Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (7 page)

The grand melodrama was offset by Lee’s snappy patter, Ditko’s stunning costume design, and, once again, the primary-color palette choices of Stan Goldberg, who selected for Spider-Man’s costume a combination of cherry red and dark cobalt (in deliberate contrast to the more vivacious azure of the Fantastic Four). None of these details mattered to Goodman, who canceled
Amazing Fantasy
immediately.

But readers responded ecstatically to the issue, and the character got its own title—
The Amazing Spider-Man
—by the end of the year. There remained an off-kilter gloom to Parker’s world, and when he wasn’t worrying about his Aunt May’s health, or earning some money to help her pay bills, his face often conveyed the bitterness of an outcast who’s finally gained some power, an I’ll-show-them madness in his eyes. He became a freelance photographer for the
Daily Bugle
, snapping shots of his alter ego in action; despite the “great responsibility” line, Spider-Man’s early crime-fighting adventures were driven more by the promise of lucrative photo ops than by any do-gooder impulse. (Alas, these pictures would inevitably be twisted into propaganda against him by
Bugle
publisher J. Jonah Jameson, who’d embarked on a campaign against the “public menace” of Spider-Man.) The moments in which Parker is receiving payment are among the few that Ditko gives him a smile. At least when Bruce Banner became the Hulk, he was issued a reprieve from self-reflection. But Peter Parker’s problems and Spider-Man’s problems became one, as evidenced by a litany of neurosis-flooded thought balloons. After one misunderstanding causes a scuffle with police officers, he runs home through the abandoned, shadowy city streets. “Nothing turns out right . . . (sob) . . . I wish I had never gotten my super powers!”

All of this was balanced, brilliantly and precariously, with breezy acrobatic action sequences. Ditko’s rendering of athleticism was quite different from Kirby’s, more about gymnastic dodging than knockout punches, but it was just as exciting. Lee’s brilliant touch was to have Parker deliver a nonstop parade of corny jokes when he was in the Spider-Man costume: a convincing manifestation of obsessive nervous thinking, yes, but more importantly an effective mood-lightener. Despite the taunting teenage jeers, empty wallet, ailing relative, hostile workplace, and criminal threats,
The Amazing Spider-Man
managed to be a whole lot of fun.

Superheroes were now regularly sweeping out the odd, neglected corners of the line.
Strange Tales
was taken over by solo adventures of the Human Torch; on the very same day that
Linda Carter, Student Nurse
was replaced on the schedule by
Amazing Spider-Man,
the last of the monster books,
Tales of Suspense
, got a new cover star: Iron Man. Tony Stark didn’t have crippling self-esteem issues, or problems paying rent, or a tough time talking to girls. He was a womanizing industrialist with military contracts and a mustache. Wounded and kidnapped by Wong-Chu, the “Red Guerrilla Tyrant,” Stark is ordered to develop a weapon for the communist enemy. Instead he constructs a metal suit that will keep his failing heart in operation, and also serve as armor in which he can escape. Kirby designed a round and clunky gray heap; by the time Don Heck drew the story, it was equipped with suction cups, jets, transistor-powered magnets, and drills but not a lot of aesthetic appeal. Steve Ditko would soon streamline the armor, and a red-and-yellow color scheme would improve the look considerably. The character of Tony Stark would later improve as well, but for now his most compelling problem was that of an oversexed playboy who “can never appear bare-chested” because of the mechanical plate over his heart.

Don Heck became the regular
Iron Man
artist; Kirby just didn’t have enough time. “The poor guy only has two hands, and can only draw with one!” Lee wrote to a fan. “I like to have him start as many strips as possible, to get them off on the right foot—but he cannot physically keep ’em all up—in fact, I sometimes wonder how he does as much as he does do.”

