Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (37 page)

Apparently, Lee didn’t. After refuting Kirby’s versions of the creations of the Fantastic Four, Thor, the Hulk, and Spider-Man (“All of them came from my basement,” Kirby had said), Lee grew exasperated. “I don’t know much of what Jack is talking about these days,” he said. “I just feel I’m listening to the mouthings of a very bitter man who I feel quite sorry for. I don’t know what the problem is, really.”

Twenty years after the Merry Marvel Marching Society record testified to the familial joy of the Bullpen, everything had fallen apart. Sol Brodsky had died in June 1984; Lee sent a eulogy from Los Angeles, but didn’t attend the funeral. On a Thursday night in March 1985, riding the subway home from the Marvel offices, Morrie Kuramoto died of a heart attack. Danny Crespi—Kuramoto’s closest friend and constant bantering partner—died two months later, at fifty-nine. He’d kept his leukemia a secret, continuing to come into the Bullpen every day without telling anyone.

A
lmost immediately after the last issue of
Secret Wars
had shipped, Carol Kalish addressed a gathering of comic-book store owners. “Let’s be honest,” she said. “
Secret Wars
was crap, right?” (The retailers agreed wholeheartedly.) “But did it sell?” The room cheered.

“Well, get ready for
Secret Wars
, series two!”

Upon the publication of the first
Secret Wars
series, Shooter told reporters that he didn’t want to write a sequel—if there ended up being one, he said, he’d rather get Tom DeFalco to do it. For whatever reason, though, Shooter decided to keep it for himself after all, and DeFalco, who’d edited the first series, did not return. Bob Budiansky drew the short straw and was assigned as
Secret Wars II
’s editor. “The traditional thing to do if you inherited a book that Jim Shooter was writing,” explained Budiansky, “was to fire him immediately. And that was okay, he understood. He was a nightmare to work with on deadlines. His work came in really late, and created all sorts of havoc. By being so late, it demanded that the Bullpen stop everything to cut out every word balloon and paste them down on the board with rubber cement. So it would mess up everybody’s schedule because books with minor corrections would be pushed aside while everything ground to a halt to do
Secret Wars
.”

Sal Buscema, a reliable workhorse, drew the first issue, but after the pages came back, Shooter hired Al Milgrom to redraw it from scratch. Despite urging from other editors, Budiansky refused to replace Shooter with another writer. “I figured Jim would inevitably get involved at the tail end of the process since it was his baby,” he said. “He’d review the book after it was all penciled and inked and lettered, and want massive changes and then it would be even worse if he wasn’t the writer.”

The plot of
Secret Wars II
was a kind of inverse of its predecessor: the Beyonder, the ethereal force from the first series that had imported all those heroes to Battleworld, now came to earth, took human form, and yearned to understand what made people tick.

The problem was that
Secret Wars II
took the big-event strategy of its predecessor and multiplied it exponentially, so the action spilled into almost every regular title the company produced. More than thirty issues of other Marvel comics—from
Daredevil
to
Doctor Strange
to
Micronauts
to
Rom
—had a Nabisco-like triangle marking them as a crossover, and although Shooter
wasn’t
the writer on those, he took a special interest in each of them.

No one questioned Shooter’s instincts for storytelling craft. But his repeated iterations of rules had started to grate: there was the harping on the necessity of establishing shots, the pointing to Jack Kirby panels for instruction, and the citing of “Little Miss Muffett” as a story that contained the crucial elements of conflict and resolution.

Roger Stern, the writer of
Doctor Strange
, called Peter Gillis, a fellow freelancer, and told him he was running out of ideas for the book. Would Gillis like to take over? When Gillis happily accepted, Stern told him there was just one catch—he’d start writing it with the
Secret Wars II
tie-in. “Every crossover got redone about three times because Jim just didn’t like it,” Gillis said later. “And that was no exception.”

