Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (25 page)

“(‘Nay’),” an impatient Thor thinks to himself, in a thought balloon.

Around the same time, Wolfman himself had written a borderline-vicious one-page parody of McGregor, “the Harmony Factor Syndrome Beneath Wakanda”—in the Marvel fan-club magazine
FOOM
, of all places. But he’d also made a promise to McGregor that he was now regretting.

“Don and I used to be friends until I became his boss,” Wolfman said. “I was basically told at one point to fire him and didn’t because I had promised him when I was black-and-white editor he’d always have all the work he needed. Much to my chagrin, he would never do anything to fix up the books. As much as I pleaded and begged and everything else, because the books were
dying
.”

McGregor’s
Jungle Action
#20 hit the newsstands in mid-December; it included a monologue about standing up for ideals that continued on for seventeen panels. Kevin Trublood, the character who delivered the speech, was a reporter who’d been told to not bother with his story about the Klan; he was an obvious stand-in for McGregor himself, with closely held beliefs (“I
believe
in the fairy tales . . . the
myths
I was taught in school”) and his own troubles with editorial resistance: “I
am
getting carried away!” Trublood shouted. “Because my character was questioned when I said I was going to do that story—that I was going to expose it . . . I realized I was afraid to write that story. My friends, my relatives, my coworkers. They made me afraid to write that story. And
they
were afraid.”
*

McGregor—going through a messy divorce, a custody battle, and health scares—refused to yield on the stories in which he was investing so much energy. “The pressure was on to bring in the Avengers,” he said, “but it was important for a black hero not to have to have white heroes come in to save the day.”

Wolfman couldn’t take it. “When a writer is specifically told—maybe 40 times—by two separate editors before me and three later as well, that his stuff is not selling, you’ve got to make changes, and the writer refuses to make the changes, there is something wrong, because again, you’re not working for yourself totally. You have to be able to compromise as long as you’re being paid by someone else.” This refusal to accede to employers’ wishes, Wolfman thought, was becoming an epidemic within the industry.

B
ut this was just one of many problems. Wolfman was mentally and physically exhausted, feeling like he couldn’t delegate his workload. “The assistants were all new, so you really couldn’t give them a lot of heavy work to do; you couldn’t ask them to edit the stuff, and no one person can edit 53 books.” All he could really do, he decided, was “occasionally goose the people in the right direction. I had a secretary who had a list of people—just to call. The only way I knew that I’d be able to make sure I spoke to everybody that worked at Marvel was to have a secretary have mandatory phone calls and it was on the chart. Once a month I managed to speak to everybody.” He was arguing with Production Manager John Verpoorten about deadlines; he was fighting with Cadence about ill-considered cost-cutting efforts (Marvel’s parent company wanted, for instance, to print comics with single-color covers); he was going through a separation with his wife. He was publicly predicting that the already barely surviving comic industry would face a bigger slump before things turned around—in fact, he and Len Wein were already looking at writing screenplays as a possible exit strategy. “It was a job that was just impossible,” Wolfman said. “I think it’s what finally killed everybody that’s been in the job.”

Verpoorten asked Roy Thomas how he felt about coming back to his old job, now that Landau was gone. Thomas’s marriage had completely fallen apart, and he was restless. Maybe it would be better this time. He met with Galton, worked out his salary with Sol Brodsky, and held one-on-one meetings with editorial and production staffers.

“I’m kind of second in command,” Jim Shooter told him, “and I completely understand if you need someone else to be your right-hand man.”

No, no, Thomas shrugged—you’ll do. “And then,” said Shooter, “he gave me a nice chunky list of people he was going to fire.”

Don McGregor wondered if he was going to be one of those people—he’d been told that he was going to be taken off
Power Man
, and to be prepared that Thomas was “totally against” his writing. When he met with Thomas, though, he was assured that wasn’t the case. In fact, Thomas told McGregor, he’d be getting even more work—it was just that Wolfman wanted to do
Power Man
. “It was like being caught in some political intrigue,” McGregor said. “Who can you trust? These are people I’ve known for years; somebody’s not telling the truth.”

While McGregor tried to solve the mystery, Thomas scheduled a vacation in Los Angeles, a last breath of freedom before returning to the daily grind. The news of his return began leaking to the fanzine press.

Wolfman waited eagerly.

T
he drama wasn’t confined to the office walls.
Howard the Duck
artist Frank Brunner was tired of having to follow fully scripted stories by Gerber—and tired of Marvel’s refusal to raise his page rate. He left the book, and through a small mail-order company began selling poster prints of a mobster duck, titled “Scarface Duck.” It looked a lot like Howard . . . but then, hadn’t Howard looked a lot like Donald anyway? “I was filling a void left by slow-moving Marvel,” Brunner reasoned, “which did not immediately see the potential of the fan market—or of the duck.”

The print sold quickly. Gerber wasn’t pleased. He told Brunner he wanted some of the profits from his co-creation.

“Which part of the print,” Brunner asked Gerber, “did you write or draw? What part of the deal did you arrange?” Then he got together with Mike Friedrich, and hatched plans for Star*Reach to cash in on Howard Fever by publishing the adventures of another identically rendered character he called “The Duckateer.” The comic was called
Quack!

Mary Skrenes, meanwhile, had gone to a New York comic store and presold enough orders for howard for president buttons to cover production costs for an entire run. Although she and Gerber were unable to convince Marvel to pull the trigger on marketing
Howard
merchandise, they did manage to get a license to sell the buttons themselves. “We didn’t have to pay a fee,” said Skrenes, “because they didn’t believe it would work.”
*

No longer speaking with Brunner, they recruited celebrated horror-comics artist Berni Wrightson to draw the button, which they advertised for one dollar plus a quarter shipping. From the Mad Genius offices, Jim Salicrup, Mary Skrenes, and David Anthony Kraft stuffed envelopes while
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
played on the television. The orders kept rolling in.

