by Sean Howe
Shortly after the issue was finished, it became clear that Wein’s workload would force him to abandon the title—not that the decision caused him much distress. “It was just another book,” he said. “It was no different to me than ‘Brother Voodoo’ or a couple of other new series that I was involved in.” But for Chris Claremont, who’d been listening in on story meetings from his desk outside Wein’s office and chiming in with ideas, it was a golden opportunity. He eagerly volunteered to take over the writing. “I said, ‘Shit, yes!’ But it was a mid-list title—we figured six issues, and out.” Instead, it would change his life.
Wein struggled with the constant cycle of cancellations and launches ordered by Lee and Landau. Iron Fist, a kung-fu hero whose origin was mostly lifted from an old Bill Everett creation that predated Timely, was given his own title, as was Black Goliath, in another attempt at an African-American audience . . . and also Red Sonja, and the Scarecrow, and Skull the Slayer, and Bloodstone, and on and on. “You’d go into the office one day,” said one assistant, “and the thirty books you’d edited last week would all be canceled, and even though they were in various stages of production, none of them was published yet, and thirty new books would be there for you to work on.”
There was also the chance that Lee would swoop in, look at a page, and offer an offhand remark that would send the office scrambling. Near the end of Roy Thomas’s tenure, Lee had taken a look at Iron Man pages in which the hero’s faceplate was so flat that it didn’t look like Tony Stark’s nose would fit. “Shouldn’t he have a nose?” he asked Thomas. In the decade since his creation, Iron Man’s faceplate had never included a nose, but Lee was the boss. In the next issue, Stark redesigned his helmet to include a big metal triangle in the front. Months later, Iron Man pages by Mike Esposito landed on the desk of Production Manager John Verpoorten’s brand-new assistant, Bill Mantlo. “I’m looking at this book and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, I must be hallucinating!’ ” said Mantlo. “ ‘Iron Man doesn’t have a nose.’ So I sat there, very innocently, with a tube of white-out, and painted out all the noses, and maybe an hour later, I hear screaming. ‘Esposito, are you out of your mind?! What happened to his nose?’ . . . Mike comes in and he’s raging, ‘Goddamn it, the nose is there!! You can see the little dot of white over each nose!’ ” Mantlo went through and dutifully scraped the Wite-Out from every panel.
To help writers keep track of the flood of new and changing characters, Thomas had kept a plastic box of index cards noting where characters had last appeared, and what their powers were. That would no longer do. Now there was a gigantic database, an alphabetized list on five pounds of perforated computer paper printouts.
Coordinating the increasingly complex story continuity between titles was also becoming a burden. One of the Marvel Universe’s hallmarks was that it was all one grand narrative, that everything that happened in one title had a potential impact on all the others. This was manageable when Stan Lee had personal oversight of eight comics a month, but nearly impossible when a cadre of excitable twenty-somethings wanted to let their imaginations wander—or when the bottom line called for franchise expansion. How could Spider-Man be everywhere at once? “The problem at Marvel,” said Wein, “was that we suddenly became a business with a bunch of books that Stan, I don’t think, ever in his heart expected to last more than a couple of years.” Complicating matters further were the proprietary battles for character use. “Gerber would want to have Hulk do one thing in The Defenders,” said Claremont, “but Englehart would say, ‘I’ve got him doing this other thing in the Avengers. Who has priority?’ ”
“There was a definite hierarchy,” said Bill Mantlo, who was drafted from the production office to write during a deadline crunch, and began getting regular assignments. “It seemed at that time that the key to being a successful Marvel writer was that you had worked for two companies, that made you better than all the hacks like me and Claremont and Moench who’d begun at Marvel, stayed with Marvel, and were loyal to Marvel. In fact, financially, if you quit Marvel and went to DC, you could come back to Marvel at a higher rate than somebody who stayed at Marvel. It was a sign of success to shit on the company, go somewhere else, and then come back, and Chris, Doug, and I, and maybe Tony [Isabella] at that point, were left cleaning up the manure, without thanks, without reward. That went on for quite a while. There was also a theory that if you were Editor, you were supposed to write The Hulk, Spider-Man, and Thor. Maybe Fantastic Four. It fluctuated, depending on who your favorite characters were when you were fifteen. That was what ‘Editor’ meant at Marvel. Not that you were someone who was officious, not that you were someone who was efficient, who was a good administrator, or who was an excellent writer in his own stead—being an editor at Marvel meant that now you should be able to write whatever the top books were considered to be, and everybody else got what was considered the dregs.”*
Over the years, Stan Lee, and then Roy Thomas, had learned how to cede some of the supervision over content. Lee’s policy was, according to Claremont, “They miss deadlines, you give them a warning, then you fire them. If the book doesn’t sell, you fix it or you cancel the book and fire their ass. If it sells, you shut up and get out of the way. You don’t micromanage. There isn’t time. There’s too much to do.”
