Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (24 page)
Snyder put up shelves in the basement of his Randolph, New Jersey, home and called his new company Superhero Enterprises. Within three years, he’d own stores in three cities, and an extremely successful mail-order business. He would cross Marvel’s path again.
S
tan Lee, meanwhile, had been busying himself on the magazine side since Chip Goodman had exited, to the chagrin of the editors there. They saw Lee as a meddler who swooped in and asked for unnecessary changes, asking out loud who these younger celebrities on the covers were.
At the launch party for Magazine Management’s
Film International
(on the first issue’s cover was nude
Emmanuelle
star Sylvia Kristal; reviews of several X-rated films ran inside), Stan and Joanie flew to Los Angeles and hobnobbed with C-listers like Arte Johnson and Victoria Principal, and retired directors like King Vidor and Vincente Minnelli, at the Greystone Mansion. It wasn’t as hip as having Fellini and Alain Resnais swing by the office, but it was Hollywood.
Lee’s name also appeared on the top of the masthead of
Celebrity
, a
People
knockoff that inserted Lee into the action, posing for photos with story subjects. The vintage of the stars—Mae West, Mickey Cohen, Robert Wagner, Lucille Ball, F. Lee Bailey—gave it the feel of an episode of
Love Boat
. The articles fawned over all of them. “If
Celebrity
’s attitude to the phenomenon [of stardom-obsessed culture] seems diffident,” wrote one observer, “that may be because it is published by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame, and primarily devoted to the exploits of Lee, the first comic book author to gain celebrity status.”
Now Lee enjoyed an exquisitely appointed office—five windows that overlooked Madison Avenue, a boomerang-shaped, glass-topped coffee table, and ample space for three chrome-and-leather chairs and two plush sofas. He still wrote the “Stan’s Soapbox” column once a month, but it was Hollywood that called to him. Not only were there movie stars with whom to mingle, but there was also an industry that didn’t seem on the verge of collapse. “No matter how successful everything became,” said one writer, “he always had the horrible feeling that everybody would disappear and he’d have to step in and write everything again.”
As it was, he barely looked at the comics. He took a look at
Iron Man
for the first time in over a year, saw the triangular nose that had been added to the helmet on his own orders, and said, “What’s this—why is this here?”
“You don’t want that?”
“Well, it looks kind of strange, doesn’t it?” Lee zoomed away, on to the next thing.
Everything was big-picture now: synergy, demographics, partnerships. Lee called at least one meeting to remind writers not to make major changes to characters, lest those changes jeopardize deals with licensees. Decisions were being made, Steve Englehart said, “not by Stan Lee as the top of a bunch of creative people, but by Stan Lee as the bottom of a bunch of businessmen. And he began to really put his energy up into the business end of it rather than down into the creative end below.”
A
s out of touch as he was with the creative process, by now even Stan Lee knew that fans were clamoring for more of Howard the Duck. Howard’s sporadic appearances, in the back pages of the tremendously titled
Giant-Size Man-Thing
, produced an avalanche of mail, and Steve Gerber found himself meeting with Lee about Howard getting his own title. Accompanying Gerber was Mary Skrenes, a college friend of Alan Weiss who’d moved to New York and easily fallen into freelance comic writing. Skrenes found that she loved comics, but it took some time getting used to the man-child comic pros that surrounded her. Gerber, whom she met on a visit to the Marvel offices, was an exception: “I came in,” she said, “and everybody clustered around me. Some of these guys weren’t used to girls. So they were all around me, saying things like, ‘I’ve been having trouble . . . I hate to go to sleep . . . I hate to wake up,’ and I looked up and I saw this big head bouncing toward me from the other room. It was Steve Gerber. He took my hand, and led me out of the room. All these guys are like, ‘What?’ ”
She quickly became Gerber’s muse—the inspiration for Howard the Duck’s go-go dancing girlfriend, Beverly Switzler—and writing partner. They began dating and soon moved in together. Her sensibility was every bit as skewed as his. When she was asked to take a crack at conceptualizing a superheroine with the name of Ms. Marvel, she turned in a proposal about Loretta Petta, a petite, dyslexic waitress who’d moved from a trailer park to the big city. “When she would get pissed—in the first issue, somebody robbed her diner—she would get super-adrenaline strength. They didn’t want her to be tiny and dyslexic; they wanted her to be statuesque. Stan just didn’t like it.”
