Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (36 page)

Now, it could afford to. Marvel’s sales on newsstands, quite miraculously, had stopped falling. But the real success story was at comic shops, where tremendous growth was taking place. Direct-market sales increased 46 percent in 1982, then another 32 percent in 1983. A rash of miniseries not only provided a constant stream of “collectible” number-one issues, but also served as a convenient way to test the market waters for a regular series. Now in the works were miniseries starring Hawkeye, Cloak and Dagger, Black Panther, Falcon, and a second Avengers team, made up of all the characters who couldn’t fit into the main one (eventually it was decided to set them up in Los Angeles, naturally, and call them the West Coast Avengers). Also in the planning stages were miniseries starring Machine Man and the Eternals, neither of which had been given much respect when Jack Kirby created them. Of course, the real cash cows were all those X-Men spin-offs that would fly on and off the shelves:
X-Men and Micronauts
;
Illyana and Storm
;
Beauty and the Beast
(which costarred the Dazzler, in a remarkable testimony to Marvel’s stubbornness, and former X-Man the Beast);
Kitty Pryde and Wolverine
. The Beast joined the lineup of
The Defenders
, which now also included two other former X-Men, the Angel and Iceman.

C
arol Kalish, not yet thirty years old, had a lot to do with Marvel’s sales success. She’d lobbied for various policies that benefited retailers—an advertising co-op program, a comics rack program, and a cash register program—realizing that the publisher’s continued growth depended on their health. She distributed copies of Jay Conrad Levinson’s
Guerrilla Marketing
to shop owners, and persuaded Marvel to accept returns on last-minute fill-in issues. She pushed for distribution in Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, too.

She loved selling as much as she loved comics, and the retailers loved her. Regarded by many as the smartest person in the comics industry, she dressed the part of the Young Urban Professional and regularly communicated in well-polished corporatespeak, but she could also talk the language of a hard-core comics fan—she
was
a hard-core comics fan. “Carol would come visit shops, take people out to dinner, ask what was selling, what fans wanted to see,” said Diana Schutz. “And after dinner, the Marvel plastic would pay for dinner, and when somebody would say, ‘Are you sure? Can you pay for this whole table?’ Carol
always
had the rationale that the money she spent on taking retailers out to dinner was another nail in the coffin of some book she despised, like
Dazzler
. That was one of the ones she was eager to get rid of.”

Kalish, hyperarticulate and strong-willed, earned the fierce loyalty of her boss, Ed Shukin, and her assistant, Peter David. But she was not so beloved elsewhere in the Marvel offices. “There was a good deal of hostility and suspicion,” David said of the relationship between the editorial and sales departments. “Editorial did not understand what the need for sales was at all. They were afraid that sales would become the tail wagging the dog. They didn’t want their stories to be sales driven, they wanted to be purely creatively driven.”

Shooter was given to repeating what Stan Lee had told him, after he’d called in a panic to ask about the rumors that Marvel was killing off its characters. “If the comics are good, sales will take care of themselves.” It was not a philosophy the sales and marketing staff was fond of.

Peter David—a former journalist who’d been unsuccessfully pitching
Moon Knight
ideas to Denny O’Neil—found himself at the center of one particularly public clash between editorial and marketing. David, charged with regularly distributing preview pages of upcoming material at events, was given photocopies of future
Alpha Flight
pages. The problem was that Marvel had been hyping that one Alpha Flight member would die in the still-upcoming issue #12, and the photocopies, from issue #13, included a dream sequence in which that dead hero rose from the grave. When Byrne saw the spoiler-heavy photocopies, he found where David was stationed and screamed at him, before knocking over furniture and storming out. (A quarter century later, the two men were still debating the specifics of the story on online message boards.)

