by Sean Howe
But Miller held out for more. He met with Jenette Kahn, DC’s publisher, and talked about a futuristic-samurai series he wanted to do, called Ronin. After lengthy negotiations, DC offered him a vastly increased royalty, his name above the title, and ownership of his characters. By the time Shooter found out about the deal, it was a fait accompli. The defection was nothing personal, Miller said, just smart business. “I learned from my mentor Neal Adams to play one publisher against another to get a better deal. These are things I could have gotten out of Marvel, but I wanted it to be a fresh start. And also by taking my name to another publisher, that was a critical statement—saying that I could bring my audience with me. And to me, that was very important.” He’d already begun leaving more and more of the artwork on Daredevil for inker Klaus Janson to finish; now he receded further from the process, and just provided rough layouts. He’d keep writing Daredevil, for now, and he’d draw Wolverine. Then he would be gone.
For those who delighted in Daredevil’s filthy cityscapes and hard-boiled rhythms, a sort of ersatz Miller style began to develop in the least likely of places: Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man. Bill Mantlo and Ed Hannigan’s introduction of the morally ambiguous duo Cloak and Dagger was serendipitously timed: two weeks before Elektra’s death, an issue of Peter Parker told the story of a pair of teenage runaways—a white female and a black male—who’d been the sole survivors of synthetic-drug experiments by the mob. Now they sought revenge on the drug trade. Dagger threw knives of light that caused shock to the victims’ systems; Cloak enshrouded victims in a sort of black-hole darkness that left them disoriented and shivering. Often, the results of these attacks were fatal.
Mantlo and Hannigan, excited by Miller’s work, began injecting the secondary Spider-Man title with dark alleys, silhouettes, and organized-crime plotlines. Hannigan’s cover art borrowed, even more explicitly than Miller had, from the inventive designs of Will Eisner’s Spirit. The title logo was incorporated into the action—part of a neon Times Square logo, or part of a word balloon, or slashed by razors, or swirling into underwater illegibility. They were the kind of innovations that grabbed attention from the other comics on the rack (the kind of experiments, in fact, that had been rejected when Neal Adams tried them fifteen years earlier).
“I think they’re the best two characters so far this decade,” Mantlo boldly claimed of Cloak and Dagger. If you discounted Miller’s Elektra, he might have been right; there wasn’t a lot of competition. Marvel was not exactly the House of New Ideas. Roy Thomas had been saying it all along: why give creations away?
But Frank Miller’s deal with DC had made waves. At Marvel’s monthly press conference in May, Jim Shooter announced that a newly formed division of the company, called Epic Comics, would allow for artists and writers to retain not just a percentage of the sales, but also ownership of their creations. Jim Starlin, who hadn’t drawn a regular series since Warlock, was the first to sign up; Steve Englehart, who hadn’t worked for Marvel since he quit The Avengers six years earlier, soon followed.
12
At the end of April 1982, Marvel Comics moved thirty blocks downtown to new, bigger offices at 387 Park Avenue South. For the first time since the mid–1950s, it was no longer part of the Madison Avenue world. “Stan had this thing—‘God damn it, we’re publishers! We’ll stay on Madison Avenue as long as I live and breathe,’ ” said longtime secretary Mary McPherran. “Then he got lured to California, and he didn’t care where we were.”
Marvel’s expansion had brought in an entire wave of younger staffers, few of whom had much concern for prestigious locales. Many of them fell under the spell of Mark Gruenwald, recently promoted from assistant editor to editor and seemingly determined to will the mythical old Marvel Bullpen—a fantasy realm of practical jokes, crazy nicknames, manic creativity, and cheerful labor—into reality. The single, skinny-tied twenty-somethings who swarmed around Gruenwald had more varied backgrounds than the fans-turned-pros that preceded them: Al Milgrom’s assistant Annie Nocenti had tended bar and worked on children’s books; Gruenwald’s assistant Mike Carlin had studied cartooning but also toiled in a rug factory. Eliot Brown, a typesetter and stat machine operator whom Gruenwald had befriended, had worked on an elephant farm. Energetic and mischievous, they quickly broke in Marvel’s new space; posters and sketches covered the windows and the walls of every office. Even the sales department radiated youthful vigor: Carol Kalish, a twenty-seven-year-old former comic-store manager, replaced Mike Friedrich as the liaison between three thousand stores and the number-one comic-book company in the world.
