by Sean Howe
She quickly became Gerber’s muse—the inspiration for Howard the Duck’s go-go dancing girlfriend, Beverly Switzler—and writing partner. They began dating and soon moved in together. Her sensibility was every bit as skewed as his. When she was asked to take a crack at conceptualizing a superheroine with the name of Ms. Marvel, she turned in a proposal about Loretta Petta, a petite, dyslexic waitress who’d moved from a trailer park to the big city. “When she would get pissed—in the first issue, somebody robbed her diner—she would get super-adrenaline strength. They didn’t want her to be tiny and dyslexic; they wanted her to be statuesque. Stan just didn’t like it.”*
But she and Gerber had better luck together. In the pitch meeting for Howard, they’d also brought along their idea for another comic, about a character named James-Michael—“a real twelve-year-old,” as he put it, “a human being poised on the edge of puberty, facing all the enormous (and enormous seeming) problems adolescence would bring.” Not, in other words, another stupid kid sidekick.
Of course, it wasn’t quite vérité—in the first issue, James-Michael’s parents die in a horrible auto accident and are revealed to be robots. James-Michael, hyperintelligent and nearly autistic in his cold manner, is adopted by a kind nurse and her hip roommate, who live in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan, and he’s haunted by dreams of a mute, caped alien who shoots lasers from his palms and leaves a trail of destruction that’s still there when James-Michael awakes. But what would they call it?
“Omega the Unknown!” Lee shot back. He put both titles on the schedule.
Things were looking up for Chris Claremont, too—the first few issues of the new X-Men series had been popular with the fans, as had Iron Fist, which he was also writing. In both titles he’d immediately set to building supporting casts of ordinary folks to surround the heroes, surrogate families for the exceptional outcasts with whom an audience of adolescents and aging fans were likely to identify. There was also the artwork: on X-Men, Dave Cockrum’s colorful costume designs and science-fiction gloss; on Iron Fist, the fluid energy and Dutch-angled dynamism of a young Canadian artist named John Byrne. Byrne was an immediate fan favorite. His characters were infallibly vivacious, his panels were filled with minutiae for trainspotting readers, and his page layouts flowed invitingly. He and Claremont immediately hatched plans to collaborate on further projects.*
At the end of 1975, Claremont left his editorial post, as Englehart, Gerber, and McGregor had before him, to devote himself full-time to writing. To replace Claremont in the associate editor position, Wolfman tapped a former DC writer with a decade of industry experience under his belt.
His name was Jim Shooter. He’d just turned twenty-four.
7
In the summer of 1964, when Jim Shooter was twelve years old, he spent a week in the children’s ward of Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh, recuperating from minor surgery. From his hospital bed, he worked his way through the nearby piles of comic books.
“The DC comics were pristine, and the Marvel comics were ratty and dog-eared,” said Shooter. “And so I read a couple DCs and I read a couple of Marvels and I found out why everyone was reading the Marvels: because they were way, way better.”
This gave the boy an idea. “My family had no money, and they won’t let you work at a steel mill if you’re twelve. I thought if I could learn to write like this Stan Lee guy, I could sell stuff to these people at DC—because they clearly needed help.”
For a year, the young Shooter studied every comic he could get his hands on, figuring out what was good, and what was bad, but above all else, he wanted to figure out the formula. “I guess I was canny enough to know that if I just wrote some comic book or everything I had ever wanted to do in a comic book that they wouldn’t buy that. They weren’t going to buy something that was too different.”
In the summer of 1965, he wrote a Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes story on spec, and gave it to his mother to send to DC. A mail correspondence followed, and within a matter of months, Shooter got a call from Mort Weisinger, the same “malevolent toad” who only a few months earlier had scared Roy Thomas away to Marvel. Weisinger invited him to meet at the DC offices. Shooter, by now fourteen, was accompanied by his mother.
He got the regular gig, and just in time. “My father had a beat-up old car and the engine died,” he said. “That first check bought a rebuilt engine for his car so he didn’t have to walk to work anymore.”