The truth was, though, that Shooter’s goals and Kalish’s goals were overlapping quite nicely, and nothing demonstrated their lockstep better than
Secret Wars
, which finally came out in January 1984. Mattel wasn’t much help—their toys were lagging months behind, and they weren’t going to put much marketing muscle into them anyway. But Shooter’s “Bullpen Bulletins” column and the articles in
Marvel Age
hammered it through the minds of readers and retailers alike:
this is going to change everything about these characters, and you are going to buy it
.

The plot for
Secret Wars
was simple: an otherworldly, ethereal force known as the Beyonder transports a few dozen superheroes and supervillains to a planet called Battleworld, where they are told to fight it out. “I am from beyond!” shouts the cosmic voice. “Slay your enemies and all that you desire shall be yours!” One could argue that the fight-filled
Secret Wars
went against everything that made Marvel Comics special—although there were the usual squabbles and misunderstandings between the good guys, there was a minimum of moral shading, other than a few pages where Mister Fantastic flirted with (and decided against) pacifism.
*
In recent
X-Men
story lines, Chris Claremont had taken great pains to transform Magneto into a compelling, possibly noble Auschwitz survivor who’d made peace with the X-Men; in
Secret Wars
, he was again reduced to a violent ideologue who would slay all who stood in the way of his dream of peace. The bad guys were all either thugs or megalomaniacs, with one exception.

The Molecule Man was clearly the character that most fascinated Shooter. A throwaway Lee and Kirby villain from the early days of the
Fantastic Four
, the Molecule Man had been just another nebbish named Owen Reece when an accident at an atomic plant gave him the power to rearrange physical matter. He’d been dusted off a few times by Steve Gerber and Len Wein in the 1970s, but it was Shooter who had played up the revenge-of-the-nerd angle in a couple of
Avengers
issues, and made Owen Reece a strangely sympathetic sociopath. “When I got my power,” Reece explained, “I wanted to get even with the whole world ’cause I’ve been picked on all my life—but I couldn’t figure out a way to do it . . . till now!” At the end of that story, Reece had agreed to go see a therapist. Now, in
Secret Wars
, Shooter had Reece preaching enlightenment to the criminal goons around him, who grew only angrier when they realized he could incinerate them at will.

But the Molecule Man’s story was abandoned without resolution, in favor of explosions and speeches about never giving up. It would be Mister Fantastic’s words that would echo most strongly in the minds of readers. “Why would a being so far removed from us and so powerful as the Beyonder bring us across the universe for a stupid, simplistic ‘good-versus-evil’ gladiatorial contest? Is he a mad god? A cosmic idiot? . . . There must be more to this . . . but what possible purpose could there be?” It was better not to think too hard. As Shooter would later say, the comic was simply a way to “teach the kids how to play with the toys.”

Secret Wars
never transcended its awkward mix of exposition and cliché. Characters constantly restated their motivations. To please Mattel, there were three new female characters introduced, but one was just a new Spider-Woman, and the other two were in the statuesque female-wrestler mode. The dynamism in Mike Zeck’s artwork began to slip away as Shooter continually ordered pages redrawn, insisting on more establishing shots, and more eye-level long shots. They fell behind schedule, and Bob Layton stepped in for a few issues; upon his return Zeck’s contribution was limited to workmanlike renderings of Shooter’s stick-figure layouts, the natural visual analog of the straight-ahead storytelling rules he espoused. When the final issue was completed at last, the emotionally strained Zeck received from Shooter a bottle of Dom Perignon, with an attached card that read, “The War Is Over.” Zeck opened it and downed the entire bottle immediately.

In the end, there were signs that remnants of Shooter’s Big Bang plans had worked their way into the series:
Secret Wars
#11 ended with the “bolt from the blue” that was mentioned in those earlier meetings, and the cover copy of #12, the final issue, read “After the Big Bang!” But apart from a few new costumes, and a new Spider-Woman, nothing much had really changed in the Marvel Universe. Which, maybe, was what the fans wanted all along.

