Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  When Shooter was drafted to provide plots to Lee for the Spider-Man newspaper strip, Lee patiently explained the process—“You see, every day, there’s a daily strip . . .”—as though Shooter were a child. When the first batch of plots was turned in, though, Lee was impressed.

  “These are good.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was an awkward pause.

  “How come the comics are not so good?”

  “Jim Shooter wanted that job desperately, desperately, desperately,” said Jo Duffy, Goodwin’s assistant. “He was Archie’s right-hand man but he really wanted to be Archie. In a sense his entire tenure working for Archie was him auditioning for the job. I don’t think Archie would have left had it not been so apparent that somebody who wanted it much more was standing right next to him saying, ‘If he leaves, me, pick me, please, please, me me me me me?’ So I think Archie felt more harassed than supported. Everybody’s perception was ‘Jim wants that job.’ ”

  “I never brought up Archie at all,” Shooter said. “Stan starts realizing that Archie won’t take the reins and fire people; he knows that Archie is not an administrative guy. So he starts concocting this idea that maybe I should be editor in chief. And maybe we can move Archie to some other thing. So, he came up with this idea that Archie would do some special projects and he tried to think of something that would sound prestigious, and a contract forever. No one wanted to get rid of Archie.”

  On a bus ride back from Pittsburgh with a friend, Shooter held forth on how the editorial division might be restructured, with multiple editors, each responsible for specific titles, reporting to the editor in chief. It was how DC Comics had done it for decades, so why shouldn’t it work for Marvel? And the autonomous writer-editor title—held by Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Steve Gerber, and Jack Kirby—that would have to be done away with. It was time for someone to consolidate control. No prima donnas allowed.

  Even from Los Angeles, Roy Thomas had sensed that Goodwin wouldn’t be long for the job. Thomas knew that Shooter was probably next in line, and that Shooter had the writer-editor positions in his crosshairs. So he wrote a letter to Stan Lee expressing his alarm at the idea of Shooter as editor in chief. “Among other things,” Thomas later recalled, “I said that Jim wanted total power, and that I could not and would not live with such a situation, and that I felt he had ambition enough to dance on all our graves.”

  When Archie Goodwin got wind of Lee’s plans to replace him with Shooter, he was pissed. Lee took Shooter out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant and broke the news that Goodwin had resigned. “His read was that I had stabbed him in the back,” Shooter said. “Even though he was going to get a raise and title, he just basically told me to go to hell.” Goodwin began working out a writer-editor contract for three books a month.

  Lee planned to announce Jim Shooter as the new editor in chief the week before Christmas. But on Monday, December 19, 1977, Marvel receptionist Mary McPherran, accompanied by the building superintendent, entered the duplex apartment of John Verpoorten. He had died in his recliner, up in the loft bedroom, after leaving work sick on the previous Friday. His cat cowered in the corner. “He always made me swear if he didn’t show up for work that I would find out what happened to him,” McPherran said. “He was afraid of dying in his apartment.” The barrel-chested Viking of a man who intimidated delinquent creators and editors concealed his softness—they didn’t know that every vacation he took was to Disneyland, or that he collected reels of old animated films. And most of them didn’t know that he was running a complicated, stressful, and selfless scam of “pre-vouchering,” through which struggling artists were floated paychecks before assignments were turned in. “This was his deep dark secret,” McPherran said. “I think that’s what killed him.” Verpoorten was thirty-seven years old.

  “I helped clean out his office,” Danny Crespi said, years later. “And I took his cigarette lighter just to have something of his. I don’t smoke anymore, but I still carry that lighter in my pocket. Someone also gave me his Mickey Mouse cufflinks. They’re too big for me but I keep ’em anyway. I still keep his picture around my office.”

  With the news of Verpoorten’s death, Lee decided it would be better to wait until after the holidays to announce Shooter’s promotion. But that Friday, at the Christmas party at the bar downstairs from the office, he threw a wrench into his own plan. “Stan and Joan had been to another Christmas party,” Shooter said, “and I guess they had a glass of wine or something. And Stan just blurted it out: ‘Hey everybody! Jim is going to be the new editor in chief.’ Archie and his wife are sitting there shooting daggers at me with their eyes. You could have heard a pin drop. No applause. The only two people who came up to me were Danny Crespi and [inker] John Tartaglione. But everybody else was silent.”

