Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (17 page)

The hired hands, given a platform at last, were happy to have the curtain pulled back. Neal Adams, currently working on DC’s
Green Lantern
and Marvel’s
Avengers
, was a rarity, an artist popular enough to refuse to work exclusively for either company. To a New York convention audience, he candidly offered his take on his employers’ business strategies. DC’s goal, he said, “probably has more to do with raising the prices even a bit higher, trying to build a market of 50-cent books. Marvel feels it can flood the market with 20-cent books and therefore take over the whole market, and they may be right. They are two very large companies and there is a very heavy competition. I hope neither of them wins.”

L
ee and Resnais’s
Monster Maker
script sold for $25,000, although it would never be filmed. Lee returned from his sabbatical to find Marvel on top and profiled in
Rolling Stone
, where an illustration of the Hulk graced the cover. Lee’s former secretary Robin Green, who wrote the feature, found him in a somewhat sensitive state when she approached him. He asked if she would be “nice,” noting that “the world is a hostile place.” There were rumors that he was unhappy at Marvel, even entertaining offers to move to DC when his contract expired. “Stan’s alone in the corner, still Facing Front and smiling, but a little down sometimes,” Green wrote. He was manic, nervous: “I asked him where he’d like to sit,” she wrote, “and he said, ‘You do what’s best for you! Have a sourball! You’re my guest!’ We talked for a while, then played back the tape recorder to see if we were picking everything up, and Stan said, ‘You know, that sounds so icky, I wouldn’t like me if I met me and I sounded like that. I’ve gotta try to sound more rugged.’ ” Lee talked about the loneliness of writing and his wife and daughter’s disinterest in comic books, and adjusted his toupee.

O
ver at DC, Kirby’s new creations—
The New Gods
,
Mister Miracle
, and
The Forever People
, which constituted a so-called Fourth World mythology—had begun appearing. These were the next-generation heroes with which Kirby wanted to replace Thor and the other “old gods” after that story about Ragnarok five years ago; this was the direction that Lee had not allowed him to take. To many readers, Kirby’s new work was all overgeared: the figures were even blockier than before, and the dialogue was stilted. But unlike Marvel, he was trying something new.

The Marvel staff awaited Kirby’s DC work with bated breath. They loved Kirby but guiltily prayed for his new projects to fail. If DC was able to capitalize on Kirby’s talent like Marvel had . . . well, the results were unthinkable. Marvel would never survive such competition. Inker Vince Colletta photocopied Kirby pages at the DC offices and carted them over to Marvel, where they went up on the walls. Marvel summoned in its own cover artists for meetings, holding up Kirby’s work for analysis.

Kirby wasn’t shy about comparing his new employer to his old one. “I don’t have the feeling of repression that I had at Marvel,” he told an interviewer. “I was never given credit for the writing I did. Most of the writing at Marvel is done by the artist from the script.”
The Fantastic Four
, he said, “was my idea. It was my idea to do it the way it was; my idea to develop it the way it was. I’m not saying that Stan had nothing to do with it. Of course he did. We talked things out. As things went on, I began to work at home and I no longer came up to the office. I developed all the stuff at home and just sent it in. I had to come up with new ideas to help the strip sell. I was faced with the frustration of having to come up with new ideas and then having them taken from me.”

The harshest barbs, though, were soon to come. In
Mister Miracle
#6, Kirby introduced Funky Flashman, a smooth-talking, fast-hustling promoter who bore more than a passing resemblance to Stan Lee. Funky Flashman, clean-shaven and bald, began his day by donning a toupee-and-beard mask, and then jumped around speaking in alliterative phrases and making promises he didn’t intend to keep. “All the great words and quotations and clichés ever written are at my beck and call!! Even if I say them sideways, the little people will listen!—in wonder! In awe! In reverence!!!—to their Funky!” Tailing him closely was Houseroy, a simpering assistant (“Master Funky! My leader!”) who looked suspiciously like Roy Thomas. At story’s end, Funky Flashman blithely sacrificed Houseroy to a quartet of angry warriors and made his slippery escape.

