Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (20 page)

“We had different points of view, different attitudes, and different things we wanted to convey, and it was a time of turmoil in the world,” said Al Milgrom, a wisecracking, self-described “frat boy” who’d known Starlin growing up in Detroit, and who collaborated with him on
Captain Marvel
. “So when we were given these characters, we went off on some tangents.” Indeed: Starlin decided to explore “enlightenment through discipline and training,” a concept he still believed in, even though it had eluded him in his own military experiences. In Starlin’s hands,
Captain Marvel
was not so much about how much power and charisma its hero had, but about how many limits he had—he was an unenlightened mope who didn’t know how to live up to his potential. Within a few issues, Captain Marvel would become “cosmically aware,” a process described in words that might have been gleaned from the Dhammapada, fortified with a generous supply of exclamation points: “This
man
has
conquered
! He’s beaten
vanity
and
pride
by seeing the
universe
as it is! He knows what must be done and does it, but does it with a
great sorrow
! For this man knows
truth
and
peace
!” Starlin transplanted his characters from that failed issue of
Iron Man
—Thanos, Drax the Destroyer, Mentor, Kronos, Eros—and added several more, turning the book into the kind of vast, multigenerational space opera that would soon make George Lucas a rich man. Of course,
Star Wars
never blew the hinges off the doors of perception.

“I was just as crazy as everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam,” said Starlin, whose hobbies included motorcycles, chess, and lysergic acid diethylamide–25. “Each one of those stories was me taking that stuff that had gone before and trying to put my personal slant on it. Mar-Vell was a warrior who decided he was going to become a god, and that’s where his trip was.” In the pages of
Captain Marvel
, existence itself might be altered several times in the course of an issue. “There is a moment of
change
, then
reality
becomes a thing of the
past
!” howls the evil ruler Thanos, before everything morphs into funhouse-mirror images. His sworn enemy Drax responds: “My
mind
and my
soul
are one . . . my soul . . . an immortal
intangible
, nothing and everything! That which cannot
die
cannot be
enslaved
, for only with
fear
is servitude rendered!” On the following page, Drax’s shifting realities are represented by thirty-five panels of warped faces, skulls, eyes, stars, and lizards.
Captain Marvel
had practically become a black-light poster with dialogue. Its sales kept increasing. Soon Starlin was opening his fan mail and finding complimentary joints sent by grateful, mind-blown readers.

Englehart, meanwhile, was humming along on a slightly less psychedelic scale. He’d revamped the dormant Beast for a few issues of
Amazing Adventures
, then landed stints on
The Defenders
,
Luke Cage
,
*
and
Captain America
, which despite its hero’s thirty years of history was barely selling. “It was taking place during the Vietnam War,” Englehart scoffed, “and here was this guy wearing a flag on his chest, and everybody was embarrassed.” Englehart did away with the character’s more reactionary rhetoric, and added a liberal-humanist charge. The first issues of Englehart’s
Captain America
explained why, if the character had been encased in a block of ice since the end of World War II, the 1950s revival comics showed him fighting communists: the fifties Cap, it turned out, was an imposter, a superpatriot turned insane by side effects of the super-serum. This retroactive continuity didn’t exactly thrill John Romita, who’d actually drawn those 1950s adventures, but readers were electrified. Within six months
Captain America
was Marvel’s number-one title, and Englehart was entrusted with
The Avengers
. These young, opinionated rabble-rousers were getting closer and closer to the marquee properties.

It was during this ascendancy that Englehart met Frank Brunner, a Brooklyn artist with long blond hair, a buckskin jacket, and a library of Carlos Castaneda and H. P. Lovecraft paperbacks. Brunner had recently quit Marvel’s token occult-superhero comic,
Doctor Strange,
because he didn’t like the scripts that sexagenarian DC veteran Gardner Fox was writing—“monster of the month” was his disparaging description of Fox’s plotting style, which incorporated a revolving door of inhuman villains. But now Fox was off the book, and Roy wanted Brunner back. When Roy asked him whom he would want on board as a writer, Brunner remembered the guy he’d talked to at parties about kabbalah, astrology, and Satanism. Englehart jumped at the opportunity to bring
Doctor Strange
back to the trippy, Day-Glo heights of the Lee and Ditko era. They got right to work.

