Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (40 page)
“It was like there was this thundercloud hovering over the office,” according to editor Carl Potts. “And you knew lightning was going to strike. You didn’t know when, but you knew somebody was gonna get fried.” Rewriting increased to unprecedented levels. “The watershed moment,” said Ann Nocenti, “was when Shooter said every single comic had to have a ‘can’t-must’ moment:
I am not a thief . . . I don’t want to steal. But I must steal because my grandmother is starving.
Every comic had to have that in the first three pages. Literally, a panel where the superhero had to say, ‘I can’t steal—but I must, for my grandmother.’ Or, ‘I can’t kill Mephisto—but I must, because he has my soul.’ He was sending comics back to the Bullpen to have the ‘can’t-must’ panel squeezed in, in the middle of the page.”
“We would put together the book and it would have to be signed off on by the editor in chief before it could go to print,” said Terry Kavanagh, Nocenti’s assistant editor. “And then he’d come in with his comments. They could be criticisms or compliments. In some cases he’d say fix this, in some cases he’d say make sure not to repeat this. That graduated, not all that slowly, to him coming in and yelling about things not being right, and being angry. And then, him coming in and yelling, ‘This isn’t right, do it better,’ and then eventually, him coming in and yelling, ‘This isn’t right and you knew it wasn’t right, and you did it anyway.’ And then finally, ‘This isn’t right and you knew it wasn’t right, and you did it on purpose just to drive me crazy, just like all the other editors.’ And he would do this very loudly; he got very close to her face and was very red in the face and I would’ve been scared if I were her.”
“He liked to say he’d put together the best comics editorial team ever,” said Potts. “Then he shifted to, everybody was clueless. What flipped that switch?”
By the end of 1986, Stan Lee’s plan to marry Spider-Man had gotten New World’s interest. Plans stormed ahead on promoting it as a live event the following summer. But Sal Buscema had a blowup with Shooter after the editor in chief sent detailed instructions on how to draw the special issue—including references on how to draw human anatomy—and quit. When a less established freelancer was offered the gig, he took it—because he’d heard that Shooter was going to blackball the next person who refused him.
A
t the end of March, a group of freelancers and editors decided to demonstrate an organized complaint. Walter Simonson, Louise Simonson, and Michael Higgins knocked on office doors, gathering editors—“like villagers with torches,” in the words of one staff member—and made their way toward Jim Shooter’s office.
When he heard voices stirring in the hallway, Tom DeFalco, tired of all the arguments and ready to leave comics for good, was sitting at his desk, on the phone, negotiating salary and moving costs for a job on the West Coast. He tried to settle the crowd that had amassed in the hallway.
Standing by Shooter’s secretary’s desk, he put his foot up to block people from streaming between the desk and the office wall. Walter Simonson stormed past, while others went behind DeFalco, around the desk. They stopped at Shooter’s door. It was shut. “At one point,” DeFalco recalled, “Mike Hobson showed up and said, ‘What’s going on?’ Everybody said, ‘We want to confront Shooter.’ ‘You guys want to talk to Shooter? Okay, let’s go.’ And everybody went in.”
“We need to talk to you,” Simonson said, opening Shooter’s door.
“I’m in the middle of a meeting with Mark and Ralph,” Shooter told him.
Everyone barreled in anyway, as Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio, whose meeting had already been a tense one, began slouching downward in their chairs, so far down that their heads were invisible. DeFalco stood behind Shooter, ready to go down with his captain.
Bodies packed into the office. Assistants crowded around the door, or gathered in the office next door, listening through the heating duct as editors took their turns confronting their boss with complaints. Hobson looked on, amused, as Shooter turned red, and challenged the accusations.
“I felt at any moment Jim might just eat me,” said one staffer. “I said, ‘Oh God, he might just start gnawing on my bones.’ Even though, I have to stress, he’d never even raised his voice to me.”
