Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (26 page)
After half a decade at Marvel, Englehart began writing for DC Comics; his Marvel titles were divvied up between Conway, Wolfman, and Claremont. All three titles suffered from Englehart’s loss.
Then Jim Starlin called, upset about art corrections on an issue of
Warlock
, and demanded the opportunity to make changes. Conway refused, on the grounds that the corrections would incur late penalties. Starlin, too, quit.
Starlin, Englehart, and Alan Weiss got on the phone together and called Stan Lee from California, insisting that he do something about Conway. It shouldn’t have come as too great a surprise to the writers who’d taken such a stance against conformity that Lee would back his editor.
But Conway was exhausted. “It was like the worst high school dysfunctional mishegoss,” Conway said. “Artists were unhappy, and I had this angry editorial staff. Every decision was fraught. I was nauseous all the time. I couldn’t see my way out of it short of firing everybody. At one point I was ready to do it. ‘Let’s get rid of this entire staff and start over.’ ”
Instead, he turned in his own resignation. He’d been in the position for less than a month. “It hadn’t occurred to me,” Conway later said, “it would be as horrific as it was.”
A
mid a flat market and an exodus of talent, Archie Goodwin, editor of Marvel’s black-and-white magazines, was drafted to be the fourth editor in chief since Roy Thomas had left twenty months before. Thirty-eight years old, Goodwin was experienced, respected, and beloved by nearly everyone in the industry. Unfortunately, he didn’t really want the job—he’d been perfectly happy working on the magazines—and only accepted it, he said later, because he was afraid to turn down a promotion.
“Archie was never great in an executive position,” recalled one of his assistants. “He loved to write more than anything, and he loved to edit books, but he did not like doing the business part. Everybody who got that job thought that meant they could do the comics they wanted. They didn’t understand it also involved advertising space, printing bills, and keeping the businessmen who owned the company happy. You had to answer questions about personnel.”
And managing the personnel was an increasing challenge. In one of his first tasks in the new position, Goodwin helped Stan Lee negotiate Gerry Conway’s outgoing freelance arrangement. Conway would now write and edit a substantial number of comics from home: the pointedly wholesome new projects
Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man
and
Ms. Marvel
, plus
The Avengers
and
Captain Marvel
(both vacated by an angry Steve Englehart),
Ghost Rider
(vacated by an angry Tony Isabella),
Iron Man
(vacated by Goodwin), and
The Defenders
.
*
Gerber, removed from
The Defenders
specifically so that Conway could meet his quota, was angry, too; an item in a fanzine even leaked the news that he was leaving
Howard the Duck
. But he resolved his differences with Marvel—greased by the offer of a writer-editor title of his own—and for
Marvel Treasury Edition
#12 wrote a final adventure for the Defenders, in which they teamed with Howard. Gerber supplied those who were paying attention with plenty of chewy subtext: the story featured a team of second-rate ne’er-do-wells (“we’re too derivative—too stereotypical—even to make names for ourselves as supervillains!”) whose greatest motivation was, in a nod to the perpetually starstruck Stan Lee, to be “on the cover of next month’s issue of
Celebrity
.”
With Starlin and Englehart and McGregor gone, Steve Gerber was the last renegade standing. “I think in most cases,” a stung McGregor told an interviewer, “they’ve weeded out all the mavericks.” Maybe that’s why Stan Lee went to Gerber when a rock manager named Bill Aucoin approached Marvel about producing a comic book starring the band Kiss.
Kiss frontman Gene Simmons was a lifelong comics fan. He’d known Marv Wolfman through fanzine circles, and based part of his onstage costume on Jack Kirby’s Black Bolt. With a spectacular live act that included pyrotechnics and simulated blood-spitting and fire-breathing, Kiss had finally climbed the album charts after three years of struggling. Now they wanted to be comic-book stars.
*
Gerber didn’t know their music, but after attending a concert with a nonplussed, ear-holding Lee, he agreed to chronicle their adventures. It was a rocky road. At one early meeting, Aucoin’s VP went ballistic when he saw that Kiss were being depicted not as superheroes but as mere musicians. “What the fuck is this?” he shouted as he ripped the pages in half. “If you’re gonna be doing a story, they’re not musicians, they’re superheroes!”