*
But she and Gerber had better luck together. In the pitch meeting for
Howard
, they’d also brought along their idea for another comic, about a character named James-Michael—“a
real
twelve-year-old,” as he put it, “a
human being
poised on the edge of puberty, facing all the enormous (and enormous seeming) problems adolescence would bring.” Not, in other words, another stupid kid sidekick.
Of course, it wasn’t quite vérité—in the first issue, James-Michael’s parents die in a horrible auto accident and are revealed to be robots. James-Michael, hyperintelligent and nearly autistic in his cold manner, is adopted by a kind nurse and her hip roommate, who live in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan, and he’s haunted by dreams of a mute, caped alien who shoots lasers from his palms and leaves a trail of destruction that’s still there when James-Michael awakes. But what would they call it?
“Omega the Unknown!” Lee shot back. He put both titles on the schedule.
T
hings were looking up for Chris Claremont, too—the first few issues of the new
X-Men
series had been popular with the fans, as had
Iron Fist
, which he was also writing. In both titles he’d immediately set to building supporting casts of ordinary folks to surround the heroes, surrogate families for the exceptional outcasts with whom an audience of adolescents and aging fans were likely to identify. There was also the artwork: on
X-Men
, Dave Cockrum’s colorful costume designs and science-fiction gloss; on
Iron Fist
, the fluid energy and Dutch-angled dynamism of a young Canadian artist named John Byrne. Byrne was an immediate fan favorite. His characters were infallibly vivacious, his panels were filled with minutiae for trainspotting readers, and his page layouts flowed invitingly. He and Claremont immediately hatched plans to collaborate on further projects.
*
At the end of 1975, Claremont left his editorial post, as Englehart, Gerber, and McGregor had before him, to devote himself full-time to writing. To replace Claremont in the associate editor position, Wolfman tapped a former DC writer with a decade of industry experience under his belt.
His name was Jim Shooter. He’d just turned twenty-four.
I
n the summer of 1964, when Jim Shooter was twelve years old, he spent a week in the children’s ward of Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh, recuperating from minor surgery. From his hospital bed, he worked his way through the nearby piles of comic books.
“The DC comics were pristine, and the Marvel comics were ratty and dog-eared,” said Shooter. “And so I read a couple DCs and I read a couple of Marvels and I found out why everyone was reading the Marvels: because they were way, way better.”
This gave the boy an idea. “My family had no money, and they won’t let you work at a steel mill if you’re twelve. I thought if I could learn to write like this Stan Lee guy, I could sell stuff to these people at DC—because they clearly needed help.”
For a year, the young Shooter studied every comic he could get his hands on, figuring out what was good, and what was bad, but above all else, he wanted to figure out the formula. “I guess I was canny enough to know that if I just wrote some comic book or everything I had ever wanted to do in a comic book that they wouldn’t buy that. They weren’t going to buy something that was too different.”
In the summer of 1965, he wrote a
Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes
story on spec, and gave it to his mother to send to DC. A mail correspondence followed, and within a matter of months, Shooter got a call from Mort Weisinger, the same “malevolent toad” who only a few months earlier had scared Roy Thomas away to Marvel. Weisinger invited him to meet at the DC offices. Shooter, by now fourteen, was accompanied by his mother.
He got the regular gig, and just in time. “My father had a beat-up old car and the engine died,” he said. “That first check bought a rebuilt engine for his car so he didn’t have to walk to work anymore.”
For four years, Shooter worked for Weisinger on various iterations of the Superman mythos—Superboy, Supergirl, etc.—not only writing scripts, but providing cover designs as well. He also won the good graces of artists Gil Kane and Wally Wood by providing stick-figure layouts for each page. But as high school wore on, the allure of the money began to wear off—it never seemed to be enough for his family anyway. What mattered now was the accolades.
*
Unfortunately, praise was limited to the occasional article in the Pittsburgh newspaper or segment on the local TV news. “My father probably said four or five words to me the whole time I was growing up,” said Shooter. “One of the greatest men to ever walk the earth . . . but not at connecting with people. He made no comment whatsoever.” And Weisinger didn’t just withhold praise—he cruelly berated his teenage employee, calling from New York every Thursday night, following the weekly
Batman
television broadcast, with a litany of complaints:
It’s not on time. It’s over the page limit. How the hell can we get a cover out of this? Why can’t you write like you used to?
He referred to Shooter as his “charity case.” “He caused a kind of pathological fear of telephones in me,” Shooter once told an interviewer. “I felt more and more inadequate . . . and my last chance to be a kid was slipping by.”