Marvel employees’ social lives were entwined with their work lives like they hadn’t been in years, maybe more than they ever had, although the move downtown further insulated Marvel from DC—the intercompany softball games and volleyball matches faded away. Instead the staff shared dinners and movies, or drinks at the Abbey Tavern on Third Avenue. When summer came around—and with it, half-day Fridays—they’d pile into cars and head to Ralph Macchio’s parents’ pool in the New Jersey suburbs. After Tom DeFalco suggested an all-comedy issue of What If?, the whole staff jumped into the act, and used the centerfold spread to celebrate their glorious workplace, just like Stan Lee had done, back when they were first learning to read.
But the cartoonish self-portraits and profiles adorning that centerfold weren’t just of the younger employees: production manager Danny Crespi and letters-column paste-up specialist Morrie Kuramoto were there, too, smiling at readers. Crespi and Kuramoto were near constants in the offices, quietly plugging away after all these decades, and bantering like lovable characters on a sitcom. Kuramoto played the quiet codger, dropping cigarette ash on everything, losing pages of artwork in the giant stacks that surrounded his desk at all times. The desk was covered with scraps of paper and thick masses of dried-up rubber cement. He was a bundle of contradictions, eating homemade health-food concoctions even as he chain-smoked. “He would squeeze your fingernails, and see when the blood came back,” remembered Ann Nocenti, “and then he would feel the top of your head and tell you to eat a carrot.” Few who worked with Kuramoto knew the tragedies of his past: following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he’d been kicked out of the U.S. Army because of his Japanese ancestry; when his family was sent to an internment camp, he’d moved to New York City and enrolled in the Art Students League. Now he celebrated Pearl Harbor Day in perverse fashion, wearing a leather pilot’s cap and aiming paper airplanes at passersby from his drawing board. He would render beautiful watercolors on his lunch break, then crumple them and throw them in the trash. “I’ll be in my office,” he’d say, as he took the Daily Racing Form to the men’s room; he’d use his winnings to take his coworkers on tours of sushi restaurants.
Crespi, a former letterer, was short, round, and jolly—the women at Marvel would rub his belly, for good luck, or snap his red suspenders, for kicks—and wore reading glasses that he often forgot were on top of his head. He was a joker, and a gravelly-voiced storyteller who maintained a forest of houseplants in his workspace. He’d been back at Marvel since 1972, when he called Morrie to ask if there was any work for him. “I didn’t give a damn about the money,” he said. “I just wanted to belong here.”
“It was like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” recalled one member of the Bullpen. “They would always be yanking each other’s chain and cursing each other out. Morrie would go into Danny’s office to eat lunch and make a huge mess on his desk, and Danny would come back from lunch and curse him out. They had no problem exchanging ethnic slurs. It just brought them closer.” Kuramoto and Crespi even argued, like an old married couple, about how often to water the plants they kept on the windowsill.
George Roussos, sixty-six, oversaw the coloring of covers, and John “Pop” Tartaglione, sixty-one, handled art corrections. Shuttling in and out were old-time freelancers who’d been Marvel presences for decades: among them were Frank Giacoia, Mike Esposito, Joe Rosen, Joe Sinnott, legendary for his inking wo
rk on Kirby’s Fantastic Four, and Vince Colletta, legendary (and controversial) for his inking work on whoever had missed a deadline. Colletta’s rush jobs were notorious among artists, but a godsend to frazzled editors, and so he never lacked for work. To pick up pages for inking, Colletta would arrive with white hair groomed, impeccably dressed in overcoat, with young women on each arm. Or sometimes he’d have Crespi meet him on the street corner, where he’d pull up in the back of a limo—again, with beauties by his side—and roll down the window.
Jack Abel, who’d drawn for Atlas Comics in the 1950s and inked for Marvel in the 1960s and ’70s, had suffered a stroke in 1980 that paralyzed his right hand; Jim Shooter gave him a job as an assistant editor until he’d recovered well enough to ink.
Nobody waited in line to meet those guys at comic conventions, or interviewed them in fanzines. But even as Marvel Comics started to gleam a little more brightly, as new-wave T-shirts and Walkmans and Ray-Bans began to fill the hallways, they were the link to the past.
