Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (42 page)

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F
or years, there had been a dearth of popular new artists making their names at Marvel Comics. The biggest names of the 1980s—John Byrne, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walter Simonson—had all been with the company since the previous decade. The exception to this trend was the self-taught Art Adams, who after high school had washed dishes at a pizza parlor and spent all his spare time drawing submissions for Marvel. Five years later, when Marvel finally showcased his heavily detailed work—in the 1985 miniseries
Longshot—
he was an instant hit with fans. The title character had a fashion style that leaped out from the parade of standard primary-color capes—a mullet haircut, leather jacket, bandolier, and a side pouch—and an otherworldly origin that showcased Adams’s talent for strange alien creatures. But his extensive cross-hatching took time, and Adams never took on a regular monthly assignment—instead, he became a perpetual guest-star artist, a surprise flash of excitement on the comic racks.

Still, Adams had an immediate impact on his aspiring peers, the young men who’d been weaned on Claremont and Byrne’s
X-Men
and Frank Miller’s
Daredevil
and who’d seen the visual style of Marvel Comics settle into staid functionality. In the last days of the Jim Shooter reign, there emerged a clutch of young artists who determinedly rendered every strand of hair, every stretch of clothing, every tooth in their characters’ mouths. If there was a scene with a brick wall destroyed, you could bet that every single brick would be delineated.

The inker on Adams’s
Longshot
was a Filipino art school dropout named Whilce Portacio. Portacio was great at rendering details but needed improvement when it came to anatomy and perspective, so editor Carl Potts had him work over Adams’s pencils, hoping he could learn a thing or two along the way. In the meantime, Potts fed Portacio books like
The Five C’s of Cinematography
and kept him busy with work inking
Alpha Flight
. Shortly afterward, when Potts hired Jim Lee, an excessively polite, South Korean Ivy Leaguer, to draw
Alpha Flight
, the two artists meshed artistically and personally. Now Lee, too, got a copy of the cinematography book, and Potts drilled him on storytelling fundamentals, much like Denny O’Neil had with Frank Miller a decade earlier. Then Lee moved to San Diego and into a studio with Portacio. Their lives and careers were now entwined for good.

After a while, Portacio figured out a way to campaign for his own penciling job. After inking Lee’s
Alpha Flight
pages, he’d draw his own pictures of the Punisher on the backs before sending them back to Marvel. Potts hired Portacio to pencil
The Punisher
just as the movie adaptation went into pre-production. When a second title starring the character was launched—
Punisher War Journal
—it went to Jim Lee.

Within a year,
Uncanny X-Men
editor Bob Harras—always on the lookout for the latest, hottest artists—asked Portacio if he’d like to fill in for a few issues of Marvel’s number-one title. When Portacio passed, the job went to Jim Lee, and his popularity went through the stratosphere. Before long, Lee was made the regular
X-Men
artist.

W
hile Lee and Portacio were first impressing Potts on
Alpha Flight
, Todd McFarlane, a cocky and foulmouthed Canadian jock, was making a splash on
The Incredible Hulk
. Back in 1980, in the summer of Dark Phoenix and Elektra, McFarlane was on a baseball college scholarship, soon to be recruited by a Seattle Mariners scout. But he’d attended the San Diego Comic-Con, and stood mesmerized as he watched Jack Kirby graciously speaking to the fans who swarmed around him. If he didn’t make the majors, he told himself, he’d be a comic book artist. Sure enough, when an ankle injury dashed his big-league hopes, McFarlane began spending more and more time practicing at the drawing table, and reading with interest about Kirby’s and Gerber’s struggles, and the soapbox speeches of Neal Adams and Frank Miller, in the pages of the
Comics Journal
. Racking up rejection letters, the self-taught McFarlane finally got his breakthrough assignment just before graduation: a backup story in Steve Englehart’s
Coyote
. He landed the
Hulk
assignment at the end of 1986; a year later, his editor was bringing pages around to other offices at Marvel, explaining that McFarlane was growing restless, and looking for new challenges. The thin-lined, detail-fetishizing samples spoke for themselves. He was hired as the new artist on
The Amazing Spider-Man
.

