Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (75 page)

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In his autobiography, Lee remembered it this way: “In a moment of inspiration, I marched the whole gang out of the office one day to a recording studio about five blocks away . . . we made a record for our fans, ad-libbing the whole thing.”

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“The creator stands on his own judgment,” Rand wrote in
The Fountainhead
. “The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks, the parasite copies. The creator produces, the parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of Man. The creator requires independence—he neither serves nor rules. He deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice. The parasite seeks power. He wants to bind all men together in common action and common slavery.”

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Soon afterward, Kirby conceived a contemporary, superspy version of Nick Fury. Fury’s existence in two different time frames was considerately explained by giving him a super-serum that kept him young. He thus joined Captain America in the ranks of World War II veterans who’d found a way to battle the aging process, a gimmick that allowed Greatest Generation heroism to carry on into the 1960s; the years of experience lent the characters an additional gravitas.

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This sent a message of unlimited possibility: in the Marvel Universe, team lineups could change, and criminals could reform.

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Lee was hardly blowing off the writing. Roy Thomas saw him the Monday morning after the November 9, 1965, blackout and learned that he’d typed ten pages of
Thor
by candlelight. Lee hadn’t been able to get to scripting
Sgt. Fury
that weekend, though—which is how Thomas ended up taking over the title.

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The
Voice
’s Sally Kempton packed in an impressive amount of Psych 101 jargon, a sure sign that the characters were matters of serious discussion. “Spiderman has a terrible identity problem, a marked inferiority complex, and a fear of women,” she wrote. “He is anti-social, castration-ridden, racked with Oedipal guilt, and accident-prone.” Mention was also made of “phallic-looking skyscraper towers” and Peter Parker’s submission toward Aunt May.

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Steve Krantz, who sold the syndication rights to television stations (and foreign markets such as Japan, South America, and Australia), also claimed credit for coming across the comics on newsstands. Krantz told Stan Lee biographer Tom Spurgeon that the Goodmans secured a percentage of profits, and that “Marvel made a great deal of money on the basis of the shows I produced.”

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“Baron Mordo” was an enemy of Doctor Strange.

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Ditko now had a free hand to insert Randian platitudes in his comics without Goodman and Lee’s interference. A sample, from
Mysterious Suspense
#1: “The greatest battle a person must constantly fight is to uphold proper principles, known truths, against everyone he deals with! A truth cannot be defeated!”

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“Cut off a limb, and two more shall take its place” was HYDRA’s pledge, a concise summary of guerrilla terrorism’s chilling power.

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In 1966 Bill Everett, who hadn’t worked for Marvel since the
Daredevil
#1 fiasco, was suddenly flush with work from Martin Goodman. He was first sated with a regular assignment on the Hulk (in
Tales to Astonish
); when Ditko departed Marvel, Everett was immediately offered work on Dr. Strange (in
Strange Tales
) and received a loan from Goodman that, according to Roy Thomas, “wasn’t going to have to be paid back, so he wouldn’t sue.”

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The rights to the Fantastic Four had been otherwise secured. Spider-Man was originally going to be a part of
Marvel Super Heroes
, but apparently Marvel and Grantay-Lawrence decided to save him for bigger things—after storyboards were drawn up, he was replaced by the Sub-Mariner.

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The side-by-side pictures of Sgt. Fury and Captain America on the back of Captain Action’s toy packaging were soon appropriated as anti-imperialist images in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film,
La Chinoise
.

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Wally Wood, reportedly, was still stinging from his Marvel experience. He told stories—somewhat unlikely stories—about Stan Lee sitting on a file cabinet and lording above freelancers while he threw their checks down to them.

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Syd Shores, the onetime Captain America artist, was supposed to relieve Kirby on the title in 1967, after a brief period of inking over Kirby’s pencils. But Lee was unsatisfied with Shores’s Marvel Method attempts, and Kirby was once again put in the role of pep talker and mentor to his own peers.

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There may have been some internal hand-wringing about the Black Panther. The first version of the cover had shown the Panther’s black skin; the published version did not. Previews in other titles that month suggest Marvel couldn’t decide how much of him to show—or how to characterize him. “Don’t miss the mystery villain of the month!” read the ads, which blocked out the cover art. (Once Marvel committed to a policy of representing black characters, however, change came quickly. The cover of the following month’s romance comic
Modeling with Millie
proudly introduced a black British model named Jill Jerold to its cast.)

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In one issue of
Strange Adventures
, Adams tweaked his peer in a panel of outrageous wavy lines that spelled out, when the comic was tilted,
Hey! A Jim Steranko effect!

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The question about Captain America in Vietnam had actually been posed to Kirby, during a March 3, 1967, joint interview with Mike Hodel on New York radio station WBAI. “That’s Stan Lee’s department, and he can answer that,” Kirby deferred. “The editor always has the last word on that.”

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The author of the
New Guard
article, twenty-two-year-old David Nolan, would go on to cofound the Libertarian Party.

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Lee’s panic was contagious. John Buscema decided to break from the Kirby style for
Silver Surfer
#4, and swelled with pride when he turned in the pages. “People were congratulating me on this particular issue. Stan tore the book to pieces! He started with the first page: ‘Well, okay, not bad.’ On and on and on. Every second page he ripped to shreds. ‘This is not good, this should be done this way . . .’ I walked out of that damn office of his; I didn’t know which way was up or down.” Demoralized, Buscema wandered into John Romita’s office and asked, “John, how the hell do you do comics?”