It wasn’t quite as easy for Wein and Wolfman. “It’s not that I think that Len and Marv didn’t want to do the same thing, but they seemed more willing to step in,” said Thomas. “They might have been more nervous about letting a writer of a not particularly successful book do something that they didn’t feel comfortable with. They might have worried that they would be out there and get the limb sawed off.” A new title called The Champions was proposed by Tony Isabella as a vehicle for the discarded X-Men Angel and Iceman, a two-guys-on-the-road serial in the spirit of Route 66. But according to Isabella, Wein began applying a succession of rules that called for changes: it had to be a team of five characters; it had to include a woman; it had to include a character that already has its own title as well; it had to include someone with super-strength. The Champions eventually became a weird mutt of a comic, in which the thoroughly mismatched Angel, Iceman, Black Widow, Ghost Rider, and Hercules teamed up to fight villains like the bankrupted “Recession Raiders” in Los Angeles.
This kind of fussing put Wein on a collision course with production manager John Verpoorten, who saw the tweaking as frivolous. If a book was in danger of missing its shipping deadline—and thus incurring hundreds of dollars in late fees—Verpoorten’s six-foot-seven shadow would darken a desk. A proofreader’s protests would fall on deaf ears. “You’ll read it when it comes out,” he’d bellow as he leaned in to grab the pages.
This, perhaps, is the best way to explain the free rein given to certain titles. As long as sales weren’t dropping, so what if a comic was a little bit loose, a little bit off the rails—why bother telling Stan? Why bother telling Len?
A proofreader could be a writer’s greatest friend. “Gerber would plot a great story, hook you with a cliffhanger, and have no clue what the hell he was going to do with the next issue,” said David Anthony Kraft. “And the deadline would come for the plot, and people would get desperate; you would see the whites of their eyes. And that’s when we would go out to dinner and kick around ideas. I did that with a bunch of Howard the Duck and Defenders issues. It made for interesting stories—if you didn’t know where you were going, the readers couldn’t outguess you. On the other hand, you could have a mess and never tie your stories up and nothing would pull together. It didn’t always turn out for the best.” Still, he says, “I tended to like that stuff. So it would just go straight out.”
With the lack of oversight came more opportunities for experimentation. Gerber, Englehart, and Starlin chased their whims and colored even further outside the lines, mixing and matching scattershot ideas from older Marvel comic books with current news headlines and pop psychology and spinning them into Dadaist mini-masterpieces that landed every mo
nth at the feet of boggled adolescents. They tackled sexual politics, nudged their protagonists into countercultural pursuits, and even offered sly commentary on Marvel Comics itself.
Gerber’s Defenders consisted of founding members Doctor Strange and the Hulk, plus Valkyrie, a sword-wielding demigoddess who’d taken over the body of naïve twenty-something occultist Barbara Norriss, and Nighthawk, aka Kyle Richmond, a playboy-turned-criminal-turned-hero with Batman-like gadgetry. But superheroics were clearly what interested Gerber the least. As he had with Man-Thing, he populated the book with deeply flawed but sympathetic hoi polloi, given to crushingly low self-esteem. And so the icy Valkyrie was destined to endure the needy overtures of not only Kyle Richmond but also the somewhat schmucky Jack Norriss, the estranged husband of her host-body.