For four years, Shooter worked for Weisinger on various iterations of the Superman mythos—Superboy, Supergirl, etc.—not only writing scripts, but providing cover designs as well. He also won the good graces of artists Gil Kane and Wally Wood by providing stick-figure layouts for each page. But as high school wore on, the allure of the money began to wear off—it never seemed to be enough for his family anyway. What mattered now was the accolades.*
Unfortunately, praise was limited to the occasional article in the Pittsburgh newspaper or segment on the local TV news. “My father probably said four or five words to me the whole time I was growing up,” said Shooter. “One of the greatest men to ever walk the earth . . . but not at connecting with people. He made no comment whatsoever.” And Weisinger didn’t just withhold praise—he cruelly berated his teenage employee, calling from New York every Thursday night, following the weekly Batman television broadcast, with a litany of complaints: It’s not on time. It’s over the page limit. How the hell can we get a cover out of this? Why can’t you write like you used to? He referred to Shooter as his “charity case.” “He caused a kind of pathological fear of telephones in me,” Shooter once told an interviewer. “I felt more and more inadequate . . . and my last chance to be a kid was slipping by.”
Holding down an adult job—and, at six feet seven inches, now towering above his classmates—scarcely anything about him, save a serious case of acne, marked him as a teenager. He tried to fit it all in, to “get good grades so I could nail down a scholarship, and have a little fun, like football games, dances, parties and stuff. But it was too much, and it all suffered.” He missed sixty days of his senior year of high school, his grades fell, and his productivity for Weisinger decreased.
He managed an NYU scholarship anyway. In 1969, shortly before he was due to fly to New York, he had a falling-out with Weisinger. So he decided to cold-call his inspiration, Stan Lee, from a pay phone at the airport. Amazingly, he talked his way into a job interview, and then an offer. But the only thing available was a full-time assistant position. Marvel’s environment was shockingly different from the jacket-and-tie, insurance-company vibe of DC. It seemed like it might be . . . fun.
He gave up the scholarship.
Shooter, flat broke, checked into a local YMCA after his first day on the job and then slept on the floor of Marvel receptionist Allyn Brodsky. He sat in on story conferences. Morrie Kuramoto taught him how to paste corrections onto art pages. Sol Brodsky gave him samples of artwork by Kirby and Gene Colan so he could try his hand at inking, and Lee asked him to submit plot pitches, but nothing came of it. After four years of being a wunderkind, he was suddenly a ghost. An impoverished ghost. “I literally did not eat for two weeks, I had no money. When I got my first paycheck, and I saw how many taxes came out, and I saw the prices for rent on apartments . . . I couldn’t survive. I couldn’t do this.”
Shooter, shell-shocked, gave up and went back to Pittsburgh.
He tried to get a job in advertising, and eventually scraped together some freelance work, but no one wanted to hire a high school graduate. By the time a couple of Legion of Superheroes fans tracked him down for an interview in 1974, the twenty-one-year-old former boy wonder, the onetime local celebrity who’d practiced signing his name with a Superman-style S, had spent a year managing a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
When Marvel assistant Duffy Vohland heard about this, he called Shooter, and—representing himself as an editor—convinced him to travel to the offices to discuss a return to comics.
To Shooter, Marv
el’s newer and bigger offices looked even more crowded and shabby than the 1969 space had. “There was a huge papier-mâché figure of Thor, donated by some fans, suspended on wires from the ceiling in the production area. There were piles of stuff everywhere—old comics, envelopes, trash, books. Two people were sword fighting with yardsticks in the hall.” The dozens of employees, he thought to himself, were “young, strange looking, and dressed for playing Frisbee in the park.” Vohland pointed out the sleeping bags that transient employees used to sleep under their desks.
Shooter, flummoxed by the chaos and unfamiliar with the new Marvel characters, darted over to DC—Weisinger had retired—and began writing Legion of Superheroes again, for another year, from Pittsburgh. But eventually, once again, the DC style began to chafe, and he started thinking about leaving comics behind. Then, in December 1975, Marv Wolfman called him. Would he like to come into the Marvel offices to talk about a staff job?
