Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (6 page)
That week, in need of new material for Goodman’s science-fiction and fantasy titles, a still-shaken Lee got in touch with two artists who’d taken assignments a couple of years earlier, briefly, right before Timely lost its distributor and work dried up. Steve Ditko, a quiet thirty-year-old who’d recently recovered from tuberculosis, got a phone call at the midtown studio he shared with fetish artist Eric Stanton. There was work again; did he want to come back?
Lee also spoke to Jack Kirby. Their paths had taken them in vastly different directions since Kirby left Timely for DC in 1941 with Joe Simon. World War II brought Kirby to Omaha Beach less than two weeks after D-Day, where bodies were still lying in heaps; to the edges of the Siege of Bastogne; even, he’d later recall, to the liberation of a small concentration camp. After the war, a reunited Simon and Kirby moved into houses across the street from one another in Long Island, and bounced around from publisher to publisher, working in the various genres that flitted in and out of vogue.
*
They did westerns, crime tales, and space adventures; with
Young Romance
, they invented the romance comic book, and when Marvel revived Captain America, they produced
The Fighting American
, a pointed rip-off of their earlier creation.
*
In 1954, they launched their own comics company, called Mainline—perfect timing for a small publisher to be wiped out amid the furor over comic-book delinquency. Simon & Kirby then ended their fifteen-year partnership, and Kirby went back to DC and cranked out
Green Arrow
and an adventure feature called
Challengers of the Unknown
. By the time Stan Lee was looking for material in 1958, Kirby was also starting work on a syndicated science-fiction comic strip called
Sky Masters
. He was flush with work, but, never having shaken the habits of an impoverished youth, Kirby always wanted to line up more.
The six- and eight-page tales that populated interchangeably finger-wiggling titles like
Journey
into Mystery
,
Tales of Suspense
, and
Tales to Astonish
were pure
Twilight Zone
in their twist-ending moral lessons. They featured contributions from several of Lee’s longtime stable of artists, but it was the collaborations with Ditko and Kirby that held clues about what was to come. Kirby delivered large-scale visions of awe-inspiring alien technology and brutish monsters, while Ditko depicted jittery, ambitious outcasts humbled by the consequences of their hubris and imprisoned by their own psyches. In both of their work, men endured excruciating scientific transformations and traumatic gains of knowledge that permanently separated them from the civilizations to which they’d once belonged.
Shortly after
Strange Worlds
and
Tales of Suspense
premiered, though, Kirby’s career hit obstacles. The DC editor who’d arranged the
Sky Masters
comic strip deal sued Kirby for not paying him the percentage that the contract stipulated. Although Kirby continued work on
Sky Masters
while the lawsuit played out, there would be no more work from DC. Joe Simon gave Kirby a few assignments when he edited a superhero line for Archie Comics in 1959, but after only a couple of months, Simon turned to advertising gigs for a steady paycheck. Kirby did not follow. “Jack never liked the advertising field,” said his wife, Roz. “I’m sure he could have gone into it, but he never liked it. His heart had always been with comics.” That left Kirby dependent on Stan Lee, his onetime errand boy, for work.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, while Lee had weathered the storms of the comics industry by holding tightly to Goodman’s ship, Kirby had earned top rates thanks to his track record and reputation as a guaranteed creator of hits. Now, with Lee’s titles on the wane, and Kirby’s disappearing connections, both of them had lost their sense of security.
Along with a few surviving western titles, much of Kirby’s output was now movie-matinee-style monsters with names like Monstrom and Titano and Groot and Krang and Droom. Lee would feed plots to his younger brother, Larry Lieber, who would then write them into scripts and send them to Kirby. With every successive cover, they became more hilarious in their repetition: it was always a clutch of tiny, high-tailing humans shrieking, falling down, and pointing fingers as they announced the mind-boggling danger that pursued them. “They warned us—but we didn’t believe Monstrom existed!” “Help! Save us! He’s alive! He’s coming! IT’S DROOM!”
“I would much rather have been drawing
Rawhide Kid
,” Kirby lamented. “But I did the monsters. We had Grottu and Kurrgo and it . . . it was a challenge to try to do something—anything with such ridiculous characters.” He described his fate as “shipwrecked at Marvel.”
