Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (3 page)

Namor did find one human he liked. Betty Dean was, of course, a pretty girl; less predictably, she was also a policewoman, friendly with the Human Torch’s alter ego Jim Hamond and thus in the unique position to act as a go-between for Timely’s two most popular characters. And so it was that in
Marvel Mystery Comics
#7, a seemingly throwaway moment—in which Betty warns Namor that the Torch is now on the police force and looking for him—carried the seeds of something revolutionary: the fictional universes of two characters, conceived by two different imaginations, were in fact one and the same.

O
r was this a fictional universe at all? Wasn’t that the Manhattan skyline behind the Torch? Wasn’t that the Hudson River that the Sub-Mariner was diving into? Superman and Batman had smiled together on a few carefree covers, but every kid knew that they were fully tethered to their respective Metropolis and Gotham City, and that never the twain would meet. Who cared if the Acme Skyscraper fell, or the First National Bank had to give up its cash? Timely’s New York City, on the other hand, was rife with Real Stuff to Destroy. In
Marvel Mystery Comics
#8 and #9, which hit newsstands in the spring of 1940, Namor wreaks havoc on the Holland Tunnel, the Empire State Building, the Bronx Zoo, and the George Washington Bridge (“Hah! Another man-made monument!” he shouts, breathlessly aroused at the potential carnage) before the Human Torch finally confronts him, and the battle rages to the Statue of Liberty and Radio City Music Hall. Was it possible that they’d turn a corner and meet the Angel? Or, better yet, show up at the reader’s home?

Maybe they’d bump into the slew of other characters that Funnies, Inc. was now cranking out for Goodman’s two new titles: the Blue Blaze and Flexo the Rubber Man, or the Phantom Reporter and Marvex the Super Robot. Alas,
Daring Mystery Comics
and
Mystic Comics
didn’t sell anything like
Marvel Mystery Comics
. Flexo the Rubber Man would never get within stretching distance of the Human Torch.

G
oodman didn’t want to count on Lloyd Jacquet’s studio alone, especially if they weren’t going to come up with new hits. He quickly realized that it was possible to reduce the role of the profit-eating middleman. When Goodman had requested another hero in the vein of the Human Torch, one of Jacquet’s freelancers, Joe Simon, had risen to the occasion, creating the flame-shooting Fiery Mask. Now Goodman asked him to create new characters directly for Timely. Simon, a former newspaper cartoonist from Rochester, New York, was earning seven dollars per page from Funnies, Inc.; Goodman would pay him twelve per page, and still spend less than he paid to Jacquet. Simon, always an astute businessman, took the money. Soon he was, incredibly, balancing the work for Goodman with a job as the editor in chief at Victor Fox’s Fox Publications, where he made corrections, assigned stories, cranked out covers, and supervised a staff of low-paid, mostly inexperienced artists.

At Fox, Simon met a twenty-one-year-old artist named Jacob Kurtzberg, a product of the Lower East Side slums. “My mother once wanted to give me a vacation,” Kurtzberg said, describing his childhood, “so she put me on a fire escape for two weeks and I was out in the open air sleeping for two weeks on a fire escape and having a grand time.” A member of the Suffolk Street Gang, as a youth he was no stranger to the rougher elements of his neighborhood (“I would wait behind a brick wall for three guys to pass and I’d beat the crap out of them and run like hell”), but Kurtzberg found his escape in fantasy: in Shakespeare, in movie matinees. The life-changing moment was the rainy day he saw a pulp magazine with an illustration of a foreign-looking, futuristic object on the cover, floating down the gutter. He picked up the copy of
Wonder Stories
and stood transfixed, staring at this thing called a rocket ship.

