Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (54 page)

Fox’s
X-Men
movie was coming out that summer, and the
Spider-Man
movie was scheduled for the following year. Each could potentially bring in a whole new audience, but only, Jemas felt, if the comics’ serpentine plots were made accessible. He also blanched at how the Marvel heroes had aged, complaining that “characters who were envisioned as teenagers were walking around with goatees, beards, and children.” The quickest solution was to start over from scratch. Jemas actually toyed with destroying the Marvel Universe and building it back up from scratch, but finally settled on the idea of adding a parallel “Ultimate” line of comics, filled with younger counterparts to the Marvel heroes.

Jemas, dissatisfied with the initial pitches that came through Bob Harras’s office, asked Quesada to sit in on an end-of-the-day meeting about the Ultimates line and explain why it was failing. “That was one of my most uncomfortable meetings at Marvel,” remembered Quesada, “because politically I’m trying to make sure everything runs smooth and there are no snags between Marvel Knights and the editor-in-chief of the Marvel staff, and Bill sort of brought me in as his hammer.” Eventually charged with scouting talent for the project, Quesada called Brian Michael Bendis, a writer of crime comics who’d filled in when Kevin Smith didn’t make his
Daredevil
deadlines. Bendis would bring
Spider-Man
into the twenty-first century.

The Peter Parker in
Ultimate Spider-Man
was a backpack-toting computer whiz with a skater haircut and an internship at
eBugle
, the
Daily Bugle
website. Aunt May and Uncle Ben were former commune dwellers, the same kind of baby boomers who might have been holding picket signs in the background of
Amazing Spider-Man
circa 1968. But these changes were mostly cosmetic.
Ultimate Spider-Man
recovered the angsty essence of the original Lee and Ditko stories, and livened the tug of Parker’s ego and conscience—the struggles of great power and great responsibility—in a way that hadn’t been done in decades.

Jemas got free samples of the comic in Wal-Marts, KB Toys, and Buster Brown shoe boxes. When the marketing blitz was done, eight million copies of
Ultimate Spider-Man
were circulating.

But the script for
Ultimate X-Men
, assigned to another writer, was rejected, and when Fox moved up the release date of
The X-Men
movie by six months, Marvel had missed its synergistic opportunity.
The X-Men
made $75 million its opening week, but sales on the comic didn’t budge. “I think at the time it was the third-biggest opening weekend of all time for a non-sequel,” said Jemas. “Crazy numbers. But the comic books were based on the ’60s continuity. So there was no graphic novel, no TV promo. The movie was for 20-year-olds and the toys were for 10-year-olds and the toys didn’t sell. We had a TV show that was from hell that didn’t tie into anything and we had merchandise that was from hell that didn’t tie into anything, too. So, we had a movie success and a god awful financial failure and we were broke—like, can’t-make-payroll broke.”

Jemas turned his attention back to streamlining the Marvel Universe proper, hammering away in meetings at the importance of stripping each character to its “central metaphor.” That week, a
New York
magazine story on the
X-Men
began with Chris Claremont’s editors shooting down his plot ideas. Bob Harras was among those challenging Claremont, but Jemas wanted to clean house entirely.

It wasn’t a difficult mission to carry out. Perlmutter and Harras had their own tensions, owing in part to Perlmutter’s draconian cost-cutting. At the end of August, Bill Jemas asked Joe Quesada if he’d be interested in the job of editor in chief.

Q
uesada immediately began shaking things up at Marvel. Grant Morrison, fresh from the critical success of the Marvel Knights title
Marvel Boy
, was recruited to take over
X-Men
from Chris Claremont; Claremont left his staff job as well. Quesada then recruited editor Axel Alonso from DC Comics’ edgy “Vertigo” line, and Alonso in turn hired J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the television show
Babylon 5
, to take over
Amazing Spider-Man
. Howard Mackie, who’d been regularly writing the web-spinner’s adventures for most of the decade, was out.