O
n Saturday, April 4, John Byrne hosted a party at his house in Connecticut, attended by several Marvel staffers and freelancers. In the backyard, a suit was stuffed with unsold issues of New Universe titles, a picture of Shooter’s face was affixed on the head, and the editor in chief of Marvel Comics was burned in effigy. “In retrospect,” says one of the staffers who was there, “it’s a little macabre, a little offensive, probably overkill. But it seemed that everybody needed it at that time. It was becoming increasingly oppressive. We all knew how to do our jobs well; we all knew how to do comic books. We were putting together the best comic books we could. But now, every stage of the way, when you’d be talking to writers about how to tell the story and you’d say, okay, we know ‘this is the right way to tell the story,’ now we had to look and see ‘What are the things that Jim might go insane over?’ It was really an unnecessary step to making comic books. And probably in some cases didn’t serve the stories and made for weaker stories and issues. Because our sole focus should’ve been getting the best comic books out. Instead it became getting out the best comic books that we could get past Jim. And in some sense we were probably able to rationalize that it really was our moral obligation—because we all took ourselves a little too seriously—that in order to make the best comics for our fans, Jim had to be out of the equation.”
“He had helped build Marvel into a powerful juggernaut,” said Tom DeFalco, “and then decided that he didn’t like the way it worked anymore, and that it needed to be completely rebuilt instantly. And you know, juggernauts don’t get rebuilt instantly.”
T
he New World owners liked Shooter and couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier, but they only knew how to deal with temperamental actors and film directors. Couldn’t they just send him a fruit basket, or offer him a more important-sounding title? But when a videotape of the effigy made its way to California, just before Shooter’s contract negotiations were about to begin, it was clear to New World that the commander had lost control of the soldiers.
On April 15, Bob Layton and David Michelinie came into the Marvel offices to meet with Mark Gruenwald and Shooter about redesigns for an Iron Man costume. When they brought the pages into Shooter’s office, Shooter calmly told them his changes wouldn’t matter. He’d just gotten the news that he would no longer be the editor in chief.
Gruenwald stopped by Macchio’s office, mimed a knife across the throat, then put a finger to his lips, signaling to be quiet. But word traveled fast, with CompuServe messages relayed quickly to Chris Claremont and Walt Simonson. “Ding-dong,” one of the messages read: “the witch is dead.”
W
hen Jim Galton and Mike Hobson had taken Tom DeFalco out to lunch to tell him they wanted him to replace Jim Shooter as editor in chief, he’d balked. “You guys are crazy,” DeFalco told them. “Find a way to make up with Shooter.” Unbeknownst to them, DeFalco was still hoping for another week or two to finish negotiating that job on the West Coast. “I always assumed that as the number-two guy, when they decided to lop off his head, mine would go too,” he said, years later. “It never once occurred to me that they would keep me.” News that DeFalco was being promoted reached his prospective employers on the West Coast, and they withdrew the job offer, sure that they wouldn’t be able to match the new salary.
Now that he was at Marvel to stay, DeFalco’s first task was to try to restore a sense of order in an office that had divided between the pro-Shooter and anti-Shooter factions. In an angry and profane open letter to the editorial staff, veteran freelancer Vince Colletta painted the former editor in chief as an unappreciated martyr. “He gave you a title, respectability, power and even a credit card that you used and abused. He made you the highest payed Editors in the history of the business. He protected you against all that would tamper with your rights, your power and your pocketbook. . . . The roof over your head, the clothes on your back, the car you drive and the trinkets you buy for your blind wives and girlfriends you owe to the Pittsburgh kid.”
A
boom-voiced Noo Yawka, DeFalco might have seemed an unusual choice to calm the waters. But he was well liked, and the Marvel troops considered him as one of them. Slowly, the hijinks and pranks returned to the offices: One assistant’s desk drawers were lined with plastic and filled with water and goldfish. Hundred-dollar bills were cast on nearly invisible fishing lines down ten stories to tempt passersby on East Twenty-Seventh Street.
DeFalco also managed to skirt one of the greatest thorns that had stuck in Shooter’s side: the controversy over the nonreturn of Jack Kirby’s artwork. Jim Galton had been confident of Marvel’s legal standing, thanks to agreements Kirby had signed in 1966 and 1972, and had seen no reason to kowtow to popular opinion on the matter. “Galton’s attitude was, ‘Why is anybody wasting any time with this? If Kirby’s gonna try to sue, let him try to sue!’ ” said DeFalco. Only weeks after Shooter departed, though, Marvel changed course, after Galton told the lawyers to put an end to the holdout. Within weeks, the list of eighty-eight pieces of artwork that had been dangled before Kirby grew to an inventory of more than two thousand pages—only a fraction of what he’d drawn, but a sizable, and lucrative, stash nonetheless. The long ordeal had come to a close, just like that, with a simple command.
