Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (50 page)
Over the next few days, as two feet of snowfall closed businesses and schools, the departing Marvel employees made their ways back into the office to gather the detritus of years of faithful service from their cubicles and offices. Unworn “Marvelution” T-shirts, handed out after the miserable slide show, went into trash cans. Mary McPherran, who’d been with the company since arriving as a hot-pants-and-sandals-wearing receptionist a quarter-century earlier, unpacked her desk and found, stowed away, a stack of old envelopes. She’d once mailed these envelopes from 635 Madison, where she worked beside Stan Lee and Herb Trimpe and Marie Severin and John Romita, to True Believers all over the world. “Congratulations!” they read. “This envelope contains a genuine Marvel Comics NO-PRIZE which you have just won!” The joke, of course, was that they were empty.
She put the box under her arm and walked out the door.
B
ob Harras had simply inherited “Heroes Reborn,” just as he’d inherited the layoffs, and just as he’d inherited a bruised and battered Marvel Comics, where surviving employees doubted the security of their jobs even as they struggled with increased workloads. But the scapegoating of the new editor in chief was nearly unanimous. Burgeoning Internet message boards buzzed that Harras—who’d given Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld so much latitude in the early 1990s—was responsible for yanking the carpet from underneath loyal employees and rolling it out for Those Image Traitors. “I don’t know if anybody from Marvel ever called me and said that I wasn’t working on
Captain America
anymore,” recalled one writer who’d been replaced by Liefeld.
Jerry Calabrese was getting an earful from critics, too—when he submitted to a CompuServe chat, retailers and readers grilled him about why Marvel had ruined the distribution network, and why there weren’t movie adaptations. Calabrese just wanted to talk about the bright future with Lee and Liefeld. “Marvel has a lot of unfinished business with guys who came up through Marvel and are no longer associated with us. The door is open and will remain open with any of them whom we can make common cause to make excellent editorial product.” A message from Steve Gerber, whose Malibu title had just been canceled by Marvel, popped up on the screen. “As someone with whom you might like to make ‘common cause,’ ” Gerber wrote, “I’ve shied away from working with the company because it seems Marvel is unwilling to publish anything more potentially offensive than a Jell-O commercial.”
Things would get worse for Marvel. In March 1996, Bullpen fixture Jack Abel, who’d drawn for Timely Comics since 1952 and had worked hard to recover from a stroke in the early 1980s, suffered another stroke while working at his desk. An editor attempted CPR while the ambulances arrived, but Abel was pronounced dead at the hospital. He was sixty-nine.
The same month, sixty-year-old Sal Buscema was informed that, due to falling sales, he was being relieved of his art duties on
Spectacular Spider-Man
—his only title. “My career was essentially behind me,” recalled the man who’d regularly provided the visuals for Steve Gerber’s
The Defenders
, Steve Englehart’s
Captain America
, and countless others. “I’d been working for Marvel for over 30 years, and here I was just shoved aside.” His older brother John Buscema, who’d begun drawing for Timely in the 1940s, coauthored
How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way
, and remained in high demand, immediately decided that it was time for him to retire, too. “I think 48 years in any business is enough,” he said. “If I can help it, I never want to do another comic.”
S
tan Lee’s Excelsior line had been in the preparation stages for a year and a half. Complete issues were finished and sitting in a drawer, awaiting the go-ahead from the sales team back east. Now, finally, it was abandoned.
The other major focus of Stan Lee’s efforts, Marvel Films, was in the same position: everything was always in development, never on the release schedule. And Lee was feeling more and more like he’d been pushed to the sidelines by Avi Arad, invited to fewer meetings, his commentary less welcome. Lee turned his attention to taping intros for the
Marvel Action Universe
cartoons. Except for a doomed TV pilot for an adaptation of the X-Men spin-off
Generation X
, the closest he’d come to seeing cameras roll was when he played himself in a cameo for Kevin Smith’s
Mallrats
, talking up the creations of Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men. Those were just three of the dozens of Marvel projects currently with various studios, and they weren’t looking good. Over the last few years, a number of
X-Men
and
Hulk
scripts had been rejected by rights-holders Fox and Universal, and
Spider-Man
. . . well, the problems with
Spider-Man
were by now legendary.