Kurtzberg threw himself into drawing his own stories, carefully studying the comic-strip artistry of Milton Caniff’s
Terry and the Pirates
, Hal Foster’s
Tarzan
, and Billy DeBeck’s
Barney Google
. A short stint at the Pratt Institute ended after a week, when his father lost his factory job, but Kurtzberg found an alternate path to his career dreams. After joining the Boys Brotherhood Republic, a local civic club designed to rescue youths from the streets, Kurtzberg began producing a mimeographed cartoon series for the organization’s newsletters. Then he enrolled in industrial school, filling out auto mechanic classes with an afternoon art course. At the end of his teens, he was hired to draw for the Fleischer brothers’ animation studio, but the assembly-line production of
Popeye
and
Betty Boop
reminded him too much of his father’s factory job. Stints at various comic-strip syndicates followed, and by the time he met Joe Simon at Fox, Kurtzberg was ready to create something of his own.

Kurtzberg was skilled, fast, and, because he was the one putting money on the table for his parents and younger brother, eager to earn as much as he could. Impressed with Kurtzberg’s talent and work ethic, Simon soon conscripted him as a partner in his freelance endeavors, and in early 1940 they worked together on a new title for Timely called
Red Raven
. Kurtzberg went uncredited for his work on an eight-page story called “Mercury in the 20th Century,” in which the fleet-footed god is sent “from High Olympus, Celestial retreat of the ancient gods” to save mankind from itself—and from Mercury’s cousin Pluto, who has taken the disguise of “Rudolph Hendler,” dictatorial leader of “Prussland.” But for another feature, the Flash Gordon–derivative “Comet Pierce,” Kurtzberg signed a pseudonymous name that he would soon adopt permanently, and legally: Jack Kirby.

Unfortunately, Simon’s title feature in
Red Raven
was inane: an orphaned plane-crash survivor raised by bird-men on a “gravity-free island” is given wings, and later fights a bald, gold-pillaging demon named Zeelmo. The comic sold poorly, and a month later, Goodman replaced
Red Raven
with a new title that starred a proven commodity:
The Human Torch
.

Despite the failure, Goodman kept Simon around as an art director on one of his crime magazines. He liked the idea of generating comics without Funnies, Inc. and encouraged more submissions from Simon and Kirby. Their track record improved immediately. After they introduced Marvel Boy and the Vision, Simon sketched out a variation on MLJ Comics’ star-spangled hero the Shield.

“I stayed up all night sketching,” Simon remembered. “Mailed armor jersey, bulging arm and chest muscles, skin-hugging tights, gloves, and boots flapping and folded beneath the knee. I drew a star on his chest, stripes from the belt to a line below the star, and colored the costume red, white and blue. I added a shield.” At the bottom of the page, he wrote “Super American.” Then he reconsidered, and changed the name to “Captain America.”
*

While Superman, Batman, and other heroes continued battling aliens, costumed villains, and bank robbers, the grittier, louder, angrier Timely stars had already rolled up their sleeves to combat the real-life villains of World War II. In the last weeks of 1939 the Sub-Mariner had taken on a German U-boat off the New York coast; soon Marvel Boy was fighting a dictator named Hiller (Goodman, it was said, was afraid that Adolf might sue), and the Sub-Mariner was joining a French island in resistance to Nazi invaders. These were sporadic battles. But now the war in Europe was ratcheting up: France had fallen, and the threat of Nazi rule spreading across the world finally began to sink in for Americans. Captain America would be focused on his mission: taking down the Third Reich.

S
ensing Captain America’s great potential, Simon negotiated a special deal with Timely through Maurice Coyne, the company’s chief accountant.
*
“We can’t keep putting out this crap for long,” Goodman had told Simon on their first meeting, but he too must have recognized something special. Not only did he agree to the 25 percent royalty rate (which Simon would split with the artist), but he also asked Simon to come on board full-time, as an editor. Goodman would still need to pay Funnies, Inc. for his two biggest characters, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, but he could get Simon to pad out the line at a huge savings. (Eventually, Goodman would buy those characters outright.)

Simon soon asked Jack Kirby to come work for Goodman full-time. While Simon handed out assignments, brainstormed titles with Goodman, designed logos, and art-directed the pulp magazines, Jack sat and drew, all day. When Simon prepared to assign the penciling of Captain America to a team of freelancers, Kirby told him not to bother. He could get it done on time by himself.