As negotiations dragged on over the following months, Gerber found himself allied with Kiss management in the pursuit of a higher-quality product than the usual floppy newsprint pamphlet. They demanded that Marvel publish the story in a 1.50 magazine format with hand-separated color; Gerber pushed to use metallic ink for the cover logo, and for Marvel to exchange advertising with rock magazines like
Rolling Stone
. He involved himself in the design, the typography, the paper stock, the photo selection. As he saw it, high-quality color comic magazines were a way out of the industry free fall—getting Marvel out of the advertising ghetto of Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Spex and You Too Can Draw Timmy the Turtle, appealing to real Madison Avenue advertisers like respectable periodicals did. To draw in Kiss fans not familiar with the Marvel line, he wrote an ad for the inside front cover that shouted, “Welcome to the Marvel Universe!” It was, he proudly pointed out afterward, “the first bit of sophisticated ad copy for itself that the company has ever put before the public.”
S
tan Lee was also interested in ads. At the end of March, he shot a thirty-second television commercial for the Personna Double II twin-blade razor (“Here at Marvel, I’ve got Spider-Man and all these characters and super villains like Dr. Doom to worry about . . . I can’t waste time worrying about things like shaving!”). Pleased with the results, he dashed off a letter to Marvel’s licensing agent. “I wonder if the basic idea mightn’t be expanded for some other sponsor who might have a big enough budget to really get the most mileage out of it,” Lee wrote. “Additionally, I could mention the ads in our ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ pages, which are printed in more than 75 million Marvel Comics annually. Needless to say, I’d be happy to personally promote the product any way I could. . . . Considering the vast influence and appeal Marvel and I seem to have with today’s so-called ‘youth market,’ it seems a shame not to be harnessing this tremendous asset in areas other than the sale of comic books alone.”
Lee’s editorial input by now largely consisted of last-minute second-guessing, in which he would grab a pile of makereadies and sit down with Archie Goodwin. With more than a decade of editorial experience, Goodwin had little use for a tedious page-by-page review of which word balloons had crooked pointers. “You know,” Goodwin finally said, “Jim Shooter is actually the guy who does the hands-on editing. You should talk to him.” (Shooter, the perpetual second in command, had briefly quit after Goodwin was named as Conway’s successor, but retracted the resignation before it took effect.)
Goodwin found the other aspects of the job no more rewarding. Conversations with the executives upstairs were fruitless. In one meeting, the businessmen wondered how to hang on to Marvel’s freelance writers and artists, more and more of whom had been migrating to DC (even Conway had bolted to the competition, only six months into his freelance arrangement). Goodwin suggested profit sharing, health insurance, and the return of artwork. After a three-hour conference about this, the response was not encouraging.
“Why are we talking about giving benefits and royalties to these people?” one of the executives asked Goodwin. “These aren’t employees on the books—they’re people we hire for
piecework
. They have no loyalty to us.” Goodwin, furious, threw up his hands. After continued conference talks between editorial and Cadence, the most that Marvel could offer its freelancers was royalty payments for reprinted stories—a practice that DC had already instituted, months earlier.
Cadence wasn’t about to sink more money than it had into keeping freelancers happy. After a letter from Sheldon Feinberg to stockholders cited cover-price increases and lower rates of returned product—but conspicuously omitted mention of newsstand sales—Galton shut down the company’s men’s magazines. The increasingly
Playboy
-like publications had been in Galton’s sights the moment he arrived on the job—“I’m not a pornographer,” he said—but the threat of unionization from the other magazines was the final nail in the coffin.
Celebrity
shut down.
Stag
and
Male
were sold off to Chip Goodman. After half a century, Magazine Management was nothing but a name.
M
arvel’s handling of the Kiss negotiations was another distressing signal. Skrenes remembered Gerber returning home one evening, devastated by the corporate attitude toward the band’s trademarks. “Kiss just looked like wild and crazy superheroes to them. So Marvel was going to do its own book of characters like the Kiss guys. Like, ‘We have the trademark on weird-looking guys, and these guys are stealing the idea by painting their faces. We’ll just do it ourselves.’ It made no sense.”
Gerber, ashamed of Marvel, informed Kiss of the scheme; the band threatened the publisher with a lawsuit unless the book proceeded as planned—with Gerber on board. By the time the matter was settled, Gerber had negotiated for himself something unheard-of at Marvel, something not even Jack Kirby—nor Stan Lee—had managed: a royalty.
