Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (41 page)

After New World tried, and failed, to purchase the Spider-Man film rights from Cannon, the company shifted to a strategy of producing sixty-five half-hours of X-Men animation, which could be sold as first run or syndication, and then exploited through licensing and merchandising. For New World, the Marvel characters provided an opportunity to expand in ways never possible with low-budget horror movies like
Hellraiser
. “Marvel represented a beachhead into that younger market that Clive Barker didn’t have,” said Rusty Citron, then the vice president of marketing. “You’re not going to put Pinhead onto Saturday morning television.”

Plans commenced for a Marvel retail venture at shopping centers across the country, developed in consultation with the team behind Canada’s colossal West Edmonton Mall, and modeled after the recently launched Disney Store: every muraled store space would include back rooms for birthday parties; merchandise was on wheels, to create “different spatial representations” for various products and characters; a comic book rack would sell every Marvel title.

But the ambition and aggression of the company—which changed its name from New World Pictures to the more sweeping New World Entertainment—soon hit the limits of reality. Its film revenues were down, and money was tied up in television production just as the syndication market was collapsing. New World sought synergy within the marketplace of children’s entertainment, but bids to take over Kenner and Mattel were both unsuccessful. After six months of planning, the New World board voted down the $1 million budget necessary to move ahead with the Marvel Store project.

New World continued its attempts to develop films based on Marvel characters, although the company’s understanding of the properties was haphazard at best. A flood of scripts that had been developed at other studios and died—
Doctor Strange
by Bob Gale,
The X-Men
by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway—were optimistically resubmitted to New World, but the executives who’d confused Spider-Man and Superman still weren’t sure what they were looking at. “They tended to look down on the titles, gravitating toward projects that made fun of the medium,” said William Rabkin, a former comic-store clerk who was evaluating scripts for the company. Rabkin boldly fired off a note to his boss. (“You’ve just bought Alaska. You need to dig below the surface and find out what’s there.”) Within days, New World’s head of production asked him to make a list of B- and C-level Marvel properties that could be fast-tracked and made on the cheap in South America.
*
Boaz Yakin, a twenty-one-year-old NYU graduate, called up New World personally, set up a meeting with a New World executive, and pitched a movie about the Punisher, who had by now emerged in the action-movie 1980s as a fan favorite. “He didn’t know what the fuck the Punisher was,” Yakin said, even though the character was by now the star of two ongoing comic titles. Nonetheless, Yakin’s script, written in ten days, zoomed into production.

Lee continued pitching characters he’d co-created a quarter-century earlier. “Stan Lee loved Ant-Man beyond all reason, and nobody ever gave a damn,” said Rabkin. “He was always on about Ant-Man; he wanted an Ant-Man script in the worst way. I had been arguing against Ant-Man because, let’s face it, he can shrink down, go through a keyhole, and look at secret papers in a desk drawer and that’s it. It’s pretty boring. But we’re sitting around the table, and Stan is pitching Ant-Man, and Bob Rehme, who ran all New World, comes in. Bob was this energetic wild guy. He never actually opened a door; he would just
vroop!
through it like the Tasmanian Devil. He comes into the room, and says, ‘Marvel meeting! What’s going on?’ ”

Lee said, “We were just talking about Ant-Man!”

“What’s that?”

“He can shrink down like . . . this!”

Rehme thought for a minute. Disney was about to make
Teenie Weenies
. If New World rushed
Ant-Man
into production, no one would ever know who had the idea first.

“That’s brilliant!” Rehme said.

Vroop!
He was out of the room, and
Ant-Man
went into development.
Teenie Weenies
was eventually released as
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
.

Although Lee had a pleasant working relationship with Rehme, it was clearer than ever that he wasn’t going to be able to call the shots when it came to movies. Even Jim Galton, in his reserved, old-publishing-world manner, could never engage with the Hollywood aggression of Sloane, Kuppin, and Rehme. That fell to Joe “the Squid” Calamari, a longtime Cadence executive who’d been hired out of law school by Sheldon Feinberg and who had now become very interested in seeing movie deals happen. To those at New World, Calamari’s ambition and aggression made him the lead voice at Marvel.

