Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (53 page)

B
ut the company was still broke, surviving on a $200 million bridge loan that would have to be paid back soon. Perlmutter’s first order of business was to terminate the expensive contracts with executives that dragged on the company’s finances. Stan Lee wasn’t worried when he heard the news. His $500,000 per year lifetime deal was a special case—after all, he was the face of Marvel Comics. Nor did he worry when Perlmutter summoned him to New York. “Ike greeted me like a long-lost brother,” Lee recalled, “telling me how important I was to him and the company and assuring me that I’d be making more money than ever from now on. I thought to myself, Gee, why did people tell me he’s such a cold fish?” Then Perlmutter presented him with a two-year contract at half his previous salary. Lee was astonished. After the royal treatment by Bill Bevins, he thought, this was like Martin Goodman all over again.

But Perlmutter had underestimated just what Stan Lee’s loyalty meant to the company. Lee’s lawyer began negotiating. Without a contract, Lee might contest the ownership of some of those characters for which Marvel had, on innumerable occasions over three decades, credited him as the creator. And even if Lee didn’t have much of a case, the damage to Marvel’s public image would be devastating. The two parties eventually settled on a salary raise to $810,000 (with generous annual increases), plus a $500,000 yearly pension for his wife, plus $125,000 for writing the Spider-Man comic strip, and a whopping 10 percent of any movie and television profits that Marvel enjoyed. Furthermore, the new contract was nonexclusive, which meant that Lee could supplement his income in other ways—in fact, by the time he re-signed with Marvel, he’d already lined up an Internet start-up called Stan Lee Media.

While Lee’s lawyer played hardball, Perlmutter saved money by sacking executives. He removed Joe Calamari (who only a year earlier had personally fired Avi Arad), Shirrel Rhoades, and a half dozen others. Then he rehired former president Jerry Calabrese to put editors out on the street. In a matter of weeks, most of the staff was gone; the number of editors was reduced from thirty to six. More titles were canceled. Every Friday, members of the dwindling staff wondered which side of the going-away parties they’d be on.
*
Once fired, an employee was told to leave his personal belongings in a box for inspection and leave the building. If the box contained comic books on which the employee had worked, they would be removed—they were company property, Perlmutter insisted.

Speculation that Marvel would soon simply hire its competitors to produce its line of comics, entirely eliminating the need for an editorial staff, ran rampant. Smoked-glass conference room doors, etched with Spider-Man logos, had been special-ordered five years ago, at the height of success; now they were among the items the company auctioned off and shipped away.

The joke everyone muttered was that, if Ike Perlmutter had his way, Marvel would consist of one guy in an office with a phone, licensing the characters. Why waste money on anything else? Memos demanded that paper clips not be thrown away, that lights be turned off if an office was vacated for more than five minutes. “Ike was an absolute tyrant, plain and simple,” said one longtime employee. “There was no negotiation, there was no meeting of the minds, If Ike said, ‘Turn the computers off at 5 pm,’ you turned the computers off at 5 pm. If you crossed Ike, you were gone.” (Fueling the fear was the rumor that the Six-Day War veteran still carried a pistol on his ankle.) After the coffee machine and bottles of water were removed from the Bullpen, word got around that Perlmutter was pushing for a policy of urinalysis for all employees. President Jerry Calabrese, for one, couldn’t take it. “After only a little less than two months,” he wrote in November, “it’s clear to me that it would be impossible for me to make the kind of positive impact and difference I believed possible when I accepted the task.”

Meanwhile, Perlmutter had begun to suspect that his longtime Toy Biz ally Joseph Ahearn, who was now chief executive at Marvel, was about to make a bid for power. Against the advice of his inner circle, Perlmutter called for Ahearn’s ouster. Eric Ellenbogen, formerly of Lorne Michaels’s Broadway Video, was announced as the replacement. In his first days on the new job, Ellenbogen suggested that a Christmas party would help the Marvel staff’s morale.

No, said Perlmutter. That was a waste of twelve hundred dollars.

Weeks later, a number of freelancers began receiving letters claiming overpayment and demanding that money be returned to the company. Steve Gerber opened his mail to find a bill for fifty-three dollars.