As an outrageously chummy sense of community returned to the letters pages and editorial notes, there was also a return to the idea that reading Marvel Comics was more than a casual undertaking, an assumption that an X-Men fan was also conversant in Iron Man lore. With Marvel’s comic sales rising 20 percent in just the last year, and a direct market that catered to hard-core collectors—gambles could be taken on smaller print runs and higher-priced items—why not package and sell inside jokes and minutiae to dedicated readers? There were reprints, more expensive and on higher-quality paper, of fan favorites that hadn’t sold well the first time: Giant-Size X-Men #1; Jim Starlin’s Warlock; Englehart and Brunner’s Doctor Strange. Marvel Fanfare printed unused inventory; The Official Marvel No-Prize Book highlighted the biggest goof-ups in the company’s history. Although Crazy, Marvel’s decade-old Mad rip-off, was discontinued, its trash-talking mascot got crossover exposure with Obnoxio the Clown vs. the X-Men. The cosmology of the Marvel Universe itself became a selling point. As they had in the mid–1960s, covers became crowded with heroes, as many as would fit, flying and punching and dancing and mugging, their primary-colored costumes liable to hypnotize young children and aging obsessives. Twenty-one heroes crowded onto the cover of What If #34, and three dozen onto the cover of Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions, Marvel’s first miniseries. In the back pages of Contest of Champions was “a complete list of every single super hero alive today,” along with powers, secret identities, and first published appearance. For the Fantastic Four Roast one-shot, cartoonist Fred Hembeck drew doodly versions of more than sixty popular characters exchanging Catskills-style zingers. And Carol Kalish and her assistant, Peter David, began putting together Marvel Age, a coming-attractions-and-behind-the-scenes comic that picked up where FOOM had left off. It was, in many ways, a return to 1965.
Some, frustrated with Marvel’s lack of exciting new characters, were unimpressed. “They’ve taken wholly upon themselves the traditional function of fanzines: the cataloguing and discussion of their own work,” read a letter in the often prickly Comics Journal. “How soon ’til we see a comic entitled Marvel Letters Pages devoted exclusively to fan raves? All they’d need then would be Mighty Marvel Amateur Fan Art and the ’Nuff Said newsletter.” Perhaps someone at Marvel saw this, and panicked: plans for a publication entitled Strange Fan Letters, already in the works, were quickly scrapped.
But cynicism was not at the heart of these endeavors, at least not at the ground level. The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe was not only the culmination of all this geekery; it was the point at which the staff’s dedication became astonishingly evident. An initial twelve issues of encyclopedic entries for hundreds of characters—something like player’s stats on the backs of baseball cards—were followed by two issues of “dead and inactive” characters, and another of “weapons, hardware, and paraphernalia.” OHOTMU was an enormous undertaking, requiring more labor than anything Marvel had attempted before, and although the entire staff felt the burden, the project was spearheaded by a core suicide squad: Mark Gruenwald, who’d become the caretaker of narrative continuity within the Marvel Universe; his assistant, Mike Carlin; Eliot Brown, who was skilled at drafting architectural plans for, say, the Avengers Mansion; and Jack Morelli, a member of the production team. They dragged pillows and sleeping bags out at night, stole couch cushions from the reception area, endured wintertime all-nighters by the heat of the Xerox machine, and secretly commandeered Marvel president Jim Galton’s private office shower. The intensity of the project ramped up as it went; eventually they’d be cramming more than 50,000 words of text into each issue.
Such intense dedication couldn’t have happened without Gruenwald. At any other company, he might have been the HR department’s worst nightmare; at Marvel he was revered, a source of inspiration. After hitting a tough deadline, he might order that the next day be spent writing songs about coworkers, or holding paddleball contests (each paddle personalized with a caricature of its owner), or drawing, or redecorating offices. Smitten by a local newscaster, Gruenwald offered a dollar for every Michele Marsh subway poster that employees could procure; he ended up with about eighty of them, and covered every square inch of his office, lining even the insides of drawers. When he’d had enough of that, he removed the posters, and declared that all walls and desks in his office be cleared completely—even the phones went into the drawers. The only excess furniture was a small school desk at which his young daughter could sit when she visited him after school.
