Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (8 page)

However subtle it may have been,
The X-Men
’s connection to the civil rights struggle was one of Marvel’s earliest acknowledgments of the fissures in American society.
*
In just a few years, the very concept of patriotism would polarize the country, and the idea of reintroducing Captain America—a character known as the “Sentinel of Liberty,” and literally wrapped in the United States flag—would have been almost unthinkable for a company courting the kids of America. As it was, the Captain America that returned to comics in 1963 in the pages of
The Avengers
#4 was a walking anachronism, a man out of time. The newer heroes found him in the sea, unconscious and encased in a block of ice, his youth preserved. “All those years of being in a state of frozen suspended animation,” exclaimed the Captain, “must have prevented me from aging!” But it didn’t prevent him from feeling guilt over the fate of his former sidekick Bucky (who, it was explained, had died just before Captain America went into a deep freeze), or a deep longing for the simpler times of the 1940s. The revived Captain America was wholesome and admirable, just like he’d always been, but now he was prone to bouts of melancholy, and confusion about what had happened to his country.

Captain America picked an especially disconcerting moment in history to reemerge.
Avengers
#4 was still in production on November 22, when news came that President Kennedy had been shot. “We were coming back from lunch, and people were listening to their car radios with the doors open,” Flo Steinberg remembered. “We didn’t have a television in the office, so everyone just sort of gravitated to a big room and sat around listening to the radio until they announced that he had died. We all left . . . just wandered.”

Everyone, that is, but Stan Lee. “He was still working on the comic books,” noted Mario Puzo. “Like that was the most important thing in the world.”

L
ee, once again scripting virtually the entire Marvel line, got his own office—with a door, and a rug—for the first time in seven years. Brodsky and Steinberg shared a desk nearby and were soon joined by another former Atlas bullpenner, Marie Severin. At Atlas, Severin worked in the coloring department under Stan Goldberg, but she was an extremely skilled artist in her own right, and able to harness her wicked sense of humor into withering caricatures. She might have been a star at
Mad
magazine, had her luck lined up differently. Instead, she was making filmstrips for the Federal Reserve Bank when she decided to drop off her illustration portfolio to Lee. He never looked at her samples, though; he sent her straight to Brodsky for a production job.

He should have hired her to draw comics. Kirby was at his drawing board seven days a week. Even at his uncanny speed—he could burn through three pages in a day—something had to give, and Lee was casting around for reinforcements. As he had with writers, he first looked to the old hands of Atlas. He’d started making phone calls to Syd Shores, the
Captain America
artist of the late 1940s, but Shores was busy doing illustration work for magazines. He’d called John Romita, the
Captain America
artist of the 1950s, but DC was paying him more than Marvel could. It wasn’t just a matter of recruiting people who could draw. The “Marvel method,” as it would come to be known, required that the artists could break down a basic plot into a finely paced, visually clear story over which Lee would write his dialogue. He wanted the panels to function like silent movies, to minimize the need for verbal exposition. Ideally, the artists would also contribute their own narrative ideas—characters, subplots—to the stories, just as Kirby and Ditko did.

Lee moved around the artists that he did have like chess pieces, trying them out on different titles until things clicked. Dick Ayers settled into comfortable stints on
Sgt. Fury
and
Strange Tales
’ Human Torch stories; Don Heck inherited
The X-Men
and
The Avengers
and Giant Man from Kirby; and Ditko briefly took over
Tales of Suspense
’s Iron Man from Heck. The Hulk was brought back in
Tales to Astonish
, reimagined by Ditko so that Bruce Banner’s transformation into the Hulk was caused by Banner’s fits of rage.
*
Artists were regularly asked to emulate Jack Kirby’s style. When new artists started on a title, Lee would ask Kirby to draw basic layouts for the first issue, providing the rookies with visual training wheels. “Stan wanted Kirby to be Kirby, Ditko to be Ditko . . . and everyone else to be Kirby,” said Don Heck; indeed, when Heck took over
The Avengers
, Lee wasn’t shy about touting what he considered the Platonic ideal. “Don Heck drew this one with Dick Ayers helping out on the inks,” he roared in the letters pages, “and you’ll be amazed how closely it parallels King Kirby’s great style!”

