Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (55 page)
He was no more polite to Marvel’s readership. Questioned about plans to launch a category of titles he called “Bad Girls for Fanboys,” Jemas shot back, “We have quite a few male readers who live in the basement of their parents’ house in Queens. For them, an evening with Elektra is as good as it gets.” To another interviewer, he delicately clarified what he meant by “Bad Girls”: “Elektra is so bad you are going to want to spank her.” Frank Miller’s tragic heroine was not only back from the dead; now she was a cheesecake ninja pinup.
Thankfully, not all of Marvel’s forays into more “adult” content catered so embarrassingly to one-dimensional titillation. At the end of an all-night bender, editor Axel Alonso recruited British writer Peter Milligan for a drastically reimagined version of
X-Force
, the
X-Men
spinoff that had once been Rob Liefeld’s playground. The brand-new, college-aged characters resembled nothing more than spoiled members of a professional sports team, juggling talk shows, limousine rides, and endorsement deals; the group was funded by a venture capitalist.
X-Force
’s dim view of youth culture—there were characters based on Allen Iverson and Eminem, and a grisly execution scene involving a teenage boy band—made it the most gleefully acerbic title Marvel had published. In the first scene of Milligan’s tenure, a character named Zeitgeist pauses from a ménage-à-trois with two supermodels to watch the “game tape” of the graphically violent super-battle he’d fought the night before; by issue’s end, all but two of the team’s original members are dead. The Kirbyish primitiveness of Mike Allred’s art, and the primary-color palette, only accentuated the ironic corruption of old-fashioned Marvel innocence. When the issue came back from the Comics Code with a slew of objections, Jemas shrugged. Not only did Marvel publish
X-Force
without the Comics Code seal, it boasted about it: “Hey Kids!” shouted one corner of the cover. “Look! No Code!”
When
Ultimate Spider-Man
writer Brian Michael Bendis pitched
Alias
, a series about a heavy-drinking, swearing, down-on-her-luck, ex-superheroine-turned-private detective, Bendis clarified, before Quesada responded, that he was prepared to tone it down. But Jemas went for it, without hesitation, in all its profane glory. Marvel wouldn’t just publish it without a Comics Code seal—it would create a whole new line of “Adults Only” superhero comics, called MAX. The first issue leaped in with both feet. “Fuck! This is—fuck! “God Fucking Dammit!” comprised the entirety of the first page’s dialogue. As it turned out, though, the obscenities were just a bit of throat-clearing before the comic settled into complex, sympathetic characterization and the smart, rat-a-tat dialogue that marked David Mamet screenplays or Richard Price novels. Bendis retrofitted his bruised underdog heroine, Jessica Jones, into Marvel’s history, making her an aging alumnus of the early 1980s Avengers (code name: Jewel), and her emotional interactions with Marvel fixtures like Luke Cage, Matt Murdock, and Steve Rogers simultaneously satisfied fanboys’ desires for in-jokes and added dimensionality to decades-old characters. Despite its achievements, it was the reference to rough sex (between Jessica and Luke “Power Man” Cage) that got all the attention. After a printer in Alabama refused to handle the first issue, Marvel had to take it elsewhere for publication.
Jemas had no patience for moral watchdogs. He withdrew Marvel’s membership from the Comics Code Authority, just like that, after nearly fifty years. The other dues-paying companies protested, but the feeling within Marvel was electric. Seemingly no one had questioned before why a publisher would continue to underwrite an outdated third-party entity that limited the content of its product.
There were other changes. Suddenly the quality of the coloring and printing improved. The practice of overprinting—through which retailers could always reorder fast-selling product, but which stuck Marvel with mounds of unsold inventory—ceased. “Bill was absolutely fearless in the way a man who does not understand the consequences of his actions can be,” said Tom Brevoort, “and he bulldozed through obstacles that could not be moved beforehand, because he was heedless—courageous, insightful, and oblivious to the fact that things couldn’t be done. That was very valuable to knocking out some of the calcification that had been built up.”
The MAX line sent the message that Marvel was a creative haven once again. Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy returned, after twenty years, to
Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu
. Gail Simone, a former hairdresser who wrote feminist critiques of comics on websites, got the green light to revive
Night Nurse
as a former “wild chick” who was “part Elvira and part Mother Teresa.” Even Steve Gerber returned, to do a
Howard the Duck
series for the MAX line, and because he didn’t like the Howard redesign that had been in place ever since Disney’s lawyers came calling in the early 1980s, Howard the Duck was rendered as a mouse. There was a thrilling sense of danger at Marvel once again, a sense that the creative forces of Marvel didn’t have anyone to answer to.