T
he first signs of
Secret Wars
’ commercial prospects came a month into 1984, with a tie-in issue of
Amazing Spider-Man
. Tom DeFalco and artist Ron Frenz had taken over the title just as
Secret Wars
was solidifying, and one of their welcome presents was an issue that Roger Stern had already plotted, in which Spider-Man’s new, black costume would first appear. Because the word around the office was that this new-costume stunt would be a disaster, DeFalco stepped in to write other Spider-Man titles while regular writers backed away, wanting nothing to do with it, especially after news of the costume leaked. “We got a ton of mail saying what a bad idea it was,” DeFalco remembered. “To the point where Shooter came to me and said, ‘What issue does Spider-Man get his black costume?’ And I said, ‘252,’ and he said, ‘Get rid of it by 253. Sales are going to plummet; everybody hates it.’ I had a long discussion with him and convinced him we had to keep it for at least eight issues. He wasn’t gonna get it in
Secret Wars
until issue 8. I said, ‘We have to
introduce
it before we get rid of it.’ ”

DeFalco and Shooter needn’t have worried—when Mattel heard about the new Spider-Man costume, they were thrilled. Now they could sell two versions of the toy. “The day we’re sending the issue out,” DeFalco said, “Shooter comes in and says, ‘Oh, by the way, keep the black costume.’ ”

On February 1, the day after
Amazing Spider-Man
#252 hit stands, Eliot Brown and Tom DeFalco arrived in California for a signing tour of comic stores. It turned out that
Spider-Man
#252 was an instant record-breaker, even more of a surprise than Walt Simonson’s first issue of
Thor
had been. By the time they arrived at the first shop, there was nothing left for DeFalco to sign—the store was already out of stock. Meanwhile, at a signing in Canada, Ron Frenz saw the issue going for fifty dollars. “The Fire Marshal shut it down because too many people had shown up,” he said. “It was like
Soylent Green
. . . . The crowd was pushing the table back and back, because it was huge and it didn’t have any direction, so the table kept migrating on me. It was like Beatles time, and nobody was expecting it.”

A
week later, DeFalco flew to the Atlanta Comics Festival, where Jim Shooter, basking in the glow of
Secret Wars
#1, laughed sportingly as some of his most trusted friends and employees—including John Byrne, Mark Gruenwald, Mike Carlin, and Tom DeFalco—provided a comics version of a celebrity roast. When they returned to New York, things looked like they were only going to get better: in an astonishing turn of events, Bill Sarnoff at Warner Publishing, DC’s parent company, had called Shooter to say that although DC’s superheroes were making a killing in licensing, the comics were losing money. Sarnoff asked if Marvel would be interested in licensing and publishing seven of DC’s titles. Marvel began negotiating for the rights to
Superman
,
Batman
,
Wonder Woman
,
Green Lantern
,
New Teen Titans
,
The Legion of Superheroes,
and
Justice League of America
. Shooter projected that Marvel’s acquisition would result in an additional 39 million copies sold over the first two years, at a pretax profit of $3.5 million. It wasn’t just a lucrative opportunity that was falling into Marvel’s lap; the removal of its chief competitor would be the “elimination of an irritation,” as Shooter put it in one memo.

But the timing was off. One week later, on February 28, First Comics filed a suit against Marvel and World Color Printing—the press that serviced nearly the entire industry—for “anti-trust and anti-competitive activities.” The suit claimed not only that Marvel was getting preferential pricing from World Color, but also that the publisher was intentionally flooding the market with product, in an attempt to drown its fledgling competitors. Marvel wasn’t about to cut down on the barrage of new titles, but the company quickly decided that taking over the reins of the major properties of the DC universe might not be wise at this point.

Shooter was disappointed, but it wasn’t a devastating loss. Marvel, he figured, could always create a new universe of its own.