Gerber, of course, had gotten none of the residuals or merchandising action on
Howard the Duck
. “I’m the most famous duck writer in the world, and I’m going broke,” Gerber told a magazine interviewer, who pointed out that anyone who’d invested in twenty copies of
Howard
#1 made more than the four hundred dollars that Gerber (“who lives in Manhattan’s unglamourous Hell’s Kitchen and sublets a shabbily furnished office in a dreary midtown building”) had been paid to write it.
A royalty was more than just a symbolic victory for Gerber, but the thrill was gone. He couldn’t believe that Marvel would be so stupid as to try to duplicate Kiss, and squander the advantage of the publicity of one of the most popular acts in the country. Even worse was the disillusionment he now felt toward Lee, his boss and hero. “I don’t know if Stan knew about this, or was forced into it,” said Skrenes. “But I knew Steve’s life was never going to be the same.”
While Gerber finished the Kiss project, Lee and the band flew in a DC9 to Buffalo, where they got a police escort to a printing plant. Lee smiled as they mixed samples of their blood into the ink supply and cameras flashed. (Bill Aucoin later claimed that the blood mistakenly ended up in an issue of
Sports Illustrated
.)
Gerber was simultaneously at work on a syndicated
Howard the Duck
newspaper strip, and trying to keep up with deadlines on the monthly
Howard
book, and a
Howard
annual, and packing up his Hell’s Kitchen apartment and preparing a move to Skrenes’s hometown of Las Vegas. It proved to be more than he could handle.
Howard the Duck
#16, conceived in desperation as he drove cross-country, was seventeen pages of Howard illustrations by various artists, set to thousands of words of text by Gerber about the difficulty of his deadlines. There were imaginary conversations between Gerber and Howard, a downbeat short story about domesticity (followed by a negative self-critique of the story), and a scenario in which “outraged Marvelites” forced Howard and Gerber into a whirring machine that produced jars of “Gerber Strained Brains”; pictures of production manager and deadline taskmaster John Verpoorten lurked on various pages. At the conclusion was a typed letter of comment on the issue: “What I did not like was your self-conscious self-effacement throughout the story,” the third paragraph began. “Okay, so maybe you’ll never grow up to be another Tom Robbins or Thomas Pynchon . . . your material may always consist more of invective than inventiveness. . . . Come on, Gerber! Get with it!”
The letter was signed, “Steve Gerber.”
B
efore leaving New York for Los Angeles, Roy Thomas had been approached by a marketing consultant who’d tried, and failed, to convince Stan Lee that Marvel should adapt an upcoming science-fiction film that was in production in Algeria. After looking at pre-production sketches, Thomas agreed to appeal to Lee.
Ed Shukin, the circulation director, was skeptical. It was a cast of mostly unknowns, and the deal called for a six-issue adaptation; the third issue would be on stands before the movie even opened. It was, he thought, an unnecessary risk at a time when Marvel’s sales were in free fall. But there was one recent shift in the company’s strategy that worked in Thomas’s favor: what seemed to most interest Lee and Jim Galton lately was shoring up copyrights and brand names (hence the creations of Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel) and creating relationships with Hollywood. In the span of months, Marvel licensed the rights for Hanna-Barbera cartoons, science-fiction films (
Logan’s Run
;
2001
),
Godzilla
, Edgar Rice Burroughs characters (
Tarzan
and
John Carter, Warlord of Mars
), and even a real-life costumed stuntman from Montreal (
The Human Fly
). Maybe they could take a chance on this, too. After all, Thomas had been right about Conan the Barbarian.
Thomas won his argument, and Marvel prepared its adaptation of
Star Wars
.
M
eanwhile, titles with original characters, like
Iron Fist
,
The Inhumans
,
Black Goliath
, and
Omega the Unknown
, were canceled. Gerber and Skrenes had planned ahead the next two years of
Omega the Unknown
, in which the extraterrestrial hero experienced various human weaknesses—addictions to alcohol, gambling, and women—and which would reveal his link to James-Michael Starling. The final issue before cancellation brought Omega to Las Vegas and ended with the announcement that the story would be continued in an issue of
The Defenders
. It never happened. “They said they wanted new ideas,” Skrenes recalled. “But when you gave them something new they said, ‘but what is it
like
?’ ”
