Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (16 page)
Kirby headed home and waited for his contract. While he began figuring out how to chop in half the Inhumans stories he’d already drawn, Lee called him to ask if he’d fill in for an issue of the floundering
Silver Surfer
, in which the title character would be recast as an angry vindicator. It would be called
The Savage Silver Surfer
. (Ironically, this was how Kirby had intended to portray the character all along, ever since he added him to the pages of
Fantastic Four
#48 just before deadline.) Kirby took the assignment, although it was salt in the wound to pinch-hit on the character he’d created himself but been denied control of.
And then the contract arrived. Kirby’s heart sank as he read the terms. He could take it or leave it. Kirby’s mood came through on the final, frighteningly intense pages of
Silver Surfer
#18. The Surfer flew away from a fight, streaked to a mountaintop, and briefly kneeled down before turning to directly address the reader, his face boiling with rage. “Too long have I displayed restraint! Too long have I refused to flaunt my power!” screamed the Surfer. “I’ll have done with reason—and with love—or mercy! To men they’re only words—to be uttered and ignored!”
*
The next time Carmine Infantino visited California, he brought a contract with him. Kirby went over to Infantino’s hotel room and signed a three-year deal with DC Comics.
T
hrough all of this, the atmosphere in the cramped Bullpen had remained, by and large, playful. Maybe it was never quite the utopian elves’ workshop depicted in the letter columns, but the
Sorry, No Visitors
sign outside the unlocked front office door was really just to ward off the creepier fans. According to Robin Green, who replaced Flo Steinberg as Marvel’s secretary, “the bullpen had become a kind of men’s den, with pictures of naked women, some playboy types and some drawings of comic book characters as they will never appear in
Spider-Man
. Some of them were downright pornographic, and you couldn’t talk to [inker] Tony Mortellaro without a tit or an ass staring you in the face.” The key to the bathroom was called “the shithouse pass.”
The short New York University student film
We Love You Herb Trimpe
, shot at the office at the time, provides visual evidence of this men’s den: Trimpe, an Alan Alda lookalike, has decorated his station with a poster of General George S. Patton (World War II biplane models linger just above the shot). John Verpoorten and Marie Severin chat and tease as they work but never look up, the desks pushed together so tightly that everyone would have to stop working in order for anyone to squeeze out of the room. They lament what’s happened to their audience, which was once made up of thrilled children and is now dominated by increasingly one-track-minded teenagers: “That word
fan
is just that,” says Trimpe. “They’re fanatics.”
Marie Severin, wide brown eyes hidden behind her glasses, dressed in what Robin Green described as “very Peck & Peck,” held her own against both the boys’ club and the fans, all of whom she targeted in brilliant, wicked caricatures that were pinned up all around the office. Her cartooning had been given a chance to shine in
Not Brand Echh
; now that it had been canceled, most of her best work was privately circulated, excoriating in-jokes about her coworkers. But behind the cigarette smoke and the wisecracks, there was a familial softness to the Bullpen as well. Kuramoto would paint nature watercolors during his lunch hour. Freelancers would regularly stop in, pull up a chair, and work. When artist Barry Smith visited the Bullpen, he witnessed a spontaneous, collaborative rendition of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” which was playing on the radio: “As it came into the long, chanting coda, one by one each person began singing along—Herb, John Romita, Morrie Kuramoto, Tony Mortellaro, Marie and a few others—all singing at the top of their lungs.”
M
arch 6, 1970, was a Friday. The ghosts of the sixties still clung. The Beatles, publicly together but having already broken up behind closed doors, released the single “Let It Be” that morning. In Greenwich Village, a few minutes after 12 noon, members of the radical group the Weathermen accidentally detonated a bomb they were building, razing their town house headquarters. Uptown, in Marvel’s offices,
Captain America
#128, in which a biker gang named Satan’s Angels provided security for an Altamont-like rock festival, was in production. Shortly after Jack Kirby’s pages for
Fantastic Four
#102 were delivered into Lee’s hands, the phone rang at 635 Madison Avenue. “Jack’s on line two,” Stan Lee’s receptionist called out.
