by Sean Howe
In California, Jack Kirby was miserable. After a promising start, his relationship with DC had quickly turned sour. Shortly after he’d signed with the company, its sales had ceded first place, to Marvel, in an industry that was failing. The comics that made up Kirby’s mythological “Fourth World” universe—The New Gods, The Forever People, and Mister Miracle—were canceled. Kirby’s stilted dialogue met resistance; his rendering of Superman was repeatedly corrected to match DC’s house style; his nonsuperhero concepts failed to impress editors. He was ready and willing to develop new titles—Omac, Kamandi, The Demon—but none seemed to carry a spark. Kirby knew there was still a home for him at Marvel; Stan Lee had made it clear in interviews. “We never had a fight,” Lee told one reporter. “We got along beautifully. I have the utmost respect for his ability and I wish he’d come back.” Tentative overtures were made, phone calls were exchanged, and Lee and Kirby began talking again.
The Mighty Marvel Convention was held on a Saturday through Monday, March 22–24, 1975, at the Hotel Commodore. Thrilling announcements made throughout the weekend suggested that Marvel might reach new audiences: a deluxe-edition Superman vs. Spider-Man comic, copublished with DC, would be the first meeting between the two iconic characters, and a deal was being finalized, at last, for a live-action Spider-Man movie. But the coup de grâce would wait until the final day of the convention.
Kirby quietly flew into New York, and, art samples in hand, sneaked into Stan’s office on Monday before heading over to the convention. Marie Severin spotted him. “I came up to the office and I saw Jack,” she said, “and Stan put a page in front of my face and said, ‘You did not see any of this!’ and I went out in the hall and yelled, ‘Kirby’s back!’ ”
Kirby’s three-year contract called for him to produce thirteen pages a week, at the rate of $1,100 a week—or $57,200 a year, or $85 per page. He declined to revisit Fantastic Four or Thor, or any of the titles he’d created with Lee. Instead, he would take back Captain America, as the sole writer, artist, and editor. He’d do an adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey; and he’d introduce a new creation, yet another ancient-secrets-of-alien-visitors concept, The Eternals.
On Sunday afternoon, at a Fantastic Four panel, Lee introduced the surprise guest. There was rapturous applause, and a standing ovation as Kirby stalked down the aisle and took the podium. The company wasn’t yet ready to announce which comics Kirby would be working on, but, he promised one audience member during a Q&A, “Whatever I do at Marvel, I can assure you that it’ll electrocute you in the mind!”
As usual, Lee didn’t hesitate to step in and rewrite Kirby’s dialogue. “ ‘Electrify,’ Jack!” he corrected. “ ‘Electrify!’ ”
In 1974, Gerry Conway had not been happy to hear about Wein and Wolfman’s promotions. In fact, he’d been furious. He’d been at Marvel longer than either of them, writing the superstar characters, pinch-hitting as an editor when Thomas was out of the office. And he had been promised, many months before, that his turn would come next. “Stan told me, ‘Well, Ger,’ in the kind of friendly, glad-hand sort of way Stan has, ‘if it ever worked out that Roy leaves the company, we want you to take over as editor.’ ” But that earlier conversation, it seemed, was quickly forgotten. Conway felt betrayed. If the main criterion for the job was familiarity and understanding of the Marvel universe, he wondered, why hire two DC guys who had just come on board in the last year? He was tired of not being taken seriously, and now suspected Marv and Len of playing political games. Apparently his achievements meant nothing to Lee, to Marvel.
So Conway was stuck with orders from Lee to bring back Gwen Stacy, somehow, if only for one issue. (Steve Gerber cheerily offered to introduce her reanimated corpse in the pages of Tales of the Zombie, as “Graveyard Gwen.”) Annoyed with the mandate,* Conway nonetheless wrote a six-part story in which Gwen returned, re-traumatized Peter Parker (and his new girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson) with her presence, and then discovered that she was, in fact, only a clone of Gwen Stacy, created by the Jackal. The Jackal, it turned out, was their onetime biology professor, Professor Warren, who’d been insanely jealous of Parker’s relationship with Gwen and later discovered he still had her DNA samples from an old science project. (Further complicating things, Warren also cloned Peter Parker, a minor subplot that would come back to haunt Marvel years later.)