I
n a strategy that was now tradition for Marvel ownership—but ironic nonetheless, given recent history—Toy Biz repaid its bridge loan with money raised through the sale of junk bonds. In February, the dumping of Fleer and Skybox, those dual albatrosses from the Perelman years, brought in another $26 million. They were sold at a fraction of what they’d cost, but Perlmutter was glad to take the money.

An even more important transaction took place in March, when the rights to the
Spider-Man
film were finally, miraculously, extricated. After MGM’s claims were rejected in a summary judgment, a series of settlements—which included Columbia Pictures waiving the rights to a James Bond series—freed the way for Marvel to resell the license to Sony, for approximately $10 million. After nearly fifteen years and countless “Tangled Web” newspaper headlines, the resolution seemed almost sudden. (Eric Ellenbogen got to announce the legal victory, and then he too was gone, after seven months, with a $2.5 million severance package. The
New York Post
reported that he’d been fired for failing to turn around and sell Marvel once the Spider-Man mess had been cleared. Others simply said he’d crossed Perlmutter one time too many, or rented one too many Porsches on business trips.)

But even as things were falling into place for the
Spider-Man
movie, more battles were under way. After Stan Lee reminisced in
Comic Book Marketplace
about his inspirations for writing an acclaimed late 1965 issue of
Amazing Spider-Man
, Steve Ditko broke his long silence. “Stan never knew what was in my plotted stories,” the artist wrote to the magazine’s editors, “until I took in the penciled story, the cover, my script and Sol Brodsky took the material from me and took it all into Stan’s office, so I had to leave without seeing or talking to Stan.” A few months later, after Lee was identified in
Time
as the creator of Spider-Man, Ditko popped up on that magazine’s letters page, too: “Spider-Man’s existence needed a visual concrete entity,” Ditko wrote. “It was a collaboration of writer-editor Stan Lee and Steve Ditko as co-creators.” This time Lee picked up the phone and called Ditko, for the first time in more than thirty years.

“Steve said, ‘Having an idea is nothing, because until it becomes a physical thing, it’s just an idea,’ ” Lee recalled. “And he said it took him to draw the strip, and to give it life, so to speak, or to make it actually something tangible. Otherwise, all
I
had was an idea. So I said to him, ‘Well, I think the person who has the
idea
is the person who creates it. And he said, ‘No, because I
drew
it.’ Anyway, Steve definitely felt that he was the co-creator of Spider-Man. And that was really, after he said it, I saw it meant a lot to him that was fine with me. So I said fine, I’ll tell everybody you’re the co-creator. That didn’t quite satisfy him. So I sent him a letter.”

But the wording of the open letter that Lee sent out in August 1999 was a stumbling block. “I have always considered Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s co-creator,” it read, and Ditko quickly pointed out that “ ‘Considered’ means to ponder, look at closely, examine, etc. and does not admit, or claim, or state that Steve Ditko is Spider-Man’s co-creator.”

“At that point,” Lee said, “I gave up.”

M
arv Wolfman had filed a suit when the
Blade
movie was released, contesting the ownership of more than seventy characters, including the titular hero, which he claimed to have created before his employment at Marvel. The trial began in November. Unfortunately for Wolfman, he did not have the backing of his peers. “My assumption for my work was that Marvel owned it,” Roy Thomas said in a deposition. “I sort of thought that Marv, coming from DC, would know that.” Gene Colan contended that the Blade character had only been fleshed out after he and Wolfman were collaborating on the
Tomb of Dracula
issue in which he first appeared. And John Byrne—still proud to be a company man—testified that Wolfman and Len Wein had warned him, at a 1975 Thanksgiving dinner, that the “companies own everything you do.” Wolfman and Wein had expressed surprise, Byrne claimed, when Steve Gerber had sued over Howard the Duck. “How could he have a case?” Byrne said they wondered aloud. “The companies own everything!”
*
Ultimately, the court ruled that Wolfman had insufficient evidence of creating Blade before his Marvel employment, and that all characters he created while on staff fell under the category of work-for-hire.