But unhinged flights of the imagination were the exception—capturing an audience was front-and-center of the editorial strategy. No one articulated this balance of experimentation and crowd-pleasing better than Grant Morrison, whose
X-Men
pitch had read like a call to arms, a manifesto for calculated rule-breaking. “This is a
pop
book,” Morrison wrote, “as essential as the new Eminem release or the latest Keanu movie. We can rejoin the culture here and the only way to do it is to drop ’80s and ’90s notions of who our audience should be. The only way to get back in there is to deliver the stuff the movies and the games
can’t
. And what the mainstream audience wants from us (and I’ve asked a lot of ’em) is raw imagination, ready-made characters, outrageous spectacle, storming angst and emotional drama. Beautiful people with incredible powers doing startling, diverting things!” Taking a cue from the movie version, Morrison replaced the X-Men’s spandex costumes with standardized team uniforms, but uniforms with a sense of fashion that could only come from an ex-raver: Day-Glo yellow biker jackets, military pants, and heavy boots. As he’d promised in his pitch, he revamped and reintroduced classic concepts like the Sentinels, the Shi’Ar Empire, and the Phoenix Force, “in such a way that it will seem as though we’re seeing these concepts for the first time.”
“Dead characters always return,” Morrison complained of the X-Men comics of the preceding decade. “Nothing that happens really matters ultimately. The stage is never cleared for new creations to develop and grow.” In a neat metafictional trick, Morrison wanted to use the well-worn elements of the X-Men mythos to explore what he saw as the central metaphor of the humans-versus-mutants theme: the ways in which older species try to stifle their newer, evolutional replacements. But even as he introduced the most off-the-wall new characters anyone had seen in a Marvel comic for years—a clumsy, virginal, straight-edge, hard-core mutant with a beak and talons; a chain-smoking, problem-drinking teenage Latina with insect wings; a creepy set of psychically linked quintuplets named the Stepford Cuckoos; Xorn, a Chinese meditator whose iron skull contained a powerful star—he built up everything to climax with the death of Phoenix. Everything new was old again.
When it was time to hit the reset button and roll out the “Ultimate” version of
The Avengers
, Jemas and Quesada hired Morrison protégé Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch, who had pushed the boundaries of DC’s corporate patience with
The Authority
, a pitch-black comic that imagined superheroes as part of the military-industrial complex. They brought a similar sensibility to the assured—and, some would say, cynical—
The Ultimates
. In this version of the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Nick Fury allied with Stark Industries to organize a team of super-powered living weapons for the United States. Thor was no longer the alter ego of Dr. Donald Blake, but rather a long-haired WTO protester with delusions of godhood. Tony Stark was no longer just a rich industrialist who had different dates to every fund-raiser—he was a nihilistic, wisecracking louche. Psychodrama abounded, from Bruce Banner’s suppressed rage to Henry Pym’s feelings of inadequacy. It was realism in ways that only comics readers defined the term: pessimistic, violent, and more concerned with repercussions than with moments of transcendence.
Hitch’s artwork—smooth and polished, filled with photographic references, and often organized in horizontal grids that approximated CinemaScope grandeur—gave readers the sense that they were peeking at beautiful storyboards for an unproduced blockbuster. Where Busiek and Ross’s similarly lifelike
Marvels
had reserved its full-page big moments for tableaux of wonder, the Millar-Hitch synthesis gave the widescreen treatment to spectacles of destruction.
Its cinematic qualities were, of course, no accident—
The Ultimates
was intended as a demonstration of how
The Avengers
franchise could be transmogrified into a megaplex attraction, a floppy comic book that could be handed over to a Hollywood producer as an all-in-one pitch souvenir. Captain America’s likeness was based on Brad Pitt; Iron Man’s on Johnny Depp. And Nick Fury, no longer a greatest-generation relic, was transformed into a dead ringer, visually and verbally, for Samuel L. Jackson in his monologue-inclined Tarantino mode. If
The Ultimates
were ever made into a movie, the casting précis was already complete.
“I
’d much rather be an actor than a writer,” Stan Lee once told French auteur Alain Resnais. He’d had a brief moment onscreen as a hot-dog vendor in the
X-Men
movie; when cameras rolled on Sam Raimi’s $140 million
Spider-Man
, he was assigned a role as a curbside vendor of cheap sunglasses. He even got some dialogue: “Hey,” he shouted to a potential customer, “how about these? They wore ’em in the
X-Men
!” The week before
Spider-Man
’s release, he appeared, as himself, in a guest spot on
The Simpsons
.