McFarlane and writer David Michelinie reintroduced Spider-Man’s thirty-year-old rogues’ gallery—Sandman, the Prowler, Mysterio, the Lizard—but it was a new villain that sealed the success of this freakier, darker version of
Amazing Spider-Man
. Spider-Man’s discarded black costume was revealed to be a sentient alien being; when it took as its host body a disgruntled former journalist named Eddie Brock, it called itself Venom. McFarlane gave the bloodthirsty Venom a hulking figure and an enormous grin of razor-sharp teeth. Now that
Spider-Man
had fierce iconography to match Wolverine’s claws and the Punisher’s arsenal, the title began putting up the kind of numbers it hadn’t seen for twenty years, and climbed the sales charts toward
The X-Men
’s number-one spot.

By the summer of 1988, the majority of Marvel’s most popular artists—including Art Adams, Portacio, Lee, McFarlane, and
X-Men
penciler Marc Silvestri—were once again under the age of thirty. As Marvel editors began to loosen the Draconian storytelling rules that Shooter had imposed, this new wave of artists began to embrace the visual language of postnarrative music videos, moving away from establishing shots and two-shots and toward frantic nonlinearity. And, in the wake of Adams’s success, there was detail, always detail, in the faces and machinery and architecture. The pages started to blacken with it.

In these artists there was also a restlessness, or at least a lack of docility, that hadn’t been seen since the days when Jim Starlin turned down John Romita on
The Fantastic Four
. Maybe it was youth; maybe it was the fact that none of them was close to Marvel’s New York headquarters, that none of them had moved to the city and paid their dues on-site. Or maybe it was just that they’d seen what had happened to Kirby and Ditko, and vowed not to let it happen to them. McFarlane pestered other artists about starting a union, a notion that had hardly been considered by anyone since the 1978 guild plans fell apart. If Marvel could screw Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, McFarlane thought, they could screw anybody.

McFarlane felt a particular debt to Steve Ditko. He restored the original underarm webbing to Spider-Man’s costume, accentuated the black borders around the eyes, and contorted the hero’s body into odd poses, just like Ditko had done. But McFarlane went further: the webbing that shot from Spider-Man’s hands now looked like intricate rope (or spaghetti, as Tom DeFalco said); the whites of the eyes doubled in size; the contortions no longer exactly obeyed anatomical rules. McFarlane said he wanted to bring out the character’s spiderlike qualities; the editorial department got nervous. Pages were brought to the Bullpen, to John Romita himself, so that Peter Parker could be made to look like himself. “That’s all you want me to change?” Romita would ask, looking down at the distortion of the character that hardly resembled the near-official interpretation he’d forged in 1966. McFarlane’s Peter Parker looked like a bodybuilder, and his Mary Jane like a Playmate. Before long, McFarlane’s version was the house style, and the artists on
Spectacular Spider-Man
and
Web of Spider-Man
were told to conform to this new vision.

But McFarlane still had to draw whatever the writer told him to draw, and in 1989, after a second summer in which
Amazing
ramped up to a punishing every-other-week schedule, he’d had enough. He told his editor, Jim Salicrup, that he wanted off the title, that he wanted a project on which he could call all the shots. McFarlane expected that he’d quickly be given a low-selling comic on which to learn the craft of writing. To his surprise, Salicrup asked him if he wanted his very own Spider-Man title. “It wouldn’t have been my choice to bring in a fourth Spider-Man book,” McFarlane said, “but I wasn’t fool enough to say no to it.”