Holding down an adult job—and, at six feet seven inches, now towering above his classmates—scarcely anything about him, save a serious case of acne, marked him as a teenager. He tried to fit it all in, to “get good grades so I could nail down a scholarship, and have a little fun, like football games, dances, parties and stuff. But it was too much, and it all suffered.” He missed sixty days of his senior year of high school, his grades fell, and his productivity for Weisinger decreased.
He managed an NYU scholarship anyway. In 1969, shortly before he was due to fly to New York, he had a falling-out with Weisinger. So he decided to cold-call his inspiration, Stan Lee, from a pay phone at the airport. Amazingly, he talked his way into a job interview, and then an offer. But the only thing available was a full-time assistant position. Marvel’s environment was shockingly different from the jacket-and-tie, insurance-company vibe of DC. It seemed like it might be . . . fun.
He gave up the scholarship.
Shooter, flat broke, checked into a local YMCA after his first day on the job and then slept on the floor of Marvel receptionist Allyn Brodsky. He sat in on story conferences. Morrie Kuramoto taught him how to paste corrections onto art pages. Sol Brodsky gave him samples of artwork by Kirby and Gene Colan so he could try his hand at inking, and Lee asked him to submit plot pitches, but nothing came of it. After four years of being a wunderkind, he was suddenly a ghost. An impoverished ghost. “I literally did not eat for two weeks, I had no money. When I got my first paycheck, and I saw how many taxes came out, and I saw the prices for rent on apartments . . . I couldn’t survive. I couldn’t do this.”
Shooter, shell-shocked, gave up and went back to Pittsburgh.
He tried to get a job in advertising, and eventually scraped together some freelance work, but no one wanted to hire a high school graduate. By the time a couple of
Legion of Superheroes
fans tracked him down for an interview in 1974, the twenty-one-year-old former boy wonder, the onetime local celebrity who’d practiced signing his name with a Superman-style
S
, had spent a year managing a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
W
hen Marvel assistant Duffy Vohland heard about this, he called Shooter, and—representing himself as an editor—convinced him to travel to the offices to discuss a return to comics.
To Shooter, Marvel’s newer and bigger offices looked even more crowded and shabby than the 1969 space had. “There was a huge papier-mâché figure of Thor, donated by some fans, suspended on wires from the ceiling in the production area. There were piles of stuff everywhere—old comics, envelopes, trash, books. Two people were sword fighting with yardsticks in the hall.” The dozens of employees, he thought to himself, were “young, strange looking, and dressed for playing Frisbee in the park.” Vohland pointed out the sleeping bags that transient employees used to sleep under their desks.
Shooter, flummoxed by the chaos and unfamiliar with the new Marvel characters, darted over to DC—Weisinger had retired—and began writing
Legion of Superheroes
again, for another year, from Pittsburgh. But eventually, once again, the DC style began to chafe, and he started thinking about leaving comics behind. Then, in December 1975, Marv Wolfman called him. Would he like to come into the Marvel offices to talk about a staff job?
W
olfman was nowhere to be found when Shooter flew into town the next morning, but the desks that surrounded the editor in chief’s door were buzzing with energy. Near the secretary’s desk, Claremont’s girlfriend was sitting on his lap. Assistant editors—Roger Stern, Roger Slifer, Scott Edelman—ran around frantically. One of them shoved nineteen pages of art from the latest
Captain Marvel
into Shooter’s hands, so he sat down and worked while he waited for his job interview to begin.
At noon, Wolfman breezed in. “Marv comes right through the big room, goes into his room, closes the door. And then he opens the door, Len comes in, and Marv says, ‘We’re going to lunch.’ ” The editorial assistants went out for coffee.
After lunch, Wolfman explained the job, which was to be “pre-proofreader.” Too many plots, he said, were going straight from the writer to the artist, without editorial supervision, and no one was seeing mistakes until they were drawn and lettered in ink. “That’s why these guys are so busy,” said Wolfman. “So much stuff comes in like that. Instead of doing it at the end, you should do it when it’s still in pencil. Just re-read the plots.” Wolfman had found a secret weapon to combat the inefficient workflow.
This secret weapon even had a nickname: “Trouble Shooter.”
F
rom California, Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart were, quite literally, destroying and re-creating galaxies. As Kirby had done with Ragnarok in
Thor
and as Steranko had done with the Prism of Miracles in “Nick Fury,” the respective Armageddons in
Warlock
and
Doctor Strange
—unleashed simultaneously, at the end of the year—left lingering trauma. Adam Warlock had defeated his corrupted future self, the Magus, only by allowing the universe to end and start anew; he remained haunted by the memory of “this explosive reshuffling of time.” Simultaneously, Doctor Strange had battled his old foe Mordo for the fate of the world, and lost. The world was brought back, of course—but Strange alone carried the heavy knowledge that everything was a re-creation, a living replica of what had died.