S
hortly afterward, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Jack Kirby was a telephone guest on the New York radio station WBAI. After the interviewer asked about working as part of the apparently fervent and joyous “Merry Marvel Marching Society” era Bullpen, Kirby responded flatly: “I didn’t consider it merry. In those days, it was a professional-type thing, you turned in your ideas and you got your wages and you took them home. It was a very simple affair. It’s nothing that could be dramatized, or glorified, or glamorized in any way. . . . I created the situation, and I analyzed them, I did them panel by panel, and I did everything but put the words in the balloons.” But, Jack, said the interviewer, what about those legendary story conferences with you and Stan, livening up the office? “It wasn’t like that at all,” he said. “It may have been like that after I shut the door and went home.”
And then the radio host introduced a surprise call-in guest: Stan Lee. “I want to wish Jack a happy birthday!” the familiar voice sounded over the airwaves. “This is a hell of a coincidence, I’m in New York, and I was tuning in the radio and there I hear him, talking about Marvel, and I said I might as well call him and not let this occasion go by without saying, many happy returns, Jack!”
Kirby jumped right in: “Well, Stanley, I want to thank you for calling, and I hope you’re in good health and I hope you stay in good health.”
Lee praised Kirby’s artwork. “Nobody could convey emotion and drama the way you did.”
“Well, thank you for helping me keep that style, and helping me to evolve all that,” Kirby said. “I was never sorry for it, Stanley. It was a great experience for me.” And then, after five years of not speaking, Kirby told Lee that he respected him.
After ten more minutes of reminiscences and niceties, Stan slipped in an “I’ll say this: every word of dialogue in those scripts was mine.” Uncomfortable laughter from the studio. “Every story.”
KIRBY
: I can tell you that I wrote a few lines myself above every panel.
LEE
: They weren’t printed in the book! Jack isn’t wrong by his own lights, because, answer me truthfully—
KIRBY
: I wasn’t allowed to write—
LEE
:—Did you ever read one of the stories after it was finished? I don’t think you did! I don’t think you ever read one of my stories. I think you were always busy drawing the next one. You never read the book when it was finished. . . .
KIRBY
:—my own dialogue, Stanley. And I think that’s the way people are. Whatever was written, it was the action I was interested in.
LEE
: I know, and look, Jack, nobody has more respect for you than I do, and you know that, but I don’t think you ever felt that the dialogue was very important. And I think you felt, anybody can put the dialogue together, it’s what I’m drawing that matters. And maybe you’re right, I don’t agree with it, but maybe you’re right.
KIRBY
: I’m only trying to say, I think that the human being is very important. If one man is writing and drawing and doing a strip, it should come from an individual. I believe you should have the opportunity to do the entire thing yourself.
When asked to make closing statements, Lee went first: “Jack has made a tremendous mark on American culture, if not on world culture, and I think he should be incredibly proud and pleased with himself, and I want to wish him all the best, him and his wife Roz, and his family, and I hope that ten years from now, I’ll be in some town somewhere listening to a tribute to his eightieth birthday, and I hope I’ll have an opportunity to call at that time and wish him well then, too. Jack, I love ya.”
“Well, the same here, Stan,” said Kirby. “But, uh . . . uh . . . yeah. Thank you very much, Stan.”
Dead air, for a moment.
“Warren, are you there?” Kirby asked the cohost. “Uh . . . you can understand now, what it was really like back then.”
T
om DeFalco, flailing at first, had urged Mark Gruenwald to accept the editor in chief position instead, but Gruenwald begged off. So Gruenwald was appointed as DeFalco’s executive editor, and the two of them sat down and made a five-year plan for Marvel’s expansion: just as there had been a whole line of X-Men titles, soon there would be an expanded line of Avengers titles, and Spider-Man titles, and so on. If someone thought four Spider-Man titles was too many, DeFalco had a quick answer:
Not for someone who really likes Spider-Man, it’s not
. Now, every time a new super-team was introduced, its individual members would spin off into their own solo titles.