It was a sweet deal: in a break with Marvel policy, McFarlane wouldn’t even have to worry about keeping continuity straight with the other Spider-Man titles. If the company’s other writers had any hard feelings about the special treatment afforded the hot artist, they were hardly comforted by what he said in interviews. He only read the sports page, couldn’t remember the last book that he read. “Uh . . . I don’t really consider myself a writer, so I don’t pay attention to writing. Now I’m sure the people at Marvel won’t be too impressed with that statement, but by the time they read it, it’ll be too late.” He was going into the project, he said, assuming “that it’s going to be a piece of shit.”
*

What made Todd McFarlane stand out was that he really didn’t seem to need Marvel Comics. He’d already sunk his earnings into starting a sports card company and opening a comic shop in Washington; he sorted through cases of hockey cards while he coasted through phone interviews. The candor of his answers was either unbearably crass or refreshingly unpretentious, depending on your perspective. “As long as I get Spider-Man in the right pose, and I’ve got a cool shot of him coming at you in the splash page, it’s not that important what’s behind him,” he told one journalist used to long-winded discussions about craft. “If I can fill up the space with stuff that kind of sort of, looks right—or at least fill it with linework—the kids figure there’s more detail put in than there really is.”

With extra time on his hands in the months before he made the leap to writing the new
Spider-Man
title, McFarlane pitched in and inked a few
New Mutants
covers over the pencils of Marvel’s latest discovery, a twenty-one-year-old Anaheim, California, native named Rob Liefeld. Liefeld’s father was a Baptist minister; his grandfather had been a Baptist minister; all that young Liefeld had ever wanted to do was draw Star Wars characters, ride his bike to the comic shop, and hide his stacks of
X-Men
from his mother. Although he’d quickly gotten work doing pinups and covers at DC Comics, his narrative instincts were shakier than McFarlane’s. But he was hardly timid: one editor was surprised to receive an entire story drawn sideways. Bob Harras liked the audacity, though, and after giving him fill-in assignments on
X-Factor
and
Uncanny X-Men
, he told Liefeld he wanted a new look for
New Mutants
, and a new character to replace Professor X as the leader of the team. Liefeld shot off pages and pages of costume designs and brand-new characters:
Bob—some future friends and/or foes for the Muties! If ya don’t like ’em, trash ’em! ’s okay with me—but if you’re interested—give me a call!
One of the characters was submitted to be the new leader: a half-cyborg “man of mystery” with a glowing “cybernetic eye.” His name, the notes said, should be either Cybrid or Cable.

When Harras and writer Louise Simonson suggested other names, Liefeld took a page from the playbook of his new friend McFarlane, and stood his ground. “Bob said, ‘Let’s call him Quentin,’ ” Liefeld recalled. “I said, ‘Yucch!’ I had already put ‘Cable’ down as his name on the sketches. Then, in Louise’s plot, after being told his name was Cable, he was called Commander X throughout. I said, ‘If this guy is called Commander X, I want nothing to do with it.’ That seemed ridiculous to me.” Harras gave Liefeld his way.

The issue of
New Mutants
that introduced Cable—he wielded a giant gun; the New Mutants were depicted in crosshairs—was an instant hit, and marked a sudden turnaround for the title’s sales. But it was the beginning of the end for Simonson, who suddenly felt expendable. As Liefeld’s illustrations of muscles and artillery became more outrageous, as backgrounds disappeared and reappeared, as he discarded 180-degree rules, the readership only grew. Liefeld “would do square windows on the outside of the building, but round ones when you cut inside the building,” complained Simonson. “It took me about six months to figure out that Rob really wasn’t interested in the stories at all. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do, which was cool drawings of people posing in their costumes that would then sell for lots of money.” And management, she felt, was uninterested in addressing her complaints. “The books were suddenly being used to make Marvel a lot of money in the short term, with no concern for the long run or the characters,” she said. “Immediate cash appeared to be what Marvel was bought for—to be milked and milked and milked. I think that at that point anyone who looked like they could produce lots of instant cash for Marvel was likened to a god, and Rob Liefeld looked like he could do just that.”

W
hile Simonson struggled with Liefeld and Harras, Marvel threw itself into promotional planning for Todd McFarlane’s
Spider-Man
#1. Eager to please the comic shops, Carol Kalish pushed for a special edition of the issue to be sold exclusively to the direct market, one that would include silver ink on a black background. In all other respects but the cover, the comic would be exactly the same.