Roy Thomas shot back at the portrayal, and at Kirby’s “near-paranoid delusions that he created all the Marvel heroes solely by himself and even wrote the stuff.” Lee kept quiet about Funky Flashman, but privately he was hurt and angry. He shaved off his beard and put a little distance between himself and his caricature.

I
t was an especially inopportune time for Marvel to have PR problems. With the Marvelmania fiasco behind him, Chip Goodman had licensed the Marvel characters in the fall of 1971 to a shaggy-haired concert promoter named Steve Lemberg, who planned to adapt their adventures for stage musicals, radio plays, and films. The first part of Lemberg’s promotional campaign was turning Stan Lee into an honest-to-God celebrity. He quickly organized a Carnegie Hall event around him. “An erudite evening of cataclysmic culture with your friendly neighborhood bullpen gang!” Spider-Man shouted from a
New York Times
ad for the January 5, 1972, event. At a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars, even a sold-out show wouldn’t make Lemberg his money back—the show was a calculated loss leader, designed simply to enhance Lee’s notoriety beyond comic circles. Sporting a mustache and sunglasses—he couldn’t help being a little funky, and a little flashy—Stan the Man gave his best effort. But the proceedings were a directionless mess, with failed improvisations and low-rent superhero costumes crafted from Magic Markers and Lycra. The guest stars that gathered to perform dramatic readings or musical numbers could not have been a more random collection: Alain Resnais; actors René Auberjonois, Peter Boyle, and Chuck McCann; writer Tom Wolfe; Beach Boy Dennis Wilson; jazz drummer Chico Hamilton; and Eddie Carmel, holder of the
Guinness Book of World Records
title for the world’s tallest man. Lee’s wife and daughter recited a poem Lee had written, “God Woke.” A slide show spilled onto two screens, where crude projections clashed with the brightly colored Carnegie Hall drapes; a rock-and-roll trio of Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe, and Barry Smith covered Elvis songs; and, according to reports, bored audience members ripped up their comic books and fashioned them into paper airplanes to direct at the stage. When it was all over, Gerry Conway went backstage to congratulate Lee and saw that his boss’s face was ashen. He looked, Conway said, “like a deer in headlights.”

Lee took a vacation shortly afterward. He visited Martin Goodman’s turquoise-carpeted condominium in Palm Beach, Florida, where they sat on the terrace overlooking the Atlantic and talked with a reporter about selling 50 million comics a year in more than a hundred countries. But all that Lee wanted to discuss, it seemed, was the Kirby-created character that he had failed to turn into a success. “While the Surfer scored highest on our college and high school polls, it left the little kids cold. Perhaps there wasn’t enough motion, or enough nonsense. Perhaps the fact that the Surfer was all white, no costume. Or that he was baldheaded. Or that he had no earthly hideout and no double identity.”

“I think that psychologically the potential reader didn’t care enough about surfing,” Goodman wryly added. “So we got the thumbs down.”

“The Surfer will return,” Lee insisted. “Maybe with some changes. We’re thinking about some changes. But we’ve gotten thousands of letters about his going and I can now say definitely that the Surfer will return.”

They looked back out on the ocean. The reporter in Palm Beach didn’t know it, but Martin Goodman, at sixty-four years old, was only weeks away from retiring.

S
oon after his father left the company that he’d founded, Chip brought his wife, Roberta, to a dinner where Cadence Industries CEO Sheldon Feinberg was being honored. “He said we couldn’t leave before he did,” remembered Roberta. “And that was the first time we came to the idea that this was going to be different than working for Martin.”

Feinberg was no expert on comic books, but even he recognized the threatening implications if Stan Lee were to jump over to DC. In a surprise twist, Feinberg gave Lee a double promotion, to president and publisher of Marvel Comics. Lee would no longer have his hands tied by the Goodmans. He could publish black-and-white comic magazines; he could have final say on covers; he could bring back the Silver Surfer.

On the day that Lee got the news, an old friend of his came by the Marvel offices.

“But who’s going to become the editor?” the friend asked.

Lee shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, some guy back there.”

