Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (56 page)

Grant Morrison grew frustrated with Jemas’s lack of interest in his proposals for new series, which he wanted to load with complex ideas about religion and mind-melting imagery—a revisiting of the “cosmic comics” of Starlin and Englehart. A sequel to
Marvel Boy
would devote an entire issue to the Kree bible “in full-on Prog Comics style”;
Silver Surfer: Year Zero
would depict the character in the way that Jack Kirby had always intended, he said: not as a Christ figure, but as an avenging angel, screaming through the starways. “I decided that movies were doing comics so well, there was no point in doing comics to look like movies any more,” Morrison said. “Let’s make this stuff really crazy . . . so that special effects have to
keep up
with
us
. I foresaw a new demand for intricate bizarre psychedelic comics and was eager to oblige. Cycles whip and twist faster all the time and pop culture’s threshing tentacles are flailing into an ultraviolet magic goth phase for a little while before the lights come on and the kids all look really weird in the sunshine. Time for the comic books to get crazier again.”

But tensions between Jemas and Morrison rose, climaxing with an angry phone call in which Jemas’s top-of-lungs screaming rattled nearby Marvel staffers. Quesada called Morrison to smooth the ruffled feathers. Morrison assured him it was water under the bridge.

Morrison had given up on the idea of winning over Jemas, though, and during the San Diego Comic Convention that summer, DC Comics announced that it had signed Morrison to an exclusive contract. Shortly after the announcement, a blindsided Joe Quesada cornered Morrison on the convention floor, where, according to one account, Morrison briefly fell into a panicky trance before railing against Jemas, whom he called “the biggest arsehole I’ve ever met.”

“It’s over, it’s over!” Morrison spat. “The Marvel era is done!”

With no Marvel booth to return to—Perlmutter had refused to pay for one that year—a shaken Quesada headed over to sign comics at the
Wizard
magazine setup. Just as he was wondering how to replace Morrison,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
creator Joss Whedon walked into view. Whedon was an avowed Marvel Comics fan—Buffy, in fact, had been largely based on the character of the
X-Men
’s Kitty Pryde. Quesada offered Whedon the job writing
The X-Men
on the spot.

Enlisting Whedon was exactly the kind of coup for which Bill Jemas was always advocating. But Jemas left before Whedon turned in his first script. “We were having a lot less fun,” Jemas said when asked about the reasons for his departure. “The money started piling up and the heads started swelling.”

G
rant Morrison’s remaining issues of
X-Men
, published after he’d departed for DC, played out like a white flag, waving resignedly to the status quo. In “Planet X,” Morrison revealed Xorn, whom he’d introduced two years earlier as an iconoclastic hero, to be just another of Magneto’s disguises. The other characters’ mixed reactions might have stood in for those of fans old and new. “What’s wrong with you these days? What happened to the brilliant, charismatic mutant outlaw I fell in love with?” asked one. Another muttered, “I miss Mister Xorn . . . when is he coming back?” (“He was a fiction,” Magneto snapped. “How often must I explain?”) Magneto murdered Jean Grey, and then Wolverine beheaded Magneto. Was there any doubt that everyone would come back?

“The ‘Planet X’ story,” Morrison said later, “was partially intended as a comment on the exhausted, circular nature of the X-Men’s ever-popular battle with Magneto and by extension, the equally cyclical nature of superhero franchise re-inventions. I ended the book exactly where I came on board. . . . ‘Planet X’ is steeped in an exhausted, world-weary, ‘middle-aged’ ennui that spoke directly of both my own and Magneto’s frustrations, disillusionment and disconnection, as well as the endless everything-is-not-enough frustrations of a certain segment of comics’ aging readership.” For Morrison, whose early manifesto for
The X-Men
trumpeted the necessity of evolution, this was a strange kind of climax.

A new title,
Astonishing X-Men
, was launched to commemorate Joss Whedon’s participation. Whedon brought his longtime favorite, Kitty Pryde, back to the fold, and returned Colossus to life. “Nothing has changed,” were Kitty Pryde’s first words when she arrived at Charles Xavier’s mansion in
Astonishing X-Men
#1. “The place was destroyed, and now it looks like nothing happened. No time has passed. Of course the professor would have it rebuilt this way. Give everyone a sense of stability. Continuity.” At Marvel’s request, the uniforms that Morrison had designed were retired, and the X-Men returned to their old costumes.

B
y 2004, Marvel was employing statistical analysts to feed information about creator and character performances into algorithms that determined launches, cancellations, and frequencies of publication. The company embraced the concept of crossovers as never before, with a relentless chain of big-event story lines that determined the course of multiple other titles. In turn, each of these massive arcs—which included prologues, epilogues, and entire spin-off series—fed into the one that followed. Major characters were torn in half, died in explosions, sacrificed themselves, lost their memories, regained their memories, lost their powers, or were revealed as shape-shifting Skrull aliens who’d posed as the real thing for years while the original hero was kidnapped on a spaceship.

These stories were conceived at “creator summits,” periodic conferences at which a core brain trust of writers (including Hollywood screenwriting veterans Jeph Loeb and J. Michael Straczynski) gathered with Marvel editors and hammered out the next six months of the company’s publishing strategy, comics’ version of the writers’ room of a television series. The level of craftsmanship was high, with special attention paid to the beats of every story pitched. And none of the new breed of writers—Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, and, later, Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction—complained publicly about editorial interference, or about a lack of equity. They’d made their names with odd, ambitious projects for smaller publishers, but at Marvel they knew the game going in. In the twenty-first-century comics industry, those who fared best were those who held no illusions about the relative priorities of commercial viability and personal expression. (For their contributions, they were each rewarded with the opportunity to publish creator-owned material through Marvel, under a new imprint called Icon. Promoting these titles was left entirely to them.)