Gerber truly began pushing The Defenders into ecstatic absurdity at the beginning of 1975, with the introduction of the Headmen, a dastardly trio whose individual exploits had appeared in forgotten one-off 1950s Atlas Comics stories: Dr. Arthur Nagan, a surgeon whose harvesting of gorilla organs led some angry gorillas to transplant his head onto a simian body; Chondu the Mystic, a yoga-advocating caster of spells; and Dr. Jerold Morgan, whose experiments in cellular compression resulted in the shrinking of his bones and loose, doughy skin hanging everywhere. Now gathered in suburban Connecticut, they plotted to take over the world . . . and while that subplot simmered, Gerber added a battle against the KKK-like Serpent Squad, which turned out to be led by Kyle Richmond’s butler Pennyworth—a self-loathing, middle-aged African American—and bankrolled by funds siphoned from Richmond’s millions.
And while all of this was unfolding, every few issues would include a random murder committed upon ordinary, usually pathetic citizenry, by an unnamed elf with a gun. There was no apparent connection between these murders and anything else in the comic . . . or, in fact, the whole of the Marvel universe.
The young editors just kept shuffling the pages through production.
In The Avengers, Steve Englehart shaped a twenty-issue story arc about Mantis, the Vietnamese prostitute who had become the “Celestial Madonna.”* She and her lover, the Avengers’ onetime foe the Swordsman, had appeared at Avengers Mansion and successfully petitioned for membership. Alas, her potent sexuality—her “death grip” involved wrapping her legs around male victims—disrupted the order of things. “Basically, Mantis was supposed to be a hooker who would join the Avengers and cause dissension amongst all the male members by coming on to each of them in turn,” said Englehart. “She was introduced to be a slut. I’ve always been a big fan of sex, and I would see these grown-up superhero guys fight supervillains, then they’d meet a woman, they’d blush and stammer. They were like big teenage boys, which always seemed dumb to me, because I was accepting them as grown-up men, so why didn’t they act like grown-up men?” Englehart eventually backed off from the strumpet angle, although a Scarlet Witch–Vision–Mantis–Swordsman love quadrangle yielded tearful melodrama, alleviated only when the Swordsman died in action.
The mysterious origins of both Mantis and the Vision unfolded over many months. It turned out that she’d been raised by a race of psychic alien cruciferous vegetables named the Cotari, who’d been brought to earth by a sect of Kree pacifists. After Mantis regained her memory of this, the Cotari tree that overlooked the Swordsman’s grave took his form, and proposed that Mantis bear its child. “By the end, because it was a cosmic time,” said Englehart, “somehow, she just turned herself into the Celestial Madonna and married a tree! And in order to marry the tree, you had to know the history of the universe, you know?”
Englehart’s retrofitted backstory for the Vision was slightly less insane, but it carried a metatextual wallop. He revealed that the Vision’s android body had been repurposed from that of the original Human Torch (absent from the Marvel Universe since his sudden demise amid creator Carl Burgos’s 1966 copyright battle). A flashback showed the villainous robot Ultron kidnapping the Human Torch’s inventor, Phineas Horton, and forcing him to resurrect his invention. Through Horton, Englehart gave voice to the regret that the embittered Burgos himself felt about the Human Torch: “I thought he’d be my crowning achievement—and my meal-ticket—but my colleagues feared him—hounded me to destroy him—and when he escaped, I was ostracized . . . and he never, ever returned to me! . . . Don’t make me face him again—not now, when I’m so old!” Ultron murdered Horton, who slowly uttered his last sentiments as he died cradled in the Vision’s arms: “I wanted an issue, creation, some part of me to live on . . .” Life would imitate art when Burgos’s own death was not acknowledged in the pages of Marvel Comics, but the Vision—“some part of me”—lived on.
Englehart then turned his attention to the Beast, formerly of the original X-Men, who’d mostly disappeared since Englehart turned him blue and furry a few years earlier. The Beast joined the Avengers, and became the first Marvel weedhead. “The Beast was a product, in his second incarnation here, of my life in California,” Englehart said. “He got older, and he started listening to rock and roll, and—quite frankly—he started smoking dope, although we couldn’t say that in the books.” What he did instead was show the Beast reading Carlos Castaneda and playing Stevie Wonder records, signifiers that “he was a young, intellectual guy who’d gotten hip.”