Stan Lee, now in his mid-sixties, had behind him twenty years of dreaming of seeing his creations on the big screen, still to no avail. “Stan’s not in the loop, because he’s not a player; he’s not a partner,” said one New World executive. “He wasn’t a vote. But he was like a pit bull. He just didn’t want to walk away.”

L
ee would outlast them all, though—New World was in trouble. “In retrospect,” said Mike Hobson, years later, “it was shocking that Marvel had sold themselves to such a fly-by-night outfit as New World.” The studio’s movies were bombing at the box office, its stock was plummeting, and, on top of that, in the aftermath of the market crash of 1987, its Wall Street investments had tanked. The company retained the junk-bond kingpin Drexel Burnham Lambert to help it restructure its staggering debt, and put on a brave face as it rebuffed purchase offers for Marvel Comics, its only profitable holding. But by the summer of 1988, the writing was on the wall. In July, as cameras in Australia were about to roll on
The Punisher
, New World put Marvel Comics on sale.

The winning bidder was Revlon chairman Ronald O. Perelman, who had set up Compact Video, a former division of Technicolor, as a shell corporation.
*
Wall Street had wondered for months what major brand name would be swallowed by the nebulous void of Compact, which had sat quietly since the spring like an open trunk, or an empty casket. The $82.5 million paid for Marvel was, for Sloan and Kuppin, a nice return on its $46 million investment of only two years before. For Wall Street, it was a shock. Ron Perelman, the man who’d bid more than $4 billion for Gillette, was now turning his attention to . . . comic books?

One magazine article outlined the Perelman strategy like this: “find an undervalued company, buy it with junk bond financing, sell the inessential product lines to recoup most of the purchase price, and return the core to profitability.” It was, in a way, just the steroidal 1980s version of the Perfect Film or Cadence model. But Marvel, Perelman knew, had a potential to be a “mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property,” ripe for exploitation and profit.

Perelman himself was like some kind of Frankensteinian amalgam of past Marvel owners, sometimes to an eerie extent. Martin Goodman met his wealthy wife-to-be on a cruise ship; so had Perelman. Martin Ackerman had an East Side headquarters that he dubbed “The Townhouse”; so had Perelman. Sheldon Feinberg had made his name as CFO at Revlon; twenty years later, Perelman gained fame for his hostile takeover of Revlon. Like all the others, Perelman was a short, Jewish, cigar-chomping mogul. The difference was that Perelman
owned
a cigar company, only one of many holdings in his personal $300 million portfolio. His pockets were deep enough that, once he’d picked Marvel from the bones of New World, he would return months later and buy New World, too.

Because he was the head of Revlon, the Marvel staff quickly dubbed Perelman “the lipstick guy.” When he first visited the Marvel offices, he was escorted around to different departments by a blond, masked staff member dressed as Spider-Woman. During the tour, he asked one editor to see some of the highest-selling comics that were being worked on. “I pulled out some beautiful pages of
Uncanny X-Men
by Barry Smith,” the editor said. “He couldn’t even look at them. I knew:
This guy does not like comics
.”

S
tan Lee’s own initial impressions of Perelman and his firm, the Andrews Group, were undoubtedly boosted by a meeting with Perelman’s number two, Bill Bevins. Bevins was all business—a well-groomed, impeccably dressed workaholic who’d met Perelman at the Predator’s Ball junk-bond conferences hosted by Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert. “We exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes,” Lee recalled, “and then, unexpectedly, he asked what my annual income was at Marvel. After I told him, he looked at me thoughtfully for a minute or two and then, in the calmest, most matter-of-fact way, he told me that henceforth I’d be earning approximately triple that amount.”

