CHAPTER 3
ARMY PLAYWRIGHT
In 1942, the United States lurched toward full mobilization in fits and starts. The attack on Pearl Harbor may have sent the nation scrambling, but to transform an economy just beginning to emerge from the Great Depression into a global war machine took time and immense coordination.
War is never just about battlefields and strategy. Both the American war effort and the entire conflict itself hinged on the near-total mobilization of the nation’s industrial base. Corporations and businesses of all sizes had to create an intricate infrastructure to support the struggle. Although mobilization took a toll on people on the home front, they rallied to do whatever was necessary to aid the troops on the battlefields overseas.
Stan Lee, just nineteen years old, realized that he could not stay home and helm Marvel while countless young men were fighting and dying in the all-out effort against the Nazi war machine. For a young man who earned his first publication credit writing about Captain America—the superhero who had punched out Hitler on the cover of his debut issue—staying out of the war would have been unthinkable. Lee enlisted on November 9, 1942. He would still be a teenager for another seven weeks.
The army needed smart troops, so it evaluated inductees on the basis of intelligence and aptitude using the Army General Classification Test. Recruits fell into one of five rankings, but based on the highly technical and scientific nature of the work in the Signal Corps, the division received a higher number of people in the upper category. Just before Lee enlisted, some 39 percent of its recruits had tested into Classes I and II, but that figure jumped to 58 percent by 1943. Lee’s intelligence enabled him to score high enough to get into the Signal Corps.1
Goodman felt apprehensive about his editor-in-chief going off to war. No one had any idea how long the conflict would last. Some other artists and writers scrambled to fill pages and waited it out to the last minute until they were drafted. The publisher really could not put up much of a fight—anything else would have been viewed as unpatriotic.
While many comic book creators and artists found themselves overseas—and most, like Jack Kirby, in the thick of enemy fire—luckily for Lee, he remained state-side. The youngster jumped from the Signal Corps to a special division within that unit that produced instructional films and other wartime information materials. Lee’s work for Goodman served as useful training. He wrote fast and in a breezy style that recruits and other trainees could comprehend. The army liked these traits as well, because the war effort hinged on strong communications tactics across countless specialty areas.
The proximity to Timely had another benefit for the young military man: He continued writing for the comic book division and Goodman’s magazine side of the house, thus keeping his finger on the pulse of his civilian job. So, while many comic book figures virtually disappeared during the war, Lee honed his skills. He worked hard at his army duties—writing and even drawing some cartoon figures—but his workaholic tendencies took over. Lee spent countless off-duty hours writing for Goodman.
During the war, Captain America remained Timely’s most popular comic book at a time when the industry boomed. By 1943 there were more than one hundred forty comic books on the newsstands, according to one source, “read by over fifty million people each month,” though only about a hundred would survive until the end of the year because of paper rationing for the war mobilization effort.2 Paper challenges limited the growth of the burgeoning industry to some degree, but the demand for comic books by servicemen kept demand skyrocketing. In 1944, for example, Fawcett’s Captain Marvel Adventures sold fourteen million copies, up about 21 percent over the previous year. Superhero titles drove sales, but publishers also hedged their bets by expanding into other areas like humor, funny animals, and teen romance.3
As the sales figures increased, comic book publishers grew rich. Suddenly, it seemed as if Goodman had a golden touch. The steady income from all those captive readers did wonders for Lee, too. He drew his army salary and the extra money that came in from freelancing for Timely. Lee had never been flush, but the war gave him some extra coins to jingle in his pocket.
When he decided to volunteer for the army, Lee had been the editor-in-chief at Timely Comics for about a year. He spent much of that time inventing new characters and keeping the popular comic books going, particularly Captain America.
But Lee and Goodman needed to find an editor to replace him for the duration of the war. They turned to Lee’s friend, artist Vince Fago, one of the early cartoon animators who had worked on Superman, Popeye, and Gulliver’s Travels for Fleischer Studios, run by the famous Max Fleischer. The animation studio was also one of the places Kirby had worked early in his career. The Fleischer firm competed with Walt Disney, a fierce rivalry for America’s animation dollars. Fleischer differed from Disney by focusing on human characters, such as Betty Boop and Koko the Clown, rather than talking mice, ducks, dogs, and other anthropomorphic figures. Later, the Fleischer brothers sold the animation company to Paramount.
“How would you like my job?” Lee asked Fago.4
Fago knew that Lee and Goodman hired him to keep the comic book division on track, but it wasn’t the same company during the war. Interests shifted and many readers wanted lighter comedic fare. The popularity of Disney’s characters and Fleischer’s cartoons blew open the children’s market. A serial imitator like Goodman didn’t need anyone to twist his arm to jump on the cartoon bandwagon. Fago specialized in the kind of funny animals that children craved, so it was a natural progression for him to step into Lee’s role. Plus, he could use the steady $250 a week he would earn as Goodman’s editorial chief.
