Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  The inside of the comic was similarly shambolic, as though the narrative had been improvised. To a degree, it had been: in recent years, Lee had begun providing artists with mere plot synopses, rather than full scripts, to ease his workload and prevent a bottlenecking of the production schedule. As a result, the artists often determined the page-by-page pacing and plot details. When the penciled pages were returned to Lee, he would write the dialogue, sometimes covering up inconsistencies, and sometimes changing the intent of the artist. Over time, this would evolve into an effective conduit for creative synergy; in these early days, it could result in something like confused rambling.

  On the opening page of Fantastic Four #1, a gray-templed man in a suit fires a flare gun, which gains the attention of most of the generically rendered Central City, but three people in particular: society girl Susan Storm, who turns invisible and sneaks out of afternoon tea; an unnamed figure who discards his trench coat, sunglasses, and fedora and rushes out of a Big and Tall Store, revealing himself to be an orange, clay-like behemoth; and teenaged Johnny Storm, Sue’s brother, who abandons his hot rod at a service station when he bursts into flames and flies away. They gather in the man’s apartment, and the action flashes back, jarringly . . .

  The next panel shows the four gathered at an earlier date. Reed Richards, the gray-templed man, is arguing with a tough-talking bruiser named Benjamin Grimm about the prospect of piloting a ship into space. “Ben, we’ve got to take that chance,” insists Susan Storm, Richards’s fiancée, “unless we want the commies to beat us to it!” And so the four of them drive to the local rocket launchpad, and, “before the guard can stop them,” take off for the stars. Unfortunately, they’re bombarded by cosmic rays, and they make an emergency return to earth. At the rural crash-landing site, the heroes discover their new, radiated physiologies. What’s striking about this sequence is the feeling of horror, the absence of joy in becoming super-powered. “You’re (gasp) fading away!” someone yells at Sue Storm as her body slowly disappears. “He’s turned into a-a—some sort of a thing!” Sue shrieks of Ben, as he grows into an ochreous, bricky mass, angrily attacks Reed, and jealously vows to win Sue. And then she notices her morphing beloved, his body elongating wildly and rubberily. “Reed . . . not you, too!! Not you, too!” Ben is restrained just as Johnny’s body ignites with flame and he flies into the air.

  Once they adjust to the transparency and the orange rockiness and the stretching and the immolation, their future is clear. “You don’t have to make a speech, big shot!” Ben says to Reed. “We understand. We’ve gotta use that power to help mankind, right?” Thus are born the Invisible Girl, the Thing, Mister Fantastic, and a new version of the Human Torch.

  A shift back to the moment of that flare-gun summons provides an anticlimactic twelve-page adventure, involving atomic power plants that have sunken into the earth, thanks to the Mole Man and his army of “underground gargoyles” on Monster Isle. (One of these creatures is recognizable from the issue’s cover, but the city streets and bystanders are nowhere to be seen.) The energy of the artwork is undeniably special, but the roaring and snarling three-headed monsters are no longer where Lee’s or Kirby’s interests lie. We’re granted one last look at the creatures that might have been named Mongu or Sporr or Zzutak, before a rock slide seals them off forever and the Fantastic Four, and Marvel Comics, fly into the future.

  The issue reached newsstands on August 8, 1961, the same week that East Germany began work on the Berlin Wall. The space-race themes couldn’t have been better timed: between the conception and publication of the comic, the Soviets had made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first man in space (although there were no reports of dangerous cosmic rays). Although sales figures wouldn’t come in for months, there was an immediate surge in reader mail—not the usual complaints about missing staples, but an engaged audience taken with the complicated characters. “We are trying (perhaps vainly?) to reach a slightly older, more sophisticated group,” Lee wrote in a private letter three weeks later. For the first time in years, it looked like Marvel had something special on its hands.