A few minutes later, a stunned Lee called in Sol Brodsky, and then Roy Thomas. The just-delivered
Fantastic Four
pages sat on Lee’s desk, still carrying the scent of the Roi-Tan Falcon cigars that Kirby smoked at his drawing board.
The King was leaving Marvel.
A
s soon as the news reached John Romita, he walked into Lee’s office and asked if they’d be canceling the
Fantastic Four
. No, said Lee—you’re going to do it. “Are you crazy?” Romita asked, but finally accepted. “I did it under extreme duress because I felt inadequate,” he recalled later. “It was like trying to raise somebody else’s child.” John Buscema had an even stronger reaction. “I thought they were going to close up,” he recalled. “As far as I was concerned, Jack was the backbone of Marvel.”
Somebody found one of the cigar butts that Kirby had left behind on his last visit to the Bullpen. “Marie Severin made a very elaborate plaque out of it,” Trimpe later recalled, “labeling it ‘Jack Kirby’s Last Cigar at Marvel,’ with fancy scroll work on it.” She hung the plaque on the wall. It read, “Kirby Was Here.”
N
ineteen seventy was a stressful year for Stan Lee—“frenzied, frantic, and frenetic,” as he put it in a letter to one friend. He was still reeling from Kirby’s departure, and in the process of moving his family from Hewlett Harbor to a midtown apartment, when Sol Brodsky sat down and told him he’d been offered the chance to lead a black-and-white comic start-up. Lee resignedly gave Brodsky his blessing and named John Verpoorten the new head of production.
There were reminders everywhere that things had changed since the early days of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man and the Merry Marvel Marching Society. Every time that Lee walked down the corridor and into his office, he passed a life-size poster of Spider-Man from years ago, drawn by the long-departed Steve Ditko. Flo was gone; Jack was gone; Sol was gone. Stan Goldberg, who’d chosen the colors for the superheroes and drew
Millie the Model
for a decade, had recently left to work for DC, as had longtime artist John Severin. Only Martin Goodman still remained from those halcyon days of the early 1960s, and although he still looked at the covers, and approved new titles, he was halfway out the door already, having arranged for Chip—who was more focused on the magazine line anyway—to take his place. Even Marvel’s mysterious owner, Perfect Film & Chemical, changed its name to the still-more-ambiguous Cadence Industries and moved out to New Jersey. And sales were down.
It wasn’t the first time Lee had watched as the people who’d helped to build Marvel left him: it had happened in 1941, when Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left; in 1949, when he’d had to fire the freelancers; in 1957, when he’d had to fire the staff. The difference now was that he had some power to determine what would happen next. Throughout 1970, as he prepared to enter his fourth decade as an employee of Marvel Comics, he started eyeing the publishing strategies more closely, and pushing for changes. He made plans with the poet Kenneth Koch to create comics about “which congressmen to vote for, who might help end the war in Vietnam a little sooner.”
*
He huddled with Carmine Infantino at DC to start the Academy of Comic Book Arts, in a bid to gain more widespread acceptance for the industry. “We’ll have exhibits in world-famous galleries,” he wrote, “a lecture bureau to provide speakers to interested groups here and overseas; and an annual awards ceremony in which we, the pros, will recognize and reward the finest artistic and literary contributions from within our field.” (The organization succeeded, at least, in giving out awards.) With Chip Goodman’s help, Lee campaigned for the Comics Code Authority to allow depictions of narcotics use. The measure was voted down, but when Lee later received a letter from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare asking him to address drug abuse in the comics, he convinced Martin Goodman to bypass the code—and Marvel published a
Spider-Man
story in which Peter Parker’s roommate Harry Osborn couldn’t stop popping pills. The newspaper coverage easily outweighed the slap on the wrist from the Code Authority.
Marvel won the battle. Within a matter of months the authority, sensing that it was on the wrong side of history, not only began to allow depictions of drug abuse, but also lifted some of its horror-content bans.
*
Marvel acted quickly to capitalize on the new guidelines, developing
Werewolf by Night
,
The Tomb of Dracula
, and almost—Lee was talked out of it—a title called
The Mark of Satan
, which would follow the adventures of the devil himself.
