Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (44 page)

Claremont tried to go along with the plan but found that even his limited role was compromised by blown art deadlines. “Jim was not a consistent producer,” he said. “I’d get seven pages; a week or two would go by, and I’d get fourteen pages. There were cases where I’d get the pages and I’d have to script them and send them to the printer a day later. It was a panic.”

Portacio, meanwhile, wanted to make a splash by killing off older characters in
Uncanny
. Claremont complained vociferously to Harras while he tried to juggle the interlocking plots of three titles. “At the same time we’re arguing back and forth,” said Claremont, “I’m trying to do this four-issue run on
X-Factor
tidying up all the loose ends left over from Weezie, asking her ‘Is it okay if I do this?’ She said, ‘
I don’t care
.’ At that point I was just like,
fuck
.” As they approached the big launch of
X-Men
, Claremont said, the battle with Harras became “an outright knock-down drag-out fight.” Harras wanted to bring Professor X back into the stories; Claremont wanted to kill Wolverine and complete Magneto’s transformation from villain to hero.

At Marvel, some felt that Claremont had put Harras into a difficult position, that he’d overstayed his welcome on the titles. “Chris wasn’t prepared for the level of imposition that was going to be placed on those titles,” said Nicieza. “He wasn’t ready for the budgetary needs that those titles were going to demand from him—the expectation of multiple crossovers, the expectation of story events that were not going to be what he wanted to do or how he wanted to do it. It was going to be a different book than the book he created.” Claremont and Harras began communicating exclusively via fax machine so that there would be a paper trail of the increasingly tense exchanges. Claremont appealed to DeFalco and delivered ultimatums to Terry Stewart.

After Claremont’s wife reminded him that they had a mortgage to pay, he negotiated to write the first three issues of the new
X-Men;
this would be, in effect, his severance pay. He gave up on his last issue of
Uncanny
after eleven pages. No one—not Stan Lee, not Jack Kirby—had stayed on a title as long as Claremont had.

There was no good-bye in the letters column, no announcement to the press. Almost overnight, Claremont was without illusions about corporate loyalty. When an interviewer expressed surprise at the seemingly sudden end of the sixteen-year tenure, Claremont reminded him that comics were exempt from the rules of “straight” publishing, in which genre-fiction authors owned their franchises. “What you have is a corporate disagreement between an employee and his supervisor. And in that light, the course of action becomes as clear as it is inevitable: the corporation instinctively supports its supervisors.” If Marvel had survived Kirby’s departure, why would it think Chris Claremont was necessary? Claremont couldn’t even draw.

Walter Simonson, who’d been writing and drawing
The Fantastic Four
while his wife was being brushed aside from
New Mutants
, followed Claremont out the door. Years later, he characterized the company’s behavior as “abrupt, rude, and disrespectful,” and railed against the mothballing of veteran creators. “The atmosphere at Marvel was becoming less enjoyable,” he said, “the scope for good creative work more limited.”

Without missing a beat, Bob Harras called up Claremont’s onetime partner and longtime rival, John Byrne, and asked if he’d like to write
The X-Men
. Although Byrne had been slow to embrace the independent-publisher model, he had just begun work on his own creator-owned title for Dark Horse Comics—with the winking title of
Next Men
—over which he would have complete control. But Byrne had been surprised by the low sales on his Sub-Mariner relaunch,
Namor
, and had no guarantee that
Next Men
would provide a cash flow. So he had more than just storytelling at stake when he took the job of scripting both X-Men books—in fact, he had the same thing on his mind that Claremont had upon leaving: “The X-Men,” Byrne volunteered to an interviewer, “are going to pay my mortgage.”

But within a few months, Byrne, like Claremont, was faced with impossible turnaround times, forced to dialogue from last-minute faxes of Lee and Portacio’s artwork. The pages were arriving piecemeal, three at a time, and every time another fax came through, the plot would take an unexpected turn, so that Byrne would have to rewrite the previous pages.