14

N
oting that the twentieth anniversary of
Fantastic Four
#1—and thus, of the Marvel Universe—was approaching, Jim Galton gathered executives and VPs to talk about what kinds of special publishing events might be scheduled. Shooter’s first idea had familiar elements. “I proposed that we do a Big Bang—that is, bring the Marvel Universe to an end, with every single title concluding, forever, in dramatic fashion,” he later told an interviewer. At this point, he said, the titles and characters would all be relaunched, and royalties would be paid to the creators of the classic heroes, like Kirby and Ditko, for whom there’d been no systemic incentives a quarter century ago. “We could just include them from that point on in the standard creator participation programs that I’d installed, as each of the characters they had created long ago were re-introduced.” When this idea was shot down, Shooter suggested a new, separate fictional universe that would have no relation to the current Marvel one. He got the green light, and a $120,000 budget, to launch a series of titles in two years, for the 1986 anniversary.

In the meantime, now that
Secret Wars
was up and running, Jim Shooter already had an entire universe to fix. He seemed a little less than pleased with how other writers were handling their titles. “I think Shooter felt some of the characters were no longer being portrayed properly,” said Tom DeFalco. “Y’know: their
essence
. He wanted to use this as an opportunity to show us how it should be done.”

“It sold through the roof,” John Byrne said of
Secret Wars
. “Better than anything up to that point. Shooter had to justify it in his mind. He had to convince himself it hadn’t sold just because it had every super-hero in the world in it. It sold because it was brilliant.” Now even Byrne was getting the graded makereadies that Doug Moench had complained about. “It was wonderful being in school again. ‘C-minus. See me.’ And he would add notes that said, ‘See
Secret Wars
for how to do this right.’ . . . I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d see
Secret Wars
for how to do anything but possibly fold it.”

There was a full-court press to promote the series in other Marvel titles, as evidenced by a darkly funny memo that was posted in the Bullpen:

Date: April 27, 1984

From: Jim Shooter

To: The Editors

Subject: Secret Wars

Since I don’t have a lettercol to hype Secret Wars (and myself) I’d appreciate some help. How about, in your lettercols for the rest of the year, mentioning how marvelous a job I’m doing, and how being the E.I.C., and therefore the ultimate authority on all the characters and like unto the Very God of the Marvel Universe, my work is absolutely perfect. Definitive, even. That seems to be the only gripe we’re getting—that the characters are not exactly
as dull and boring
the same as they appear in their regular titles. If you guys would talk up the wonderful job I’m doing we could
trick the little fucks
make it clearer to the charming readers that, despite my stylistic differences from the other writers, we’re writing the same characters.
Only I write them better.
Let’s legitimize the hell out of it, okay?

When the memo leaked to the
Comics Journal
, a Marvel spokesman confimed its veracity, but then assistant editor Eliot Brown suddenly stepped forward and accepted responsibility for staging a hoax. Shooter refused to comment. Regardless of its true author, the memo captured a sentiment that Marvel employees recognized: nobody understood the characters like Shooter did. As
Captain America
moved toward its three hundredth issue, Shooter started reworking dialogue at the last minute. The writer, J. M. DeMatteis, was in the midst of a yearlong story, building to a climax in which the Red Skull, Captain America’s archenemy of nearly half a century, was killed. An exhausted Captain America would hurl his shield into the East River, walk away, and try to find a meaningful life as Steve Rogers. “My idea,” said DeMatteis, “was that Captain America’s gonna just say, ‘You know what? I’ve tried punching people and dropping buildings on their heads for forty years, and there has to be another way.’ He was ultimately going to become a global peace activist which was going to create all kinds of problems for him—the government would turn against him, all the Marvel heroes would turn against him, and the only allies to support him would be Doctor Doom and the Sub-Mariner. I had recast the Bucky of the 1950s as Nomad; he was basically going to freak out about all this and, in the end, assassinate Captain America.” Black Crow, a Native American character that DeMatteis had created, would now be the new Captain America.