“E
nough of that ‘Dear Editor’ jazz from now on!” blared the letters column in
Fantastic Four
#10. “Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (that’s us!) read every letter personally, and we like to feel that we know you and that you know us!” Thus were planted the seeds for Lee’s most important non-super-powered characters: the merry members of the mythical Marvel Bullpen. There
had
been real bullpens, of course—first at the Empire State Building, and then again here at 655 Madison, though that was already five years in the past, before Stan got shuffled off into the corner, crowded in between file cabinets. Now Lee began to paint a picture of a utopian workplace, in which all the jolly artists cracked jokes while they worked away under one happy roof. (Doctor Doom even visited “the studio of Kirby and Lee, on Madison Avenue,” in that same issue of
The Fantastic Four
, crashing a plotting session and knocking them out with sleeping gas.) In reality, Kirby only came into the offices about once a week. He worked from a varnished-pine room in the basement of his Long Island home, with a bookshelf of Shakespeare and science fiction for inspiration and a ten-inch black-and-white television for company—and the door shut, to keep the cigar smoke from billowing out to the rest of the house. His name certainly wasn’t on any Madison Avenue door. “That was a lot of stuff that Stan Lee put into magazines, but the artists were all over the island,”
Iron Man
artist Don Heck told an interviewer. “I could go into the office two times this week, and somebody else could go in two other times . . . you just don’t cross paths.” But Lee’s spirit of cheer was genuine. Things were looking brighter.

“I would see Stan being very convivial out of the corner of my eye, seeming to have fun with his work,” said Bruce Jay Friedman, who had watched as the comic kingdom had been stripped from Lee in the late 1950s. “He was sort of like a big kid. I had no idea there was a legend building right in front of my eyes.”

Still, Lee needed help. “We seem to exist from crisis to crisis,” he wrote in private correspondence with a fan. “You can’t possibly imagine how rushed we are. It isn’t a question of can’t our artists do better (or can’t I write better)—it’s more a question of how well can we do in the brief time allotted to us? Some day, in some far distant Nirvana, perhaps we will have a chance to produce a strip without a frantic deadline hanging over us.” Soon Sol Brodsky, who’d been a production hand for Atlas Comics, returned, as the de facto production manager. “My job was mainly talking to the artists and the writers and telling them how I wanted the stuff done,” Lee recalled. “Sol did everything else—corrections, making sure everything looked right, making sure things went to the engraver, and he also talked to the printer. . . . Little by little, we built things back up again.”

Lee began sharing more of the writing duties, often with old friends. “Martin Goodman started pressuring Lee to have other writers do some of the stories,” said Leon Lazarus, an ex-Timely staffer who was himself recruited to script an issue of
Tales to Astonish
. “He became concerned that Stan would have too much leverage over him, and he worried about what would happen if Stan ever decided to leave the company.”

At the end of 1962, Lee moved younger brother Larry back over to the westerns, and assigned “Iron Man,” “Thor,” and “Ant-Man” scripts to other veterans. “The Human Torch” was passed like a hot potato, finally landing with an artist credited as Joe Carter.

Joe Carter’s real name, it turned out, was Jerry Siegel. The co-creator of Superman had been reduced in the late 1950s to pleading for assignments from Superman’s copyright holder, DC Comics, and toiling under the abusive watch of editor Mort Weisinger for little pay. (According to industry legend, Weisinger once said to the meek Siegel, who was seated in his office, “I have to go to the can. Do you mind if I use your script to wipe my ass?”) In the early 1960s, Siegel started making noise about a Superman lawsuit, and, bracing for DC’s wrath, began looking elsewhere for employment. How could Lee
not
give work to one of the creators of the industry?

Unfortunately, Siegel’s earnest, old-fashioned scripts didn’t meet Lee’s standards. Nor, it seemed, did anyone else’s. Lee started seizing back “Iron Man” and “Thor” and “Ant-Man.” Despite the substantial plotting contributions of Kirby and Heck and Ditko, when it came to the narration and dialogue, he trusted only himself.

Desperate to catch up on deadlines, Lee got Goodman’s approval to hire George Roussos, who could ink two dozen pages in a day, for a staff position. But Roussos, wary of Goodman’s hiring-and-layoff cycles, passed. Lee had better luck finding an assistant—a “gal Friday,” in his words—to at least help with the administrative work. In March 1963, a temp agency sent over Florence Steinberg, a button-cute, bouffant-sporting twenty-five-year-old in pearls and white gloves who’d recently arrived in New York from Boston. Steinberg, a former art history major, was every bit as upbeat and outgoing as Lee—she’d been student council president in high school and later volunteered for campaigns of both Ted and Bobby Kennedy. Now stationed at a desk next to Lee, she answered fan mail (hundreds of pieces arrived every day), called freelancers, and shipped pages to the printer for sixty-five dollars a week, while he sat atop a stool and pounded away on his typewriter, or greeted visiting artists for story conferences.