B
ut Lee had not worked this long and hard just to return to crank out monster comics in a repeatedly endangered industry. For all his campaigning to improve the standing of comic books in the eyes of the world, he wasn’t willing to go down with the ship. Rumors swirled that Lee was just waiting out his contract;
*
such speculation only gained traction when his frustrations surfaced in public. “The comic book market is the worst market that there is on the face of the earth for creative talent and the reasons are numberless and legion,” he told a gathering of industry colleagues.
I have had many talented people ask me how to get into the comic book business. If they were talented enough the first answer I would give them is, “Why would you want to get into the comic book business?” Because even if you succeed, even if you reach what might be considered the pinnacle of success in comics, you will be less successful, less secure and less effective than if you are just an average practitioner of your art in television, radio, movies or what have you. It is a business in which the creator . . . owns nothing of his creation. The publisher owns it. . . . Isn’t it pathetic to be in a business where the most you can say for the creative person in the business is that he’s serving an apprenticeship to enter a better field? Why not go to the other field directly?
“I would tell any cartoonist who has an idea,” Lee concluded, “think twice before you give it to a publisher.”
He looked for a way to sample life outside the confines of not just Goodman’s rule, but of comic books entirely. He’d solidified his friendship with Alain Resnais, the director of acclaimed art-house films like
Hiroshima Mon Amour
and
Last Year at Marienbad
, who was, like Fellini before him, an avowed Marvel Comics fan. Unlike Fellini, Resnais wanted more than to just pay his respects. He wanted to collaborate on a screenplay.
“The Monster Maker
is a realistic fantasy about a frustrated movie producer who overcomes his frustrations through trying to solve the problems of pollution,” Lee told
The New York Times
about the ecologically focused film. “There will be lots of symbolism—and garbage.” With a junk-culture-toiling protagonist nudged into a higher calling on the advice of his wife, it would be difficult not to see
The Monster Maker
as autobiographical. This, perhaps, was how Lee saw his own journey, as a man who’d gone from churning out schlocky product to taking an honorable place in the world and speaking against societal ills. In order to devote more time to working on
The Monster Maker
, Stan Lee took a sabbatical from writing comic books for the first time in his life.
A
t first it was hard for Lee to let go of the flagship titles, the ones he’d never entrusted to anyone else. Just as no one’s artwork seemed to please him like Jack Kirby’s did, no one’s scripts seemed to please him like his own. But he’d poured everything he had into the
Silver Surfer
series, just to see it canceled. What did it matter anymore? So he handed over the keys to those who’d most thoroughly absorbed his style and could most seamlessly generate simulacra of past glories:
The Amazing Spider-Man
went to Roy Thomas,
Fantastic Four
to Archie Goodwin,
Captain America
to Gary Friedrich. And, most surprising to Marvel fans,
Thor
went to a teenager named Gerry Conway.
Born in Brooklyn, Conway was eight years old when
Fantastic Four
#1 hit the stands. By the time he was sixteen, he was writing scripts for DC Comics; soon after, he met Roy Thomas, who assigned him a Marvel writers’ test. But Lee was, as usual, less than impressed with the way another writer handled the characters he shepherded.
“He writes really well for a seventeen-year-old kid,” Thomas reasoned.
Lee, who himself had first walked into Marvel’s offices at that age, paused. “Well, can’t we get someone who writes really well for a
twenty-five
-year-old kid?”
After writing a single Ka-Zar story in
Astonishing Tales
, though, Conway earned a gig writing
Daredevil
. He soon became Marvel’s new utility player. Just as Thomas had been picking up slack on titles Lee didn’t have time for, Conway swooped in and covered
Iron Man
,
The Sub-Mariner
, and
The Incredible Hulk
. Conway managed to shake up
Daredevil
by partnering him with the Black Widow, whom Gene Colan rendered as something like an acrobatic Ann-Margret, a skintight-suited siren with long, red hair.
*
(“There seemed to be some natural chemistry between them,” Conway said. “I think Gene’s Black Widow was comics’ first empowered sexy babe.”)
