Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  When the time came to draw the comic, though, things got rocky. Starlin created dozens of sketches for Shang-Chi, whom he rendered with a Chinese face—except when drafting different costume designs. “I did just this generic face on top of the figures and Stan said ‘That’s the face you’ve gotta go with.’ ” Starlin tried to explain the misunderstanding, but Lee held his ground. Making matters worse, Starlin finally read the Sax Rohmer source material and was aghast at the pervasive racism. “By the time we finally got done with it,” Starlin said, “I had a friend who was Oriental who looked at it—he told me flat out he found the whole thing insulting. That was enough for me.” When the first issue came out, fans wrote in to complain about Fu Manchu’s bright yellow skin, prompting a laborious explanation about the color printing process. By then, Starlin had walked.

  Englehart soon followed. “I got five issues into it and they called me up and said, ‘Stan rode up on an elevator today and heard two guys talking. One guy said, “what’s the hottest thing in movies these days?” and the other guy said, “Kung fu movies and the reason why is because it’s wall-to-wall violence.” ’ Stan got off the elevator, walked to Marvel Comics and said, ‘Let’s do wall-to-wall violence.’ They called me up and said, ‘We don’t want any more of this philosophy. We just want kung fu fights.’ ”* The series continued on without him, with cover lines like “The Fortune Cookie Says: DEATH!”

  Englehart focused his attention on Captain America, which, at the time of the Watergate scandal, suddenly seemed like the richest opportunity at Marvel. He crafted a conspiracy story line with thinly veiled correlations to actual headlines: the Committee to Reelect the President (C.R.E.E.P.) became the Committee to Regain America’s Principles (C.R.A.P.), with the real world’s ex-adman H. R. Haldeman replaced in the comics by ex-adman Quentin Harderman. It all climaxed with Captain America tracing the shadowy “Secret Empire” straight to the Oval Office—where a disgraced commander in chief committed suicide by gunshot.

  Englehart never showed the president’s face, but Marvel called him when the pages arrived, asking for reassurance that it was not intended to be Nixon. “I swore up and down that it wasn’t,” he said. “But once it was in print, I had no problem admitting it.”

  Starlin, on the other hand, felt like he was getting a hard time. After the Shang-Chi fiasco, he began turning his work in at the last moment, to avoid editorial interference. John Romita, who’d been given the title of art director, offered Starlin a regular gig on the flagship Fantastic Four but found that the young superstar was no longer yearning to be a team player. “Starlin turned down the FF, and that was the first time I ever heard of a professional comic artist—they used to be so grateful to get a steady book that they would crawl on their bellies—turn down a book. He said he didn’t want to be ‘tied down’ to it.”

  When Mike Friedrich, Starlin’s old Iron Man writing partner, moved out to Hayward, California, and started independently publishing his own anthology comic book, Starlin jumped at the chance to contribute. The first issue of Star*Reach opened with Starlin’s seven-page tale about an artist who enters a slick “death building,” drops acid as he rides the elevator, boasts that he’s a “being of imagination,” and beheads a cloaked figure of Death. But the artist is then himself slain. As the story ends, another acid-eating artist enters the building—“My name is Starlin, Jim Starlin!”—one more lamb for the slaughter. The slick office building, revealed upon further inspection of the artwork, was at Fifty-Fifth and Madison—the address of Marvel Comics. Just as “Death Building” was going to press, Starlin threw a fit about an inking substitution in Captain Marvel, told Marvel he was quitting, and took off for California.

  Brunner quit, too, finding the pace too grueling when rising sales of Doctor Strange convinced Marvel to push it from every other month to a monthly title instead. “It was definitely an Oscar and Felix kind of relationship,” Englehart said of the collaboration. “I smoked dope, and dropped acid, and ate mushrooms—and I made my deadlines. Brunner was also into that stuff, and in the end couldn’t keep up. He would be saying ‘We could do this, we could do that,’ and I would be saying, ‘Yeah, but we have to get it into seventeen pages.’ ” Brunner had started to lose interest anyway—he was more excited about a new project he’d been working on with Gerber, a short story that featured the return of Howard the Duck.