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“Everything we felt made Marvel Marvel were the things that they felt made the stories not really suitable for the very immature television audiences,” Lee said in 1968. “We just moved away from it, said, ‘You’ve got the show; put it out any way you want,’ so they’ve been writing their own stories, which I don’t watch.”

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The irony, of course, is that the dialogue was by Lee and not by the voiceless Kirby.

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This project was ultimately abandoned when the Marvel higher-ups deemed its politics too radical.

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Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, who’d been shoving every kind of social commentary into
Green Lantern/Green Arrow
for the past year, responded by giving Green Lantern’s former sidekick, Speedy, a heroin habit. At the New York Creation Con that year, Gerry Conway promised an upcoming Sub-Mariner story in which the hero “meets up with a New Orleans hooker, goes into a New Orleans cathouse, and does the whole routine with the pimp there. We felt that that was a little strong, so we changed that into something that’s cleaner . . . they’re all drug addicts now. The Comics Code accepted that.”

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The mimeographed fanzine
Newfangles
reported that Lee had been letting slip to college audiences that “when his contract is up in three years, no one will see anything of him but dust clouds.”

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The Black Widow’s new costume, designed by John Romita, was based on Tarpe Mills’s early 1940s comic strip heroine and series
Miss Fury
, which Timely had reprinted.

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Where Marvel had once revealed campus riots to be the result of dastardly plans by the Kingpin (
Amazing Spider-Man
#68, January 1969) or Modok (
Captain America
, December 1969), now racial discord was also explained away by supervillains. Both the Sons of the Serpent (
Avengers
73, February 1970) and the Red Skull (
Captain America
143, November 1971) fomented race riots by disguising themselves as militant blacks. The disenchanted-peace-activist-turned-supervillain Firebrand (“anything the man puts up, I’m ready to tear down!”;
Iron Man
27, July 1970) wore a raised-fist emblem and stoked anger in the ghettos. He, too, was later revealed to be white.

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“To label it as another ‘Marvel Magazine,’ ” Kurtzman wrote in a June 22, 1972, letter to Lee, “to advertise it as one of a line—can you imagine what it would have done to the uniqueness of Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated if their covers had been labeled ‘a TIME magazine’?”

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Friedrich left New York after his upstairs neighbor was strangled in her apartment by serial killer Rodney Alcala, and Friedrich’s wife suggested that a move back to Missouri might be in order.

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Among the 1973 highlights, thanks to arrangements with two different merchandising reps: bubble bath, paint-by-numbers sets, Halloween costumes, walkie-talkies, calendars, rubber balloons, and bicycle horns.

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The new attitude was reflected in the existing titles as well. In
Daredevil
#91, a group of women voice their admiration of Black Widow: “Now there’s a woman with her own mind,” they cheer, “
definitely
the Gloria Steinem of the jump-suit set!”

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Marvel was soon back to its old tricks: in
My Love
#25 (September, 1973, “No Man Is My Master,” written by Lee) a young woman named Bev explores feminism but realizes she misses being condescended to; after dating respectful milquetoasts, she returns to a louse who bosses her around and actually utters the words “Me, Tarzan—you, Jane!” In the last panel, she says, “And that’s the way it was meant to be!” The final caption reads “The Start—of something lovely!” A 1974 internal memo vowed to use a noncomic format “should we ever again attempt to reach the female market in the future.”

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There may have been a credibility deficiency to begin with: Stan and Romita were soon (very quietly) working on a proposal for
Playboy
that included characters named Lord Peckerton and Clitanna the High Priestess; the first issue was to open with a shot of the ruler of “a sensual empire” using “chicks as footstools.”
Playboy
, trying to compete with
Penthouse
’s “Wicked Wanda,” demanded more S&M. Romita balked, and Stan followed him in solidarity. “That’s the only time I can point to Stan passing up a chance to make money,” Romita later said.

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At Marvel, militant feminists served the same purpose as black militants had a few years before: destructive forces that endangered the achievements of moderates. Compare the words of the Cat in 1973’s
Marvel Team-Up
#8 (“If she isn’t stopped, she’ll destroy everything women have fought for . . . the precious little we’ve gained!”) to Falcon’s in 1970’s
Captain America
#126: “They’re like a black version of the Klan! All they preach is hate Whitey! They can set our progress back a hundred years!”

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Blade was born in an English brothel and trained in hand-to-hand combat by a jazz trumpeter.

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In 1973, Roy Thomas offered one of these positions to nineteen-year-old Gary Groth, who would go on to become one of Marvel’s most outspoken critics as the editor of the
Comics Journal
. The idea of Groth as a Marvel employee brings to mind the apocryphal story of a young Fidel Castro trying out as a pitcher for the Washington Senators.

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Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl had welcomed their son into the world in 1968, a year after Sue Storm’s pregnancy was first revealed. Such anomalous domesticity only made
The Fantastic Four
seem that much more exotic.

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This caused further trouble and embarrassment: Stan Lee, the public face of the company, could only respond, “Howard the Who?”

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They also hinted at plans to realign the political thrust of
Iron Man
: announced that Stark Industries would shift “priorities from weaponry to ecological research.”

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In a story that appeared in
Luke Cage, Hero for Hire
#8, Englehart said that artist George Tuska—who would ignore Englehart’s subplots and send back artwork with the explanation “I didn’t feel like drawing that”—tricked him into referring to Luke Cage as a nice “schvartze” boy. Englehart didn’t realize that
schvartze
was a derogatory Yiddish term for a black person. An awkward apology appeared three issues later. “What can I tell you?” Englehart shrugs. “I’m from Indiana.”