It was not surprising, then, when Quesada’s arrival caused friction with two of the more contentious Marvel veterans. Steve Englehart, working on a Fantastic Four series, complained publicly that changes to his script were made without his input; he and Quesada issued a series of competing press releases. A week later, Quesada canceled John Byrne’s
X-Men: The Hidden Years
, a series set in the past, and Byrne took up the matter on his website. “Joe Quesada was not able to give me any sort of reason that made sense—killing profitable books in a failing market?—so, since I have no interest in devoting my time and effort to a company apparently intent on committing suicide, my relationship with Marvel is over.”
*
Nearly every remnant of the old guard was gone.

S
tan Lee was gone, too, except for his scant duties as a well-paid Marvel figurehead. Two years earlier, during the lapse in his Marvel contract, Lee began working with a lawyer and businessman named Peter Paul on an Internet venture called Stan Lee Media. They’d met through fund-raising events, and before long Paul was introducing Lee to A-list celebrities like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Ali. “I was looking for ways to liberate him,” Paul said of Lee. “He was lying fallow at Marvel.”

Although its primary concern was online animation, SLM had other, ambitious plans—feature films, amusement park rides, a line of clothing featuring famous Stan Lee catchphrases—and with the power of Lee’s name, it quickly attracted investors. Within a year of the company’s creation, Peter Paul engineered a reverse merger with a shell company, and Wall Street money started flowing in. Six months later, when its website finally launched, stocks were changing hands at $31 a share, and SLM was capitalized in the neighborhood of $300 million. For a while, Lee continued to write his “Stan’s Soapbox” column for Marvel. “Nothing short of an H-bomb could tear me from the company I love,” he wrote in 1999. “I’m just setting up my own website, in my spare time, for the fun of it. Come and visit when we officially open in August, but no matter what—Marvel rules!”

But most of his time was spent breathing in drywall dust at the SLM headquarters, where he’d arrive at nine thirty each morning to find an ever-expanding office space. Even Marvel had never grown at the pace of an Internet start-up, but it suited Lee’s energy. Although his level of technology savvy topped out at replying to email messages, at nearly eighty years old Lee was giving speeches at technology conferences.

To the SLM creative staff, he lived up to his legend, bouncing around and acting out scenes for new characters, even if some of those creations seemed suspiciously like pastiches of Marvel heroes; one, the Accuser, managed to incorporate a wheelchair (like Professor X), a law-practicing alter ego (like Daredevil), and an armored suit (like Iron Man). And Lee had generated a tremendous amount of goodwill among the entertainment industry over the past decades. There were partnerships on the table with Burger King, Fox Kids, the Backstreet Boys, and RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. Michael Jackson toured the offices and pondered a team-up of mammoth proportions. “If I buy Marvel,” the King of Pop asked Stan the Man, “you’ll help me run it, won’t you?” Lee assured him that he would.

By the summer of 2000, Lee would have certainly enjoyed putting Marvel in its place. “I was very surprised that Stan Lee was, on the inside, considered to be an outsider,” recalled a Marvel executive. “Somebody to take care of—somebody we’ve gotta pay attention to.” The “Stan’s Soapbox” column, a regular feature since 1967, was discontinued; Marvel explained that it took up potentially valuable advertising space. Perlmutter had also been campaigning to remove the “Stan Lee Presents” banner from the comics, and had even insisted that Lee be scratched from the list of those who received complimentary copies of new comics. “Ike had it in for Stan like you wouldn’t believe,” said one editor. “Ike hated him.”

Lee could afford to buy his own comics—his Stan Lee Media stock was, by now, valued at $35 million. But there were signals that he ultimately wielded no more power at SLM than he did at Marvel in the 1960s. “Stan once had a big lunch with all the artists,” recalled SLM artist Scott Koblish, “and we all steered it toward our ideas for making money: CD-ROMs, publishing—we had a fistful of ideas, and Stan was jazzed about all of them, but he warned us before he left the lunch that as soon as he’d show these ideas to the execs they’d get shot down.”