Goodman used Disney as a guide, which licensed its characters in comic book form to Dell. Timely transformed into a kind of Disney-lite, putting out a flurry of funny animal comics, in publications like Comedy Comics and Joker Comics. Some of these characters Lee had devised, like Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal, which he created with future Mad magazine illustrator Al Jaffee. The comedy duo—Ziggy was the straight man, and Silly was the less intelligent one—battled with Toughy Cat, who wore bright red pants that were frayed at the bottom and mismatched suspenders. Their antics and the ensuing popularity helped carry Timely during the war years and after. The pair headlined their own book until September 1949.5
Timely’s titles grew so popular that Fago could barely keep up with demand, a perpetual challenge in the early years. He estimated that each comic had a print run of about five hundred thousand. “Sometimes we’d put out five books a week or more,” Fago remembers. “You’d see the numbers come back and could tell that Goodman was a millionaire.”6 The publisher kept his fingers on the pulse of comic book readers and what his competitors put out, so his real acumen centered on taking calculated risks with new genres and seeing what popped based on what his fellow publishers were selling.
Following shortly on the heels of the children’s market success, Goodman pushed Timely to go after female readers. Miss America, a teenage heiress who gained superhuman strength and the ability to fly after being struck by lightning, first appeared in Marvel Mystery Comics #49 (November 1943), with Human Torch and Toro on the cover thwarting an attacking Japanese battleship. In January 1944, Miss America became the title character of her own comic book. However, when sales were not as strong as Goodman had anticipated, they delayed the next issue until November, renaming it Miss America Magazine #2, with a real-life model portraying the character in her superhero outfit. Along with the new look came new content—Fago and his team gradually eliminated the superhero material in favor of teen girl topics.
Lee’s basic training took place at Fort Monmouth, a large base in New Jersey that housed the Signal Corps. Research played a prominent role in the division and on the base. Several years earlier, researchers had developed radar there and the all-important handheld walkie-talkie. In the ensuing years, they would learn to bounce radio waves off the moon.7
At Fort Monmouth, Lee learned how to
string communications lines and also repair them, which he thought would lead to active combat duty overseas. Army strategists realized that wars were often determined by infrastructure, so the Signal Corps played an important role in modern warfare keeping communications flowing. Even drawing in numerous talented, intelligent candidates, the Signal Corps could barely keep up with war demands, which led to additional training centers opening at Camp Crowder, Missouri, and on the West Coast at Camp Kohler, near Sacramento, California. On base, Lee also performed the everyday tasks that all soldiers carried out, like patrolling the perimeter and watching for enemy ships or planes mounting a surprise attack during the cold New Jersey winter. Lee said that the frigid wind whipping off the Atlantic nearly froze him to the core.
The oceanfront duty ended, however, when Lee’s superior officers realized that he worked as a writer and comic book editor. They assigned him to the Training Film Division, coincidentally based in Astoria, Queens. He joined eight other artists, filmmakers, and writers to create a range of public relations pieces, propaganda tools, and information-sharing documents. His ability to write scripts earned him the transfer. Like countless other military men, Lee played a supporting role. By mid-1943, the Corps consisted of twenty-seven thousand officers and two hundred eighty-seven thousand enlisted men, backed by another fifty thousand civilians who worked alongside them.
The converted space that the army purchased at Thirty-Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fifth Street in Astoria housed the Signal Corps Photographic Center, the home of the official photographers and filmmakers to support the war effort. Colonel Melvin E. Gillette commanded the unit, which was also his role at Fort Monmouth Film Production Laboratory before the army bought the Queens facility in February 1942, some nine months before Lee enlisted. Under Gillette’s watchful eye, the old movie studio, originally built in 1919, underwent extensive renovation and updating, essentially having equipment that was the equivalent of any major film production company in Hollywood.
Gillette and army officials realized that the military needed unprecedented numbers of training films and aids to prepare recruits from all over the country who had varying education levels. There would also be highly sensitive and classified material that required full army control over the film process, from scripting through filming and then later in storage. The facility opened in May 1942 and quickly became an operational headquarters for the entire film and photography effort supporting the war.
The Photographic Center at Astoria was a large, imposing building from the outside. A line of grand columns protected its front entrance, flanked by rows of tall, narrow windows. Inside, the army built the largest soundstage on the East Coast, enabling the filmmakers to recreate or model just about any type of military setting.
Lee found an avenue into the small group of scribes. “I wrote training films, I wrote film scripts, I did posters, I wrote instructional manuals,” Lee recalled. “I was one of the great teachers of our time!”8 The illustrious division included many famous or soon-to-be-famous individuals, from three-time Academy Award–winning director Frank Capra and New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams to a children’s book writer and illustrator named Theodor Geisel. The world already knew Geisel by his famous pen name “Dr. Seuss.” The stories that must have floated around that room during downtime or breaks!