After Denny O’Neil was asked to integrate the Beyonder into an issue of
Daredevil
, editor Ralph Macchio relayed to him that Shooter didn’t feel he understood the character. “I kept the Beyonder offstage as much as possible,” O’Neil said. “That so offended Jim that he took the royalties away from me.” Shooter rewrote the issue himself, and, according to O’Neil, “Our relationship deteriorated pretty quickly.”
*

“There was a lot of criticism of the content,” added Howard Mackie, who was Mark Gruenwald’s assistant at the time. “And the requests for rewriting became more and more. There were times things were completely written, and you were told,
you’re not getting it
. There was an issue of the
Avengers
that Roger Stern had written, with the Beyonder. A whole bunch of it had to be redrawn, because there was a costume change on the Beyonder that no one had been told about.”

“Shooter was bouncing a lot of the tie-ins,” said Mike Carlin. “He’d read the stories and say, ‘This doesn’t match what I was going to do’—but he hadn’t
done
it yet, so it was hard for anybody to imagine.”

T
hat the Beyonder spent most of
Secret Wars II
outfitted in shoulder pads, turned-up collars, jumpsuits, and Jheri curls was an early indicator that Jim Shooter had some quibbles with United States culture in 1985. For all the gripes that the series was another cynical cash-in, it possessed moments of truly biting satire, often aimed at mindless consumerism: the geeky Molecule Man returned, but instead of using his staggering powers, he chose to sit on a couch with his unitard-wearing girlfriend Volcana; the two would call each other “baby-kins” and “snookums” while taking in
Hogan’s Heroes
and
Laverne and Shirley
marathons. Meanwhile, the stranger-in-a-strange-land Beyonder fell in with a bad crowd of mobsters and hookers, and took joyrides in a Cuisinart-equipped Lamborghini. Ironically, the character strongly resembled Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’s poor-selling 1970s hero Omega the Unknown: a powerful, fish-out-of-water naïf corrupted by junk culture and vice.
*

The series petered out into an endless shaggy-dog tale, in which the Beyonder repeatedly destroyed and restored people and places, his own fulfillment always just out of reach. Despite appearances by the most cosmic of Marvel’s entities—Starlin’s In-Betweener, Ditko’s Eternity, Kirby’s Galactus and the Watcher—the story was grounded by odd, simplistic characterizations, and chirpy expositional dialogue that seemed to cater to small children even as it included references to prostitution. Worse, the superheroes—the characters Jim Shooter was so protective of—were by turns boorish and pious. “Aw, who cares? He’s someone else’s problem now!” shrugged Spider-Man, as the Beyonder escaped in an elevator, echoing the hubris that allowed Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben to be murdered years before. Had Spider-Man really learned nothing about being a hero?

If you wanted to find out, you’d have to read a lot of comic books. In ten years, the price of a single issue had tripled to seventy-five cents, which meant that the nine parts of
Secret Wars II
, plus the flood of its tie-in crossovers, added up to more than thirty dollars of allowance money. In fact, Marvel in 1985 was in the business of breaking piggy banks—suddenly, it seemed, no series stood alone. In the midst of the
Secret Wars II
run, John Byrne gave up on writing
Alpha Flight
and decided to switch jobs with
Hulk
writer Bill Mantlo; they engineered a crossover between those titles, so you were obliged to read both or neither. Claremont’s
X-Men
and
New Mutants
titles became increasingly intertwined, even as the steady stream of spin-off miniseries continued. Spider-Man was now a franchise in itself, as
Web of Spider-Man
joined
Amazing Spider-Man
and
Spectacular Spider-Man
, and each of their stories figured into one another, too.

Specialty comic-book stores now accounted for as much of Marvel’s sales as newsstands. The company’s audience was growing more dedicated, and flush with disposable income, and older. Were you in or out?