At the very least, Lee was not in the loop when it came to the inner workings of the business. “He would sit in business meetings and occasionally say something,” one friend reported. “But mainly he’d sit there and doodle, or fall asleep.” He didn’t yet know that his business partner, Peter Paul, had served jail time in the 1970s for cocaine possession and defrauding Fidel Castro for $8.7 million in a bizarre coffee shipment scheme that involved plans to sink a Panamanian freighter. (Paul would later claim he was working as a CIA operative.) Paul had not put his checkered past behind him: Stan Lee Media was outspending its revenues 20 to 1, and falling behind on its bills, as Peter Paul manipulated the stock prices.

No one knew why the stocks were falling. But in a matter of weeks, the SLM staff braced for the end, backing up portfolio samples and removing valuable items from their offices. On December 15, a Spider-Man statue arrived from Germany, a birthday gift the staff had collectively purchased for Lee’s birthday. As they waited for an ominous 4 p.m. meeting, they pieced together the seven-foot statue and signed a card.

When the layoffs were announced, Stan Lee collapsed. “I think of that old James Brown trick in ‘Please, Please, Please,’ where they gather him up because he can’t go on,” Koblish recalled. “They gathered Stan up and led him out, and then they gathered the rest of us up in the big room, room 145, and told us that that was it.”

It had been forty-three years since Martin Goodman made him fire the Timely staff, leaving Lee alone to build from scratch. Now, half a lifetime later, he had to suffer the additional blow of betrayal. Peter Paul was gone, on his way to São Paulo, Brazil, along with $250,000 that Lee had loaned him personally. “He is like a grandfather. He is sweet and unassuming—and easily taken advantage of,” said a friend. “But not anymore; he’s jaded. He said to me, ‘Now the only people I know I can trust are my wife and my daughter.’ ”

Across the country, several members of Perlmutter’s team were gathered in a meeting with Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada. “A guy stuck his head in the door,” recalled one attendee, “and said, ‘Great news, guys! Stan Lee Media is going under!’ Joe had the good sense to put his head down and not say anything. Bill made some kind of comment like he was playing along, but I don’t think even he was comfortable with that. But everybody else in the room was having a good laugh about this. That was the mentality. They hated him. It was bizarre.”

B
ill Jemas was the kind of guy who cared more about the New York Knicks than about Nick Fury. He was proud to slay the sacred cows of the geeky world he’d entered—no more hang-ups about continuity, he liked to say, no more writing “comics about comics.” He took pride in challenging the staff on what kinds of stories were off-limits: in one early meeting he suggested revealing the origin of Wolverine, which, despite the popularity of the character, had remained shrouded in mystery. The editors were aghast at his impiety.

Marvel suddenly pushed for commonsense changes that might seem blindingly obvious to anyone who wasn’t entrenched in industry tradition: first pages were given to story recaps of previous issues, freeing writers from having to shoehorn clumsy exposition into the dialogue or captions. The all-capital-letters word balloons, a holdover from a time in which poor printing technology necessitated the extra clarity, were replaced by proper English. Sensing that trade paperback collections could be a vital part of the company business—and a beachhead into bookstore chains—Marvel began clearly demarcating beginnings and endings of story arcs, so that a half-dozen “episodes” could easily be packaged into a single paperback volume. When another writer-artist team came along, to continue the television show analogy, a new “season” began.

How many of these changes involved input from Joe Quesada was difficult to say, because Jemas was the strongest personality in Marvel editorial since Jim Shooter—and Jemas wasn’t even technically in editorial. But Jemas and Quesada jumped with both feet into the world of online comics fandom, becoming a two-headed public persona for the Marvel Comics of the twenty-first century. Before long, they’d perfected a good-cop, bad-cop routine. Jemas had little interest in diplomacy, blaming “bad, bad books” for Marvel’s late 1990s slump, and implying a network of cronyism. “In 1995, a typical Marvel
X-Men
book was selling a million copies a month,” Jemas told an interviewer. “We could have afforded to hire just about any writer in the world—from John Irving to Scott Turow—but the editors hired each other, and they hired their friends.”