At the end of the story arc, the cloned Gwen—a sad, innocent naïf who shared the memories of the real one—bid a tearful good-bye to Peter Parker, the love of her life, and walked with a packed suitcase into the sunset. Despite the silly contrivances, Conway and artist Ross Andru had produced a genuinely moving, thought-provoking story.
When Lee finally saw the story he’d forced Conway to write, he shrugged. “This doesn’t really work, does it?” Conway simmered.
“You’re going to have to take care of Gerry,” Thomas had warned Lee, knowing that Conway felt he’d earned a heightened level of respect from the company. But now Conway felt he was being treated as just another scribbler, answering to the indivisible team of LenMarv, who, the way he saw it, “really didn’t feel that they wanted to fragment their authority.” When it was decided that Conway’s increasingly popular Spider-Man villain the Punisher would get a solo spotlight in the black-and-white magazines, Conway remembered that Thomas had promised him the opportunity to edit the book himself. But the magazines were Marv Wolfman’s kingdom now. Conway would have to settle for just scripting, once again. Incensed, he began taking freelance work from Martin and Chip Goodman’s Atlas Comics, and then took a staff job writing—and editing—for DC Comics. His first assignment was to tinker with the last issues of Kamandi that Kirby had submitted before his abrupt departure. And before long, Conway found himself writing the character to which he’d just bid farewell.
Marvel and DC’s Superman vs. Spider-Man crossover was going to be oversized, eight times the price of a regular comic, and heavily promoted: a guaranteed blockbuster. For writer Gerry Conway and artist Ross Andru, it was a wonderful payday. For Len Wein, it was the breaking point. At a meeting in Lee’s office, sitting around the coffee table, Wein questioned Al Landau’s decision to remove Andru from his regular Amazing Spider-Man gig to work on the project. Spider-Man, after all, was Marvel’s number-one title.
“I’m the editor in chief,” Wein said. “Why didn’t you discuss this with me first?”
Landau looked at him. “Because it was none of your fucking business.”
Wein hurled himself at Landau. Marv Wolfman, who’d been sitting between the two, dove into the middle of the melee and tried to push Wein back. As Stan frantically tried to make peace between everyone, Wein realized that the pressure was finally getting to him. The more time he’d spent with the business side, the more he hated the job. “I’m not all that great at running something,” said Wein. “I spent all my time up on the ninth floor fighting with the accountants about getting people more money, or not canceling the book, or giving us more pages . . . the comic books were going on by themselves.” When he wasn’t checking in and out of the hospital with kidney problems, he was frantically trying to catch up with the relentless stream of product being churned out. (“Len was taking a lot of tranquilizers in those days,” recalled Dave Cockrum.)
On April 9, 1975, Marvel announced that Wein was stepping down. Marv Wolfman would assume the editor in chief duties, and Archie Goodwin would fill Wolfman’s position overseeing the black-and-whites. “I basically cut the same deal Roy had cut,” said Wein, “to take my books and just edit those.” Those books, as it turned out, included Amazing Spider-Man and Thor, which Gerry Conway had recently abandoned when he’d been unable to secure the same editor/writer title.
“We’re presently undergoing a period of very heavy dramatics,” Wolfman admitted in a 1975 interview, but he was fiercely determined not to fall victim to the pressures that had overtaken Wein. For all the similarities between the two old friends, Wolfman had a greater interest in being in charge, and more of an
ability not to get hung up on details. One of the biggest problems, as he saw it, was the number of blown deadlines. (“I was just speaking to our printer,” John Verpoorten once informed a gathering of the editorial staff. “He was wondering if we were still in business.”) This would result in a reader buying, say, the latest issue of Avengers, complete with brand-new cover, only to find a reprint of an old story on the inside. But what could an editor do? There wasn’t enough good talent to fire all the delinquent contributors. Rolling up his sleeves, Wolfman had John Verpoorten add a new title on the schedule: Marvel Fill-In Comics would be written by Bill Mantlo, who’d begun his writing career by volunteering to script a deadline-crunched comic when nobody else was available. Now Mantlo would be a preemptive strike. Marvel Fill-In, drawn by workhorse Sal Buscema, would feature two or three characters from whichever titles were in greatest danger of falling behind. When the inevitable Dreaded Deadline Doom struck, the story could easily be slotted in to one of the titles in which those characters were regularly featured.
