that Lee had been letting slip to college audiences that “when his contract is up in three years, no one will see anything of him but dust clouds.”
* The Black Widow’s new costume, designed by John Romita, was based on Tarpe Mills’s early 1940s comic strip heroine and series Miss Fury, which Timely had reprinted.
* Where Marvel had once revealed campus riots to be the result of dastardly plans by the Kingpin (Amazing Spider-Man #68, January 1969) or Modok (Captain America, December 1969), now racial discord was also explained away by supervillains. Both the Sons of the Serpent (Avengers 73, February 1970) and the Red Skull (Captain America 143, November 1971) fomented race riots by disguising themselves as militant blacks. The disenchanted-peace-activist-turned-supervillain Firebrand (“anything the man puts up, I’m ready to tear down!”; Iron Man 27, July 1970) wore a raised-fist emblem and stoked anger in the ghettos. He, too, was later revealed to be white.
* “To label it as another ‘Marvel Magazine,’ ” Kurtzman wrote in a June 22, 1972, letter to Lee, “to advertise it as one of a line—can you imagine what it would have done to the uniqueness of Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated if their covers had been labeled ‘a TIME magazine’?”
* Friedrich left New York after his upstairs neighbor was strangled in her apartment by serial killer Rodney Alcala, and Friedrich’s wife suggested that a move back to Missouri might be in order.
* Among the 1973 highlights, thanks to arrangements with two different merchandising reps: bubble bath, paint-by-numbers sets, Halloween costumes, walkie-talkies, calendars, rubber balloons, and bicycle horns.
* The new attitude was reflected in the existing titles as well. In Daredevil #91, a group of women voice their admiration of Black Widow: “Now there’s a woman with her own mind,” they cheer, “definitely the Gloria Steinem of the jump-suit set!”
* Marvel was soon back to its old tricks: in My Love #25 (September, 1973, “No Man Is My Master,” written by Lee) a young woman named Bev explores feminism but realizes she misses being condescended to; after dating respectful milquetoasts, she returns to a louse who bosses her around and actually utters the words “Me, Tarzan—you, Jane!” In the last panel, she says, “And that’s the way it was meant to be!” The final caption reads “The Start—of something lovely!” A 1974 internal memo vowed to use a noncomic format “should we ever again attempt to reach the female market in the future.”
* There may have been a credibility deficiency to begin with: Stan and Romita were soon (very quietly) working on a proposal for Playboy that included characters named Lord Peckerton and Clitanna the High Priestess; the first issue was to open with a shot of the ruler of “a sensual empire” using “chicks as footstools.” Playboy, trying to compete with Penthouse’s “Wicked Wanda,” demanded more S&M. Romita balked, and Stan followed him in solidarity. “That’s the only time I can point to Stan passing up a chance to make money,” Romita later said.
* At Marvel, militant feminists served the same purpose as black militants had a few years before: destructive forces that endangered the achievements of moderates. Compare the words of the Cat in 1973’s Marvel Team-Up #8 (“If she isn’t stopped, she’ll destroy everything women have fought for . . . the precious little we’ve gained!”) to Falcon’s in 1970’s Captain America #126: “They’re like a black version of the Klan! All they preach is hate Whitey! They can set our progress back a hundred years!”
* Blade was born in an English brothel and trained in hand-to-hand combat by a jazz trumpeter.
* In 1973, Roy Thomas offered one of these positions to nineteen-year-old Gary Groth, who would go on to become one of Marvel’s most outspoken critics as the editor of the Comics Journal. The idea of Groth as a Marvel employee brings to mind the apocryphal story of a young Fidel Castro trying out as a pitcher for the Washington Senators.
* Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl had welcomed their son into the world in 1968, a year after Sue Storm’s pregnancy was first revealed. Such anomalous domesticity only made The Fantastic Four seem that much more exotic.
* This caused further trouble and embarrassment: Stan Lee, the public face of the company, could only respond, “Howard the Who?”
* They also hinted at plans to realign the political thrust of Iron Man: announced that Stark Industries would shift “priorities from weaponry to ecological research.”
* In a story that appeared in Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #8, Englehart said that artist George Tuska—who would ignore Englehart’s subplots and send back artwork with the explanation “I didn’t feel like drawing that”—tricked him into referring to Luke Cage as a nice “schvartze
” boy. Englehart didn’t realize that schvartze was a derogatory Yiddish term for a black person. An awkward apology appeared three issues later. “What can I tell you?” Englehart shrugs. “I’m from Indiana.”
* With Shang-Chi and Son of Satan’s Damian Hellstrom, post-Vietnam Marvel writers replaced Stan Lee’s longing orphans (Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, Johnny Storm) with righteous Oedipal anger.
* Not everyone was enamored of the lysergic-intensive lifestyle: Gerry Conway said he feared for his sanity when he tripped with Englehart and Weiss, and that one member of the acid coterie—he won’t say who—“went around the bend” permanently. “He was dating an ex-girlfriend of mine who told me, ‘All he wants to do is drop acid and fuck! He won’t take me anywhere!’ Later, he did my horoscope at a party, decided he was my enemy, and that was it.”