  Lee and Kirby improved the comic with every subsequent issue, giving emphasis to the internal struggles of the dysfunctional team, especially Johnny Storm’s callow moodiness and Ben Grimm’s rage and self-pity (his occasional return to human form was always fleeting, a cruel tease to his hopes for normality). This misery was offset, though, with tricked-out secret headquarters and a sleek flying automobile called a FantasiCar. And although they remained unmasked (in another break from comic-book convention, they were going to keep their identities public), at the urging of letter-writing fans they soon had snappy blue uniforms. “Jack gave them this long underwear with the letter ‘4’ on their chest,” said Stan Goldberg, who designed the color schemes of the Marvel comics. “I made the ‘4’ blue and kept a little area around it white, and then when the villains came in—the villains get the burnt umbers, dark greens, purples, grays, things like that—they can bounce off it.” The blast of colorful heroics against a murky background world immediately set Fantastic Four apart from everything else on the newsstand.

  There were immediate signs—a letters page, cliffhangers—that these characters would be sticking around, that Marvel was committed to seeing this through for a while. And soon Fantastic Four had company. Goodman canceled Teen-Age Romance to clear the way for The Incredible Hulk, a Nuclear Age updating of the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde story, and Marvel had its second superhero title of the 1960s. Again, the scientific frontiers of the Cold War were vital to the story: Dr. Bruce Banner was preparing to test a Gamma Bomb for the U.S. military when a reckless teenager named Rick Jones drove his convertible onto the desert testing site on a dare. Banner called for a delay on the test while he got Jones to safety, but a communist spy on the lab team proceeded anyway, bombarding Banner with radiation. The highlight of the story was the traumatic gamma-blast sequence, which made the Fantastic Four’s metamorphoses look relaxing in comparison: “The world seems to stand still, trembling on the brink of infinity, as his ear-splitting scream fills the air,” Lee wrote, over Kirby’s panels of Banner in a catatonic state, mouth agape and eyes filled with terror, as hours passed and medical professionals tried to bring him back from the edge of insanity. Later, as night fell, Banner’s body grew and turned gray, and he began to wreck guns, and jeeps, and all prospects for his own happiness. As the Hulk, he would be relentlessly stalked by General Thunderbolt Ross, whose military-man bullheadedness positioned the monster as an antiauthoritarian rebel. Hip-talking Rick Jones, meanwhile, spent the early issues as Banner’s one friend, locking him up at night like he was a violent drunk on detox watch. It all added up to pure misery for the title character, filled with blackouts, fear, guilt, and unrequited love for the general’s daughter Betty. You could call the Hulk a superhero, but what was he saving? And from whom?

  Kirby and Lee staked out more gradations on the hero-villain continuum. In Fantastic Four #4, Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, returned for the first time since 1954. In this new context, with romantic designs on Sue Storm and hatred for the rest of the human race, Namor teetered close to villainy. The next issue introduced Victor Von Doom, an old classmate of Reed Richards, who, after being scarred in a scientific experiment, trekked to Tibet to learn the “forbidden secrets of black magic and sorcery” and then took over his Eastern European homeland of Latveria. Doctor Doom was insufferably pompous, but along with his haughty manner came a sort of honorable code; he always kept his word. When Doom and the Sub-Mariner briefly teamed for an uneasy alliance in Fantastic Four #6, the Marvel landscape suddenly had some neat shadings: the bickering protagonists versus a tempestuous Byronic sparkplug and a Faustian archenemy.

  In early 1962, as the Hulk and Sub-Mariner made their way toward newsstands, Lee and Kirby worked out three more heroes for the summer, each of which would headline a title previously devoted to monsters: Journey into Mystery would spotlight their take on Thor, the Norse god of thunder. In t
he Marvel version, lame physician Don Blake was vacationing in Scandinavia and found a walking stick that, when struck against the ground, became the hammer of legend—and transformed Blake into the long-haired titan with a winged helmet, weather-controlling abilities, and an Old English patois of verilys and methinkses. Tales to Astonish, meanwhile, would be the home of Ant-Man, alter ego of Henry Pym, yet another scientist driven into superheroics by the communist threat. Pym developed a serum that shrank him to a height of six inches, and an oversize helmet that allowed him, via electronic impulses, to command . . . ants.