He found his breaking point when Harras called and asked him to script an entire issue overnight. Byrne refused. “Something’s gotta be done about this,” he told Harras. “This is insane.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Harras assured him, then hung up the phone and hurried over to Nicieza’s office. “John’s not scripting this issue,” Harras said. “Can you do it for me?”

“When do you need it by?”

“Tomorrow.”

“There’s no way.”

At that very moment, Scott Lobdell, a struggling stand-up comic who was always hustling for freelance writing gigs, walked by Nicieza’s office door. Nicieza, smiling, pointed his finger, and Harras looked up.

Harras hung his head and let out a resigned sigh.

Lobdell finished the issue overnight. Two weeks later, Byrne heard from a friend who’d seen Lobdell at a party. Lobdell had been given the regular
X-Men
writing assignment. “Years later,” Byrne said, “I was told you should always be careful when Bob says, ‘We’ll take care of it.’ ”

R
ob Liefeld, meanwhile, weighed his options. He and Nicieza had already begun introducing flashy, violent new characters into
New Mutants
—Deadpool, Domino, Shatterstar, Feral—the future members of
X-Force
. As he prepared for the launch, he wrote a letter to director Spike Lee, who had put out a call for people doing “extraordinary things” in their Levi’s 501 jeans. Liefeld, with his boyish good looks and bottomless enthusiasm, was chosen from a pool of 700,000 entries to appear on a national commercial. He and
X-Force
were going to be on television.

Liefeld also thought back to a standing offer he’d had from a black-and-white comics publisher called Malibu Comics, to do his own independent comic. Testing the waters, he placed an ad in the
Comics Buyers Guide
for an upcoming title, to be called
The Executioners
. It was a team of “rebel mutants from the future come to destroy their past”—a plot familiar to X-Men readers. One character in the ad, Cross, looked a lot like Cable, the leader of X-Force; others resembled Feral and Domino. Harras called Liefeld at six thirty one morning and asked what he thought he was doing. Marvel would sue if Liefeld didn’t drop the plans.
*
The Executioners
was put on the back burner.

But Liefeld had an itch now, and he began talking it over with some of his friends. Back in 1985, when he was just starting out, he’d created another team of superheroes, called Youngblood. Maybe it was time for them to see the light of day—and not at Marvel.

T
odd McFarlane never liked the idea of editors, and when the hands-on Danny Fingeroth replaced the laissez-faire Jim Salicrup as his boss on
Spider-Man
, McFarlane absolutely hated it. “You sell a million, I’ll listen to you,” he told Fingeroth. “If I can turn in 22 blank pages and the kids buy a million copies, who cares how comic books have been done for the past 50 years? I don’t care that there used to be words or pictures—if the kids are buying a million copies, then they’re happy, I’m happy and you’re selling comic books.”

McFarlane, who’d always resisted authority, bristled at plenty now: not receiving a Spider-Man T-shirt that Marvel had sent out as a promotion, not getting invited to editorial summits that determined future plans for the comics, not getting to use the villains he wanted to use. He’d filled
Spider-Man
with stories about drug addiction, police corruption, and child molestation, but in the end it was a drawing of a sword in a villain’s eye that brought him to loggerheads with Fingeroth and Tom DeFalco, who assured McFarlane that the Comics Code wouldn’t allow the depiction.

McFarlane quit, and didn’t even bother to line up more work. “There’s no reason for me to take over a monthly title when I could do a special project that would give me creative freedom, better reproduction, a bigger PR push,” McFarlane had told a brand-new comics magazine called
Wizard
, just before he took his exit. “Probably what you’ll see me do if and when I leave
Spider-Man
is special projects for a couple of years and then—if I do go back to monthly comics—I’ll self-publish. If I’m going to work day in and day out, I’ll do it for myself.” He’d talked about creating a series of hockey cards, and getting out of comics altogether, but now McFarlane started thinking about this idea that Rob Liefeld had, of publishing creator-owned titles through Malibu Comics. What if they could get a few other big names to join them—what kind of message would that send to Marvel and DC?