Gruenwald would be left to sort out the ways that all the stories wove together. In the 1970s, before he’d even worked at Marvel, Gruenwald obsessively catalogued the continuity of Marvel’s story lines in pseudo-academic self-published journals. Now he kept lists and charts on his walls to manage the traffic of the overarching Marvel Universe narrative. “If you wanted a Spider-Man villain, you had to check with the Spider-Man office,” DeFalco said. “They were supposed to pull out a chart on the next bunch of issues and say, ‘We have no plans for Electro.’ Or, ‘We have a plan for him in our May issue, and he’s allergic to hamburgers. If you’re going to have him come out in your April issue, you should at least show a sensitivity to hamburgers.’ ”
D
eFalco was not immediately given a vice president title, which Jim Shooter had held, and which would limit the amount of clout he’d have in any disagreements about publishing strategy. But DeFalco was happy to expand anyway; he’d never had much use for precious worries about brand dilution. He was a throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks kind of guy, determined to push the limits of both the marketplace and the creative staff. “Retailers will always tell you you’re publishing too much; wholesalers will tell you there’s no room on the racks, you can’t publish anything more,” he said. “You’ve got to force everybody to do the work.”
Editors were put on a royalty plan, which helped to ease their pain—and helped to encourage commercial thinking. Three-part stories, continued between the three different Spider-Man titles, began to crop up, with the intention of testing the market limits. Yet another X-Men title was needed, so Chris Claremont pitched the idea of moving Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde to England, where they would become part of a new team called Excalibur. Multi-title crossovers, which had popped up here and there since
Secret Wars II
, would soon begin to take place every several months.
*
T
here was one notable instance of belt-tightening—in the spring of 1987, the mediocre-selling New Universe, Shooter’s one-year-old baby, was unceremoniously cut in half. One of the surviving four titles was Jim Shooter’s
Star Brand
; editor Howard Mackie called John Byrne and asked him if he’d want to take it over. It was an inspired choice: only months earlier, in an issue of DC Comics’
Legends
, Byrne had drawn a remarkably Shooter-like character named Sunspot. “From this day forward,” Sunspot declared, “I will show you all how power is meant to be used! I will remake this sorry world in my own image!” Then, just in case anyone missed the reference to Shooter, the character boasted, “I wield the ultimate power—the power to create a New Universe!”
*
before shooting himself in the foot.
Star Brand
was one of the company’s lowest-selling books, but Byrne agreed to return to Marvel for the chance to put his own stamp on Shooter’s most autobiographical creation. Immediately, he conceived a story line in which the Shooter stand-in character, Ken Connell, destroyed the city of Pittsburgh—Shooter’s hometown.
Other exiled freelancers made their returns to the company. Editor Mike Higgins, a Deadhead who’d been a fan of Marvel’s 1970s head trips, reached out to as many Shooter enemies as he could—including Steve Gerber, Doug Moench, and Gene Colan—and offered them work on a new title called
Marvel Weekly
. By late 1987, everyone from Marv Wolfman to Paul Gulacy to Don McGregor to Don Heck was getting the first calls they’d had from Marvel in years. The idea was that each issue would feature a rotation of four serials that revived cult characters like Man-Thing and Shang-Chi. They’d be staggered so that if one character’s story line concluded in an issue, the other three would end with cliffhangers—so that at no time would a reader feel a sense of closure.
By the time the first issue was published—almost a year later—the title had changed to
Marvel Comics Presents
, the publication schedule had been scaled back to every other week, and Higgins had left the company. The front covers featured not Shang-Chi or Man-Thing but Wolverine, whose ever-growing popularity guaranteed brisk sales.
By now, Marvel determined to introduce a regular
Wolverine
solo title as well. Chris Claremont had just launched
Excalibur
when he was informed of the plans. He complained to DeFalco about the integrity of the character, and about the threat of dilution, but the editor in chief would have none of it. Wolverine was his own franchise now, one that had become too big to contain. The series would happen with or without Claremont. After twelve years, the idea of someone else determining the character’s fate was unthinkable, so once again Claremont rolled up his sleeves and got to work.
“N
ew World didn’t want to be in the comic book business,” said one former employee, “but you couldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” What the company really hoped to do was capitalize on the multiple-platform potential of intellectual property. A luncheon was held at the ‘21’ Club to promote the idea of a Spider-Man cartoon; plans began for a $300,000 Spider-Man Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float; and the media was alerted that Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson would be married in a ceremony at Shea Stadium, just before the world-champion New York Mets took the field.
*
Officiating at home plate on that Saturday night was Stan Lee, pleased to be at the center of a sellout crowd of 55,000, for an event that was covered by
Good Morning America
and
Entertainment Tonight
. Lee was thrilled that New World was exploiting the Marvel characters in ways that Cadence never had.