Stan Lee felt the same way. “[Martin Goodman] goes by and he doesn’t even say hello to me,” he told one of his artists. “It’s like a ship sinking, and we’re the rats. And we’ve got to get off.”
T
he editors of
Men
and
Male
and
Stag
paid little attention to the guy toiling on funnybooks, sitting alone at his corner desk at 655 Madison Avenue. There was no staff surrounding Stan Lee any longer, just the handful of artists who dropped off finished pages, and the occasional visits from
Millie the Model
penciler Stan Goldberg, who would stop by to pitch in on production work. “It was basically him and I on all those books that came out,” Goldberg said of Lee. “Jack Kirby would come up, and if I didn’t catch him to have a bite to eat or something, he would run home.” The click and clack of Lee’s two-finger typing continued.
Martin Goodman’s fateful game of golf came in the spring of 1961. When Stan Lee rolled up his sleeves and went back to writing about superheroes once again—at the age of thirty-eight, and twenty years into a no-longer-promising career—nobody blinked.
T
he cover of
The Fantastic Four
#1 was nothing like the other superhero titles on the rack. There were no colorful costumes; the protagonists appeared small and helpless; a white background lent the whole scenario an unfinished look. The shakily rendered title logo looked almost like it had been drawn by a child. What it
did
resemble was the monster magazines that Stan and Jack had been churning out for Goodman. In fact, with its scaly skin, mouth agape, and right arm raised, the unnamed creature erupting from the city street and threatening the heroes could have been a relative of Orrgo the Unconquerable, the cover star of that same month’s
Strange Tale
s #90; the off-balance citizens scurrying away on each cover were identically panicky. Any special appeal of these new heroes was unclear. “I can’t turn invisible fast enough!” cried a well-coiffed blond woman in a pink blouse. “It’s time for The Thing to take a hand!” shouted an orange lump with his back to the reader. If you didn’t know (as you couldn’t possibly, yet) that the awkward man in the foreground had the ability to stretch his body as though it was rubber—just like Quality Comics’ old Plastic Man character—you might guess that Jack Kirby had simply never learned to draw elbows properly.
T
he inside of the comic was similarly shambolic, as though the narrative had been improvised. To a degree, it had been: in recent years, Lee had begun providing artists with mere plot synopses, rather than full scripts, to ease his workload and prevent a bottlenecking of the production schedule. As a result, the artists often determined the page-by-page pacing and plot details. When the penciled pages were returned to Lee, he would write the dialogue, sometimes covering up inconsistencies, and sometimes changing the intent of the artist. Over time, this would evolve into an effective conduit for creative synergy; in these early days, it could result in something like confused rambling.
On the opening page of
Fantastic Four
#1, a gray-templed man in a suit fires a flare gun, which gains the attention of most of the generically rendered Central City, but three people in particular: society girl Susan Storm, who turns invisible and sneaks out of afternoon tea; an unnamed figure who discards his trench coat, sunglasses, and fedora and rushes out of a Big and Tall Store, revealing himself to be an orange, clay-like behemoth; and teenaged Johnny Storm, Sue’s brother, who abandons his hot rod at a service station when he bursts into flames and flies away. They gather in the man’s apartment, and the action flashes back, jarringly . . .
The next panel shows the four gathered at an earlier date. Reed Richards, the gray-templed man, is arguing with a tough-talking bruiser named Benjamin Grimm about the prospect of piloting a ship into space. “Ben, we’ve got to take that chance,” insists Susan Storm, Richards’s fiancée, “unless we want the commies to beat us to it!” And so the four of them drive to the local rocket launchpad, and, “before the guard can stop them,” take off for the stars. Unfortunately, they’re bombarded by cosmic rays, and they make an emergency return to earth. At the rural crash-landing site, the heroes discover their new, radiated physiologies. What’s striking about this sequence is the feeling of horror, the absence of joy in becoming super-powered. “You’re (gasp) fading away!” someone yells at Sue Storm as her body slowly disappears. “He’s turned into a-a—some sort of a thing!” Sue shrieks of Ben, as he grows into an ochreous, bricky mass, angrily attacks Reed, and jealously vows to win Sue. And then she notices her morphing beloved, his body elongating wildly and rubberily. “Reed . . . not you, too!! Not you, too!” Ben is restrained just as Johnny’s body ignites with flame and he flies into the air.
