Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (9 page)

“The Voices of Marvel” featured nearly all of Marvel’s boldfaced names, giving charmingly inept deliveries to punch lines that perhaps could not be delivered any other way. Lee, Kirby, Ayers, Heck, Steinberg, Brodsky, Goldberg, inker Chic Stone, letterers Artie Simek and Sam Rosen, and brand-new Marvel superstar Wally Wood were all packed into the five-minute recording. Missing again was Steve Ditko. Lee made it into a gag:

STAN
: Hey, what’s all that commotion out there, Sol?

SOL
: Why, it’s shy Steve Ditko. He heard you’re making a record and he’s got mike fright! Whoops! There he goes!

STAN
: Out the window
again
? You know, I’m beginning to think he
is
Spider-Man.

The month the record was announced, a notice ran on the first page of
Amazing Spider-Man
. “Many readers have asked why Stan’s name is always first on the credits! And so big-hearted Lee agreed to put Stevey’s name first this time! How about that?!!” The joke was that Lee’s name was below Ditko’s—and twice the size.

Ditko wasn’t laughing. As an increasingly devoted adherent of the works of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand—whose Objectivist philosophy stressed self-interest, individual rights, and cold, hard logic—he was hardly the picture of a docile employee. Stan Lee, meanwhile, was a magnet for acclaim, eager to please, and beholden to Goodman’s demands—practically a made-to-order Rand villain.
*
“I don’t know what he did, or where he lived, or who his friends were, or what he did with himself,” Stan Lee would say years later about Steve Ditko. By the beginning of 1965, the two were no longer speaking. Ditko came up with his own plots, drew his pages, and dropped off his artwork with Sol Brodsky to pass along to Lee.

T
he M.M.M.S. was an immediate smash; chapters opened at Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge. Flo Steinberg came into the office on weekends to process the orders that were pouring in. “We had to write down everybody’s name and make labels for each one, and pull out all these hundreds of dollar bills. We were throwing them at each other there were so many!” The mania wasn’t confined to the mail, either—teenage fans started calling the office, wanting to have long telephone conversations with Fabulous Flo Steinberg, the pretty young lady who’d answered their mail so kindly and whose lovely picture they’d seen in the comics. Before long, they were showing up in the dimly lit hallways of 625 Madison, wanting to meet Stan and Jack and Steve and Flo and the others.

There was no time for that. Lee had an entire fictional universe to manage. He’d vigilantly kept a consistent continuity between all the titles, so that, for instance, when the Hulk was captured in
Tales to Astonish
, Reed Richards wondered about his whereabouts in a
Fantastic Four Annual
. If Tony Stark went missing from
Tales of Suspense
, he was also AWOL in the next issue of
The Avengers
. One issue of the World War II–set
Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos
, which had previously been isolated from the superhero characters, featured a crossover appearance from Captain America.
*
Eventually, the demands of such choreography became so tangled that Lee removed Thor, Iron Man, Giant-Man, and the Wasp from
The Avengers
, replacing them with Hawkeye, a former Iron Man foe, and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, erstwhile X-Men nemeses.
*
Captain America remained in
The Avengers
, but his solo adventures in
Tales of Suspense
now exclusively covered his World War II past, which didn’t have to be so tightly synchronized.

Lee was also still trying to plug holes in the workforce. Throughout 1965, more Atlas veterans returned: George Tuska started drawing Captain America in
Tales of Suspense
over Kirby’s layouts; Gene Colan started a Sub-Mariner feature in
Tales to Astonish
; John Severin (Marie’s older brother) penciled “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” for
Strange Tales
. Kirby briefly reclaimed the Hulk from the incommunicado Ditko before turning it over to a merry-go-round of trial-basis artists who’d eventually include the still-deadline-resistant Bill Everett.

Lee continued to court John Romita, who’d been unceremoniously laid off in 1957. Romita had resisted Lee’s persistent overtures throughout the early 1960s, doubting claims about Marvel’s changed fortunes. He’d seen enough boom-and-bust cycles to know to stick with the sure thing: DC still paid higher rates. Why take the risk?

In 1965, Romita finally told Lee he was leaving the comic business altogether, and taking a job doing storyboards for the ad agency BBDO. “After eight years of penciling romance comics, I was burned out,” Romita said. “I couldn’t pencil another thing.” Lee insisted they get together and talk.

“You have no idea how popular these guys are,” Lee said over lunch, pulling out issues of
Fantastic Four
and
Amazing Spider-Man
. Romita thought
Spider-Man
looked terrible, but Lee insisted that the superheroes were connecting with readers, that this was the future. Romita hesitantly agreed to work with Marvel again, on the condition that he would only be inking work that had been already penciled.

Three weeks later, Lee asked Romita for a sample illustration of Daredevil. He didn’t mention that the current
Daredevil
artist, Wally Wood, was headed out the door. To Wood, the so-called Marvel Method—drawing an issue before there was a script—meant that he was plotting the story without being paid or credited. So for the tenth issue of
Daredevil
, Lee turned over the reins completely, and provided a setup for the reader that had a familiarly insinuating ring. “Wally Wood has always wanted to try his hand at
writing
a story as well as drawing it, and big-hearted Stan (who wanted a rest anyway) said okay! So, what follows next is anybody’s guess! You may like it or not, but you can be sure of this . . . it’s gonna be
different
!”

A frustrated Wood immediately decamped to the fledgling Tower Comics to edit a line of superhero titles, and Lee assigned Romita to
Daredevil
, based on his illustration of the hero swinging through the air. When Romita turned in his pages, though, Lee told him his style still betrayed too much of his romance-comics background. Lee told Romita he’d get another artist to break down the story into rough layouts, to show him how it was done. Then he called Jack Kirby.