But Conway’s
Thor
, illustrated by John Buscema and his younger brother Sal in a faux-Kirby style, faced the same uphill climb as Thomas’s
Amazing Spider-Man
and Goodwin’s
Fantastic Four
. There were not just the long shadows cast by Lee and Kirby, but also the mandates to preserve status quo; character development was replaced by dramatized public service announcements. The low-selling
Captain America
became
Captain America and the Falcon
, and the new African-American costar began warily dating, and debating, a shrill black militant named Leila. The Avengers tackled women’s lib, the Sub-Mariner addressed ecological concerns, and the Incredible Hulk, Thor, and the Inhumans visited the ghetto. Where was the fun in that?
*
There hadn’t been any new superhero titles in a year or two now—launches were limited to low-cost genre-dabbling like
Western Gunfighters
,
Lil’ Kids
,
Our Love Story
,
Spoof
,
Harvey
, and
Fear
. There was a growing sense, among the letter-writers and fanzine publishers, that Marvel was simply becoming a copy of itself. An issue of
The Fantastic Four
included art appropriated from an unpublished Kirby story. In an attempt to encourage Marvel’s writers and artists to keep creating new characters while he was away, Lee suggested new anthology titles like
Marvel Feature
,
Marvel Spotlight
, and
Marvel Premiere
. But
Marvel Feature
’s the Defenders, the first super-team in eight years, included no new characters—it simply threw together Doctor Strange, the Sub-Mariner, and the Hulk.
Marvel Premiere
starred a character named Adam Warlock—but he was a renamed version of a character that Kirby had introduced in 1967, updated by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane as a kind of cosmic-peacenik
Jesus Christ Superstar
who wandered around with zany longhairs, fighting authority figures of every stripe. The most exciting Marvel comic of 1971, by fan consensus, was an
Avengers
story arc called “The Kree-Skrull War,” in which Thomas and Neal Adams reteamed for a welcome return to the tradition of multi-issue space epics. It was an ambitious, often thrilling tour through various Marvel mythologies, featuring not just the two battling alien races, and the Negative Zone, and Captain Marvel, and the Inhumans, but also appearances by Timely-era heroes like the Angel, the Blazing Skull, the Fin, the Patriot, and the original Vision. Paying tribute to what had come before him, with “The Kree-Skrull War” Thomas seemed to be touring disparate corners of the Marvel universe with a dustbin and craft glue, picking up the detritus left in Lee and Kirby’s wake and fitting it all together. You could argue that it reached new levels of intertextual ecstasy, or you could wonder if it was just a final, grand echo of past glories, intoxicating fumes from an empty tank.
A
s the comics coasted along without Lee and Kirby, Martin Goodman hatched a devious plan to conquer DC once and for all. When Marvel and DC agreed to hike the price of comics (which had previously been raised from 10 to 12 cents in 1962, and to 15 cents in 1969), their handshake deal called for the books to expand from 36 to 52 pages—but at a whopping 25 cents apiece. But after a month, Goodman immediately cut back to fewer pages at 20 cents, and offered newsstand proprietors a bigger cut of the profits, ensuring that Marvel would get better rack space. The slow-footed DC tried to make a go of their higher-price, thicker comics, but they took a bath on the maneuver, and by the time they crawled back to the 20-cent price point, they’d lost the battle and the war. For the first time in its history, Marvel Comics was the number-one comic book company in the world. When Goodman got the news, he took the Marvel staff out to dinner at the after-work hangout of DC Comics employees, whose offices were directly across the street.
Unfortunately, leading the comic-book industry was a dubious distinction. Both Marvel and DC had managed to attract media coverage because of the so-called relevance of their social-issues coverage—a
New York
magazine cover story trumpeted, somewhat misleadingly, “The Radicalization of the Superheroes”—but the impact on the bottom line was minimal. Marvel had lost even its underdog status now. In industry circles, the grumblings of Ditko and Wally Wood had been common knowledge for a while, and many others objected to the lack of creative control that DC and Marvel afforded. But with Kirby’s departure—and the growth of an organized network of fandom, rife with zines and conventions—gossip and accusations began to spread like wildfire.