  In the summer of 1974, news started to surface that Martin and Chip Goodman were planning a return to comics—with the specific goal of exacting revenge on Marvel and Al Landau, whose crowding out of Chip they considered an unforgivable act of betrayal. They created cover designs that blatantly imitated Marvel’s branding, right down to the thin horizontal banners at the top of each magazine. They called themselves Atlas Comics, but people in the industry almost immediately began calling them “Vengeance, Incorporated.”

  The Goodmans spread the word that Atlas would pay higher page rates than Marvel or DC; it would return original artwork; it would even offer the creators ownership of their characters. One artist set up shop outside Marvel’s Madison Avenue offices, enthusiastically redirecting other freelancers to Atlas’s headquarters, a block away. Before long, many significant Marvel alumni, including John Severin, Wally Wood, Gary Friedrich, Gerry Conway, and Steve Ditko, had signed up; even Lee’s own brother, Larry Lieber, was hired as an editor.

  In desperation, Lee sat down and typed up a letter to freelancers. “Recently, a number of smaller companies—some already established, some in the process of attempting a launch—have decided that the only way to match Marvel’s success is to lure away as many of our people as possible.” Then he ramped up the drama considerably.

  It’s like Nazi Germany and the Allies in World War II. Hitler, being a dictator and having no one to answer to, could do as he wished whenever the mood struck him, and could make the most extravagant promises to his captive people, while being completely heedless to the consequences. The U.S., however, had to move slowly, following firmly established principles of law and government. Marvel, like the Allies, simply cannot counter-react with impetuous pie-in-the-sky offers and promises.

  Being aware of this situation, certain competitors are making increasingly frenzied efforts to decimate Marvel’s staff, with more and more such offers being dangled before the eyes of almost anyone who can use a pencil, brush, or typewriter. Offers which could ultimately become sand beneath your feet—but their purpose will have been achieved.

  Lee emphasized that Marvel was the largest employer of comic freelancers, that its rates had continually risen over the last fifteen years, and that it had instituted a hospitalization and life insurance plan for exclusive freelancers. He emphasized that it was he himself who’d introduced prominent credits in the comics, and that it had been Martin Goodman who had not allowed the return of original artwork. “Marvel has never lied to you,” he wrote, in closing. “Marvel never will. Stay with us. You won’t regret it.”

  Lee threatened Archie Goodwin, who’d been writing for Marvel, that working for Atlas would be a bridge-burner, and Thomas advised freelancers that there would be no guarantee of future work with Marvel if they strayed. But in August, Thomas himself went to dinner with Chip, and talked things over—just wanting to feel things out. He was burning out at Marvel, leaving work and beginning all-night writing sessions at ten or eleven at night. Jeanie had come back to him—for now—but things with her felt tenuous, irreparable, and the stress of the job wasn’t helping things. He was defending company policies he didn’t agree with, constantly caught between labor and management. According to Romita, many of the older Bullpen members had never cottoned to Thomas, or accorded him respect. “When you’re used to working with Stan, a lot of them had trouble taking orders from Roy. They felt like he was a kid who shouldn’t be in charge.” When veteran inker Vince Colletta learned that Roy was planning to remove him from inking duties on Thor, he marched into Roy’s office and threatened to throw him out the window.

  Now
Thomas was also feeling unfriendly pressure from above, in the person of Al Landau. They’d gotten off to a bad start: When there had been the threat of an industry-wide artists’ union, Thomas wanted to fly to the Philippines to recruit artists who’d work at cheaper rates. Landau vetoed the trip on the ground that it would be “too much like a vacation,” despite the revolutionary war raging near Manila at the time. When Thomas broached the idea of selling comics directly to comic stores at a discount, Thomas said, Landau “would look at me as if I were an idiot, tell me that that would just make the wholesalers and retailers mad, and change the subject.” A quarter century later, Thomas could remember only one or two times that he and Landau agreed on anything.