But Goodman was already nervous about the idea that Hitler might be killed before Captain America reached newsstands. Kirby penciled the issue, but Simon had an old cartoonist pal from Syracuse, New York, ink the pages. Also brought in to help was Syd Shores, a quiet art school graduate who’d spent seven years working in a whiskey plant, and would become Timely Comics’ third employee. On Shores’s first day at work, Simon sat him down at a desk in the room he already shared with Kirby, handed him the cover that Kirby had just drawn, and asked him to ink it. It showed Captain America punching out Adolf Hitler.

W
hile
Captain America
#1 was at the printers, a tall, teenaged cousin of Jean Goodman traveled down from the Bronx to the foot of the McGraw-Hill Building—which, he’d later recall with wonder, “seemed to be made entirely of glass”—and rode the elevator up to the Timely offices for the first time. He opened the door to a tiny waiting room and gave his name, Stanley Lieber, to the secretary at the window.

Circulation manager Robbie Solomon—Jean Goodman’s “Uncle Robbie”—was expecting the visit. Stanley’s mother, Celia, was Robbie’s sister. Celia had explained to Robbie that Stanley wanted to be a writer, but he was floundering—he’d recently been fired from a menial job in trouser manufacturing. Solomon opened a door to the left of the secretary’s window and invited Stanley to follow him back. They took a quick left into the eighteen-by-ten room that Simon, Kirby, and Shores shared. “This is my nephew,” Solomon said. “Can you find something for him to do?” Simon interviewed the teenager, who didn’t seem to know much about comic books but was very eager. And, of course, he was a relative of the boss. Simon hired him.

O
n December 20, 1940,
Captain America
#1 hit newsstands. It told the story of a scrawny army-enlistment reject named Steve Rogers who was administered an experimental “super-soldier” serum that bulked him up and allowed him to fight those who would threaten the United States. No bulletproof Superman, he carried a stars-and-stripes shield that matched his patriotic costume. Except for the appearance of actual Nazis,
Captain America
didn’t add much to the formula that MLJ Magazines’
The Shield
had introduced: just another scientifically improved, star-spangled enemy of Fifth Columnists. But the ever-shifting angles and fluid action of Kirby’s artwork gave it wings.
Captain America
#1 sold a near-
Superman
number of one million copies, exceeding everyone’s expectations; the office was deluged with orders for the “Sentinels of Liberty” fan club, which for a dime included a brass badge depicting a smiling Captain America. Simon focused his energy helping Timely to capitalize on its success, brainstorming titles with Goodman—
U.S.A. Comics
,
All-Winners Comics
, and
Young Allies
, which featured Toro and Bucky, teenage sidekicks of the Human Torch and Captain America—and designing logos. Simon and Kirby held story conferences in the tiny waiting room out front, where they handed out assignments to writers. “And when the script came back,” said Simon, “we’d tear it apart, change the dialogue and everything else. When things got really hectic, we’d write the story right on the drawing board.” For the second issue of
Captain America
, they sent the hero to Germany, where he and Bucky infiltrated a concentration camp in the Black Forest. “Dot Yankee schwein vood upzet mein plans,” Hitler worried, before Bucky kicked him in the stomach.

W
hile Kirby hummed to himself, cranking out pages behind a cloud of cigar smoke, Stanley would empty ashtrays, sweep floors, fetch coffee, and erase pencil marks from inked pages. Sometimes he would get to proofread, and often, to the consternation of his older coworkers, he would break the silence with an ocarina. “Jack sat at a table behind a big cigar,” he remembered years later. “Joe stood up behind another big cigar, and he would ask Jack, ‘Are you comfortable? Do you want some more ink? Is your brush okay? Is the pencil all right?’ And then Joe would go out and yell at me for a while, and that was the way we spent our days.”

After a month or two, Simon gave Stanley a break, or maybe it would be better described as busywork—text features were needed to qualify for magazine postal rates, Simon told him to write a short Captain America story that would be accompanied by two panels of illustration. He turned in twenty-six ham-fisted paragraphs, with the title “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge,” which he signed with a pseudonym, so as not to derail his future career as a serious writer. The byline read “Stan Lee.”