“We would get together every two months, have dinner, get loaded about 10 o’clock, and stay there until 3 or 4,” said Englehart. “He would be thinking about what would
look
really cool, and I would talk about where I could go with Dr. Strange’s consciousness, and we would come up with a summation that was greater than the parts.”

When they weren’t at each other’s apartments getting high, they were rampaging around with Starlin, Al Milgrom, and artist Alan Weiss, a Las Vegas–bred ladies’ man who shared a Queens apartment with a rotating cast of five stewardesses. Together, they’d ingest LSD and wander
Death Wish
–era Manhattan at all hours. “We sort of took New York as this vast stage set,” said Weiss. “We would launch ourselves to some part we hadn’t seen yet, and go explore, day or night.” There was the time they traipsed by security guards and wandered through the World Trade Center while it was being built. On one July night they went to Lincoln Center for a screening of Disney’s
Alice in Wonderland
and hatched a
Doctor Strange
plot that included a hookah-smoking caterpillar. Then they walked to the U.S. Customs House in lower Manhattan and climbed around on Daniel Chester French’s four statues of the continents, where they envisioned a
Defenders
story in which Doctor Strange transformed each statue into thousands of living soldiers to battle hordes of Atlantean invaders.

In Rutland, Vermont, where the annual Halloween parade organized by comics fan Tom Fagan drew swarms of industry professionals, Starlin and Weiss and Englehart sat under a waterfall, opened their minds, and discussed that hoary stoners’ concept: God. In a matter of months, their respective visions—informed by such occult touchstones as the Knights Templar, Atlantis, the Illuminati, Druidry, and Aleister Crowley—would turn up in simultaneous issues of
Captain Marvel
and
Doctor Strange
. The evil megalomaniac Thanos captured the all-powerful Cosmic Cube and turned himself into God, but was defeated on a technicality (nobody worshipped Thanos, the heroes helpfully explained at the end—and a god needs worshippers). In
Doctor Strange
, a thirty-first-century magician named Sise-Neg found that by moving backward in time, he could absorb energy from Cagliostro, Merlin, and priests of Sodom and Gomorrah, gathering power until he reached the beginning of time, and became God.

“When the book came out,” Brunner said, “Stan finally got a hold of it, and he wrote us a letter saying, ‘We can’t do God. You’re going to have to print, in the letters column, a retraction, saying this is not
the
God, this is just
a
god.’ Steve and I said, ‘Oh, come on! This is the whole point of the story! If we did that retraction of God, this is meaningless!’ So, we cooked up this plot—we wrote a letter from a Reverend Billingsley in Texas, a fictional person, saying that one of the children in his parish brought him the comic book, and he was astounded and thrilled by it, and he said, ‘Wow, this is the best comic book I’ve ever read.’ ” Englehart had a Christmastime layover in Dallas, and mailed it from there, ensuring a proper postmark. “We got a phone call from Roy, and he said, ‘Hey, about that retraction, I’m going to send you a letter, and instead of the retraction, I want you to print this letter.’ We printed
our
letter! We later found out that Jim Starlin was in New York at that time, up in the Marvel offices, and he was reading the
Doctor Strange
fan mail, and he was the one who actually saw the letter, believed it was the real thing, and gave it to Roy, who gave it to Stan.”

The
real
letters they got, from college students and freaks, were accompanied by baggies of Wowie Maui and said things like, “I like to smoke a bowl, put on ELO or ELP or Pink Floyd and read the latest issue of
Doctor Strange
.” Those weren’t printed.