Lee took full advantage of the publicity machine surrounding the movie. In countless newspaper, magazine, radio, and television interviews, which always included mention of his teeming seventy-nine-year-old energy, he not only told his familiar tales—about coming up with the idea for Spider-Man, about his years toiling for Martin Goodman—but he looked to the future. Avoiding conversation about Peter Paul or Stan Lee Media, he announced yet another start-up, POW! Entertainment, for which he’d already created an animated Pamela Anderson vehicle called
Stripperella
. He promoted a biographical DVD called
Stan Lee’s Mutants, Monsters & Marvels
, and, a quarter-century after he’d signed a contract to write his memoirs, proudly mentioned that Simon & Schuster was finally publishing
Excelsior: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee
. (The introductions to each chapter in his autobiography, worded in the third person, gave an idea of how he felt about the recent successes of the Marvel films: “Stan thought Avi did quite well in his new task. Of course, he had a great ballpark to play in. It would be difficult not to do well when you controlled characters like The X-Men, Spider-Man, The Hulk, Daredevil, and so many additional heroes who had been popular for decades, and were offering them to studios that were hungry for proven characters that could be franchised.”)
This was Lee’s moment in the spotlight, and he wasn’t going to let any opportunity go to waste. On April 23, a press release announced that he was taking his file copies of Marvel publications out of storage and putting them up for sale. The auction house predicted they would take in about $4 million.
Six days later, at the
Spider-Man
premiere party in Westwood, Los Angeles, Adam Sandler, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Will Smith were Lee’s red-carpet compatriots, along with stars Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. The film grossed $39 million on opening day—a new world record.
Spider-Man
ran 121 minutes. Both of Stan Lee’s lines were cut.
“I
Haven’t Made a Penny from Spider-Man,” read a London
Times
headline in June 2002, for an article in which Stan Lee good-naturedly explained that he wasn’t seeing any profits from the movie. “People naturally assume that I have. They read that the movie will make half a billion dollars so they figure I’ll get about a third of that, but no.” When the journalist expressed his surprise, Lee waved it aside. “But I’ve had a great life,” he assured him. “I’ve enjoyed it and I have formed a new company and things look very promising.”
Still, it seemed that there were subtle ways in which he was distancing himself from his old company. “If I had done that movie there would have been less destruction,” he said of the myriad explosions that ripped across the screen in
Spider-Man
. When another reporter informed him of a Nick Fury series—part of Marvel’s adult-readers MAX line—in which the crusty colonel strangled an enemy with his own entrails, Lee responded, “I don’t know why they’re doing that. I don’t think that I would do those kinds of stories.”
Lee had long outgrown an interest in keeping up with new superhero adventures, and now he’d even sold his comic book collection. Even as he insisted that he held no regrets, in conversation he returned to the idea of what might have been. “I wish I had come to Hollywood and been a screenwriter,” he mused. “I wish I had the time to be a novelist. I think I could have done better. I mean, I would have loved to have written a great novel. I would have loved to have written a great bunch of screenplays. I would have loved to have written a Broadway show. I didn’t have any big compulsion to write comics. It was a way of making a living.”
On November 12, 2002, citing the provision in his 1998 contract that called for “participation equal to 10% of the profits derived during your life by Marvel (including subsidiaries and affiliates) from the profits of any live action or animation television or movie (including ancillary rights) production utilizing Marvel characters,” Stan Lee filed a $10 million lawsuit against Marvel Enterprises and Marvel Characters.
B
y the time of
Spider-Man
’s release, Avi Arad and Peter Cuneo had renegotiated Marvel’s Hollywood deals so that the company would receive a percentage of gross, rather than net, profits. It was an impressive feat, and fortuitously timed, since the company’s heroes were now hot property.
Blade 2
, which opened at number one at the box office on Easter, was still in theaters when
Spider-Man
was released, and by then big-budget adaptations of
Hulk
and
Daredevil
were already in production, and Fox had given
X-Men 2
a release date.
Almost overnight, superheroes were the apple of the public’s eye. The weekend that
Spider-Man
opened, thousands of comic shops around the country participated in Free Comic Book Day, an idea hatched by a California retailer who’d noticed the long lines at Baskin-Robbins Free Scoop Night. Timed to piggyback on the movie’s buzz, the event included giveaways from all the major publishers, who hoped to lure new audiences to the endangered art form.