Wolfman was nowhere to be found when Shooter flew into town the next morning, but the desks that surrounded the editor in chief’s door were buzzing with energy. Near the secretary’s desk, Claremont’s girlfriend was sitting on his lap. Assistant editors—Roger Stern, Roger Slifer, Scott Edelman—ran around frantically. One of them shoved nineteen pages of art from the latest Captain Marvel into Shooter’s hands, so he sat down and worked while he waited for his job interview to begin.
At noon, Wolfman breezed in. “Marv comes right through the big room, goes into his room, closes the door. And then he opens the door, Len comes in, and Marv says, ‘We’re going to lunch.’ ” The editorial assistants went out for coffee.
After lunch, Wolfman explained the job, which was to be “pre-proofreader.” Too many plots, he said, were going straight from the writer to the artist, without editorial supervision, and no one was seeing mistakes until they were drawn and lettered in ink. “That’s why these guys are so busy,” said Wolfman. “So much stuff comes in like that. Instead of doing it at the end, you should do it when it’s still in pencil. Just re-read the plots.” Wolfman had found a secret weapon to combat the inefficient workflow.
This secret weapon even had a nickname: “Trouble Shooter.”
From California, Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart were, quite literally, destroying and re-creating galaxies. As Kirby had done with Ragnarok in Thor and as Steranko had done with the Prism of Miracles in “Nick Fury,” the respective Armageddons in Warlock and Doctor Strange—unleashed simultaneously, at the end of the year—left lingering trauma. Adam Warlock had defeated his corrupted future self, the Magus, only by allowing the universe to end and start anew; he remained haunted by the memory of “this explosive reshuffling of time.” Simultaneously, Doctor Strange had battled his old foe Mordo for the fate of the world, and lost. The world was brought back, of course—but Strange alone carried the heavy knowledge that everything was a re-creation, a living replica of what had died.
Much like, some readers were beginning to say, Marvel Comics. “The notion,” said Gerry Conway, “was that you had a cycle, and every three years you replaced your readership. Once boys hit puberty they would stop reading comics, and you’d be picking up the next group of ten-year-olds. So the goal was to write material appropriate for that age group.”
If you couldn’t have anything but the illusion of change, the most you could hope for was to reset the buttons for the new crop of ten-year-olds.
The big news at the beginning of 1976 was Howard the Duck #1. Gerber’s weird creation—and the promise of sophisticated humor, and the popularity of artist Frank Brunner—inspired a wild gold rush among comic-collectible dealers, who hurried to newsstands and bought up every copy of the issue—sometimes before it even hit the racks. Rumors circulated that Marvel had conspired to keep the issue from the hands of fans, or that a computer error caused half the press run to be shipped to Canada, where unsold copies had been promptly destroyed.
“I said, ‘What’s with this duck? He’s just another Walt Disney character. It won’t work,’ ” Marvel circulation director Ed Shukin told the New Yorker. “So that’s why we only printed 275,000. At the time, I hadn’t actually read a copy of Howard. That was a mistake. I underestimated that duck.”
Speculators did not. Within weeks, the comic was selling for nearly ten times the cover price—if you could find someone to sell it to you at all. It wasn’t uncommon for comic-shop owners—of which there were now a few hundred throughout the country—to keep piles in the storeroom, unsold, as they watched prices soar. Pretty soon, Howard the Duck was the first Marvel comic to make mainstream headlines since Spider-Man had gone up against the Comics Code. Howard’s image was emblazoned on the front cover of the Village Voice (“The Last Angry Duck Stands Up For America”) while Gerber humored the press. (“There’s a sensual quality to him,” Gerber told Playboy. “If you stood Howard next to Superman, you could tell instantly which would be more interesting to jump into bed with.”) It wasn’t long before Marvel announced that Howard the Duck would be running for president in the 1976 election.
