Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  The political implications did not go unnoticed. The fanzine LoC published an essay titled “The Rape of Ms. Marvel,” zeroing in on a line of dialogue in which Marcus admitted using the “subtle boost” of an electronic device to seduce Danvers. Chris Claremont, who had invested two years of toil and tears and screaming with editors to transform Ms. Marvel into a respectable character, only to see her cosmically roofied and whisked away to a literal limbo, was aghast.

  So was Perez. While the issue was being completed, Marv Wolfman approached the frustrated Avengers artist and asked if he’d be interested in joining him on a relaunch of DC’s kid-sidekick group The Teen Titans. Perez immediately left The Avengers, and the two ex-Marvel creators began developing what would soon be DC’s best-selling comic.

  10

  X-Men #137 hit the stands on June 17, 1980. A legion of dedicated readers, unwilling to wait for the issues to arrive at newsstands, flocked to comic stores, returned to their homes, and tore through the pages until suddenly it was over, and they were trembling. Jean Grey’s personality flickered in and out like a weak radio signal in the final moments, as the now-dark Phoenix force continued to overwhelm her. “I’m scared, Scott,” she cried to Cyclops, just before stepping into the path of an ancient Kree weapon. “I’m hanging on by my fingernails. I can feel the Phoenix within me, taking over. Part of me . . . welcomes it.” And then, suddenly, Cyclops kneeled and wept before a smoking crater.

  Fandom was agog. “The flawed tragic lead whose actions bring about his or her own doom has been fused with the helpless, innocent female victim of the tragic course of events. It is as if Lady Macbeth and Desdemona were the same person,” wrote Peter Sanderson in a review for Comics Fandom. An unprecedented number of distraught letters poured into 575 Madison. “The X-Men used to be my favorite mag, but after this hideous issue I seriously doubt if I will ever touch another issue again!”

  Claremont acknowledged that Shooter’s mandates had improved the story, even if he felt that the long-term result—Jean Grey’s death—was the wrong one. “Unfortunately,” he said diplomatically, “you come to a situation where different attitudes and different books reflect the different moral and philosophical attitudes of the different writers and artists.” Many fans blamed him anyway, and called him a murderer. He received multiple death threats. But comic shop cash registers rang up The X-Men more than twice as much as any other comic that month. Shooter asked Jim Starlin if he’d like to kill Captain Marvel.

  Stan Lee’s mind was on other things. That Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter announced the formation of Marvel Productions, which was planning “twenty developmental presentations for Saturday morning cartoons, prime time specials and pilots.”* The DePatie-Freleng studio, Marvel’s intended partner, had dissolved, but David DePatie and Lee Gunther were named president and vice president of Marvel Productions, and took over projects abandoned by the old studio. Lee, who had finally relinquished his New York apartment for a luxury condominium in Beverly Hills, was named creative director of the new company. He also retained his publisher title at Marvel Comics, but for the first time in forty years, the comics weren’t his responsibility.

  Steve Gerber noted the announcement. He’d been working on Saturday morning cartoons for Ruby-Spears Productions in Los Angeles, swallowing the bitter pill of being asked to work up a presentation for a series based on Marvel characters that would team heroes like Black Panther, Thor, Machine Man, the Scarlet Witch, Ms. Marvel, and Doctor Strange with canine companions. To Gerber’s relief, the series was not picked up,* and he soon made public his feelings about the man who’d once been his hero. “Stan was responsible for a massive infusion of creativity into the industry twenty years ago,” he wrote in a letter to the Comics Journal, “but he is also the man who, under the protective umbrella of Marvel company policy, has robbed Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others of the credit due them as creators for those same twenty years.”

  In August, Gerber filed a copyright infringement suit against Cadence Industries, Marvel Productions, and Selluloid Productions (which produced a Howard the Duck radio show starring Jim Belushi). The suit asked for more than a million dollars in damages for Marvel’s pursuits of “derivative media work” without Gerber’s permission or compensation. Central to Gerber’s claim was the fact that he’d created the character before the institution of work-for-hire contracts—and, indeed, before the 1976 copyright law went into effect.