After seven straight years of decline, Marvel had finally stopped the bleeding, with a combination of Hollywood hype and the influx of fresh ideas. But even as direct-market sales began to turn around—and they were still only a quarter of what they’d been a decade earlier—publishers watched helplessly as newsstand exposure shrank. A whopping 85 percent of sales now came from comic stores, and nobody was likely to wander into a comic store unless they were already looking for comics.
Marvel continued to talk about the importance of attracting new readers, but appealing to younger children wasn’t part of that strategy. “I think the 8-year-old comic reader is a myth,” Joe Quesada told a reporter. “It’s not a concern to me. A year ago, when I took that job, that’s what I was concerned with. I heard comic-store owners saying, ‘Where are my 8-year-old readers?’ You know what? I don’t think they were ever really out there.” Instead, Marvel wanted to court teenagers, a demographic that had been nearly eradicated by competition from television and video games. The syndicated
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
TV show became Jemas’s shorthand for what he was looking for—a continuing series with young, attractive stars and a rich backstory that nevertheless was accessible to a new audience. (According to one writer, at the height of Jemas’s
Buffy
-mania, there were three female-monster-killer series simultaneously in development at Marvel.)
“There has been a perpetual push and pull over whether each project should target the loyal ‘core’ market of dedicated comic fans (‘fanboys’) or the broader audience of Marvel fans in the ‘mass market,’ ” Jemas wrote, and it was clear that he relished his role in antagonizing the pimply nerds of the base readership. In fact, it started to seem like chasing away die-hard customers was a primary goal. After a series of public debates between Quesada and writer Peter David about the low-selling
Captain Marvel
, Jemas stepped in with a challenge. “Peter is a talented writer maybe two or three issues of the year,” Jemas announced to the press, “but the rest is just inside jokes for fans who have been reading his stuff for 20 years. He’s just feeding off his old work. I feel that he needs to make his stories accessible to new readers or it’s doomed.” In a contest dubbed “U-Decide,” sales of David’s
Captain Marvel
would be judged against a new title called
Marville
, which Jemas himself would write. Whichever title sold least would be canceled.
*
Politically incorrect, attention-getting trash talk was business as usual for Jemas and Quesada. (“They have Batman and Superman, and they don’t know what to do with them,” Quesada once said to a reporter about DC Comics. “That’s like being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can’t get it up. What the fuck?”) The difference was that, with
Marville
, the dog-and-pony show seemed to dictate the content of the comics. It had been trumpeted as a demonstration of the storytelling techniques Peter David had failed to learn, but its first issue perpetrated precisely the crimes Jemas had denounced.
Marville
was a directionless string of satirical set pieces so filled with inside jokes that a text feature on the first page of each issue was necessary to spell out each reference. In the first issue, the Superboy-like KalAOL, son of Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, is sent back in time from 5002 A.D., where he meets a sexy redheaded cab driver named Mickey and a sexy brunette cop named Lucy. There were jabs at Ron Perelman, but also at Peter David. Iron Man showed up and, after bloodying a few bystanders, spouted, “I know, I destroyed the local economy. But you can pay Mexicans a dollar an hour and they still work like N—” at which point he was interrupted by the Black Panther: “People would think poorly of you if you said a bad word.” Spider-Man and Daredevil’s old enemy the Kingpin turned out to be Spike Lee in a Malcolm X cap. The politics of
Marville
#1 might have been deemed offensively incendiary, if only they weren’t so bewildering. At its most coherent,
Marville
#1 simply came off as an extended screed against superhero comics and the culture that had grown around them.
*
Worst of all was the cover, which uncomfortably melded Marvel’s post–Comics Code embrace of prurience with its interest in the teen market. The front of the first issue prominently featured Mickey’s crotch, as she sat in the driver’s seat of her taxi, clad in a bikini and high heels. (She was a dead ringer for
Buffy
star Sarah Michelle Gellar.) On the next issue’s cover, she appeared at a front door, smiling at the reader, her nakedness barely hidden by the housewarming gifts that filled her arms: pizza, a six-pack, video games, and porn on VHS.
Meanwhile, within the actual pages of
Marville
, a godlike being towed KalAOL, Mickey, and Lucy through the ages, leading Platonic dialogues about the relative merits of creationism and evolution. During parts of these lectures, they all skinny-dipped. In the sixth issue, KalAOL returned to the twenty-first century and pitched a comic-book executive on the series itself. “This thing,” the executive finally said, “will never sell.”