  But the third character—intended for Amazing Fantasy, the worst seller of the bunch—had problems. When Lee asked Steve Ditko to ink the first six penciled pages of Kirby’s latest feature, Ditko pointed out that the concept—a teenaged orphan with a magic ring that transforms him into an adult superhero—was a retread of the Fly, a character that Kirby had already done for Harvey Comics in 1959. Lee decided that some changes were in order. With the deadlines approaching, he typed up synopses for the Thor and Ant-Man features, and handed them over to his younger brother, Larry Lieber, to write out as full scripts. Then he gave his full attention to the revised Amazing Fantasy character. In the new synopsis, a radioactive spider bite replaced the ring as the source of power, and there was no transformation to adulthood for the meek teenager. Instead of giving it to Jack Kirby, Lee asked Ditko, even though Ditko’s moody, almost foreboding style hardly seemed to cry out for teenage superheroics.

  Amazing Fantasy #15, featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man, reached newsstands in June 1962. It strayed far from superhero conventions, further even than The Fantastic Four had. Unlike Kirby, whose heroes had a stocky majesty, Ditko populated his stories with rail-thin, squinting malcontents, placing the protagonist, Peter Parker, in a constellation of sneers, jabbing fingers, and angry eyebrows. On the very first page, Parker—tie, vest, big round eyeglasses, and tightly combed hair—is ostracized by his sweater-letter classmates, a nightmare vision of high school social life in which Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica have teamed up against one four-eyed weakling. Parker’s friends are limited to his elderly Uncle Ben and Aunt May, who dotes on him like he was a small child, and his piles of textbooks. After the science-lab spider bite gives him great strength and agility, and the ability to scale walls (his “spider-sense” intuition will come later), Parker enters a wrestling contest to earn some scratch. (He wrestles with a mask on, because his adolescent insecurities remain—“What if I fail? I don’t want to be a laughing stock! I-I’ll find some way to disguise myself!”—but makes quick work of his bulky opponent.) His feats land him an appearance on a TV show, for which he sews his own red-and-blue costume, complete with underarm webbing, spider insignias on the chest and back, and a white-eyed balaclava hood. Clothes, however, do not make the hero: after the broadcast, a criminal runs past Parker in the halls of the studio, and he shrugs off the opportunity to intervene. He’s looking out for number one—until he comes home one evening to find that a burglar has murdered his saintly Uncle Ben. Parker, dressed as Spider-Man, tracks down and captures the thug before realizing it’s the same criminal he allowed to escape from the studio. Rattled and guilt-ridden, he finally understands his fate. “With great power,” Lee’s narration tells the reader, “there must also be great responsibility!”

  The grand melodrama was offset by Lee’s snappy patter, Ditko’s stunning costume design, and, once again, the primary-color palette choices of Stan Goldberg, who selected for Spider-Man’s costume a combination of cherry red and dark cobalt (in deliberate contrast to the more vivacious azure of the Fantastic Four). None of these details mattered to Goodman, who canceled Amazing Fantasy immediately.

  But readers responded ecstatically to the issue, and the character got its own title—The Amazing Spider-Man—by the end of the year. There remained an off-kilter gloom to Parker’s world, and when he wasn’t worrying about his Aunt May’s health, or earning some money to help her pay bills, his face often conveyed the bitterness of an outcast who’s finally gained some power, an I’ll-show-them madness in his eyes. He became a freelance photographer for the Daily Bugle, snapping shots of his alter ego in action; despite the “great responsibility” line, Spider-Man’s early crime-fighting adventures were driven more by the promise of lucrative photo ops than by any do-gooder impulse. (Alas, these pictures would inevitably be twisted into propaganda against him by Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson, who’d embarked on a campaign against the “public menace” of Spider-Man.) The moments in which Parker is receiving payment are among the few that Ditko gives him a smile. At least when Bruce Banner became the Hulk, he was issued a reprieve from self-reflection. But Peter Parker’s problems and Spider-Man’s problems became one, as evidenced by a litany of neurosis-flooded thought balloons. After one misunderstanding causes a scuffle with police officers, he runs home through the abandoned, shadowy city streets. “Nothing turns out right . . . (sob) . . . I wish I had never gotten my super powers!”

  All of this was balanced, brilliantly and precariously, with breezy acrobatic action sequences. Ditko’s rendering of athleticism was quite different from Kirby’s, more about gymnastic dodging than knockout punches, but it was just as exciting. Lee’s brilliant touch was to have Parker deliver a nonstop parade of corny jokes when he was in the Spider-Man costume: a convincing manifestation of obsessive nervous thinking, yes, but more importantly an effective mood-lightener. Despite the taunting teenage jeers, empty wallet, ailing relative, hostile workplace, and criminal threats, The Amazing Spider-Man managed to be a whole lot of fun.