Over the decade that movie producer Menahem Golan had retained the rights for
Spider-Man
, he’d managed to involve half a dozen different corporate entities. Golan had originally bought the
Spider-Man
rights for his Cannon Films; after leaving Cannon, he transferred them to 21st Century Films. Next, he raised money by preselling television rights to Viacom, and home video rights to Columbia Tri-Star; then he signed a $5 million deal with Carolco that guaranteed his role as producer. But after Carolco assigned the film to James Cameron, Cameron refused to give Golan the producer credit, and the lawsuits began. By the end of 1994, Carolco was suing Viacom and Tri-Star; Viacom and Tri-Star were countersuing Carolco, 21st Century, and Marvel; and MGM—which had swallowed Cannon—was suing Viacom, Tri-Star, 21st Century, and Marvel.
Toy Biz’s Isaac Perlmutter, who stood to profit from the impact that Marvel-related films would have on the action figures, pushed Perelman to start investing in Hollywood. “Right now, you’re dying,” Perlmutter said, in his heavy Israeli accent. “And if you don’t do anything, I tell you again, Marvel is a bankruptcy.”
Of course, one of the reasons that Marvel struggled to sell studios on its movies was that Toy Biz had already sewn up the lucrative product licenses for itself. But in July 1996, Marvel sold a chunk of its 46 percent ownership in Toy Biz to raise money to create Marvel Studios. Now Jerry Calabrese and Avi Arad (with the help, presumably, of Stan Lee) would assemble pre-production packages—commissioning scripts, hiring directors, casting actors—and then turn them over to studio partners for completion. No longer would Hollywood’s whims hold Marvel hostage. “We are finally on the verge of breaking out,” Arad told
Variety
. “This is our bar mitzvah year in a sense.”
T
hose in New York, where a post-layoff bunker mentality had taken root, might have disagreed. Office doors stayed shut throughout the day, opening briefly only to facilitate micromanaging. (“We see writer-driven comics as an experiment that has failed,” Bob Harras’s assistant told one
X-Men
writer). The Spider-Man titles, mired in the Clone Saga, continued to cause headaches. At Harras’s insistence, the team of editors and writers was supposed to explain that Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin, was behind the entire villainous plot; this twist was complicated by the fact that Norman Osborn had been quite memorably impaled in a 1973 issue. There was also the difficulty of eliminating Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson’s baby. In the end, Mary Jane was told by a nurse that she’d had a miscarriage, while a suspicious-looking hospital worker was shown delivering a package on seaside docks. In subsequent years, no writer has been eager to revisit the morbid question of whether Spider-Man’s infant daughter was miscarried or permanently kidnapped.
Originally conceived as a four-month story, the Clone Saga lumbered on for two years, as the monthly circulation of
Amazing Spider-Man
dropped 50 percent. Now the most vital moments in the Spider-Man comics were sly references to Marvel’s financial struggles. In an issue of
Spider-Man Unlimited
, a criminal businessman advises publisher J. Jonah Jameson to make a public offering. “I’d never take the
Bugle
public, Kingsley,” Jameson spits, “because I know that its long-term integrity would suffer under corporate connivers like you, who dream up ridiculous little schemes which only produce short-term goals!” The
Daily Bugle
newspaper downsized. “They’re laying off nearly a hundred people! I heard one poor kid fainted when he was terminated!” a secretary tells Peter Parker, before he is called in to his editor’s office. “You’ll still have plenty of freelance work,” the editor assures Parker, in language that intentionally echoed what outgoing Marvel employees had been told, “probably more than ever!” Even Spider-Man had been put out on the street.
For the newly launched
Spider-Man Team-Up
comic, Harras told editor Tom Brevoort to bring back Howard the Duck. But when Brevoort and his assistant called potential writers, they all voiced the same concern:
I’d love to read that, but I’d hate to be the one to write it. Call Steve Gerber.
They braced themselves, and reached out to Gerber.
After thinking it over for a few days, Gerber called back and explained that he was at work on a comic that teamed his Destroyer Duck character with Savage Dragon, a creation of Image cofounder Erik Larsen. “I want to do an unofficial crossover,” Gerber said, “where we’ll do these two stories—the one in that book and the one in your Marvel book—and we’ll set them in the same location, but the characters won’t really run into one another, they’ll just kind of run back and forth across the same landscape. But if you have the two books together, you can see the larger tapestry.” Brevoort, intrigued, approved the idea, on the condition that nothing in
Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck
—over which he’d have no editorial control—was going to get him in trouble.