  Even Stan Lee had started to grow distant—he’d encourage Thomas to push for policies like returning original art to freelancers, or paying royalties on reprints, or distributing directly to specialty comic shops, but if Landau resisted, Lee would stay quiet. “By becoming publisher,” Thomas said, “he had gone from being creative force to total company man, which was what he wanted—but I didn’t want to follow him along that path as I had before.” For his part, Lee told people that he and Thomas were no longer seeing eye to eye.

  The comics themselves, at least, were the best they’d been since Kirby left—in fact, Thomas had even had conversations with Kirby about coming back from DC. “Roy was very open to ideas, and allowed you to do almost anything. He managed to find ways to get you into the company before you knew you were there,” said Marv Wolfman. “Len had no intention of ever coming over, but slowly found himself working full-time for Marvel. . . . Roy knew how to handle people.” Thomas was also talking to Starlin about returning, maybe taking over the superhero-as-Christ parable Warlock, with stories so far-out they’d make Captain Marvel look like Marmaduke. Steve Englehart followed the Watergate story in Captain America with adventures based on the Symbionese Liberation Army’s Los Angeles siege and the People’s Revolutionary Army’s kidnapping of an Exxon executive in Argentina; in The Avengers, he embarked on a weird epic that involved time travel and telepathic trees.

  But Thomas wouldn’t be around to see these stories reach fruition. The final straw came, at last, after a freelancer was caught trying to drive up his Marvel income by lying about his page rate with DC. A seething Stan Lee went out to lunch with DC president Carmine Infantino and hammered out an agreement to share information about how much each freelance writer or artist was getting.

  When Thomas heard the news, he was appalled—this was collusion, and he wanted no part of it. Jeanie had wanted him to quit all along, ever since Stan had rescinded that job offer to her—hell, he had quit once, over the phone, but Stan had talked him out of it. That wouldn’t happen again. Before leaving the office that night, he sat down, took out a sheet of paper, and in a one-paragraph memo decried Lee and Infantino’s plan as “unethical, immoral, and quite possibly illegal.” He would not enforce it. The next day, Thomas wrote from home; and when he returned to Marvel the following day, Lee summoned him into his office. “I suppose that you consider this your letter of resignation,” Lee said, before trying to explain his position on freelancer rates. “It doesn’t matter,” Thomas said. “It’s probably best if I leave Marvel.”

  6

  The staff was summoned in for the announcement that Thomas—the second-longest-tenured Marvel employee—was stepping down. The reaction was stunned silence. “Roy was there, sitting rather quietly, and Stan didn’t seem happy about it either,” remembered Jim Salicrup, who at the time was seventeen years old and working at Marvel as a messenger. “I don’t think there was ever any real animosity; I think Stan may not have realized how much more was involved from the days when he had to run the comics line. He may have just thought that Roy was going nuts or something, or demanding too much. I think Roy wanted to put in a structure that would better cope with the expanding workload, and I don’t think they realized that this isn’t a job for just one person—you have to have x amount of editors handling x amount of titles.”

  Privately, Lee and Thomas worked out the details of his departure from staff. Carmine Infantino had offered Thomas the chance to write Superman at DC, but Lee certainly didn’t want his protégé working for the competition, and so he offered Roy a contract that allowed him to continue writing from home, editing himself and answering directly to Lee. Thomas would stay on at the office for a few weeks, oversee a transition, and then, as a sort of going-away present, he’d get a new title called The Invaders, featuring World War II–era adventures of his beloved Golden Age characters. He’d also stay on Conan the Barbarian, the comic adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s pulp character that he’d convinced Marvel to license, and which had become a surprise hit. Lee and Thomas decided that the future editorship should be split up, with Len Wein, recently hired as Thomas’s assistant, taking over the color comics and Marv Wolfman the black-and-whites. With the inseparable “LenMarv” running things, Marvel could get two minds in perfect sync.* Thomas flew down to Washington, D.C., where they were attending a science-fiction convention, to make the offer.

  At first Wein was ambivalent. “I’ve been assistant editor for three months, and now you want me to run the company?” he asked. But Thomas, eager to settle the matter, reassured Wein that he was a capable successor. “He wanted out,” recalled Wein. “It took me a year to understand why he left: It was an impossible job. And as long as we kept doing that impossible job, they wouldn’t believe it was impossible.”