“Because I’m president of Marvel,” Jemas wrote in an open letter on the issue’s last page, “I could ignore the bean counters and publish Marville without regard for minimum sales projections and margin requirements. But that’s just me. Let’s talk about you.” With this, he announced he was bringing back the Epic line, not as a creator-owned imprint, but as “Marvel’s
Project Greenlight
,” an open-submission contest for novices. A seventh issue of
Marville
was published, but there wasn’t a story, just twenty-five pages of text: Jemas’s storytelling advice and rules for submissions.
Marville
only lasted six months, but the dreadful and bizarre legacy of its front covers continued. A cover for
Thunderbolts
, which featured a
Fight Club
–like network of villainous wrestlers, depicted a young woman, glistening, covered in bruises and smiling, sitting on the floor of a gym shower. Along the top ran the words “Bling-Bling • Booty • Boxing • Bars” (Jemas pushed his editors to adopt the attention-grabbing cover lines of magazines like
Cosmopolitan
and
Maxim
). Another series,
NYX
, was about young mutants on the street, in the tradition of Larry Clark’s
Kids
; the young teenage girl on the cover of the first issue fingered her bikini strap, a pacifier hanging from her parted lips. And
Trouble
, which relaunched the Epic line, made a bid to revive romance comics—by imagining adolescent, sexually active versions of Peter Parker’s Aunt May and Uncle Ben.
T
o the outside eye, it may have seemed that Bill Jemas had a free hand to do whatever he liked—but that would be discounting Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad. Perlmutter was the most hands-on owner Marvel ever had, as the employees were reminded repeatedly. A conference-calling executive might be interrupted from his negotiations by an angry Perlmutter, waving a thirty-dollar invoice in his face, asking why so much money was being spent. “He used to wander the hallways and stand in your doorway,” recalled one editor, “and stare at you until you got uncomfortable and then he’d leave. He always had a notebook in his hand, like he was writing notes about you.” Once, when Perlmutter heard that some employees were involved in a Fantasy Football league, the staff returned from a meeting to find all computers confiscated. Social, frivolous lunchtime activities—a half hour of watching television, or playing Dungeons & Dragons—were banned from the offices.
For a while, Jemas held sway with the Israeli boss, even bypassing the CEO in the chain of command. “Bill reported to Peter Cuneo,” recalled one observer, “but it was just a façade for the investors. Bill really reported to Ike. They screamed at each other, but Ike listened to him for some reason. ‘He’s smart,’ Ike would say to me, maybe because he stood up to him.”
But Perlmutter’s longtime ally Avi Arad, who was trying to put together movie deals on the West Coast, had an agenda that was often at cross-purposes with Jemas’s chance-taking. Arad felt like he was stuck on damage-control duty with Hollywood stars who’d gotten eyefuls of over-the-top blood and guts. Michelle Pfeiffer walked into his office and told him she wouldn’t take her son, an
X-Men
fan, into comic-book stores because of the gratuitous violence. George Clooney pulled out of talks to portray Nick Fury after he laid his hands on the issue in which the hero choked an enemy soldier with his own intestines.
Arad began paying closer attention to the comic books; he and Jemas were increasingly at each other’s throats. Occasionally, when a MAX series about an old character—Deathlok, say, or Shanna the She-Devil—was scrapped at the last moment, the scuttlebutt would be that the envelope-pushing content had been deemed a threat to already-in-the-works movie deals. Marvel’s plans to feature a back-from-the-dead Princess Di in
X-Statix
caused outrage in the British press, but some claimed that it was Arad’s displeased Hollywood friends who ultimately nixed the issue.
“Publishing was where it all started, and it was great source,” Arad said. “You had readymade storyboards to look at, to understand how to lay out stories. But the big deal for the company was merchandising—everything from cereals to shirts to videogames to shoes, you name it. That’s where the serious revenues were coming from.”
If the comic books damaged the brand, it would all come crashing down.
A
s his conflicts with Arad mounted, Jemas also increasingly sparred with staffers, who complained that he was quick-tempered and prone to shifting mandates. “Bill was the smartest guy in the room in most rooms he went into,” said Tom Brevoort. “But as the success got greater, Bill started to think he was the smartest guy in every room.” When the writer of
The Fantastic Four
resisted the idea of moving the group to the suburbs and giving them day jobs, Jemas took him, and the artist, off the title. Then he typed up a two-page treatment and hired a playwright to take over.