“S
tan tried to give me the job in a kind of half-assed way,” Roy Thomas remembered years later. “He didn’t really want to relinquish his major claim to fame, which of course was being the creative force behind Marvel Comics.” At first, Lee wanted his old job divided between production manager John Verpoorten, Frank Giacoia (as assistant art director), and Thomas, who’d get a mere “story editor” title. Only after Lee realized that the ambiguous hierarchy of such a triangulated structure would cause him management headaches did he yield the editor in chief title to Thomas.

Meanwhile, Chip Goodman, who’d been preparing to take over his father’s business since leaving grad school in the mid–1960s, would remain ensconced with the men’s magazines—out of sight and out of mind, as far as Lee was concerned.

Of course, Chip had already left a legacy at Marvel—he’d sold nearly all of the film rights. Steve Lemberg was, like Robert Lawrence (
Marvel Super Heroes
) and Don Wallace (Marvelmania) before him, amazed at how much he’d been given for a minimal cost. “I owned more rights to Marvel than Marvel had,” Lemberg mused. After an initial price of $2,500, he could renew indefinitely, with full, exclusive creative control of all characters. “The only decision that Chip ever made was to give me all the rights to his comic books. They gave me a twenty-page contract with interlocking rights and options; I could do anything I wanted. I could make movies, records, anything. It was really a trip.” There was talk of a Thor radio series, to run in sixty-five, five-minute installments, a $2.5 million arena-rock show based on various characters, and a Silver Surfer film starring Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. But all of this went on the back burner while Lemberg put together a rock musical LP called
Spider-Man: From Beyond the Grave
, featuring the former lead singer of the Archies. Marvel’s world domination would have to wait a little longer.

“It’s time for Phase Two to begin,” Lee proclaimed in his “Bullpen Bulletins” column. “No man, no group of men, no publishing company can rest on its laurels—and Marvel’s still much too young, too zingy, too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to settle back and bask in the sun of yesterday’s success. . . . If you think we turned you on before, the best is yet to be—wait’ll you see what’s coming! Hang loose! Face front! Marvel’s on the move again!” Restless from all the time spent in Martin Goodman’s shadow, Lee quickly began casting around for new, more sophisticated ventures. He started to line up luminaries like Anthony Burgess, Kurt Vonnegut, and Vaclav Havel to write a line of adult comic books (Tom Stoppard expressed interest as well). He asked former
Mad
editor (and father figure to the underground comix scene) Harvey Kurtzman to edit a satirical magazine called
Bedlam
.
*
Lee also turned to the legendary Will Eisner, who wrote to prospective contributors that he’d be publishing a Marvel-funded magazine that was “neither sophomoric, nor foul-mouthed or tasteless.” Lee invited underground publisher Denis Kitchen to New York to discuss packaging an anthology title that would feature left-of-center artists like Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman, and Basil Wolverton. Kitchen demanded that artists would retain trademarks to their characters and their original artwork.

Lee decided that he needed to play along with Kitchen’s rules if Marvel was going to hold sway with hipper audiences. “One of Marvel’s major assets,” read an internal marketing memo, “has always been the large number of high school and college students who read our publications. However, each day a new crop of sexy movies and raunchy underground comix, as well as a proliferation of nudie magazines vies with us for this fickle audience.” The memo went on to suggest that the company’s product should be available in gas stations, record shops, bookstores, and “youth boutiques.” Marvel had lost its edge, though—it didn’t even realize that even the underground scene had peaked.

Of all Lee’s attempts to reach a “sophisticated” audience, only the Kitchen project would reach fruition, but when
Comix Book
#1 was finally published, it was without Marvel’s logo. The final product, which allowed for partial nudity and a negotiated selection of profanities, occupied an uncomfortable limbo between its artists’ usual sex-and-drug hijinks and the relatively innocuous Marvel style. Lee canceled it after three issues, citing poor sales, but Kitchen wondered if it had also rocked the corporate boat too much. One underground cartoonist who visited the Marvel offices heard employees asking why “the hippies” were getting special treatment. “All the other people who worked for Marvel—in the bullpen and the freelancers—all started giving him a lot of shit about it,” said Denis Kitchen, “because they resented that these newcomers had a different deal than they did.”