  Superheroes were now regularly sweeping out the odd, neglected corners of the line. Strange Tales was taken over by solo adventures of the Human Torch; on the very same day that Linda Carter, Student Nurse was replaced on the schedule by Amazing Spider-Man, the last of the monster books, Tales of Suspense, got a new cover star: Iron Man. Tony Stark didn’t have crippling self-esteem issues, or problems paying rent, or a tough time talking to girls. He was a womanizing industrialist with military contracts and a mustache. Wounded and kidnapped by Wong-Chu, the “Red Guerrilla Tyrant,” Stark is ordered to develop a weapon for the communist enemy. Instead he constructs a metal suit that will keep his failing heart in operation, and also serve as armor in which he can escape. Kirby designed a round and clunky gray heap; by the time Don Heck drew the story, it was equipped with suction cups, jets, transistor-powered magnets, and drills but not a lot of aesthetic appeal. Steve Ditko would soon streamline the armor, and a red-and-yellow color scheme would improve the look considerably. The character of Tony Stark would later improve as well, but for now his most compelling problem was that of an oversexed playboy who “can never appear bare-chested” because of the mechanical plate over his heart.

  Don Heck became the regular Iron Man artist; Kirby just didn’t have enough time. “The poor guy only has two hands, and can only draw with one!” Lee wrote to a fan. “I like to have him start as many strips as possible, to get them off on the right foot—but he cannot physically keep ’em all up—in fact, I sometimes wonder how he does as much as he does do.”

  “Enough of that ‘Dear Editor’ jazz from now on!” blared the letters column in Fantastic Four #10. “Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (that’s us!) read every letter personally, and we like to feel that we know you and that you know us!” Thus were planted the seeds for Lee’s most important non-super-powered characters: the merry members of the mythical Marvel Bullpen. There had been real bullpens, of course—first at the Empire State Building, and then again here at 655 Madison, though that was already five years in the past, before Stan got shuffled off into the corner, crowded in between file cabinets. Now Lee began to paint a picture of a utopian workplace, in which all the jolly artists cracked jokes while they worked away under one happy roof. (Doctor Doom even visited “the studio of Kirby and Lee, on Madison Avenue,” in that same issue of The Fantastic Four, crashing a plotting session and knocking them out with sleeping ga
s.) In reality, Kirby only came into the offices about once a week. He worked from a varnished-pine room in the basement of his Long Island home, with a bookshelf of Shakespeare and science fiction for inspiration and a ten-inch black-and-white television for company—and the door shut, to keep the cigar smoke from billowing out to the rest of the house. His name certainly wasn’t on any Madison Avenue door. “That was a lot of stuff that Stan Lee put into magazines, but the artists were all over the island,” Iron Man artist Don Heck told an interviewer. “I could go into the office two times this week, and somebody else could go in two other times . . . you just don’t cross paths.” But Lee’s spirit of cheer was genuine. Things were looking brighter.

  “I would see Stan being very convivial out of the corner of my eye, seeming to have fun with his work,” said Bruce Jay Friedman, who had watched as the comic kingdom had been stripped from Lee in the late 1950s. “He was sort of like a big kid. I had no idea there was a legend building right in front of my eyes.”

  Still, Lee needed help. “We seem to exist from crisis to crisis,” he wrote in private correspondence with a fan. “You can’t possibly imagine how rushed we are. It isn’t a question of can’t our artists do better (or can’t I write better)—it’s more a question of how well can we do in the brief time allotted to us? Some day, in some far distant Nirvana, perhaps we will have a chance to produce a strip without a frantic deadline hanging over us.” Soon Sol Brodsky, who’d been a production hand for Atlas Comics, returned, as the de facto production manager. “My job was mainly talking to the artists and the writers and telling them how I wanted the stuff done,” Lee recalled. “Sol did everything else—corrections, making sure everything looked right, making sure things went to the engraver, and he also talked to the printer. . . . Little by little, we built things back up again.”