Wood was already working at Tower Comics when he saw Lee’s letters-page remarks for
Daredevil
#10: “Wonderful Wally decided he doesn’t have time to write the conclusion next ish, and he’s forgotten most of the answers we’ll be needing! So, Sorrowful Stan has inherited the job of tying the whole yarn together and finding a way to make it all come out in the wash! And you think you’ve got troubles!” Wood turned to his Tower colleagues and fumed about Stan Lee. He’d hold on to his rage for years to come.

T
he truth was that Lee—writing at home in Hewlett Harbor all day on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and coming into the midtown offices the other three days—was still desperate for help with the writing workload. When Steve Skeates, an Iron Man fan preparing to graduate from Alfred University in upstate New York, wrote Marvel a letter in comic-book form, Lee called him personally and hired him, over the phone, as an assistant editor. When Skeates arrived at the offices, he was moved around from desk to desk, where he looked over scripts and tried to help with the production process. But Lee quickly realized that the nervous college graduate knew nothing about how comic books were made and was more adept at bumming cigarettes from Marie Severin than correcting scripts. Asked to redirect word balloon pointers, Skeates could only respond with shakily drawn lines.

It was at this moment that Lee got a note from letters-column regular Roy Thomas, announcing that he’d just moved to New York and would like to meet in person. Thomas was twenty-four years old. He’d spent the last few years teaching high school English in his native Missouri, but he lived and breathed comic books, writing letters to DC and Marvel and editing the fanzine
Alter Ego
. He’d come to New York to work for Mort Weisinger at DC—the same editor who had made Jerry Siegel’s life so miserable. But when Thomas arrived, Weisinger promptly shaved 10 percent from the promised salary, and informed him that he was on staff for a trial period of two weeks. Then Weisinger introduced Thomas to his previous assistant, explaining that he’d already been fired but was going to train Thomas. When Weisinger needed Thomas for something, he summoned him into his office with a buzzer, then muttered profanities under his breath. Within two weeks, Thomas was tearing up in his lonely Twenty-Third Street hotel, wondering if pursuing a career in comic books had been a terrible mistake.

Lee called Thomas’s hotel and asked him to take a writing test, adding dialogue and captions to pages of
Fantastic Four Annual
#2. On July 9, just two weeks after moving to the city, Thomas was in Stan Lee’s office. Lee, tired of conducting his young-talent search and impressed by Thomas, did not want to let him get away. He swiveled away in his chair, gazed out the window, and asked, “What it would take to hire you away from DC?”

Lee sent Thomas home that weekend with instructions to script an issue’s worth of
Millie and the Model
pages; when Thomas returned on Monday, he was shoehorned into Brodsky and Steinberg’s office, a typewriter atop his corrugated metal desk. He’d been hired to sit there and write for forty hours a week—“staff writer” was his title—but with the phone ringing, freelancers coming and going, and Sol and Flo and Marie hurrying around, he couldn’t concentrate, and, before long, he was staying at work until 8 or 9 p.m., clicking off the last lights in the darkened building. Lee revised the terms of the job so that Thomas could work as an editorial assistant during the day and write scripts at home. There was frenzied rewriting from Lee at first, but before long, Thomas’s uncanny ability to mimic the boss’s style earned him a free hand in his collaborations with the artists of
Sgt. Fury
and
The X-Men
. Finally, after nearly three years of searching, there was someone that Lee trusted to not only script, but also co-plot, Marvel’s superhero comics. Lee could devote more time to his secondary position—comics’ ambassador to the world.
*

B
y now, Marvel’s newsprint masterpieces were being referenced in Cornell physics classes and Colgate student newspapers, and Lee was fielding regular requests for campus speaking. Newspapers, slowly at first, sat up and took notice: the
Wall Street Journal
noted the sales increases, while the
Village Voice
pointed out beatniks’ embrace of the kooky, hip stories. “Marvel Comics are the first comic books in history in which a post-adolescent escapist can get involved,” the
Voice
gushed. “For Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World.” Lee’s snappy, self-conscious patter was singled out, as was the verisimilitude of the New York City settings. “There are approximately 15 superheroes in the Marvel Group, and nearly all of them live in the New York area. Midtown Manhattan is full of their landmarks. On Madison Avenue the Baxter building houses the Fantastic Four and their various self-protective devices. . . . Doctor Strange is a master of occult knowledge and often walks around in ectoplasmic form; his creators imply that he lives in the Village because no one there is likely to become alarmed at being jostled by a wraith.”
*
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, poet Michael McClure featured a Doctor Strange monologue from
Strange Tales
#130 as a centerpiece in his controversial 1965 play
The Beard
.

A similar infatuation gripped the art world. Roy Lichtenstein appropriated one of Kirby’s
X-Men
panels for his painting
Image Duplicator
, and future Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey made a ten-minute experimental film,
The Origin of Captain America
, in which an actor read from
Tales of Suspense
#63. There were scattered other comics in the background of Morrissey’s film—and all of them were from Marvel. Lee seized the opportunity and slapped a “Marvel Pop Art Productions” logo on the corners of the covers. Kirby found resonances with modern art as well: he experimented with
grisaille
photocollages in his
Fantastic Four
stories, lending grandiosity to outer-space (and interdimensional) sequences.

The comics also caught the attention of Robert Lawrence, a partner in Grantray-Lawrence Animation, who spied them on the newsstands and made the connection to the Pop Art movement. He contacted Martin Goodman, who by now was teaching his younger son, Chip, the ins and outs of the family business. Grantray-Lawrence made a sweetheart deal to produce an animated series,
The Marvel Super Heroes
, taking all its images directly from published comic panels. The studio secured a continuing interest in merchandising profits related to the show. “We wrote an unbelievable contract with the Goodmans,” Lawrence boasted, “because they didn’t know what they had and where to go.”
*