Once that was out of the way, Wolfman was the recipient of a nice bit of luck: the threat of Martin and Chip Goodman’s Atlas Comics—which had been launched while Wein was running ragged—fizzled. Atlas was hindered by a number of second-rate creations and poor organization; even the best titles faced distribution troubles. According to one report, the publisher’s Los Angeles distributor immediately returned 2,200 of the 2,500 it had ordered—never even bothering to unpack them. Getting work with Atlas was like hitting a small jackpot—it paid handsomely, but then the money stopped for good. Artist Jack Abel turned in his pages for Wulf, used his fee to pay for a vacation to Florida, and returned to find them out of business. David Anthony Kraft, who’d left Marvel for a 50 percent pay hike writing at Atlas, rode cross-country on his motorcycle, with visions of writing issue after issue of Atlas’s Demon Hunter on the beach. By the time he arrived on the West Coast, Atlas Comics had collapsed.
In the spring, Al Landau had sent out a memo demanding that someone go through the Atlas comics and take notes on possible plagiarisms. It was certainly moot now: Atlas castoffs were simply absorbed into Marvel’s empire. Kraft and Rich Buckler reworked “Demon Hunter” as “Devil-Slayer,” and wrote him into Astonishing Tales. Howard Chaykin walked directly from the Atlas offices and sold a reworked “Scorpion” to Marvel as “Dominic Fortune.”
Of course, none of this solved the problem that no company’s comics were selling. “We were just a bunch of punk kids working in the back end of Magazine Management,” said Chris Claremont. “Nobody bought comics. It was a dying industry, and we knew it. Nobody cared. We were just there to have fun. We all figured by 1980 we’d all be out looking for a real job.”
Across the nation, supermarkets were replacing mom-and-pop stores, and few had interest in maintaining spinner racks filled with low-profit-margin comics. Worse, the fact that comics were sold to distributors on a returnable basis made publishers extremely vulnerable to unfair business practices. Stories proliferated about unsold copies sitting in warehouses and then stripped of their covers, which were returned in exchange for credit. The coverless comics were then sold at a reduced price—all at a profit to the distributor.
So in 1973, Phil Seuling, a loud-talking high school English teacher and convention organizer from Coney Island, approached Marvel and DC about getting the same 60 percent discount that the wholesalers enjoyed. In return for such a low rate, Seuling would agree to pay for all unsold copies. After all, he could sell the back issues to collectors. For the publishers, it was an improvement on the old business model of printing two or three copies for every one sold, but it wasn’t a sustainable alternative, not yet. In 1974, this method of “direct distribution” accounted for only $300,000 of Marvel’s sales. The newsstand problem had to be fixed.
For a while, Al Landau managed to give Cadence Industries the illusion that he’d turned Marvel around. Because the comics were returnable, profit reports were based on monthly estimates of “sell-through” copies, not on the quantity shipped. “He had a bit of a Ponzi scheme,” one Cadence executive explained. “If you distribute 100,000 copies, and estimate 50% sales, and the next month you distribute two books—print 200,000, and estimate 50%—you have 150,000 in reserve. He kept publishing more every month, so he hid the fact that his estimates were way overblown. He was running the company right into the ground.”
When Sheldon Feinberg began to grow suspicious of Landau’s numbers, he dispatched two Cadence employees from New Jersey, installing them at Marvel: first, an accountant named Barry Kaplan became chief financial officer, and then a recently hired Curtis Circulation consultant named Jim Galton became a vice president. They went through the profit-and-loss statements and didn’t like what they saw.
When Landau returned from a vacation, he found Galton sitting in his office chair.
“What are you doing here?” Landau asked.
“Didn’t Shelly tell you?” Galton asked.
Galton and Kaplan took Landau out to the Players Club for lunch. At the table, Galton broke the news that he was personally replacing Landau as president of Marvel and Magazine Management. Landau grabbed his chest and fell to the floor as Galton and Kaplan looked on.