Soon afterward, Joe Simon began actions to terminate Marvel’s copyright transfer for the first ten issues of
Captain America
. He’d already settled with the company once, in 1969, but in the interim, the courts had redefined the rules of work-for-hire, and an April 1999 claim by the widow of
Superman
co-creator Jerry Siegel paved the way. When Marvel’s
Captain America
copyright was up for renewal in December, the eighty-six-year-old Simon leaped at his chance.

“Christ, I’m doing this for my children and other creative people who should have their rights,” Simon told a reporter. “I’m not doing it for myself. I’m too old to be doing this for myself, but I’m not going to quit by any means. They’ve spent so much money on this. Marvel must have spent a million bucks on this. I think some people would get together and back me on this.”

Even Simon could see that it was movies, not publishing, where the future lay—comics, he said, were for the “masturbation generation,” a parade of big guns and big breasts. “The business is going to hell in the first place, but the characters are more valuable than ever. So, we’ll do the best we can.”
*

P
eter Cuneo, the third Marvel CEO to work for Perlmutter inside of a year, was a renowned turnaround king. He didn’t follow comic books any more than Perelman had. Did it matter? “Whether you’re selling deodorant or a wrench,” he said, “you’re always trying to find a way to emotionally bond to the consumer.” Like Joe Simon, Cuneo had no doubt what the future held for Marvel: not just Hollywood, but the cross-marketing of video games, fast-food restaurants, and soft-drink companies. A new division, the Marvel Characters Group, was created solely to manage synergistic opportunities. “The Marvel Characters Group will be running the superheroes as brands,” said Cuneo. “Think of them as agents for the characters. An agent for the X-Men says, ‘I have an X-Men movie coming out in July. What special things are we going to be doing in the publishing division? What integrated promotions are we planning?’ ”

Coordinating all that with the comic books was easier said than done. Although the X-Men titles remained at the top of the charts, they were as much a creative battleground as ever, as a half-dozen successive writers complained of editorial micromanaging and rewriting. The editors, meanwhile, insisted that they were only listening to the fans, that letter-writing campaigns determined which characters stayed or departed. “What do the fans want?” one writer grumbled. “They want change. What happens when you give them change? It’s not the change they wanted, and everybody wants things back the way they were.”

It wasn’t just a matter of populist rule. Within the offices, a full-fledged bureaucracy had taken root. Editor in Chief Bob Harras and Editorial Director Chris Claremont, who’d once fought for custody of the mutant characters, were now both part of the chain of command, and neither was ready to cede control. “Bob definitely stood over my shoulder a lot,” said one editor. “I don’t think it was good for the books, for me, or for him.” Scripts were turned in, second-guessed by Harras, and then triple-guessed by Claremont, who still had emotional ties to the characters and stories. “Technically, Chris was not supposed to be involved in the X-Men books, but there was no way to keep them away from him,” the editor said. “I would often say to my assistant, ‘I don’t think Chris really wants to write the books, but I don’t think he wants anyone else to write them either.’ ” By the end of 1999, Chris Claremont was, once again, writing
The
X-Men
.

As the pillars of Marvel’s publishing business, the X-Men titles had long carried a heavy weight. Now, during an industry-wide slump, the burden was tremendous, and everyone on the creative side felt it. Perhaps Harras summed it up best. “There seems to be a perception that there’s this evil corporation of Marvel dictating changes and so on, but that’s not reality. It’s just that everyone is watching you, inside and outside the company.”

Shortly afterward, when Peter Cuneo appointed a new president of the company, it meant there was one more person to watch the X-Men franchise. Bill Jemas, a Harvard Law graduate and NBA executive, had gained experience with the Marvel brand in the 1990s, when he worked for Fleer. Now he took a look at the company’s biggest properties and made his disapproval clear. There were sixty titles a month, Jemas said, and he didn’t like any of them. And
The X-Men
, with its complicated story lines and overpopulation of characters, was at the top of his list. “I went to Harvard Law,” he told a room of editors. “If I can’t understand it, it’s not because of me.”