Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (76 page)

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With Shang-Chi and
Son of Satan’s
Damian Hellstrom, post-Vietnam Marvel writers replaced Stan Lee’s longing orphans (Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, Johnny Storm) with righteous Oedipal anger.

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Not everyone was enamored of the lysergic-intensive lifestyle: Gerry Conway said he feared for his sanity when he tripped with Englehart and Weiss, and that one member of the acid coterie—he won’t say who—“went around the bend” permanently. “He was dating an ex-girlfriend of mine who told me, ‘All he wants to do is drop acid and fuck! He won’t take me anywhere!’ Later, he did my horoscope at a party, decided he was my enemy, and that was it.”

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Perhaps feeling he had nothing to lose, in his final issue Englehart included a character that looked and talked exactly like the original inspiration for Shang-Chi: David Carradine’s Caine.

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“The story,” said Jim Shooter, “was that when Roy left, Len and Marv went together to Stan and told him that everybody hated Gerry, and if he hired Gerry, everyone would quit. And Stan decided, for whatever reason, to go with that theory, and he hired Len as editor in chief. And Gerry quit and went to DC. Stan finally thought it was time to fulfill the old promise.”

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“Whatever anybody else did was meaningless,” Mantlo told
Comics Feature
. “Your job was to come on to a book, and create it out of whole cloth. Marvel history meant nothing, but not
because
of Marvel history—just that you were so intent on being better than the past writer, or showing how stupid the past writer was, that you went to great lengths to negate everything he said. . . . Whoever took over was starting all over.”

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“I never liked Mantis,” said Dave Cockrum. “Most of the Marvel staff at the time hated Mantis’ guts. I think it was mostly that ‘this one’ crap. The one thing I did like about her was the skirt of the costume. In the
Giant Size Avengers
I drew her leaping about, and occasionally showed just a glimpse of her ass. . . . Mantis, however, didn’t wear underwear.” When Englehart received Cockrum’s pages, he claimed that they didn’t reflect his instructions, cut up the pages, and rearranged the panels to his liking.

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The eighth issue of Marvel’s in-house fanzine,
Foom,
quoted Conway as saying, “I was forced to bring back Gwen Stacy, so I’m turning her into a [sexual reference deleted].”

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A different version of Ms. Marvel would eventually see the light of day, written by Gerry Conway: Carol Danvers, a security agent at Cape Kennedy Space Center, was a bystander during a battle between Captain Marvel and his Kree enemy; when an exploding piece of Kree technology radiated her, she gained the strength of ten men and “the knowledge and instincts of a Kree warrior.” She left her security job to edit
Woman
magazine for the
Daily Bugle
’s J. Jonah Jameson.

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Byrne got his first break at Marvel thanks to Duffy Vohland, a large, flamboyant, red-bearded, velvet-shoulder-bag-toting puck who was an assistant in the Marvel offices. According to David Kraft, “Whenever there was any assignment and people would say, ‘Who can we get to do this?’ Duffy would be there, going
Johhhhnn Byyyyrne
in his owl-like monotone. All over Marvel, there would be this voice going
Johhhhnn Byyyyrne
, pointing in every direction for everything.”

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“You know who my inspiration was, for becoming a comic book writer?” Gerry Conway asked in
Comics Interview
#13. “Jim Shooter—because Jim Shooter is only a year and a half older than I am, and I saw his name mentioned in a Superman story that he’d written in the mid-Sixties, and it said, ‘Thirteen-year-old Jim Shooter wrote this story,’ and I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m thirteen years old and I could write as well as this!’ ”

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A week later,
Howard the Duck
#2 featured a character named Arthur Winslow, a lovesick “author and collector of old movie stills” with outdated, idealized codes of romance and heroism. As he’s transformed into the “Space Turnip,” he cries, “I stand
apart
, because I dare to believe in the power of what one man can do—the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, James Bond—the
heroes
, the stuff of legends!”

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According to a contract signed March 12, 1976, Marvel was paid a 5 percent royalty fee on each button.

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“Gerry was going to make the trains run on time,” said Shooter. “But he seemed to be especially hard on LenMarv and their people. I was like, ‘If you pull these books away from Len, and you have all these fill-ins for his books and then we use them right away, because you say he’s not catching up enough, we are going to lose him. He’s going to quit.’ And he closed the door, and he said, ‘Of
course
, he’s going to quit. What do you think I’m doing this for? The bastard screwed me, and
I want rid of him
.’ ”

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To his credit, Conway managed to inject some Gerberian weirdness into the eventually brand-diluting
Peter Parker
: in the first issue, real-life New York City mayor Abe Beame blackmailed J. Jonah Jameson into paying the ransom money that South American terrorist the Tarantula was demanding for American hostages.

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They weren’t alone in this. Marvel had spoken with Elton John’s manager about doing a Captain Fantastic comic book, and David Bowie’s wife, Angela, had licensed the rights for Black Widow—she even went so far as to do a photo shoot of her dressed up in costume, with actor Ben Carruthers as Daredevil. Kiss had expressed interest as early as March 1976.

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“I grew up loving Stan and Jack’s comics,” one of the people who oversaw those letters columns insisted, years later. “But it was hard going to find any positive letters. I confess I even made some up to try to balance the negative. Mostly, any positive feedback came from kids younger than the general Marvel reader’s level of maturity. So I resorted to padding the positive—not the other way around.”

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“My power—it’s hitting me like a drug,” Phoenix marveled in
X-Men
#105. “I’ve never felt such . . . ecstasy! God in heaven, what have I become?”