If Galton couldn’t turn things around in a year or two, there would be no more Marvel Comics. In fact, Sheldon Feinberg was itching to shut down Cadence’s entire publishing operation. “I think by June 30th of the year I arrived, Marvel had lost two million dollars,” said Galton. “The first thing I had to do was put some order into the organization and stop the bleeding. It was bleeding profusely. That took about six months. In the process, we killed a lot of magazines, and pared down the staff, which had been allowed to just grow with no rhyme or reason.” Shortly after Landau left, Galton also gave Landau’s number two, Ivan Snyder, the heave-ho, but with a unique sort of severance package: $39,000 worth of Marvel toys and apparel, sold to him at cost. “Ivan was spending a great deal of time trying to build a mail-order company within the company,” said Kaplan. “There was a room set up for all the licensed product that Marvel bought from its licensees, which they advertised in the comics.” Kaplan pointed out to Galton that Snyder’s little project was requiring a large amount of office space, and the shipping-and-handling services of three full-time employees, and not making money for the company. By making a deal with Snyder, Marvel could both get rid of the inventory and gain an ad revenue stream. Snyder agreed to buy advertising space, at a preferential rate.
Snyder put up shelves in the basement of his Randolph, New Jersey, home and called his new company Superhero Enterprises. Within three years, he’d own stores in three cities, and an extremely successful mail-order business. He would cross Marvel’s path again.
Stan Lee, meanwhile, had been busying himself on the magazine side since Chip Goodman had exited, to the chagrin of the editors there. They saw Lee as a meddler who swooped in and asked for unnecessary changes, asking out loud who these younger celebrities on the covers were.
At the launch party for Magazine Management’s Film International (on the first issue’s cover was nude Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristal; reviews of several X-rated films ran inside), Stan and Joanie flew to Los Angeles and hobnobbed with C-listers like Arte Johnson and Victoria Principal, and retired directors like King Vidor and Vincente Minnelli, at the Greystone Mansion. It wasn’t as hip as having Fellini and Alain Resnais swing by the office, but it was Hollywood.
Lee’s name also appeared on the top of the masthead of Celebrity, a People knockoff that inserted Lee into the action, posing for photos with story subjects. The vintage of the stars—Mae West, Mickey Cohen, Robert Wagner, Lucille Ball, F. Lee Bailey—gave it the feel of an episode of Love Boat. The articles fawned over all of them. “If Celebrity’s attitude to the phenomenon [of stardom-obsessed culture] seems diffident,” wrote one observer, “that may be because it is published by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame, and primarily devoted to the exploits of Lee, the first comic book a
uthor to gain celebrity status.”
Now Lee enjoyed an exquisitely appointed office—five windows that overlooked Madison Avenue, a boomerang-shaped, glass-topped coffee table, and ample space for three chrome-and-leather chairs and two plush sofas. He still wrote the “Stan’s Soapbox” column once a month, but it was Hollywood that called to him. Not only were there movie stars with whom to mingle, but there was also an industry that didn’t seem on the verge of collapse. “No matter how successful everything became,” said one writer, “he always had the horrible feeling that everybody would disappear and he’d have to step in and write everything again.”
As it was, he barely looked at the comics. He took a look at Iron Man for the first time in over a year, saw the triangular nose that had been added to the helmet on his own orders, and said, “What’s this—why is this here?”
“You don’t want that?”
“Well, it looks kind of strange, doesn’t it?” Lee zoomed away, on to the next thing.
Everything was big-picture now: synergy, demographics, partnerships. Lee called at least one meeting to remind writers not to make major changes to characters, lest those changes jeopardize deals with licensees. Decisions were being made, Steve Englehart said, “not by Stan Lee as the top of a bunch of creative people, but by Stan Lee as the bottom of a bunch of businessmen. And he began to really put his energy up into the business end of it rather than down into the creative end below.”
As out of touch as he was with the creative process, by now even Stan Lee knew that fans were clamoring for more of Howard the Duck. Howard’s sporadic appearances, in the back pages of the tremendously titled Giant-Size Man-Thing, produced an avalanche of mail, and Steve Gerber found himself meeting with Lee about Howard getting his own title. Accompanying Gerber was Mary Skrenes, a college friend of Alan Weiss who’d moved to New York and easily fallen into freelance comic writing. Skrenes found that she loved comics, but it took some time getting used to the man-child comic pros that surrounded her. Gerber, whom she met on a visit to the Marvel offices, was an exception: “I came in,” she said, “and everybody clustered around me. Some of these guys weren’t used to girls. So they were all around me, saying things like, ‘I’ve been having trouble . . . I hate to go to sleep . . . I hate to wake up,’ and I looked up and I saw this big head bouncing toward me from the other room. It was Steve Gerber. He took my hand, and led me out of the room. All these guys are like, ‘What?’ ”