Captain Marvel’s struggling-musician sidekick Rick Jones was getting hip, too. In Englehart’s Captain Marvel #37, Jones’s tourmate Dandy hands him a capsule, which she coyly refers to as “Vitamin C”: “a present, in case your ‘personal thing’ gets boring!” Rick Jones’s ‘personal thing’ at this point was that he would switch places with Captain Marvel every time he banged together the metal “Nega-Bands” on his wrists; this meant he spent a lot of time biding time in the Negative Zone, where one of them had to remain at all times. The next time Jones is floating idly in the Negative Zone, he pops the pill and begins hallucinating about his childhood in the suburbs; meanwhile, Captain Marvel’s jaw starts tingling, his head pulses, and his surroundings take on the properties of an Escher drawing. When the Watcher shows up and attacks Captain Marvel, our hero breaks out in a cold sweat; fortunately, by the next issue, he and Rick both have their bearings. Captain Marvel lauds Rick for the growth of his mind. Psychedelic drugs have made them even more “cosmically aware”; all ends well.
For all of Gerber and Englehart’s subversive invention, though, it was the willful provocation of Jim Starlin’s Warlock that tested the limits of Marvel’s corporate inattention to low-selling content. Roy Thomas had made the character a Christ figure; now Starlin, the recovering Catholic, used him to deliver a critique of organized religion, as well as a protest against systemized stiflings of creative voices.
Wandering space, Adam Warlock comes upon a “non-believer” who’s being pursued by armed soldiers; he tries to save her, but fails. Using the “dread power” of his mysterious Soul Gem, he revives her just long enough to learn that her killers were from the Universal Church of Truth, an iron-fisted group with intergalactic reach, led by a being called the Magus—who, Warlock is shocked to learn, is his own future self.
As Warlock journeys to find the Magus, he gains unlikely allies (the foulmouthed troll Pip; the green-skinned, fishnet-wearing alien assassin Gamora) and several more enemies (including Captain Marvel’s old foe Thanos). But the greatest threat to his survival, and to his sanity, is the powerful crystal on his forehead—the vampiric Soul Gem—which, he slowly realizes, is thirstily absorbing the spirits of his enemies.
Adam Warlock’s adventures were perfect vehicles for Starlin’s meditations on the price of power, and for the suspicions he harbored toward rigid institutionalism. Plotting, scripting, penciling, inking, and coloring, Starlin was, in a sense, the first auteur that Marvel had seen since Steranko’s early carte blanche days. But even the slightest editorial interferences set off Starlin’s inner rebel, and before long, the authority that he questioned so relentlessly was no longer limited to the church.
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sp; “Stan always had trouble with the stuff I did,” Starlin said, pointing to “The Infinity Formula,” a Nick Fury story he wrote while he was also working on Warlock. “I had Fury embezzling funds so he could get this formula that would extend his life. Stan was so upset by it he said it would never be used in Marvel continuity, or ever reprinted.”
At first there were sneaky little under-the-radar jokes in Warlock—altering the Comics Code seal to read as the “Cosmic Code” on the cover of one issue, or having Pip walk into a bar and order a “merde stinger” in the next. And then, the stakes were raised. In the fourth issue of Starlin’s saga, Warlock is brainwashed by a pair of clowns, intent on making him conform. “Now take it easy, true believer!” says Len Teans, the first clown. “This is where you shed those dark aspects that set you apart from your fellow clowns!” The second clown, Jan Hatroomi, paints a clown face on Warlock, who is then taken to see another “renegade” being pummeled with pies. “He used to be one of the best,” Teans says. “But he tried to buck the system! He began to think people were more important than things!” A child buying this comic from the local drugstore would find this all very wild, of course—even if he didn’t notice that “Len Teans” and “Jan Hatroomi” were anagrams for Stan Lee and John Romita, or that the pummeled clown looked a lot like Roy Thomas.
Adam Warlock is led to a swaying tower of trash, to which clowns are busy adding wheelbarrows of garbage. When the tower collapses, he finds a diamond in the wreckage. “Oh, that stuff!” says Len Teans. “We just can’t seem to keep it out of our refuse! Someone keeps putting it in while we’re not looking!” Jim Starlin was painting Marvel Comics as a delirious purveyor of junk.
The next issue of Warlock credited Len Wein with not editing, but instead with “fussing.” No one even bothered to change it.