O
n Friday nights, Englehart and Starlin stayed in and watched television. They had become rabid fans of ABC’s
Kung Fu
, which starred David Carradine as a Shaolin monk in the Old West who alternated between Eastern philosophizing and ass-kicking. They approached Roy Thomas about doing a
Kung Fu
adaptation for Marvel, but the show was produced by Warner Bros.—DC Comics’ corporate parent—so they created their own concept:
Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu
. “I was already doing Doctor Strange, which represented the Western mystical philosophy,” Englehart recalled. “I really saw
Shang-Chi
as a chance to do the Eastern mystical philosophy, albeit with a more action-oriented hero than Doctor Strange.” In that spirit, he and Alan Weiss settled on Shang-Chi’s name, which meant “the rising advancing of the spirit,” by throwing the
I Ching
and mixing and matching hexagrams. Then Thomas, who’d secured the rights to Sax Rohmer’s pulp-novel Fu Manchu character, suggested they incorporate martial arts into a Fu Manchu comic. So Shang-Chi became the son of Fu Manchu, who learns his father’s evil secret and dedicates himself to fighting him.
*
The mix of philosophy and ass-kicking was perfect for an era that embraced
Passages
and
Walking Tall
.

The plotting was the easy part—party all day; rest; drop more acid. “We saw a movie and came out at 9 or 10, not tired. We started out in midtown and walked all the way to South Ferry. I don’t know that we would have walked that far if we hadn’t been chemically altered. About two in the morning, we came to the AT&T Long Lines building. A monolith, with monitored underwater cables to Europe, and no windows—a huge monument in a neighborhood of 1940s warehouses. There’s construction going on the other side of the street, with guys bent over acetylene torches throwing six-story shadows on the building.” They had their model for Fu Manchu’s headquarters. When they turned and saw abandoned construction vehicles, they had their scene for a climactic martial-arts fight. The comic was practically writing itself. As Weiss said, “Some of it was chemically fueled. But it was always fodder for creativity. We got very . . . enhanced. We were
extremely
enhanced.”
*

When the time came to draw the comic, though, things got rocky. Starlin created dozens of sketches for Shang-Chi, whom he rendered with a Chinese face—except when drafting different costume designs. “I did just this generic face on top of the figures and Stan said ‘That’s the face you’ve gotta go with.’ ” Starlin tried to explain the misunderstanding, but Lee held his ground. Making matters worse, Starlin finally read the Sax Rohmer source material and was aghast at the pervasive racism. “By the time we finally got done with it,” Starlin said, “I had a friend who was Oriental who looked at it—he told me flat out he found the whole thing insulting. That was enough for me.” When the first issue came out, fans wrote in to complain about Fu Manchu’s bright yellow skin, prompting a laborious explanation about the color printing process. By then, Starlin had walked.

Englehart soon followed. “I got five issues into it and they called me up and said, ‘Stan rode up on an elevator today and heard two guys talking. One guy said, “what’s the hottest thing in movies these days?” and the other guy said, “Kung fu movies and the reason why is because it’s wall-to-wall violence.” ’ Stan got off the elevator, walked to Marvel Comics and said, ‘Let’s do wall-to-wall violence.’ They called me up and said, ‘We don’t want any more of this philosophy. We just want kung fu fights.’ ”
*
The series continued on without him, with cover lines like “The Fortune Cookie Says: DEATH!”

Englehart focused his attention on
Captain America
, which, at the time of the Watergate scandal, suddenly seemed like the richest opportunity at Marvel. He crafted a conspiracy story line with thinly veiled correlations to actual headlines: the Committee to Reelect the President (C.R.E.E.P.) became the Committee to Regain America’s Principles (C.R.A.P.), with the real world’s ex-adman H. R. Haldeman replaced in the comics by ex-adman Quentin Harderman. It all climaxed with Captain America tracing the shadowy “Secret Empire” straight to the Oval Office—where a disgraced commander in chief committed suicide by gunshot.