  Chris Claremont, a twenty-four-year-old former intern who’d been writing and proofreading part-time while trying to get his acting career off the ground, was named Wein’s associate editor: Scott Edelman and Roger Slifer, both nineteen, served as assistant editors. As everyone was figuring out their new duties, there were fifty-four color comics a month that needed to be published. Wein had no choice but to decrease his writing workload, and since he wanted to continue on The Incredible Hulk, he’d have to find someone else to write the new X-Men series, which was finally in production after many months of development.

  The return of the X-Men had been plotted during Roy Thomas’s tenure. Marvel president Al Landau still had a hand in the Transworld Features Syndicate, which had begun repackaging Marvel comics for foreign markets; when Landau realized that European and Asian characters would have great international value, he charged Thomas with devising a super-team of non-Americans. Thomas, who’d been already itching for a few years to revive Marvel’s mutant team, saw a way for the discontinued title to fill Landau’s order.

  Thomas, Mike Friedrich, and artist Dave Cockrum went out to lunch at the Autopub, a car-themed restaurant in the bowels of the General Motors building, to brainstorm. Sitting at a table made from car chassis, surrounded by monuments to assembly line production, the trio discussed the idea of replacing the old X-Men members with a multi-ethnic team of mutant heroes. Cockrum, who filled his notebooks with sketches of original costume designs, ideas for hire at the ready, was a one-man character machine. He went home and perused his files, selecting characters he’d kicked around over the years, while in college, while in the army, and while working on DC’s Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes: Typhoon. Black Cat. Mr. Steel. Thunderbird. Nightcrawler. The project went into limbo for months, however, and by the time the title was on the schedule in late 1974, Wein had replaced Friedrich; Typhoon and Black Cat were combined into “Storm”; Mr. Steel was “Colossus”; and Nightcrawler had evolved from an actual demon into a mutant German acrobat with a pointed tail.

  The X-Men lineup also included the Canadian mutant Wolverine, whom Len Wein and John Romita had created when Thomas detected a need to exploit the Canadian market. Wolverine had appeared in one Incredible Hulk story and quickly made an impression as one of a trend in new characters, including Conway and Romita’s Punisher and Rich Buckler’s Deathlok, who were angry, violent, and defined by their weapons.

  Giant-Size X-Men #1 begins by introducing five individuals, in turn, as they display
their powers. Kurt Wagner (Nightcrawler) is hunted by a Bavarian mob as he leaps around and scales buildings; Canadian special agent Wolverine unsheathes a metal claw as he confronts his commanding officer on a military base; in Kenya, Ororo Munroe (Storm) is praised as a goddess for controlling wind and rain; Siberian farmer Peter Rasputin (Colossus) transforms into a powerful man of steel in order to save his sister from an errant tractor; Apache John Proudstar (Thunderbird) tackles a buffalo on an Arizona reservation. Each of them, along with past X-Men associates Banshee and Sunfire, are visited in turn by Professor X, who appeals to their consciences with a sales pitch on power and responsibility. He gathers them at his mansion in Westchester County, where he furnishes them with costumes, and where a condescending Cyclops explains that the X-Men—Iceman, Angel, Marvel Girl, Havok, and Polaris—have gone missing on Krakoa, an island in the South Pacific.

  Exchanging threats and insults all the while, these eight set forth for Krakoa, which turns out to be itself a sentient being (“Krakoa . . . the island that walks like a man!”). The rescue mission itself is unremarkable; once the X-Men are freed from captivity (they’ve been captured by the island itself), it is they, and not the new recruits, who win the battle and earn escape. In fact, nearly everything about Giant-Size X-Men #1 is a familiar echo of Fantastic Four #1: the Magnificent Seven–like gathering of the team, the dysfunctional bickering, the mysterious island to which they are summoned, even the dramatic escape by plane as the island explodes behind them.

  With the final word balloon of the issue—“what are we going to do with thirteen X-Men?” someone in the plane asks—the transition begins. The old X-Men will be put out to pasture; the new X-Men will have a shot at capturing a younger audience.