  As Marvel’s lawyers prepared a response, Gerber worked on Thundarr the Barbarian, a Saturday morning cartoon he’d created for Ruby-Spears. Among the other prospective shows that Thundarr beat for its time slot on ABC that fall were Spider-Man and Daredevil, making Gerber’s success especially sweet. And Thundarr the Barbarian had another connection to the Marvel of old: it featured characters designed by Jack Kirby, now gainfully employed in the animation industry.

  While Gerber celebrated, he also began promoting a paperback comic he’d written for Eclipse Comics, which offered royalties and copyright retention and had become the de facto home of Marvel expatriates like Don McGregor and Steve Englehart. Gerber conceived Stewart the Rat partly as a riposte to both Marvel and Disney, who had earlier forced Howard the Duck’s appearance to be altered so that he looked less like Donald Duck. “For me it was almost like revenge against both companies,” he said. “Fine, if you’re not going to let me do this duck, I’ll do a mouse and we’ll see how you feel about that!”

  Stewart the Rat was only one in a flood of exciting new projects that summer, and publishers courted the hard-core fans at conventions across the country, as star writers and artists flew in and out of Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York. The convention circuit stroked many an ego—“I’ve got fans in the sense of people whose brains fall out when they hear my name,” John Byrne said—but it was still, largely, a musky and nebbishy subculture. The rock stars of the comic world did not have rock-star groupies. Being a “fan favorite” meant “you get to hang out with a lot of pimply little kids with loads of money to spend on original art,” complained Bill Mantlo, whose Micronauts had developed a following. Chris Claremont was slightly more generous about the situation. “Rarely will you find among fans, comic or SF, a magnificent physical specimen of humanity,” he observed. “Because if you’re that good mentally or physically, you don’t need the fantasy—the reality’s good enough. It’s people who need the fantasy who indulge in it, and people who need the fantasy are usually lacking something. They’re usually a bit too smart, or they’re not Raquel Welch or Dolly Parton—any of the clone varieties of cuties you see on TV.”

  There was plenty to discuss on panels and at autograph-signing booths, with or without cuties. Fans were flocking to The New Teen Titans. It was deemed “DC’s X-Men” for the way that it, too, dusted off adolescent characters from the 1960s, paired them with new members from faraway lands, and mined the cultural conflicts for melodrama—but it was also an undeniably well-done comic, and the first threat in a while to Marvel’s hype monopoly. For the three hundredth issue of Thor, Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio stepped in to tie up the saga that Roy Thomas had left unfinished. The first issue of Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Moon Knight was off the presses in early August, a slick throwback to both the Shadow and to Neal Adams’s early 1970s Batman comics. There were announcements about a series of oversized paperbacks called Marvel Graphic Novels: sixty-four-page albums on high-quality paper, to be sold for five or six dollars at comic stores and, hopefully, regular bookstores like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. Oh, and the comic that Marvel had promised to sell exclusively to direct-sales retailers was finally going to come out: the world would see Dazzler #1 after all.

  Mobbed by fans with one question on their minds—is Jean Grey really gone for good?—John Byrne walked through throngs with a shirt that read she’s dead and she’s going to stay dead. The next issue, X-Men #138, filled with Cyclops’s tormented memories of Jean, was to hopeless-romantic Marvelites what the last five minutes
of Annie Hall were to Woody Allen fans. It sold even more copies than its predecessor. As if that weren’t enough, Byrne had, with Roger Stern, made Captain America popular again, taking the hero back to his Nazi-fighting roots, and imbuing his alter ego Steve Rogers with something resembling a personality.

  But another Marvel artist was coming up quickly, a rival for the fans’ attentions. Frank Miller’s expressionistic work on Daredevil had made the title a reader favorite for the first time in its fifteen-year history. Miller began to sit near Byrne at convention panels and whisper menacingly, “I’m right behind you, John.”

  Frank Miller had moved to Soho in 1977, a tall country boy enchanted with New York City. When he wasn’t scraping together rent money with ad agency jobs and carpentry work, he hung out in the lobbies of DC and Marvel, pestering editors, or asking advice from artists at Neal Adams’s Continuity studio. “Neal in particular took a great deal of time with me, and was very generous,” Miller said, “even though at the end of every meeting he was telling me I should go back to Vermont.”