I
n the past two years of expansion, Marvel’s sales had grown more than 30 percent, and its net income more than quadrupled. The company was now squeezing out profits everywhere it could, with editor-generated series like Tom DeFalco’s
Darkhawk
(which, according to Marvel, combined the “gritty realism” of Ghost Rider with the “urban vigilante tactics” of Punisher), and Bob Budiansky’s
Sleepwalker
. In March 1991, it made its first foray into the world of 1–900 telephone number rackets, with a “Help Me Save Mary Jane” touch-tone interactive audio trivia game that cost $2.70 for two minutes and earned the company about $20,000 in the first five days. But the real windfall was yet to come. Eight days after spinning the news of Claremont’s departure—he’d be taking a “sabbatical,” a Marvel rep said—Nicieza and Liefeld’s
X-Force
#1 went on sale. Its nearly four million copies was the new record-holder, leaving Todd McFarlane’s
Spider-Man
#1 in the dust. Double-sized and priced at $1.50, each issue was poly-bagged with one of five trading cards, unavailable elsewhere. Once-casual collectors tried their hands at investment purchases, stocking up by the hundreds. Skeptics wondered who would buy all these down the road—after all, there were only a few hundred thousand comic readers in the world. “It’s got that ’90s feel,” Bob Harras told a reporter, and perhaps the straight-faced, ass-kicking, drill-sergeant barking, and heavy artillery of the one-eyed Cable did reflect some kind of zeitgeist, or at least a trend that had carried through Wolverine and the Punisher and the first
Batman
movie. Liefeld’s California smile appeared with increasing regularity in newspapers, in magazines, and on late-night television shows. It was rumored that his tax bill that year was more than most comic-industry salaries.

The timing of Marvel’s July 16 public offering couldn’t have been better. A week earlier, following the $54 million opening of
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
, James Cameron had spoken to
Variety
about his plans to tackle a Spider-Man movie, legitimizing the idea that Marvel could finally transcend four-color newsprint. Seeing the possibility of high returns were Wall Street number crunchers and hordes of collectors alike, and stock went from $16½ to $18 on the first day, trading at a volume of 2.3 million shares as a man hired to dress as Spider-Man walked the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Most of the money raised would not go back into Marvel, however—it would be split between MacAndrews & Forbes, a holding company wholly owned by Perelman, and Perelman himself, who enjoyed a $10 million dividend.

Of course, as
USA Today
noted the following day, “revenue growth depends on Marvel producing a blockbuster issue every year,” and the company wasn’t taking any chances. On August 16, the first of four $1.50 editions of Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s
X-Men
#1 hit stands. Every week a different cover was shipped to stores, building up to a fifth version, a $3.95 bonanza with a foldout of the previous four covers. When the smoke cleared, nearly 8 million copies had been sold—roughly seventeen copies for every regular comic book reader.
*

Retailers were split on the wisdom of such bonanzas—for some, it seemed like money in the bank; others worried about getting stuck with inventory. But other Marvel initiatives were unanimously troubling: serial-numbered, sealed blister packs of comics, aimed at the collector market (“You are on the ground floor of one of the major collectibles of the 90s”) were sold to Wal-Mart at a cost lower than what the direct market paid. A line in the Marvel prospectus that mentioned plans for a Marvel retail chain also had shop owners squawking. Where was the company’s loyalty to those who had been selling its products through the tough times?

In September, Carol Kalish, who’d been a crucial component of Marvel’s success in the direct market, died at the age of thirty-six after suffering a coronary embolism on the way to work. Her death sent shockwaves through the industry. “Comic-store owners saw her as one of them,” said Sven Larsen, who had worked under her as a distributor liaison. “She’d come from the fan background, and she was sort of Champion of the Geeks, as far as they were concerned.” The affection and trust that the retail community felt for Kalish would not easily be replaced.