During story conferences, Lee repeatedly drilled home the idea of dynamism. Every word, he insisted, should move the story forward. All action should be emphatic; when a fist came down on a desk, it should be thunderous, and when someone was punched, they should be sent through the air. Speaking characters should be drawn with mouths wide open. Discussing a fight scene, he’d act out the action for artists, standing on his desk, or jumping on the couch, or making voices, as they craned their necks up in disbelief at the balding, exuberant, forty-two-year-old human action figure. Despite Lee’s enthusiastic calisthenics, some of the artists agonized at the sparseness of the plot outlines, which required them to conjure scene-settings and determine pacing (working in the Marvel Method was “like digging into my insides and pulling it out,” one of them groaned, years later). The obvious solution, Lee figured, would be to find artists with writing experience who were used to heavy creative lifting and didn’t need everything spelled out for them.

He quickly ran through his options. An attempt to collaborate with original Human Torch creator Carl Burgos on solo adventures of the new, teenage incarnation of the character ended quickly. Lee next enlisted Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, now forty-six years old and working as an art director in Massachusetts, to see what he could do with the name “Daredevil,” which was once another company’s trademark but had since fallen out of use. The concept for the new “Daredevil” was not remarkable: Matt Murdock, the hard-studying son of a down-and-out single-father boxer, saves a blind man from an oncoming Ajax Atomic Labs delivery truck—and is then blinded himself by a radioactive cylinder. This being Marvel, however, the radiation also heightens his other senses, which come in handy later when he has to avenge his father’s murder. Murdock grows up to be a defense lawyer, satisfying Lee’s somewhat forced “justice is blind” hook and providing Daredevil with easy access to criminal happenings.

But Everett didn’t come through on the deadline, even after getting a hand from Kirby on the character design. “I was putting in 14 or 15 hours a day,” he said later, “and then to come home and try to do comics at night was just too much.” He delivered the two-thirds of
Daredevil
#1 that he’d completed to a panicked Sol Brodsky; as luck would have it, Steve Ditko was in the Marvel offices, and Brodsky corralled him into finishing the issue at an available desk. It would be another year before Everett would work for Marvel again.

The second issue of
Daredevil
was given to Joe Orlando, who’d done impressive science-fiction and horror comics for EC. “The problem,” admitted Orlando, “was that I wasn’t Jack Kirby. Jack—or Ditko, or just a couple of others—could take a couple sentences of plot and bring in 20 pages that Stan could dialogue in an afternoon or two. When I drew out the story my way, Stan would go over it and say, ‘this panel needs to be changed’ and ‘this whole page needs to be changed’ and on and on. I didn’t plot it out the way he wanted the story told so I wound up drawing at least half of every story twice. They weren’t paying enough for that so I quit.”

Now
Daredevil
went to Orlando’s mentor, the brilliant but mercurial Wally Wood. His slick space tales in
Weird Science
and parodies in
Mad
had made him one of the brightest lights of the EC Comics stable, and Jack Kirby had personally chosen him to ink his work on the
Sky Masters
comic strip. Like Kirby, he was a workhorse. But it wasn’t just a punishing schedule that was wearing on Wood. He suffered from a chronic migraine, battled depression, drank heavily, and pulled all-nighters in his studio, subsisting on caffeine and cigarettes.

Shortly before Marvel came calling, Wood had angrily quit
Mad
for good after an editor rejected one of his stories. He needed the money, and he’d quit drinking, but that didn’t mean he would just fall into line for the company. He was stubborn, and given to playing little games. “Even though there were ashtrays in Stan’s office,” said Flo Steinberg, “he’d always drop ashes on Stan’s carpet. And that would drive Stan bananas. So when Woody would go into Stan’s office, I would walk with him and then very deftly take away his cigarette at the last minute. And it worked a few times. But as soon as he was in Stan’s office, he’d light up another one.”

Lee trumpeted his new star with a cover blurb, something that even Kirby and Ditko weren’t afforded. “Under the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood, Daredevil reaches new heights of glory!” screamed the front of
Daredevil
#5. The cover itself, though, was drawn by Jack Kirby. Lee could always count on Kirby.