DeMatteis’s plan was, in a way, a politically radicalized echo of those old Big Bang rumors in which Steve Rogers would die and a new Captain America would take his place. But while DeMatteis and his artist plugged away on upcoming issues, Jim Shooter took a look at Steve Rogers throwing away his shield in the final pages of #300 and insisted that there was simply no way this could happen—Captain America, he said, would never act like this. Shooter cut the double-sized issue in half and rewrote it himself. Steve Rogers would never have his crisis of faith, and Black Crow would never become Captain America. DeMatteis, disgusted, quit the title he’d been writing for three years.

After
Secret Wars
came out, Marvel’s editors, writers, and artists started to wonder if only Jim Shooter knew what Jim Shooter wanted. Of course, Shooter wasn’t the only one to have proprietary instincts about Marvel-owned characters—Stan Lee had for years been territorial about the usage of Silver Surfer. And as the leader of the editorial department, it was well within Shooter’s rights—it was his duty, really—to act as the custodian of the characters.

And Shooter was still open to the persuasions of his editors, still willing to take chances. The new artist on
The New Mutants
, Bill Sienkiewicz, had been making huge strides on
Moon Knight
before he and Moench left; now, more than a year later, his work was like nothing ever seen in superhero comics. His very first page depicted a bear’s head that morphed into a crossword puzzle that morphed into a blanket; on the following pages, it looked like he’d dropped his brush, dripping India ink everywhere. To exploit Sienkiewicz’s outside-the-box experimentation, Chris Claremont and editor Ann Nocenti fed him the idea for a hyperactive, bionic, shape-shifting character. And then there were the near abstractions of the painted cover, the first in a series that would push the boundaries of Marvel’s visual style. “I let him do the craziest covers he could think of,” said Nocenti, “because it was about trying to explode out of old-school Marvel into something more modern.” Sienkiewicz began working with other media, something few artists since Jack Kirby had done: “I went to Radio Shack and bought circuit boards and transistors and soldered all these transistors into a pattern and painted them, slapped them on with modeling paste and ran wire and tape and painted this whole biocircuitry collage.”

Letters of praise and letters of horror poured in. One, written in crayon to Shooter, simply read, “GET RID OF HIM JIMMY BEFORE HE RUINS EVERYTHING.” But readers were buying it compulsively—trying to figure out if they hated it or loved it, but buying it just the same. For a while, at least, Shooter allowed Sienkiewicz a free hand.

“That was the thing about Jim,” Nocenti said. “He was kind of old-fashioned, but he could see to the future if you battled hard enough.”

O
f course, embracing the new meant ditching the old. To make way for Bill Sienkiewicz, Sal Buscema—whose unwaveringly straightforward style had offset the absurdity of Steve Gerber’s
The Defenders
and Steve Englehart’s
Captain America
—had been taken off
New Mutants
. “I knew you couldn’t have an old-fashioned artist on something geared to bring in new readers,” said Nocenti. “Probably the hardest call I ever made at Marvel was to Sal Buscema, to say, bluntly—too bluntly—‘I am taking you off this book.’ He asked why, and I said, ‘You’re old fashioned. This needs to be new.’ And he was really mad, then upset. Then he turned around, and in the next issue of
The Incredible Hulk
. . . it was fucking magnificent. It was like Sal saying, ‘You want to see what I can do?’ He just pulled all the guns out.” Not everyone, though, had a
Hulk
gig on which they could prove themselves.

Shooter had a reputation for keeping the old hands, the guys who’d been around the industry for decades, busy with work—not just Vinnie Colletta, but Don Perlin, Mike Esposito, and Frank Springer. But stories began to circulate of some veterans being put out to pasture. While inker Chic Stone recuperated from a heart attack, he received a dispatch from Shooter that shut the door on future work. “The letter was basically two sentences long,” Stone remembered, “and it said something to the effect of, ‘Dear Chic, Your services are no longer needed by Marvel Comics. If anything comes up I’ll let you know.’ ”

When Jim Mooney’s contract expired, he sent a letter of inquiry to Shooter. “I got a very short note,” Mooney recalled. “ ‘Retire.’ I’m paraphrasing that a little bit. It wasn’t quite that abbreviated, but it was damn close.”