Marvel’s publishing business was booming, and expanding ever more rapidly; not only were new titles continually popping up, but the best-selling
The Uncanny X-Men
and
Amazing Spider-Man
had each moved to a twice-a-month summer schedule. DeFalco and Gruenwald began looking back into Marvel’s past for new-series fodder; the economics of the direct market, they reasoned, would allow room for titles that appealed to a dedicated, if smaller, audience. They’d initiate the returns of 1970s-vintage characters like Guardians of the Galaxy, Ghost Rider, Deathlok, and Nova—the last of which was reintroduced as a member of
New Warriors
, a market-research-generated comic about teenage superheroes.

I
ncentive checks were growing for writers, artists, and now editors, many of whom were enjoying a renewed sense of power now that Shooter had departed. There were still, occasionally, conflicts over control of characters: Steve Englehart was fired from
West Coast Avengers
(for refusing to include Iron Man in the title); months later, he was fired from the
Fantastic Four
(for refusing to include Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl) and
Silver Surfer
. Englehart claimed that DeFalco was instituting a “plan to end innovation across the line.” DeFalco said he was just backing his editors.

DeFalco had seen firsthand what happened to morale when the editorial staff was divested of responsibility. But his management style was about more than just taking their side in an argument; he felt that the editors needed to be accountable caretakers, protecting the legacy of the grand narrative and keeping the company’s best interests in mind.

Because Marvel still had the characters that everyone clamored to write and draw, and the royalties that everyone wanted to enjoy, there was no shortage of big-name talents to keep the wheels in motion. After Englehart’s departure, Walter Simonson took over
Fantastic Four
, John Byrne took over
West Coast Avengers
, and Jim Starlin took over
Silver Surfer
—until they, too, each had problems, at which point the rotation would begin again. When Byrne said he would quit
She-Hulk
unless DeFalco removed an editor he didn’t like, DeFalco repeated his mantra:
I back my editors
. Byrne was fired from the book, and
She-Hulk
was given to Steve Gerber. Byrne didn’t go far, though—he began work on
Namor
, a new series that cast the Sub-Mariner as a venture capitalist.

Less than a decade earlier, it had seemed as though publishers like Pacific and Eclipse were going to pull all the big names away from Marvel and DC. But the smaller companies had fallen on hard times, especially after market gluts in 1986 and 1987. Comic-store owners, faced with a flood of product, played it safe and stocked shelves with perennial bestsellers from Marvel and DC. For all the qualms that Starlin, Gerber, and even Steve Ditko had voiced over the years, it seemed that it was only at “the Big Two” that there would always be work.

Although Marvel’s Epic imprint had yielded some interesting projects, it had failed to launch any breakout characters, and its original mission of providing a venue for creator-owned concepts had been diluted over the years. After the more “mature” content of Miller and Sienkiewicz’s
Elektra: Assassin
found a home there, Epic had begun to serve a second role, that of a high-production-value vanity press for previously existing, Marvel-owned characters. Because
Elektra: Assassin
and
Havok & Wolverine
were, by far, the most successful of Epic’s releases, an effort was made to create an interconnected line of superhero comics within Epic. Although Archie Goodwin, Epic’s editor, conceived of the characters, Marvel would retain all copyrights. By the middle of 1989, Goodwin saw the writing on the wall for Epic, and he departed for DC Comics.

Jim Starlin’s
Dreadstar
, Steve Englehart’s
Coyote
, Steve Gerber’s
Void Indigo
, Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy’s
Six from Sirius
—none of these properties had lasted at Epic, and the rabble-rousers behind them now had families to worry about. Frank Miller was still making noise, snubbing Marvel and DC for the independent start-up Dark Horse, but he was a special case—still soaring from
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
, still possessing the juice to sell comics on his name alone, and nearly a decade younger than the rest. This generation had pushed for changes in the industry, and they’d made a difference. But someone else would have to come along to take the torch.