Gerber’s Man-Thing had carried healthy doses of social satire, but Howard the Duck really seemed to loosen something inside the writer. He had a lot to get off his chest about American materialism, about the cheap violence in martial arts movies, about groupthink, about Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church. The agitation rubbed off on his work in The Defenders, too—the alien Nebulon tried to conquer earth not with cosmic blasts, but by posing as a Werner Erhard–like leader of self-improvement seminars, in which attendees were given clown masks and told to declare themselves “Bozos.” Another issue depicted protesters outside a screening of Waste, a stand-in for the real-life 1976 surprise hit Snuff.
Marv Wolfman greatly respected Gerber’s work, and he’d been an early champion of Howard the Duck. But he found the darker stories—including one that Stan Lee called “one of the best written comics I’ve ever been jealous of”—to be “gruesome” and “revolting.” Increasingly, the tone of the comics was a point of contention for Wolfman, who’d even dusted off Nova, a character he’d created as a teenager, in hopes of getting back to the kid-friendly spirit of the early 1960s Marvels. The inclination was not contagious.
“I was working at that particular time with very highly tempered people,” Wolfman said. “It was very difficult—maybe a stronger editor could do it—to tell Steve Englehart to do something, or Steve Gerber, or Don, or . . . 90% of the staff that was there was very emotionally high-strung people.”
Don McGregor, no longer on staff—and thus no longer able to push his own comics through unhindered—had become evangelistic about creative freedom, the battle lines of which, for him, often involved issues of race (despite editorial queasiness, he’d pushed through mainstream comics’ first interracial kiss) and issues of verbiage. Englehart had once poked fun at McGregor’s self-serious and long-winded prose in an issue of The Avengers, in which Black Panther declines membership to the group in a monologue that pushes at the boundaries of the panel:
“Thor, the fine fool’s gold of stark velvet morning seems to light the mottled tapestry of desire and disaster that comprises the legend of life for my people and myself in this hidden, half-slumbering nation-state we proudly proclaim Wakanda—but the amber eyes of reason widen as mauve shadows of regret creep across all the outside worldscape, and scream the bleeding need for Panther’s presence at this time.”
“(‘Nay’),” an impatient Thor thinks to himself, in a thought balloon.
Around the same time, Wolfman himself had written a borderline-vicious one-page parody of McGregor, “the Harmony Factor Syndrome Beneath Wakanda”—in the Marvel fan-club magazine FOOM, of all places. But he’d also made a promise to McGregor that he was now regretting.
“Don and I used to be friends until I became his boss,” Wolfman said. “I was basically told at one point to fire him and didn’t because I had promised him when I was black-and-white editor he’d always have all the work he needed. Much to my chagrin,
he would never do anything to fix up the books. As much as I pleaded and begged and everything else, because the books were dying.”
McGregor’s Jungle Action #20 hit the newsstands in mid-December; it included a monologue about standing up for ideals that continued on for seventeen panels. Kevin Trublood, the character who delivered the speech, was a reporter who’d been told to not bother with his story about the Klan; he was an obvious stand-in for McGregor himself, with closely held beliefs (“I believe in the fairy tales . . . the myths I was taught in school”) and his own troubles with editorial resistance: “I am getting carried away!” Trublood shouted. “Because my character was questioned when I said I was going to do that story—that I was going to expose it . . . I realized I was afraid to write that story. My friends, my relatives, my coworkers. They made me afraid to write that story. And they were afraid.”*
McGregor—going through a messy divorce, a custody battle, and health scares—refused to yield on the stories in which he was investing so much energy. “The pressure was on to bring in the Avengers,” he said, “but it was important for a black hero not to have to have white heroes come in to save the day.”
Wolfman couldn’t take it. “When a writer is specifically told—maybe 40 times—by two separate editors before me and three later as well, that his stuff is not selling, you’ve got to make changes, and the writer refuses to make the changes, there is something wrong, because again, you’re not working for yourself totally. You have to be able to compromise as long as you’re being paid by someone else.” This refusal to accede to employers’ wishes, Wolfman thought, was becoming an epidemic within the industry.