Don Heck, the original Iron Man artist, had been kicked around plenty in recent years, already feeling underappreciated before Harlan Ellison and Gary Groth had a laugh about him as “the world’s worst artist” in a
Comics Journal
interview. More recently, after Jim Shooter accepted DC’s suggestion to hire Heck to replace George Perez on
JLA/Avengers
, Perez suggested that bluffing was afoot. “Shooter,” he said, “knows full well that Heck will never sell the book.”

J
ack Kirby wasn’t looking for new work from Marvel, but he was still looking to get his
old
work back, as he had since the 1970s, when Marvel had started returning new art pages in exchange for the signing of a release statement. (At that time, he said, he’d “pleaded and cajoled” for some recent pages, “but when I told them I wanted the 60s stuff back, they said they were too valuable.”) In 1983, as the company went through its stockpiles of original art, and finally began returning older pages to artists, there was an additional release form that acknowledged its status as work-for-hire. But the warehouse was a mess, Kirby was told, and the inventory list had been lost. The salt in the wound was that pages were regularly turning up for sale at comic conventions.

Kirby told the
Comics Journal
that no one at Marvel would listen to his problem, and he did so in uncharacteristically angry language. “They don’t give a shit,” he said. “I feel adamant; I feel like I’ve contributed a lot when people really needed me, and there’s a hell of a lot of ingratitude. It smells like garbage.”

Kirby watched as vintage artwork was returned to Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers, and Don Heck, among others. Word got out that several pages had been stolen from the Marvel offices, while other pages sat on the rusty, collapsing shelves of a warehouse. And then, in August 1984, Kirby was sent a list of artwork that Marvel had recovered—only 88 of the 8,000 pages he’d sent them throughout the 1960s. Accompanying the list was a four-page form that no other artist had been asked to sign. He wouldn’t be allowed to sell the artwork; he couldn’t make copies of the artwork; he couldn’t publicly exhibit the artwork; he’d let Marvel access the artwork whenever it wished; and if Marvel wanted to modify the artwork, it was free to do so.

Kirby refused to sign. His words got tougher. “I wouldn’t cooperate with the Nazis, and I won’t cooperate with them,” he said. “If I allow them to do this to me, I’m allowing them to do it to other people.” As the stalemate continued, Marvel would claim that the Kirbys, through their lawyers, were threatening to sue for the rights to characters Jack had created. “We’ve never tried to get the copyrights back from Marvel,” Roz Kirby told Shooter at a heated panel convention in 1985. “It’s you people who keep bringing it up.”

By that time, though, the Kirbys’ lawyer had, in fact, broached the subject of copyright claims for Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four—after a
Variety
ad announcing Cannon Films’ planned
Captain America
film credited the character not to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, but to Stan Lee. Things deteriorated, and they got more personal. “I saved Marvel’s ass,” Kirby told an interviewer, and compared Lee to Sammy Glick, the backstabbing main character of Budd Schulberg’s
What Makes Sammy Run?
When asked if he would ever consider working with Lee, he was adamant. “No. No. It’ll never happen. No more than I would work with the SS. Stan Lee is what he is. . . . He has his own dreams and he has his own way of getting them. I have my own dreams but I get them my own way. We’re two different people. I feel that he’s in direct opposition to me. There’s no way I could reach the SS. I tried to reach them. I used to talk with them and say, ‘Hey, fellas, you don’t believe in all this horseshit.’ And they said, ‘Oh, yes, we do.’ They were profound beliefs. They became indoctrinated. And Stan Lee’s the same way. He’s indoctrinated one way and he’s gonna live that way. He’s gonna benefit from it in some ways and I think he’ll lose in others. But he doesn’t have to believe me.”