T
he ideal Marvel Comics fan bought all these crossovers, and bought the maybe-they’ll-be-collectible number-one issues, and didn’t necessarily have much in common with the dope-smoking chin-scratchers who’d rallied behind Jim Starlin’s
Warlock
and Steve Englehart’s
Doctor Strange
and Steve Gerber’s
Howard the Duck
. In
Secret Wars II
, Shooter had reserved his harshest measures for a character named Stewart Cadwell, a former comic-book writer, who hurled brickbats at trash culture even as he profited from it by writing for animated television. “I’m sick of the violence, the mediocrity, the idiocy—Reaganomics, for Pete’s sake,” shouted the angry liberal Cadwell, who subsisted on McDonald’s and cigarettes. When the Beyonder offered him super powers, Cadwell used them to lash out—but after he destroyed the NBC studio that employed him, the X-Men and Avengers quickly defeated him, reducing him to a simpering fool. Not coincidentally, Stewart Cadwell looked exactly like Steve Gerber.

Gerber had, in fact, recently quit animation, and worked on a Wonder Woman pitch for DC Comics. When he and Frank Miller, who was working on a Batman miniseries, heard about each other’s projects, they got together and pitched a Superman project. Talks fell apart, though, after DC wouldn’t give them 20 percent of a new Supergirl they created for the project. Gerber then shopped around a series he’d created with Val Mayerik called
Void Indigo
. The independent publishers passed, DC showed interest but wouldn’t agree to let Gerber and Mayerik retain copyright, and Gerber found himself talking to Archie Goodwin at Marvel’s creator-owned Epic Comics line. Gerber took some heat from the comics press for returning to Marvel—the target of several issues of
Destroyer Duck
—but what could he do? They had promotional muscle, and they were interested. Two issues of
Void Indigo
were published before, amid controversy surrounding its violence, it was canceled.

Shortly afterward, Marvel made plans to revive the
Howard the Duck
comic series in order to capitalize on a big-budget movie adaptation that George Lucas was producing. In accordance with the terms of his settlement with Marvel, Gerber was offered the chance to write it. In April 1985, shortly after reading himself satirized in
Secret Wars II
, Gerber turned in a script of what was to be the first issue of the new
Howard
. It was a parody of multi-issue, multi-character crossovers, called “Howard the Duck’s Secret Crisis.” But after Jim Shooter requested editorial changes to the script, the plans fell apart.
*
Gerber went off to work as a creative consultant on a
Howard the Duck
movie.

Meanwhile, Jim Starlin, who’d been happily chugging along on
Dreadstar
for Epic for a few years, began having trouble getting paychecks on time. “I’m of the opinion at this point, though people up at Marvel deny it, that Marvel is less than enthusiastic about continuing creator-owned characters and wouldn’t be sad to see them all go,” he said. Proving that Marvel had indeed allowed him to retain all rights to
Dreadstar
, he took his property and departed for the independent First Comics.

Steve Englehart fared better in his reunion with Marvel. Like Gerber, he’d come to miss the benefits of working for an established company, and was ready to return to the land of work-for-hire, which now offered the added lure of incentives. “I got tired of writing stories and not having them come out,” he explained. “It’s something that you always could and can count on at the two majors, that they’ll publish the stuff.” Returning to Marvel, Englehart immediately wove together a story about Wonder Man, Black Talon, and the Grim Reaper—the very story he’d been working on in the
Avengers
, nearly a decade earlier, when he’d told off Gerry Conway. But the story had turned into melodrama now, more ponderous even than Claremont’s
X-Men
. It wound through double-sized, higher-priced issues of
West Coast Avengers
and
The Vision and Scarlet Witch
, one more multivolume narrative event.

Frank Miller had returned to working for Marvel, too, even as he used his celebrity to speak, at every turn, against the company’s treatment of Jack Kirby. Fed up with New York City—“one Bernhard Goetz is enough,” he explained—Miller had taken off for downtown Los Angeles, holing up in an industrial space loft, across the street from a dive bar where one had to step over hypodermic needles. In addition to a gritty, futuristic reimagining of Batman, he began working on two dark, ambitious graphic novels for Marvel: one about the late Elektra, which he was illustrating himself, and one about Daredevil, on which he was collaborating with Bill Sienkiewicz.
*
That collaboration would lead, in turn, to the nine-issue
Elektra: Assassin
series for Epic, fully painted by Sienkiewicz.