  Instead, Miller landed a gig on Daredevil, working with writer Roger McKenzie, and put his interests in film noir and elaborate cityscapes to use. Daredevil was the closest thing Marvel had to a private eye and it gave Miller a venue with which to celebrate his love affair with New York. Unlike nearly every popular artist since Adams, Miller favored expressionism over realism; he took inspiration from the cartooning of Will Eisner and EC artists like Harvey Kurtzman and Bernie Krigstein. His pages were filled with elevated trains, water towers, glass skyscrapers, and dive bars, all shoved into thin, claustrophobic rectangles.

  Miller took storytelling advice from Jim Shooter; they’d get drinks and talk about Matt Murdock’s character and motivations. When Denny O’Neil took over the editorial reins of Daredevil, he, too, took Miller under his wing. “He was one of the best students I ever had,” O’Neil said. “We would play volleyball on Sunday afternoons, and when everybody would walk to Nathan’s for hot dogs afterward, he’d ask me questions about my work. He became like a second son.” They shared meals two or three times a week, picking apart stories and discussing their craft. O’Neil hired Miller to draw an Amazing Spider-Man annual, and together they plotted a story in which Spider-Man, looking for Doctor Strange, found himself at a punk-rock show at the Bowery club C.B.G.B. It was a perfect introduction to Frank Miller’s aesthetic: while the rest of Marvel’s heroes were still lingering at stale discos, Miller ripped it up and started again, with a stripped-down vocabulary and a throwback to the grit, violence, and threat of the early 1950s.

  Meanwhile, Daredevil had evolved, in O’Neil’s words, “from a weak-tea Spider-Man to a shooting star.” Miller started contributing more to the plots, and when he and McKenzie began to disagree on the comic’s direction, the editor didn’t hesitate to let Miller take charge. “I decided it was probably the art more than writing that was getting attention,” O’Neil said. “So I chose Frank.”

  “Everybody liked Frank’s artwork on Daredevil,” said Jo Duffy, “but when he was working with Roger, I don’t think anybody realized they were seeing a phenomenon. People didn’t go, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s come down from the mountain—we’re saved!’ until he’d been writing for two months.”

  Miller worked up a tale about a character he called Indigo. She was Matt Murdock’s long-lost college girlfriend, the daughter of a Greek diplomat. She’d left Murdock—and the United States—when her father was assassinated; her innocence gone, she’d trained to become a high-paid mercenary. Now she was back, and Matt Murdock, as Daredevil, had to stop the woman he’d loved. Indigo was based largely on an old femme fatale from Will Eisner’s Spirit, the international spy Sand Saref, but Miller’s emerging fascination with Japanese martial arts—Indigo wielded a pair of sai, which resembled mini pitchforks—instantly gave the story a new, visually striking, twist. Then he decided to play up the mythic potential of the story by changing Indigo’s name to Elektra. Daredevil #168—the debut of Frank Miller, auteur—was an instant hit. The whole industry finally sat up and took notice of the young Vermonter.

  Calling all the shots on a comic seemed like a pretty good arrangement to John Byrne, too. At the San Diego Comic-Con in early August, when Shooter told him that Doug Moench was leaving The Fantastic Four, he volunteered to be the new writer; a few weeks later, upset again with the way Claremont had written a page of The X-Men, he decided he’d had enough of sharing control—enough fighting with Claremont about Cyclops’s personality, or whether Wolverine should keep his mask, or whether Magneto’s villainy allowed for nobility. He called X-Men editor Louise Jones one Saturday and quit on the spot. Then he called Jim Shooter and said he wanted to draw, as well as write, The Fantastic Four. And—why not?—he’d ink his own pencils, too.

  Oddly, there had never been two writer-artists at one time at Marvel, despite the fact that most of the company’s greatest works tended to be the ones where the artist had story input. Although some critics suggested that the divisions of labor at Marvel and DC had been an insidious attempt to decentralize creative control, the truth was that Marvel was thrilled to have, in Miller and Byrne, two multitasking superstars trying to one-up each other. “This rivalry was very much encouraged by Jim Shooter, because he wanted good comics,” Miller said. It didn’t exactly hurt the bottom line, either, especially in the fan-driven direct market, which by the fall was representing 30 percent of Marvel’s sales.