But when Gerber learned that Harras had been campaigning to bring back Howard the Duck not just for this specil issue but in issues of
Ghost Rider
and
Generation X
as well, he called his lawyer. There was no contesting Marvel’s ownership of Howard the Duck anymore—that had been settled out of court—but Gerber was damned if he was going to unwittingly endorse a full-blown Howard revival. Gerber’s lawyer called Marvel and raged. Brevoort called Gerber and told him there were no hard feelings if he wanted to walk away from writing the issue.
Gerber paused. “No. I said I was going to do this story and I’m going to do it.”
S
pider-Man Team-Up
#5 featured not only the returns of Howard the Duck and Beverly Switzler, but also long-absent, off-the-wall Gerber creations like the Kidney Lady and the Elf with a Gun. The crossover, as it were, was only a matter of a few panels that overlapped with
Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck
, in which Howard and Beverly find themselves in a crowded scrum of duck clones.
Over in that other, non-Marvel, comic, Gerber pulled a switcheroo. “They haven’t got any friends over there! They’re comin’ with us!” shouted Destroyer Duck as he grabbed Howard and Beverly from the melee. “Anyhow, one of the clones ran out that way. They’ll never know the difference!”
In effect, Howard and Beverly had been rescued from the Marvel Universe, replaced by imposters. In the remainder of
Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck
, Gerber’s beloved creations were put into a witness protection program. “They’d never know me back on the ol’ plantation,” says Howard, now sporting eyeglasses and green-dyed feathers. He and Beverly Switzler take the names Leonard and Rhoda Martini, and head for Buffalo, New York, far from Marvel’s clutches.
M
onths later, Gerber was sending out emails about the “Howard the Duck Death Page” that he’d posted on AOL. “That page contains my final word on the subject,” he wrote, “until
Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck
comes out. As I’ve been telling people: There’s more than one way to skin a duck.
Dragon/Duck
illustrates Method #2.”
Brevoort was furious at Gerber’s deceit and certain that he’d lose his job for allowing it to happen. When confronted, Gerber explained that Brevoort had simply been “in the way of the gunfire.” The editor, who said he’d always considered Gerber a “bastion of moral integrity and moral fiber, the little guy fighting the man,” vowed to never work with Gerber again. “He decided that me and my life and my family, we’re perfectly acceptable collateral damage to the larger point that he wanted to make,” Brevoort concluded, years later.
Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck
was met with audience indifference and low presales. Gerber, heartbroken, offered to fax the twenty-page plot to retailers, but when the comic finally shipped, months late, nobody noticed.
M
ark Gruenwald put his game face on and tried to raise morale, but coworkers noticed that even he was keeping to himself more than usual, his attentions seemingly elsewhere. He’d always been organized; now he became fastidious, straightening shelves and rearranging the office library. On a writer’s retreat in Long Island, the team leader, the constant cheerleader, was uncharacteristically quiet as his friends joked with him.
“He loved the Marvel Universe and the characters and the publishing profoundly, but he loved the people more,” said Tom Brevoort. “There were cases where a title under his purview really needed a change if it was going to recapture any sort of an audience, but in doing so, that was going to put some writer or artist out in the cold. Mark resisted doing that for the longest time because he just didn’t have the heart to do it. And then when he had no choice but to do it, it haunted him.” Former Marvel editor Mike Carlin, one of Gruenwald’s best friends, offered him a job at DC Comics, but Gruenwald felt too invested in the company he’d helped to build over the past twenty years.
Before Gruenwald left for his weekend home on August 9, he grabbed a preview copy of Rob Liefeld’s
Captain America
#1. It was Gruenwald’s favorite Marvel character; until a few months earlier, he’d either written or edited every issue since 1982. On Monday morning, rumors started flying around the offices, confirmed by an 11 a.m. email from Terry Stewart. “It’s with my deepest and most profound regret that I inform you that Mark Gruenwald passed away unexpectedly early today at home,” the note began. The cause of death was a heart attack. A collective shock ran through the building, and, via phone calls, to freelancers throughout the country. One former colleague collapsed upon hearing the news. “It can be said without reservation,” the email concluded, “that Mark embodied the spirit of what we like to think Marvel is and should be.”