T
he heavily photo-referenced look of
The Ultimates
became au courant as the Marvel Universe moved closer to real life, or at least to what could be imagined as a CGI adaptation. And, in a kind of return to Stan Lee’s early 1970s stories about campus riots and LSD, many of Marvel’s big events nodded at headlines without getting too caught up in taking a political stand.

INTERVIEWER
: Were you looking to have the story be a forum for the discussion of capital punishment or . . . preemptive capital punishment?

BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS:
It’s a discussion among the characters, but nothing is being preached, because I don’t have an opinion about it, myself.

In
Secret War
(whose very name acknowledged the granddaddy of Marvel crossovers), Manhattan was attacked in retaliation for covert operations that S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury had undertaken in Doctor Doom’s homeland of Latveria. In
Civil War
, the U.S. government responded to potential dangers by passing the Superhuman Registration Act, which led to a rift between those supporting heightened security (such as Iron Man) and those supporting civil liberties (such as Captain America).

By the end of
Civil War
—which, when it was finally collected into paperback reprints, spread over two dozen books—Iron Man was the new director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Captain America had been assassinated, and Spider-Man had revealed his identity to the world. None of those developments would last.

“There is an old joke about death in the comic-book world,” noted the
Wall Street Journal
editorial page upon learning of Captain America’s death. “No one stays dead except Bucky, [DC’s] Jason Todd and Uncle Ben.” But the so-called Bucky Clause no longer held—all of those characters had, in recent years, returned. It was revealed, in fact, that Bucky Barnes had been a bionic-armed Soviet assassin in the decades since World War II. Now he became the new Captain America, and Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, was out of the picture—for a while, until it turned out he’d been shot with a gun that simply “froze him within space and time.”

And when Spider-Man unmasked himself, it wasn’t much of a threat to the status quo, because Marvel’s creative summits had already hatched a
diabolus ex machina
to get out of it. To save the life of his Aunt May, Spider-Man made a deal with the demon Mephisto, which also erased the public’s memory of his identity and undid his albatross marriage to Mary Jane. For a while, the idea of bringing Gwen Stacy back from the dead was once again batted around.

For those who weren’t central to Marvel’s story-planning committee, the misdirections and interdependencies of the Marvel Universe could be daunting. “Everything is so connected that I can’t get my head around it,” Joss Whedon said, when he decided to leave
Astonishing X-Men
. “I kind of like it when the Hulk’s doing his thing, and Cap’s doing his thing, and you buy it once a month and get excited. . . . There are definitely characters I like, but I have no idea if they’re going to be dead, rebooted, Ultimated or be wearing a black costume by the time I get to them.”

D
uring a conference call in April 2005, Marvel Studios announced that it had settled the lawsuit with Stan Lee. Lee received $10 million and would continue to collect his yearly salary. “Our settlement with Stan terminated all rights to future profits,” Peter Cuneo told investors. “Both sides felt that we wanted to settle not only the past, but the future.”

That future was the real reason for the call. For the past year, Avi Arad and Chief Operating Officer David Maisel had been working on a plan for Marvel to produce its own movies, through a unique deal structure in which Merrill Lynch would put up $525 million for Marvel to make its own films of ten characters. Budgets would range from $45 million to $165 million, and Marvel would put up its own movie rights as collateral. To some, it looked like a big risk.

Arad felt differently. In the past seven years, the company had become a virtual IP farm club for Columbia (
Ghost Rider
and the two
Spider-Man
films), Fox (three
X-Men
films,
Daredevil
,
Elektra
, and the upcoming
Fantastic Four
), and New Line (three
Blade
sequels), with studios raking in $3.6 billion worldwide. For
Spider-Man
and
Spider-Man 2
alone, Columbia pulled in nearly $1.6 billion; Marvel saw only $75 million, and nothing from DVD releases. “Nobody knows better than us how to make our characters come alive for audiences,” Arad said. “We just want to get paid for it.”

The strategy was to corner the market on films about the individual members of the Avengers: they’d get back the rights to
Iron Man
from New Line; roll out
Captain America
and
Thor
; they’d even redo
The Hulk
, which had been a disappointment for Universal in 2003. And then, for the coup de grace, they could build on brand familiarity with the Avengers and combine the franchises into a monster-sized team-up movie.

But after the deal was in place, Arad and Maisel clashed about how quickly to produce the films, how to allot the budgets, and which characters to use. Just as Ike Perlmutter had once favored Arad over Stan Lee and Bill Jemas, now he put his faith in Maisel. Less than a year after Marvel Studios had gained its independence, Arad quit. He cashed out his stock and walked away with $59 million.

Iron Man
, the first self-financed film from Marvel Studios, took in nearly $100 million in its opening weekend. After the credits rolled, there was a preview of what was to come: Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, just like
The Ultimates
had imagined) showed up in Tony Stark’s apartment to talk about “the Avengers Initiative.” The circle was closing. The interweaving intricacies of the Marvel Universe, in all their glory, would be replicated as synergistic Hollywood franchises.

On the first weekend of May 2012,
The Avengers
broke the record for the biggest box-office debut in movie history. A week later, it had grossed more than $1 billion worldwide.

“W
hen kids were creating comics, they were happy to get their job,” Arad mused in 2012. “A movie is made, it’s successful, and all of the sudden they say, ‘Wait a minute, what’s in it for me?’ It’s human nature. If a creator wants to create a book, and self-publish it, and make a big success of it, which is what McFarlane did, that’s their prerogative. If they want to work for a company and be guaranteed so many pages a month and so on, that’s a different business. So there are people who feel that they did this, therefore they deserve that, and . . . I don’t remember any of them on a journey to try and make a movie out of these things. And believe me, it’s far tougher to make a movie than publish a comic book.”