Their office mates at Magazine Management, including future
Godfather
novelist Mario Puzo, scoffed at how frantically Lee and Steinberg and Brodsky were starting to work. But for Lee, something magical was happening. As the breakneck pace of new character introductions continued—Steve Ditko single-handedly developed the arrogant-surgeon-turned-benevolent-magician Doctor Strange for a backup feature in
Strange Tales
*
—the existing characters began to generate synergistic relationships with one another. A two-page sequence in
Amazing Spider-Man
#1 showed the web-spinner attempting to join the Fantastic Four (he was greatly disappointed to learn that group membership didn’t include a salary); the same month, the Hulk (whose own title had just been canceled)
*
showed up in
The Fantastic Four
#12. Doctor Doom battled Spider-Man; the Human Torch spoke at an assembly at Peter Parker’s high school; and Doctor Strange ended up in a hospital under the care of Dr. Don Blake, the alter ego of Thor. When Ant-Man showed up in
Fantastic Four
#16, accompanied by an alluring new heroine named the Wasp, a footnote explained all: “Meet the Wasp, Ant-Man’s new partner-in-peril, starting with issue #44 of
Tales to Astonish
!”
*
It was canny cross-promotion, sure, but more important, it had narrative effects that would become a Marvel Comics touchstone: the idea that these characters shared a world, that the actions of each had repercussions on the others, and that each comic was merely a thread of one Marvel-wide mega-story.

It all set the stage for
The Avengers
, which gathered an all-star team of Marvel’s marquee names (except for Spider-Man, fated to remain a sulking lone wolf). Iron Man, Ant-Man, the Wasp, Thor, and Hulk joined forces to defeat Thor’s enemy Loki, and decided that they should get together more often—for an issue every month, to be precise. “The Avengers are on the march,” wrote Lee, “and a new dimension is added to the Marvel galaxy of stars!” It wasn’t just bluster. Bringing these heroes together forced Lee to further differentiate their individual personalities and voices, and allowed Kirby to show off his skill with complex visual choreography, balancing multiple characters within the confines of single panels.

Shockingly, Lee and Kirby managed to roll out another super-team comic the same month, with all-new characters.
The X-Men
followed the adventures of a group of super-powered teenage mutants who were enrolled at the private school of Professor Charles Xavier, a wheelchair-bound psychic. Under Xavier’s leadership, the valiant but inexperienced X-Men—Scott Summers, the self-serious and laser-eyed Cyclops; Hank McCoy, the acrobatic, simian-shaped whiz-kid Beast; Bobby Drake, the jocky, clowny, snowball-generating Iceman; Jean Grey, the redheaded telekinetic Marvel Girl; and Warren Worthington III, the feather-winged scion Angel—used their abnormal abilities to halt the schemes of bad-apple mutants like the metal-commanding Magneto. On their downtime, the guys practiced combat maneuvers, gathered among bongos and beatniks at Greenwich Village’s Coffee A-Go-Go, or panted at an endlessly patient Jean Grey.
*
But despite the banter that streamed between its adolescent heroes,
The X-Men
was the bête noire of
The Avengers
—like Spider-Man, the mutants were viewed with suspicion by the very society they fought to protect, an angle that became even more pointed as time went on. “Look at the crowd! They’re livid with rage! Just like Professor X always warned us . . . normal humans fear and distrust anyone with super-mutant powers!” cried Angel in
X-Men
#5, which was written shortly after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by white supremacists. A few issues later, after the Beast saved the life of a young boy, a mob chased him down and tore his clothes anyway. Was it a coincidence that the nonviolence-preaching Professor Xavier and his archenemy, the by-any-means-necessary warrior Magneto, lined up so neatly as metaphors for Martin Luther King and Malcolm X? “Remember, we are homo superior,” scolded Magneto, plucking the Nietzschean term from an old science-fiction novel. “We are born to rule the earth. . . . Why
should
we love the homo sapiens? They hate us—fear us because of our superior power!” If the casually liberal Lee was laying out for readers where he stood on bigotry, it was also clear that he felt there were appropriate limits to the reaction to that bigotry: the hard-line Magneto and his protégés labeled themselves the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. “By any means necessary” was hardly a superhero catchphrase.