S
tan had been ramping up his hip, alliterative, carnival-barker-as-beatnik style for a couple of years now, assigning nicknames to everyone who worked on the comics and delivering letters-page news updates in a voice that was a unique cocktail of impossible bluster and blushing self-deprecation. In 1964’s
Marvel Tales Annual
#1, he’d run black-and-white photos of “Merry Marty Goodman,” “Smilin’ Stan Lee,” “Sparkling Solly Brodsky,” “Jolly ol’ Jack Kirby,” and sixteen others. There was one particularly notable absence: “Sturdy” Steve Ditko was nowhere to be seen. “A few of our bullpen buddies were out of town when these pix were taken,” the text cheerily explained, “so we’ll try to print their pans later on.”

In fact, Ditko was quietly distancing himself from the Marvel pep rally. On July 27, 1964, a group of fans rented out a meeting hall near Union Square and invited writers, artists, and collectors (and one dealer) of old comic books to meet. Ditko showed up at this, the first comic-book convention, but he was hardly an ambassador of good cheer. One fan, Ethan Roberts, called it “the most depressing exchange I ever had with a comics pro.” Ditko—“tall, thin, balding, dour, with glasses”—responded to Roberts’s pursuit of a career in comics by telling him “how hard the job was, and that it paid too little and had few lasting rewards. It was a real downer.” Ditko never appeared at another convention. When drawings he’d given to fans were published on the covers of their mimeographed fanzines, he responded with angry letters (“This isn’t the first time I’ve been treated inconsiderately by members of fandom”) and stopped giving away his artwork.

Two weeks after the convention,
Amazing Spider-Man
#18 appeared. It was entirely plotted by Ditko, who’d been having disagreements with Lee about the direction of the comic and gradually taking more control of story lines. Ditko thought Lee was afraid to go with his instincts, too eager to please the letter-writing fans, with “the tendency to take write-in complaints too literally.” Ditko resisted Lee’s requests to soften the harsh edges of the supporting characters that surrounded Spider-Man. He also argued against overwhelming the title with fantastic or mystical elements, preferring to keep the stories “grounded more in a teenager’s credible world.” Lee called for a maximum of costumed fight scenes; Ditko pushed for more scenes of Peter Parker. The eighteenth issue brought their conflict to a head: there were a few panels of the Sandman swinging at Spider-Man, but for the most part, it was a superhero comic without an adventure, just a broke, picked-on, lovelorn teenager and his crummy problems. Lee’s letters-page description in other Marvel comics that month threw Ditko under the bus even as it made its sales pitch. “A lot of readers are sure to hate it,” he promised of the issue, “so if you want to know what all the criticism is about, be sure to buy a copy!”

These fissures started to show just as Lee’s cheerleading reached fever pitch. Bard College invited him for a speaking engagement, and other schools quickly followed. Lee was so taken by this interest from the world of higher learning that when he decided to start a Marvel fan club—the Merry Marvel Marching Society, or M.M.M.S.—membership targeted college students more than ten-year-old kids. For a dollar, one could purchase an M.M.M.S. kit that included, along with stickers and a membership card, a button “designed to look great when worn next to your Phi Beta Kappa key!”

A flexi-disc 33 rpm record was also included in the kit. For “The Voices of Marvel,” Lee wrote a script filled with corny jokes, booked time at a midtown studio, and gathered staff and freelancers at the offices to practice. “Stan treated it like he was producing the Academy Awards,” said Kirby. “He’d written it and rewritten it . . . we all went into the office, more people than there was room for. When you weren’t rehearsing your part, you had to go out in the hall and wait. No work was done that day on comics. It was all about the record. We rehearsed all morning. We were supposed to go to lunch and then over to the recording studio . . . but when lunchtime came, Stan said, ‘no, no, we’re not ready,’ so most of us skipped lunch and stayed there to rehearse more. Then we took cabs over to the recording studio and we were supposed to be in and out in an hour or two but we were there well into the evening. I don’t know how many takes we did.”
*