Once they adjust to the transparency and the orange rockiness and the stretching and the immolation, their future is clear. “You don’t have to make a speech, big shot!” Ben says to Reed. “We understand. We’ve gotta use that power to help mankind, right?” Thus are born the Invisible Girl, the Thing, Mister Fantastic, and a new version of the Human Torch.
A shift back to the moment of that flare-gun summons provides an anticlimactic twelve-page adventure, involving atomic power plants that have sunken into the earth, thanks to the Mole Man and his army of “underground gargoyles” on Monster Isle. (One of these creatures is recognizable from the issue’s cover, but the city streets and bystanders are nowhere to be seen.) The energy of the artwork is undeniably special, but the roaring and snarling three-headed monsters are no longer where Lee’s or Kirby’s interests lie. We’re granted one last look at the creatures that might have been named Mongu or Sporr or Zzutak, before a rock slide seals them off forever and the Fantastic Four, and Marvel Comics, fly into the future.
T
he issue reached newsstands on August 8, 1961, the same week that East Germany began work on the Berlin Wall. The space-race themes couldn’t have been better timed: between the conception and publication of the comic, the Soviets had made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first man in space (although there were no reports of dangerous cosmic rays). Although sales figures wouldn’t come in for months, there was an immediate surge in reader mail—not the usual complaints about missing staples, but an engaged audience taken with the complicated characters. “We are trying (perhaps vainly?) to reach a slightly older, more sophisticated group,” Lee wrote in a private letter three weeks later. For the first time in years, it looked like Marvel had something special on its hands.
Lee and Kirby improved the comic with every subsequent issue, giving emphasis to the internal struggles of the dysfunctional team, especially Johnny Storm’s callow moodiness and Ben Grimm’s rage and self-pity (his occasional return to human form was always fleeting, a cruel tease to his hopes for normality). This misery was offset, though, with tricked-out secret headquarters and a sleek flying automobile called a FantasiCar. And although they remained unmasked (in another break from comic-book convention, they were going to keep their identities public), at the urging of letter-writing fans they soon had snappy blue uniforms. “Jack gave them this long underwear with the letter ‘4’ on their chest,” said Stan Goldberg, who designed the color schemes of the Marvel comics. “I made the ‘4’ blue and kept a little area around it white, and then when the villains came in—the villains get the burnt umbers, dark greens, purples, grays, things like that—they can bounce off it.” The blast of colorful heroics against a murky background world immediately set
Fantastic Four
apart from everything else on the newsstand.
There were immediate signs—a letters page, cliffhangers—that these characters would be sticking around, that Marvel was committed to seeing this through for a while. And soon
Fantastic Four
had company. Goodman canceled
Teen-Age Romance
to clear the way for
The Incredible Hulk
, a Nuclear Age updating of the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde story, and Marvel had its second superhero title of the 1960s. Again, the scientific frontiers of the Cold War were vital to the story: Dr. Bruce Banner was preparing to test a Gamma Bomb for the U.S. military when a reckless teenager named Rick Jones drove his convertible onto the desert testing site on a dare. Banner called for a delay on the test while he got Jones to safety, but a communist spy on the lab team proceeded anyway, bombarding Banner with radiation. The highlight of the story was the traumatic gamma-blast sequence, which made the Fantastic Four’s metamorphoses look relaxing in comparison: “The world seems to stand still, trembling on the brink of infinity, as his ear-splitting scream fills the air,” Lee wrote, over Kirby’s panels of Banner in a catatonic state, mouth agape and eyes filled with terror, as hours passed and medical professionals tried to bring him back from the edge of insanity. Later, as night fell, Banner’s body grew and turned gray, and he began to wreck guns, and jeeps, and all prospects for his own happiness. As the Hulk, he would be relentlessly stalked by General Thunderbolt Ross, whose military-man bullheadedness positioned the monster as an antiauthoritarian rebel. Hip-talking Rick Jones, meanwhile, spent the early issues as Banner’s one friend, locking him up at night like he was a violent drunk on detox watch. It all added up to pure misery for the title character, filled with blackouts, fear, guilt, and unrequited love for the general’s daughter Betty. You could call the Hulk a superhero, but what was he saving? And from whom?