  The next morning, Shooter’s home telephone rang at seven o’clock. “I pick it up,” he recalled, “and it’s Marv Wolfman’s voice. He doesn’t say hello.

  “He says, ‘What are you going to do?’ ”

  PART III

  Trouble Shooter

  9

  Stan wants me to run Marvel Comics, and he’s disappointed when I don’t. He doesn’t want to be hassled. The way he sees it, for the most part, I deal with them and he deals with me.

  —Jim Shooter, February 16, 1978

  Everything that has been done to us in the past years has been from the attitude, “Here, my boy, have a lollipop.” It’s been a parent dealing with an unruly child. We’re not children! We’re people! We’re creators! It’s about time we stood up and made them take notice of that fact.

  —Chris Claremont, May 7, 1978

  The commercial victories of the Star Wars and Kiss tie-ins had, unfortunately, been anomalies. Howard the Duck’s popularity had dropped markedly after the first several issues. The added exposure from the CBS Spider-Man and Hulk television shows had boosted the popularity of those titles—sales of the Hulk comic rose 35 percent—but the line as a whole was still anemic. Record-breaking blizzards in the northeastern United States had punishing effects on shipping and sales of all newsstand periodicals. And then there was the chaos of the Marvel offices themselves. In January 1978, Jim Shooter’s first month as editor in chief, Marvel was scheduled to ship forty-five comics; only twenty-six were delivered on time, and some of the titles ran as much as four months late. Trying to stop the bleeding was John Verpoorten’s former assistant, Lenny Grow, who was suddenly pushed into the role of production manager. With John Romita swamped with Spider-Man newspaper strip deadlines, Brodsky gave Marie Severin the title of art director. Shooter, meanwhile, barely had time to glance at the comics Marvel was printing—he was busy overhauling the structure of the expanding editorial division.

  He hired a young and motley bunch. Two editors shared stewardship of the color comics: former associate editor Roger Stern, who had extensive knowledge of the Marvel characters, and Bob Hall, an artist who’d been a protégé of John Buscema and who also moonlighted as a playwright. The magazine line was edited by Rick Marschall, a former newspaper syndicate editor and comic-strip historian; his assistant, Ralph Macchio, was another prolific letter writer who’d been a vocal Don McGregor fan. In February, Shooter hired an assistant of his own. Mark Gruenwald, who resembled Bill Murray and had a sense of humor to match, was a comic-book obsessive on the level of Roy Thomas, and impressed Shooter with his publication of The Omniverse, a scholarly zine that chin-scratchingly parsed the minutiae of fictional superhero worlds. Gruenwald would serve as liaison between Marvel and the writer-editors—while they lasted.

  Steve Gerber, the last to sign a writer-editor contract, and falling behind on deadlines once again, was the first to go. In February, he was relieved of his duties as the writer of the Howard the Duck newspaper strip. Gerber’s lawyer informed Marvel that this was a violation of his contract, and that he was considering legal action regarding the ownership of the Howard the Duck character; shortly thereafter Marvel terminated Gerber’s con
tract altogether. Asked by the Comics Journal if chronic lateness was the reason for the company’s decision, Shooter replied, “I would just say that we found it advantageous to get out of the contract we were in.” Gerber maintained that he and Gene Colan were not getting advance payments on time.

  Stewardship of Howard was split up: Marv Wolfman took over the newspaper strip, and Bill Mantlo took over the comic book. When the strip was canceled later in the year, Gerber complained publicly about the “downright horrible” quality of Wolfman’s work. “Once I was gone,” he told the Village Voice, “Howard was lobotomized, devoid of substance, and turned into a simple-minded parody. So, they’re putting him out of his misery.”

  An ending to Gerber and Skrenes’s Omega the Unknown saga, repeatedly promised in letters columns and repeatedly rescheduled, was finally written without its creators’ input. “It just got to the point where we couldn’t work with Shooter anymore,” Skrenes said. “He was screwing with us and punishing us and trying to have somebody else write it, like they always did with Howard.” Omega was killed off in an issue of The Defenders. Gerber and Skrenes swore to each other that they’d take their original plans for the character’s ending to their graves. “I’d heard for years,” Skrenes said of Shooter, “ ‘Mort Weisinger gave this guy a nervous breakdown.’ And they make him an editor, and it’s like, he didn’t get the memo that we get to do what we want with the book.”