  Claremont and Byrne eked out one last high note in The X-Men before dissolving their collaboration: for the two-part “Days of Future Past,” they borrowed plot devices from old episodes of Dr. Who and The Outer Limits to share a glimpse of the future Marvel Universe as a dark dystopia in which mutants are hunted down and murdered by the giant robot Sentinels. A forty-something Kitty Pryde—or Kate, as she calls herself—travels back in time from this nightmarish 2013, and explains to the present-day X-Men that the murder of Senator Robert Kelly, an advocate for a piece of legislation called the Mutant Control Act, will trigger the widespread mutant hysteria that leads down the dark path of her future world. She enlists the present-day X-Men to prevent the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from assassinating Kelly. With these stories, the idea of a widespread “Mutant Scare” truly took hold, and the civil rights metaphors that had been hinted at since the beginning of The X-Men would be increasingly apparent.

  But that would be left to Claremont and Dave Cockrum, who returned to The X-Men immediately after Byrne departed. It was all fine with Marvel, and with retailers: they’d sell more copies of Fantastic Four, thanks to Byrne, and they’d keep selling The X-Men. No one was going to give up reading it now.

  The direct market was transforming the entire industry. Advance orders for the direct-only Dazzler #1 were at 250,000 in the fall; by the time it was published in December, more than 400,000 copies of what had once seemed a guaranteed failure were being carted from delivery trucks. And this was without the benefit of any newsstand sales.* DC quickly started its own direct-sales department, and some distributors even began publishing their own comics now that there was an entire distribution network that could efficiently handle small press runs.

  Marvel’s top brass finally realized that if the company wanted to attract, or even maintain, talent, it would have to offer better terms. Shooter and Friedrich began with the contracts for the upcoming graphic novels. They’d tried to figure out how royalties were paid to authors in the “real” world, acquiring and sifting through sample contracts from Simon & Schuster and Grosset & Dunlap, soliciting consultation from Neal Adams and Jim Starlin, but when it came time to work out details with Cadence’s legal team, they reached an impasse. With Stan Lee trying to package cartoons on the West Coast, visiting New York maybe once a month, and Jim Shooter overseeing a growing number of experimental comic formats, help was needed. Jim Galton hired Michael Hobson, a former William Morris agent who’d spent the 1970s at Scholastic, to serve as the vice president of publishing. Balding, bespectacled, and
mustachioed, Hobson looked like the Monopoly Man come to life. He also knew what he was doing. “They really hadn’t had a publisher,” said Hobson. “Stan was ‘publisher,’ but he wasn’t a business person, thank goodness. Comic-book people were absolutely unaware as to what their business was like as compared to the book business.” Hobson moved into Stan Lee’s now-empty office at 575—unlike Galton, ensconced on the eleventh floor, he would mingle with editorial—and began the long process of what he called “calming the beasts.” It would be another year before a satisfactory contract was drafted. Starlin walked away from the royalty negotiations more than once, but Shooter kept wooing him back. Eventually, Starlin agreed to kill Captain Marvel, the character he’d made his name with, for the first Marvel Graphic Novel—on the condition that he could do another graphic novel featuring Dreadstar, a character he owned.

  In the meantime, Shooter kept leaving his mark on Marvel Comics. Concerned about accessibility for new readers, he instituted a rule against stories that stretched for more than two issues. (When Captain America editor Jim Salicrup tried to enforce the rule, Roger Stern and John Byrne quit the book in protest.) He hired Tom DeFalco, the former Archie Comics editor who’d spearheaded Dazzler, to edit all three Spider-Man titles (“Spider-Man’s a teenager,” Shooter told him. “It’s just like doing the Archie books, except with superheroes”). Shooter personally took over the editing on Dazzler, and even drew two issues of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man to serve as an example of what he was looking for (which was, often, a grid of six or nine uniformly sized panels of eye-level, medium-size shots that sacrificed dynamism for absolute clarity). He began writing The Avengers, and then came to loggerheads with its artist, Gene Colan, who’d been drawing for Marvel continuously since 1965, over disagreements on Colan’s artwork, which was the antithesis of the Shooter grid. Colan, naturally, went to DC, where he soon began drawing Batman. All of this intrigue was gleefully reported by an increasing number of comics-related magazines that fed industry gossip to fans.