After work on the Handbook was finished, Gruenwald started a public-access cable comedy show, Cheap Laffs, with Carlin and Brown. “We dressed up in costumes,” said Ann Nocenti, who appeared in several episodes. “Mark was the director: ‘Dress like a vampire. Now look vampy.’ It was like Ed Wood on acid.”
There were pranks, too. Many of them were directed at Jack Abel, who briefly shared an office with Gruenwald and Carlin, and whose unflappability (he might respond with a calm “Hey”) only managed to send the pranksters into further conniptions. When Gruenwald placed leftover ham from a sandwich in Abel’s cabinet, it was weeks before Abel noticed. Opening the drawer to find a brush, his measured response was, “Hey. Someone left a ham sandwich in my desk . . . without the sandwich.” Another time, Abel—in the habit of taking catnaps—awakened in total darkness, encased in a fortress that Gruenwald and Carlin had constructed from couches, desks, and other nearby furniture. From inside this ad hoc room came a measured, muffled voice. “Hey. Who turned out the lights?”
“Even while it was happening,” Carlin said, years later, “I knew this was going to be ‘the good old days.’ It was going to be what everyone was talking about for the rest of their lives.”
Stan Lee, far away in California, was as dedicated as ever to getting Marvel Comics onto the big screen, and Jim Galton, one floor above the editorial offices, was still pursuing all possible licensing partnerships. But the old, cautious refrain of only giving the illusion of change seemed to fade away. “There are writers and artists who think that Shooter will stop them if they try to do something different,” John Byrne opined. “The problem is that we’ve had Marv and Roy and Len who were bozos, and who you did have to sneak good stories by in order to get something done and people think Shooter’s going to do the same.”*
It was quite clear, actually, that Jim Shooter was interested in shaking things up. Nova—a character that Marv Wolfman had created for a fanzine, a decade before donating him to the Marvel Universe—lost his powers in the pages of ROM. J. M. DeMatteis—a former Rolling Stone writer and DC freelancer who’d gotten his break at Marvel when Roy Thomas left Conan—engineered the death of Nighthawk in The Defenders. In an Amazing Spider-Man annual, Roger Stern introduced the new Captain Marvel: a black woman named Monica Rambeau, a lieutenant in New Orleans’s Harbor Police Department. Of course, the new Captain Marvel’s CV—feminist security guard turned cosmic warrior—wasn’t too different from that of the former Ms. Marvel, Carol Dan
vers, and a week later, in X-Men #164, Claremont and Cockrum gave Danvers new powers and a new superhero name. Out in deep space with the X-Men, and offered membership with the team, Danvers hesitantly declined, preferring to explore the universe. “Returning with you means rejecting my heart’s desire—but fulfilling that desire means leaving everyone, everything I love. Earth was Carol Danvers’ home . . . but I fear it has no place for—Binary.”* Presumably, Claremont was happy to send her away from the meddling hands of other writers and editors. (Giving her an overblown farewell monologue was just a Claremontian bonus.)
Denny O’Neil, now writing Iron Man, began plans to replace the man within the armor: Tony Stark, fallen off the wagon and sleeping in the gutter, would step aside as his black pal James “Rhodey” Rhodes became the new Iron Man.
Mark Gruenwald offered Spider-Woman to Ann Nocenti, who’d written only one short story for Marvel. “No female character has been written regularly by a female writer before,” he told her. “You’ll bring a whole new perspective to comics.” The only catch was, by the way, that Nocenti would have to kill the character. “I think he had probably asked everybody else to do it—and everyone said no, because it’s a creepy thing to kill a hero. But I didn’t know better. I thought, ‘Okay, it’s just like a cardboard cutout; it’s a girl in a spider suit on a Slurpee cup. So I did four issues, and killed her, and then got torrents of email from sad, horrified kids. I didn’t quite understand the intense bonds that kids have for these characters. They’re alive, you know? That was a real introduction to the whole Marvel universe.”
Allegedly, the idea behind Shooter’s proposed “Big Bang” was this: the Marvel Universe had become much too complicated, the histories of the characters too long and involved for the creation of accessible new stories. Years later, Tom DeFalco remembered the pitch. “ ‘There’ll be something in the sky that will indicate things are changing. And then there will be the Big Bang, and then we’re gonna come out with new versions of pre-existing characters.’