Much like, some readers were beginning to say, Marvel Comics. “The notion,” said Gerry Conway, “was that you had a cycle, and every three years you replaced your readership. Once boys hit puberty they would stop reading comics, and you’d be picking up the next group of ten-year-olds. So the goal was to write material appropriate for that age group.”
If you couldn’t have anything but the illusion of change, the most you could hope for was to reset the buttons for the new crop of ten-year-olds.
T
he big news at the beginning of 1976 was
Howard the Duck
#1. Gerber’s weird creation—and the promise of sophisticated humor, and the popularity of artist Frank Brunner—inspired a wild gold rush among comic-collectible dealers, who hurried to newsstands and bought up every copy of the issue—sometimes before it even hit the racks. Rumors circulated that Marvel had conspired to keep the issue from the hands of fans, or that a computer error caused half the press run to be shipped to Canada, where unsold copies had been promptly destroyed.
“I said, ‘What’s with this duck? He’s just another Walt Disney character. It won’t work,’ ” Marvel circulation director Ed Shukin told the
New Yorker
. “So that’s why we only printed 275,000. At the time, I hadn’t actually read a copy of
Howard
. That was a mistake. I underestimated that duck.”
Speculators did not. Within weeks, the comic was selling for nearly ten times the cover price—if you could find someone to sell it to you at all. It wasn’t uncommon for comic-shop owners—of which there were now a few hundred throughout the country—to keep piles in the storeroom, unsold, as they watched prices soar. Pretty soon,
Howard the Duck
was the first Marvel comic to make mainstream headlines since Spider-Man had gone up against the Comics Code. Howard’s image was emblazoned on the front cover of the
Village Voice
(“The Last Angry Duck Stands Up For America”) while Gerber humored the press. (“There’s a sensual quality to him,” Gerber told
Playboy
. “If you stood Howard next to Superman, you could tell instantly which would be more interesting to jump into bed with.”) It wasn’t long before Marvel announced that Howard the Duck would be running for president in the 1976 election.
G
erber’s
Man-Thing
had carried healthy doses of social satire, but
Howard the Duck
really seemed to loosen something inside the writer. He had a lot to get off his chest about American materialism, about the cheap violence in martial arts movies, about groupthink, about Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church. The agitation rubbed off on his work in
The Defenders
, too—the alien Nebulon tried to conquer earth not with cosmic blasts, but by posing as a Werner Erhard–like leader of self-improvement seminars, in which attendees were given clown masks and told to declare themselves “Bozos.” Another issue depicted protesters outside a screening of
Waste
, a stand-in for the real-life 1976 surprise hit
Snuff
.
Marv Wolfman greatly respected Gerber’s work, and he’d been an early champion of
Howard the Duck
. But he found the darker stories—including one that Stan Lee called “one of the best written comics I’ve ever been jealous of”—to be “gruesome” and “revolting.” Increasingly, the tone of the comics was a point of contention for Wolfman, who’d even dusted off Nova, a character he’d created as a teenager, in hopes of getting back to the kid-friendly spirit of the early 1960s Marvels. The inclination was not contagious.
“I was working at that particular time with very highly tempered people,” Wolfman said. “It was very difficult—maybe a stronger editor could do it—to tell Steve Englehart to do something, or Steve Gerber, or Don, or . . . 90% of the staff that was there was very emotionally high-strung people.”
D
on McGregor, no longer on staff—and thus no longer able to push his own comics through unhindered—had become evangelistic about creative freedom, the battle lines of which, for him, often involved issues of race (despite editorial queasiness, he’d pushed through mainstream comics’ first interracial kiss) and issues of verbiage. Englehart had once poked fun at McGregor’s self-serious and long-winded prose in an issue of
The Avengers
, in which Black Panther declines membership to the group in a monologue that pushes at the boundaries of the panel:
“Thor, the fine fool’s gold of stark velvet morning seems to light the mottled tapestry of desire and disaster that comprises the legend of life for my people and myself in this hidden, half-slumbering nation-state we proudly proclaim Wakanda—but the amber eyes of reason widen as mauve shadows of regret creep across all the outside worldscape, and scream the bleeding need for Panther’s presence at this time.”