“W
hy are you taking the job again?” Gerry Conway asked his old friend Roy Thomas—and while Thomas was on the West Coast, that question kept ringing in his ears. It turned out that he really liked being in California. He liked it so much, in fact, that he rented an apartment at a singles complex in Toluca Lake and soon informed Lee that he was not going to return after all. But, he said, he had a solution: Conway, who’d been so unceremoniously passed over in 1974 and departed for DC, should be the new editor in chief.

“Gerry swooped in the day before he took over,” said Jim Shooter, “and there was terror and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. There was panic everywhere.” Conway didn’t like what he saw at 575 Madison. “A handful of writers had what amounted to their own fiefdoms. They ran their five or six titles as if they were editors themselves. So you ended up with this informal and dysfunctional setup with no lines of authority. There were a lot of egos running rampant, because no one was telling anyone what to do.

“Len and Marv’s primary interest was in being creators, not bosses. When your basic group was Roy and me and Marv and Len as primary writers, and Englehart and Gerber, you have no problems. But once the company started expanding to forty or fifty titles, you had to bring in other people who needed more guidance, and they weren’t getting it. So when I came back, it was chaos. They were missing shipping deadlines all over the place, penalized by the printers, almost to the point of losing the profit margin. And nobody was responsible.”

Conway was ready to shake things up, to root out the freelancers who were not making deadline. He immediately called the writers he anticipated having trouble with, including Steve Englehart, Wein, and Wolfman, and laid down the rules. Don McGregor, no longer protected by Wolfman’s promise, was immediately removed from the Black Panther strip in
Jungle Action
. Conway insisted that the decision was purely financial, that poor sales had combined with blown deadlines (and subsequent late fees charged by the printer) to create a money-losing endeavor. “Maybe the Panther would have done equally well with a minuscule print-run and no color,” Conway said, “but that’s not the kind of book we were publishing, and Don just couldn’t sell the kind of book the Panther was.” So
Jungle Action
was canceled and the Black Panther was given his own title, with Jack Kirby assigned as writer and artist.
*

B
ut Shooter was himself clashing with writers whose scripts he was proofreading—many of whom had been given free rein for years. To his mind, the line was 5 percent magnificence, 95 percent trash. He thought Gerber, McGregor, and Englehart’s stories were indulgent. “I tried to read the ‘good’ stuff,” he said, “and it was complicated and convoluted and didn’t make any sense and wasn’t written in English.”

He told Tony Isabella to rewrite the climax to a two-year
Ghost Rider
story line, in which the hero was saved by Jesus Christ, on the grounds that it would be seen as religious propaganda. When Shooter and Englehart had a blowup over a plot inconsistency on finished pages, Englehart mailed circled copies of the original script, pointing out that he’d had it right all along. Conway and Shooter both apologized to Englehart, but the environment had turned inescapably toxic.

“It was a cesspool of politics and personality issues,” said Conway. “I was not ready for it—just twenty-three years old, and thrust into this morass that had built up in the previous year and a half of chaos.”

Conway spelled out the protocol in a staff-wide memo dated March 12: “There’s been a problem in the past with communications between the writers and the editorial staff. It should be understood that all the assistant editors are surrogates for the editor, and that my authority is delegated to them on a day to day basis . . . assume that their decisions are my decisions.”

That was it, then. Shooter’s word was final.

T
o much of the staff, Conway was an outsider, a DC guy who’d come barreling back into their clubhouse and tried to make up new rules. They stuck together, in their weird way. When a young writer was removed from his book, a member of the production team came to Conway and insisted the writer not be fired.

“What are you talking about?” Conway demanded. “Why not?”

“Because he’s a member of our coven!”

The writer was not given his job back, and Conway’s relationship with the production department was never the same.

Meanwhile, Conway’s secretary—inherited from Wolfman—refused to do anything but answer fan mail. Conway told her to change her ways or she’d be gone. Then he received a visit from one of his top writers, who happened to be dating the secretary.

“Gee,” the writer said in measured tones, “my girlfriend’s really unhappy. I really hope you can keep her . . .”

She stayed.

S
teve Englehart’s latest idea for
Doctor Strange
was appropriately zany: Strange and his lover/apprentice Clea would be whisked back in time to explore “The Occult History of America,” an adventure that would put them in contact with notable Freemasons like Francis Bacon, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Clea and Benjamin Franklin would have a torrid affair—cuckolding Strange—as they sailed from England to bear witness to the occult-influenced drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Finally, they’d return to the present, where the evil sorcerer Stygro was vampirically feeding off the energy of American patriotism. “It seemed like the thing to do for the bicentennial,” Englehart said.

But he only made it through two issues. When he missed a deadline on an issue of
The Avengers
, Conway called to remove him from an assignment, and he snapped. “I found myself in a real sort of schizophrenic thing,” Englehart said, “sitting there sort of watching myself saying, ‘well, then fuck you, I quit.’ And part of me was thinking, ‘Do you realize what you’re doing?’ ”

Englehart wrote the last eight pages of the delinquent comic in five minutes. “I just said, ‘I’m going to get this out of here,’ and wrote just silly shit. It wasn’t a real
Avengers
comic book, it was just dialogue for the sake of dialogue.” When the
Avengers
pages arrived at the Marvel offices, the last panel read, “Dear bullpen: stick it in your ear.—Steve.”