  Jack Kirby’s contract was up for renewal in April 1978. At a convention in West Virginia, Stan Lee announced that Kirby had signed a long-term contract as an artist only; he said Kirby’s scripting was “imaginative but undisciplined,” but Lee was confident that the artwork would return to form once Kirby was paired with other writers.*

  But there was no new contract. Kirby’s tour of duty was, in fact, coming to an end. His latest return had been a major disappointment, to him and to Marvel. None of his books had sold as well as hoped, the reaction from readers was less than enthusiastic, and even his supposed autonomy had been undermined. “The editorial staff up at Marvel had no respect for what he was doing,” said Jim Starlin. “All these editors had things on their walls making fun of Jack’s books. They’d cut out things saying ‘Stupidest Comic of the Year.’ . . . [T]his entire editorial office was just littered with stuff disparaging the guy who founded the company these guys were working for. He created all the characters these guys were editing.”

  Tensions were now worse than they’d ever been in the sixties. Kirby reportedly received hate mail on Marvel letterhead, and crank phone calls from the office. When Roy Thomas persuaded him to draw an issue of the imaginary-tale series What If? (it was a self-reflective story called “What if . . . The Fantastic Four were the Marvel Bullpen?” starring Lee, Kirby, Thomas, and Flo Steinberg), Kirby refused to allow Thomas to script it, and replaced the Thomas character with a Sol Brodsky one. Once the pages arrived at Marvel, an editor went through and changed all of Kirby’s references to “Stanley” to “Stan” and corrected all the grammar in the dialogue—except for that of the Jack Kirby character.

  “I didn’t really get a shot,” Kirby later said of his 1970s work at Marvel, pointing to professional jealousy. “A guy will create a book, another will fill his book up with knock letters—he’s off in five months, or three months, and the other guy’s got his shot. . . . I see it as a serpent’s nest. And in a serpent’s nest, nothing can survive. Eventually all the snakes kill each other. Eventually they’ll also kill whatever generated them.”

  In the end, Kirby’s exit plan from the frustrations and limitations of the comic-book industry was the same that Stan Lee’s had been: Hollywood. Kirby was invited by Hanna-Barbera to produce storyboards for NBC’s new Fantastic Four cartoon—for which both Lee and Thomas were writing. Kirby still wasn’t calling the shots—because the Human Torch had already been optioned by Universal, Kirby had to create a cute robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. to be the Fantastic Four’s fourth member—but the pay was better, and the treatment was more respectful.

  Jack Kirby would never work for Marvel Comics again.

  In the spring of 1978, Marvel’s lawyers, faced with new copyright laws going into effect, decided that the company needed proof that its publications were being produced as work-for-hire. Previously, a legally questionable “contract” had been rubber-stamped on the backs of paychecks—if you signed the check, you signed the contract. But now Jim Shooter began handing out single-spaced one-page contracts that granted Marvel “forever all rights of any kind and nature in and to the work.” When freelancers read the contract, they flipped. Then they tried to organize.

  DON’T SIGN THIS

  CONTRACT!!

  YOU WILL BE SIGNING

  YOUR LIFE AWAY!!

  COMICS CONTRACT MEETING

  SUNDAY, MAY 7, 9 E. 48TH STREET

  THIRD FLOOR 4:00 PM

  Neal Adams was by now the de facto leader in the battle for creators’ rights—he’d recently made headlines for insisting that DC Comics compensate Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Now he led the discussion at the first Comics Creators Guild. The demands he advocated were radical: that work sold to comic companies would entail North American rights only, that artwork remain the property of the talent, that all disputes be determined by arbitration, and—the kicker—that the scale of artists’ pay be tripled.