Kirby and Lee staked out more gradations on the hero-villain continuum. In
Fantastic Four
#4, Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, returned for the first time since 1954. In this new context, with romantic designs on Sue Storm and hatred for the rest of the human race, Namor teetered close to villainy. The next issue introduced Victor Von Doom, an old classmate of Reed Richards, who, after being scarred in a scientific experiment, trekked to Tibet to learn the “forbidden secrets of black magic and sorcery” and then took over his Eastern European homeland of Latveria. Doctor Doom was insufferably pompous, but along with his haughty manner came a sort of honorable code; he always kept his word. When Doom and the Sub-Mariner briefly teamed for an uneasy alliance in
Fantastic Four
#6, the Marvel landscape suddenly had some neat shadings: the bickering protagonists versus a tempestuous Byronic sparkplug and a Faustian archenemy.
In early 1962, as the Hulk and Sub-Mariner made their way toward newsstands, Lee and Kirby worked out three more heroes for the summer, each of which would headline a title previously devoted to monsters:
Journey into Mystery
would spotlight their take on Thor, the Norse god of thunder. In the Marvel version, lame physician Don Blake was vacationing in Scandinavia and found a walking stick that, when struck against the ground, became the hammer of legend—and transformed Blake into the long-haired titan with a winged helmet, weather-controlling abilities, and an Old English patois of
verily
s and
methinks
es.
Tales to Astonish
, meanwhile, would be the home of Ant-Man, alter ego of Henry Pym, yet another scientist driven into superheroics by the communist threat. Pym developed a serum that shrank him to a height of six inches, and an oversize helmet that allowed him, via electronic impulses, to command . . . ants.
But the third character—intended for
Amazing Fantasy
, the worst seller of the bunch—had problems. When Lee asked Steve Ditko to ink the first six penciled pages of Kirby’s latest feature, Ditko pointed out that the concept—a teenaged orphan with a magic ring that transforms him into an adult superhero—was a retread of the Fly, a character that Kirby had already done for Harvey Comics in 1959. Lee decided that some changes were in order. With the deadlines approaching, he typed up synopses for the Thor and Ant-Man features, and handed them over to his younger brother, Larry Lieber, to write out as full scripts. Then he gave his full attention to the revised
Amazing Fantasy
character. In the new synopsis, a radioactive spider bite replaced the ring as the source of power, and there was no transformation to adulthood for the meek teenager. Instead of giving it to Jack Kirby, Lee asked Ditko, even though Ditko’s moody, almost foreboding style hardly seemed to cry out for teenage superheroics.
A
mazing Fantasy
#15, featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man, reached newsstands in June 1962. It strayed far from superhero conventions, further even than
The Fantastic Four
had. Unlike Kirby, whose heroes had a stocky majesty, Ditko populated his stories with rail-thin, squinting malcontents, placing the protagonist, Peter Parker, in a constellation of sneers, jabbing fingers, and angry eyebrows. On the very first page, Parker—tie, vest, big round eyeglasses, and tightly combed hair—is ostracized by his sweater-letter classmates, a nightmare vision of high school social life in which Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica have teamed up against one four-eyed weakling. Parker’s friends are limited to his elderly Uncle Ben and Aunt May, who dotes on him like he was a small child, and his piles of textbooks. After the science-lab spider bite gives him great strength and agility, and the ability to scale walls (his “spider-sense” intuition will come later), Parker enters a wrestling contest to earn some scratch. (He wrestles with a mask on, because his adolescent insecurities remain—“What if I fail? I don’t want to be a laughing stock! I-I’ll find some way to disguise myself!”—but makes quick work of his bulky opponent.) His feats land him an appearance on a TV show, for which he sews his own red-and-blue costume, complete with underarm webbing, spider insignias on the chest and back, and a white-eyed balaclava hood. Clothes, however, do not make the hero: after the broadcast, a criminal runs past Parker in the halls of the studio, and he shrugs off the opportunity to intervene. He’s looking out for number one—until he comes home one evening to find that a burglar has murdered his saintly Uncle Ben. Parker, dressed as Spider-Man, tracks down and captures the thug before realizing it’s the same criminal he allowed to escape from the studio. Rattled and guilt-ridden, he finally understands his fate. “With great power,” Lee’s narration tells the reader, “there must also be great responsibility!”