Lee took up a desk in the scriptwriter bullpen, to the right of eminent author William Saroyan—at least when the pacifist author came into the office. Saroyan, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life in 1939, spent much of his time working from a hotel in Manhattan. Saroyan had rejected the Pulitzer when he won it, which just made him more popular with readers and other artists. Later, the army sent Saroyan to work on films in London. Lee, along with the others, including screenwriter Ivan Goff and producer Hunt Stromberg Jr., earned the official army military occupation specialty designation “playwright.”9
Even with a full production company in New York City, some army divisions would need Lee and his colleagues on location. He journeyed to a number of camps on temporary duty (TDY in military vernacular), essentially crisscrossing the Southeast and Midwest, making stops in North Carolina, Indiana, and other locations. Each base had a critical need for easy-to-understand instruction manuals, films, or other public relations materials.
With the influx of men surging into the armed forces via draft or enlistment, thorough training didn’t always happen. Whenever he had to write a script, film, or military gadget (or some other subject he knew little or nothing about) that would be used during combat, Lee attempted to simplify the information. “I often wrote entire training manuals in the form of comic books. It was an excellent way of educating and communicating,” he said.10
One of Lee’s temporary posts took him deeper into the nation’s heartland—Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, just northeast of Indianapolis—which must have been jarring for a New York City boy who had never really been out into the country. He worked with the Army Finance Department, which seemed perpetually struggling to keep up with payrolls and in need of training manuals and films, since the army couldn’t find enough recruits with finance backgrounds.11
Looking out at the wannabee-accountants and payroll servicemen marching in various drills, Lee noticed their lack of vigor. So, he penned a song for them to sing while they marched, basically inserting new lyrics over the well-known “Air Force Song.” The peppy scriptwriter included memorable lines, like “We write, compute, sit tight, don’t shoot,” but the song energized the men and livened up the drills.
Another project also demonstrated the kind of army work the young serviceman did during the war years. When the higher-ups in Finance realized that it took too long to train payroll officers, they asked Lee to rewrite the instructional manuals to get the program running more efficiently. Part of Lee’s response included creating a cartoon character who added a bit of levity to the training manuals, but also helped the officers learn the proper methods in a lighthearted manner. “I rewrote dull army payroll manuals to make them simpler,” Lee remembered. “I established a character called Fiscal Freddy who was trying to get paid. I made a game out of it. I had a few little gags. We were able to shorten the training period of payroll officers by more than 50 percent. I think I won the war single-handedly.”12 Clearly Lee realized that using humor would help the men learn the intricate processes.
Next, Lee moved on to his “all-time strangest assignment.”13 The work centered on creating anti–venereal disease posters aimed at the troops in Europe. Sexually transmitted diseases had plagued armies throughout history, so American leaders took the effort seriously. Even utilizing extensive education programs and making condoms readily available, however, they were still losing men to syphilis and gonor-rhea. Prevention required every effort and was a critical concern. For example, the British—culturally less willing to face the STD situation—had forty thousand men a month being treated for VD during the Italian campaign.
Servicemen overseas were lectured extensively, sometimes up to half a dozen times a month and every man was given prophylactic kits when on an overnight pass or furlough. The kits included an ointment, cleaning cloth, and cleansing tissue. Often they were given condoms in packs of three. Another line of attack included education campaigns. Military leaders went to extreme measures to thwart STDs, including the creation of propaganda posters that showed Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo deliberately plotting to disable Allied troops by the spread of VD. Many of these images, such as the ones famously created by artist Arthur Szyk, depicted the Axis leaders as subhuman animals with rat-like features. The link between them and the disease deliberately created an adversarial image and played on the xenophobic attitudes of the typical Allied soldier.
Lee sat at his desk confounded about what to do for the poster. He had to promote the prophylactic stations the army had set up, in Lee’s words, “all over Europe.” Soldiers visited the huts afterward and got a series of rough and painful treatments to prevent con
tracting VD. “Those little pro stations dotted the landscape,” Lee said, “with small green lights above the entrance to make them easily recognizable.” He wrestled with many different examples and then realized that the simplest message would work best: “VD? Not me!”14 Lee illustrated the poster with a cartoon image of a happy serviceman walking into the station with the green light clearly visible. Lee’s superiors bought it, and countless posters flooded overseas posts. The poster may be one of the most-seen works Lee ever created, but it was also the most roundly ignored.
While it is difficult to quantify the importance of the films, posters, photos, and other materials the Signal Corps produced, the armed forces realized that using films to educate soldiers cut training time by 30 percent. On the home front, Signal Corps troops provided 30–50 percent of the footage for newsreels that played at movie theaters and kept the public informed about the global conflict. Photographers were even able to use new telephoto technology to snap pictures at the front and send them back to the United States almost immediately. Lee, Capra, Geisel, and the other Army “playwrights” did important work for the war effort.
Lee worked on film scripts, posters, and brochures for the Army just as he had back in Goodman’s Manhattan headquarters: quickly and efficiently. It got to the point where the other “playwrights” couldn’t keep up. The commanding officer ordered Lee to slow down.
Stan Lee Page 6