  But it was a difficult time to build consensus among comics professionals. Steve Englehart, Frank Brunner, and Steve Gerber, unsurprisingly, were among those who were ready to take up arms. Others, like Roy Thomas and Mark Gruenwald, worried that Adams’s success removed him from the economic realities of the average freelancer; some felt that his strategy favored pencilers over writers, inkers, and other professionals. Many feared that the industry was on the brink of collapse. “I think with things being tight this way, when the industry’s hurting this way, this is not the time to push for the Guild,” said Ross Andru.

  Bill Mantlo wanted to go further. “A guild isn’t strong enough,” he told the Comics Journal. “We need a union.” But an attempt to unionize had been the last straw at Magazine Management before Galton pulled the plug. The fear in the hearts of those who’d spent their lives working for Marvel Comics, who’d seen their livelihoods ebb and flow with the fluctuating market, was summed up by Gene Colan: “They’ve treated me pretty decently and I don’t want to go off on a limb. It’s a little risky at this point and I’m not going to make any waves.”

  “If we really want to take John Byrne and consider him as a phenomenon, it starts with the X-Men,” John Byrne once told an interviewer. He was unsettled, he said, by all the attention, the hooting and hollering his name caused at convention panels while his heroes received only polite smatterings of applause. But Claremont and Byrne’s X-Men was undeniably something special, the most perfect blend of angst and exaltation Marvel had seen since Lee and Ditko’s Spider-Man. The visual facility wasn’t just the work of Byrne, but the regular team that began coalescing: the smooth delineations of inker Terry Austin, the high-contrast hues chosen by colorist Glynis Wein, and the neatly uniform Art Deco characters of letterer Tom Orzechowski all contributed to a streamlined reading experience that contrasted with the often-murky visuals that had crept into superhero comics. In a sense, the look of the X-Men was a return to the “Pop Art Productions” of Marvel’s heyday.

  Claremont and Byrne’s skilled pacing (and their rare ability to regularly meet deadlines) allowed them to freight some of the same Big Ideas that had distinguished Starlin and Englehart’s work—meditations on corruption, mortality, mysticism, and totalitarianism—into page-turning potboilers, a smoother-edged synthesis of the cult favorites that had come before. They juggled more subplots than even Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four, and snuck in plenty of personal drama, for which Byrne’s glamorous characters—cheekbones, full lips, dimples, and almond-shaped eyes—were perfect vehicles.

  It was also the soapiest saga ever put forth by the House of Ideas, filled with agoni
zed romances, self-confidence crises, lectures on morality, psychic scars, and worrying. In the first story that Claremont and Byrne plotted together, Jean Grey and the Beast were separated from the rest of the X-Men, each group believing the other killed. Jean flew to Scotland to clear her head; halfway across the world, Cyclops sat by a pond and thought, “Jean and Hank died. . . . How am I going to tell the professor? It’ll break his heart. I’m surprised it hasn’t broken mine. Surprised . . . and a little scared.” Joined by Storm, he continues, “I mourned for Hank, but—for Jean there’s nothing there. After the shuttle flight, nothing had changed between us, yet everything had. She wasn’t the girl I’d loved anymore.”

  There was drama behind the scenes as well. When editor Roger Stern visited Byrne in Calgary, Alberta, with a makeready of the issue in hand, Byrne blew a gasket over the way Claremont rendered Cyclops’s monologue. “I was tempted to throw it off my balcony,” he said. “We were sitting on my balcony reading it and I was yelling and screaming and the neighbors were coming out and going, ‘What’s going on down there?’ ” He began writing margin notes in blue pen, so that if Claremont changed something, Byrne could take the pages and prove he’d intended something else.

  Byrne complained, loudly, about what he called “Chris-shticks,” and Claremont certainly had trademark tics—rampant italicization for emphasis in dialogue, confident women, psychic bonds, and characters who always took vacations in the United Kingdom. There were also the endlessly reflective thought balloons and somber monologues. “Chris’ idea of a perfect issue of the X-Men,” Byrne once said, “would be 22 pages of them walking around in the Village or at Scott’s apartment or something like that, where they sit around, out of costume, in jeans and t-shirts, and just talk.” Claremont, for his part, said that all he cared about was the emotional relationships. “To me,” he told an interviewer, “the fights are bullshit.” But at a time when so many superhero comics were devoid of personality, it was easy to cut some slack to someone who was investing so heavily in human interaction.*