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In early 1977, Claremont married Bonnie Wilford, a Gardnerian Wiccan; according to one friend, they were “quite active in the New York City demimonde.”

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Claremont, who’d spent time on a kibbutz in college, was liberal with his use of geresh.

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Lee also characterized Kirby’s work on their just-completed Silver Surfer graphic novel, two years in the making, as “better than recent stuff, but not his best.”

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Byrne was not the only artist to note Claremont’s involvement in psychological nuances of characters in those days. “He used to call and give me the plot on the phone and he would talk and talk and talk and talk!” recalled
Ms. Marvel
artist Jim Mooney. “I used to think, My God, does he
need
to take this long?”

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The X-Men
was one of the titles on which Salicrup succeeded Stern, which meant that Chris Claremont began to occasionally get his way, and Shooter had to field complaints from Byrne. Salicrup: “Even though Chris was the guy who’d come into the office more, Roger, I guess, was very close friends with John Byrne. It got to be kind of awkward in editing situations. If the two were quibbling over something, probably John had an unfair advantage in that one of his best friends was the editor. When I took over, I tried to be fair to both of them.”

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For a time, according to writer Steven Grant, there was talk of Donna Summer going on the road as the Disco Queen—performing one set as herself, and another in character. A lawsuit between Summer and Casablanca, however, quickly ended that possibility.

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Wolverine had a lot in common with the characters of Clint Eastwood, from the shadowy origins of
A Fistful of Dollars’
Man with No Name to the tough-justice tactics of
Dirty Harry
’s Inspector Callahan. In 2011, when director James Mangold and actor Hugh Jackman made plans for a Wolverine film, the model they reached for was Eastwood’s
The Outlaw Josey Wales
.

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Based on a real-life English secret society given to weeklong orgies in the bowels of a desecrated church, the Hellfire Club had earlier been fictionalized on a 1966 episode of the British television show
The Avengers
, in which Emma Peel went undercover with a spiked dog collar, corset, and whip. It was from this leather-intensive vision that the Claremont and Byrne edition took its visual cues.

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Lee, anxiously trying to sell his New York apartment so that he could move to Los Angeles, was at the time finalizing his own contract negotiations with Marvel, after entertaining offers from other parties.

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“It was the quest for the cosmic orgasm,” said Claremont. “Her feeding on the star, was an act of love, of self-love, of masturbation probably.”

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According to Claremont, at first “Shooter wanted Jean punished. He wanted her to suffer. His idea was she go to prison, that she be tortured horribly, that she be drawn and quartered, whipped, chained . . .”

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Later, Lee would joke, “We figured if people are going to ruin our characters, we could probably do it as well as anybody else.” According to a May 2, 1980, letter from Jim Galton to David DePatie, the development budget for the remainder of the year was only $100,000.

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When Joe Ruby brought Gerber along to a pitch meeting with producer Fred Silverman, Gerber waxed enthusiastically about how Captain America’s throwback patriotism made him a “man out of time.” Silverman stared at the writer. “You know, we’re not doing Ibsen here.”

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For comparison,
The Savage She-Hulk
#1, which had been considered a smash one year earlier, sold a
total
of 250,000 copies between the newsstand
and
the direct market.

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One positive, and permanent, change that Byrne would make would be to change the name of the Invisible Girl—who’d been a mother since 1968—to the Invisible Woman.

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There were, in fact,
ten
inkers.

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“After I got mugged,” he told the magazine
Amazing Heroes
, “I was really eager to see criminals shot on sight.”

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Byrne retracted the statement after threat of legal action from Roy Thomas.

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This speech could well have been written for Dave Cockrum, who finally left behind, for good, his most successful creations. He began work on
The Futurians
graphic novel, which Marvel would publish but the ownership of which he would retain.

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In 2011, Jim Shooter offered an alternate scenario. “My guess is that someone, probably Macchio, took idle office chatter about the idea I’d proposed and twisted it around to bait Doug so they could watch the ensuing fun,” he wrote on his website.

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In 1977, Lee wrote a five-page article about the creation of Spider-Man that made no mention of Jack Kirby’s involvement; Steve Ditko’s name appeared only once.
Quest
magazine ran Lee’s article in its July issue, with the title “How I Invented Spider-Man.”

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Whether or not Lee realized it, Thor had, in fact, been depicted in DC’s
Tales of the Unexpected
#16, back in 1957. In “The Magic Hammer,” a man who found Thor’s hammer gained the ability to control thunderstorms. The artist was Jack Kirby.

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In the pages of
Fantastic Four
, John Byrne’s “Trial of Reed Richards” had made the point that Galactus was a crucial part of the universe, and neither good nor evil. Now, in
Secret Wars
#9, Reed Richards concluded, “I’m still not certain that, in the cosmic scheme of things, what we’re doing is right—but I realized just how badly I want to see my baby born, Cap! I want that more than anything! And I’m going to fight for it!”

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In
Power Man & Iron Fist
#121, Jim Owsley provided the most unique version of the Beyonder: arriving in a black neighborhood, he sports mirrored shades, an outrageous Afro, and black skin. “Slide me a piece o’ the porgie on the down fry side,” he tells the waitress. “Greens ’em beans, ’em walking Johnny to the rocks. Cool?”

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The Beyonder wasn’t easy to like. Just as the cosmic seducer named Marcus had caused all that trouble for Ms. Marvel in Shooter’s
Avengers Annual
#10, the Beyonder used his otherworldly powers to woo the Dazzler in
Secret Wars II
. Presto: a bearskin rug, a hansom cab, a Paris café. Thankfully, though, the Beyonder realized the vileness of his gambit before impregnating the Dazzler.