Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  “It sold through the roof,” John Byrne said of Secret Wars. “Better than anything up to that point. Shooter had to justify it in his mind. He had to convince himself it hadn’t sold just because it had every super-hero in the world in it. It sold because it was brilliant.” Now even Byrne was getting the graded makereadies that Doug Moench had complained about. “It was wonderful being in school again. ‘C-minus. See me.’ And he would add notes that said, ‘See Secret Wars for how to do this right.’ . . . I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d see Secret Wars for how to do anything but possibly fold it.”

  There was a full-court press to promote the series in other Marvel titles, as evidenced by a darkly funny memo that was posted in the Bullpen:

  Date: April 27, 1984

  From: Jim Shooter

  To: The Editors

  Subject: Secret Wars

  Since I don’t have a lettercol to hype Secret Wars (and myself) I’d appreciate some help. How about, in your lettercols for the rest of the year, mentioning how marvelous a job I’m doing, and how being the E.I.C., and therefore the ultimate authority on all the characters and like unto the Very God of the Marvel Universe, my work is absolutely perfect. Definitive, even. That seems to be the only gripe we’re getting—that the characters are not exactly as dull and boring the same as they appear in their regular titles. If you guys would talk up the wonderful job I’m doing we could trick the little fucks make it clearer to the charming readers that, despite my stylistic differences from the other writers, we’re writing the same characters. Only I write them better. Let’s legitimize the hell out of it, okay?

  When the memo leaked to the Comics Journal, a Marvel spokesman confimed its veracity, but then assistant editor Eliot Brown suddenly stepped forward and accepted responsibility for staging a hoax. Shooter refused to comment. Regardless of its true author, the memo captured a sentiment that Marvel employees recognized: nobody understood the characters like Shooter did. As Captain America moved toward its three hundredth issue, Shooter started reworking dialogue at the last minute. The writer, J. M. DeMatteis, was in the midst of a yearlong story, building to a climax in which the Red Skull, Captain America’s archenemy of nearly half a century, was killed. An exhausted Captain America would hurl his shield into the East River, walk away, and try to find a meaningful life as Steve Rogers. “My idea,” said DeMatteis, “was that Captain America’s gonna just say, ‘You know what? I’ve tried punching people and dropping buildings on their heads for forty years, and there has to be another way.’ He was ultimately going to become a global peace activist which was going to create all kinds of problems for him—the government would turn against him, all the Marvel heroes would turn against him, and the only allies to support him would be Doctor Doom and the Sub-Mariner. I had recast the Bucky of the 1950s as Nomad; he was basically going to freak out about all this and, in the end, assassinate Captain America.” Black Crow, a Native American character that DeMatteis had created, would now be the new Captain America.

  DeMatteis’s plan was, in a way, a politically radicalized echo of those old Big Bang rumors in which Steve Rogers would die and a new Captain America would take his place. But while DeMatteis and his artist plugged away on upcoming issues, Jim Shooter took a look at Steve Rogers throwing away his shield in the final pages of #300 and insisted that there was simply no way this could happen—Captain America, he said, would never act like this. Shooter cut the double-sized issue in half and rewrote it himself. Steve Rogers would never have his crisis of faith, and Black Crow would never become Captain America. DeMatteis, disgusted, quit the title he’d been writing for three years.

  After Secret Wars came out, Marvel’s editors, writers, and artists started to wonder if only Jim Shooter knew what Jim Shooter wanted. Of course, Shooter wasn’t the only one to have proprietary instincts about Marvel-owned characters—Stan Lee had for years been territorial about the usage of Silver Surfer. And as the leader of the editorial department, it was well within Shooter’s rights—it was his duty, really—to act as the custodian of the characters.

  And Shooter was still open to the persuasions of his editors, still willing to take chances. The new artist on The New Mutants, Bill Sienkiewicz, had been making huge strides on Moon Knight before he and Moench left; now, more than a year later, his work was like nothing ever seen in superhero comics. His very first page depicted a bear’s head that morphed into a crossword puzzle that morphed into a blanket; on the following pages, it looked like he’d dropped his brush, dripping India ink everywhere. To exploit Sienkiewicz’s outside-the-box experimentation, Chris Claremont and editor Ann Nocenti fed him the idea for a hyperactive, bionic, shape-shifting character. And then there were the near abstractions of the painted cover, the first in a series that would push the boundaries of Marvel’s visual style. “I let him do the craziest covers he could think of,” said Nocenti, “because it was about trying to explode out of old-school Marvel into something more modern.” Sienkiewicz began working with other media, something few artists since Jack Kirby had done: “I went to Radio Shack and bought circuit boards and transistors and soldered all these transistors into a pattern and painted them, slapped them on with modeling paste and ran wire and tape and painted this whole biocircuitry collage.”

  Letters of praise and letters of horror poured in. One, written in crayon to Shooter, simply read, “GET RID OF HIM JIMMY BEFORE HE RUINS EVERYTHING.” But readers were buying it compulsively—trying to figure out if they hated it or loved it, but buying it just the same. For a while, at least, Shooter allowed Sienkiewicz a free hand.

  “That was the thing about Jim,” Nocenti said. “He was kind of old-fashioned, but he could see to the future if you battled hard enough.”

  Of course, embracing the new meant ditching the old. To make way for Bill Sienkiewicz, Sal Buscema—whose unwaveringly straightforward style had offset the absurdity of Steve Gerber’s The Defenders and Steve Englehart’s Captain America—had been taken off New Mutants. “I knew you couldn’t have an old-fashioned artist on something geared to bring in new readers,” said Nocenti. “Probably the hardest call I ever made at Marvel was to Sal Buscema, to say, bluntly—too bluntly—‘I am taking you off this book.’ He asked why, and I said, ‘You’re old fashioned. This needs to be new.’ And he was really mad, then upset. Then he turned around, and in the next issue of The Incredible Hulk . . . it was fucking magnificent. It was like Sal saying, ‘You want to see what I can do?’ He just pulled all the guns out.” Not everyone, though, had a Hulk gig on which they could prove themselves.

  Shooter had a reputation for keeping the old hands, the guys who’d been around the industry for decades, busy with work—not just Vinnie Colletta, but Don Perlin, Mike Esposito, and Frank Springer. But stories began to circulate of some veterans being put out to pasture. While inker Chic Stone recuperated from a heart attack, he received a dispatch from Shooter that shut the door on future work. “The letter was basically two sentences long,” Stone remembered, “and it said something to the effect of, ‘Dear Chic, Your services are no longer needed by Marvel Comics. If anything comes up I’ll let you know.’ ”

  When Jim Mooney’s contract expired, he sent a letter of inquiry to Shooter. “I got a very short note,” Mooney recalled. “ ‘Retire.’ I’m paraphrasing that a little bit. It wasn’t quite that abbreviated, but it was damn close.”

  Don Heck, the original Iron Man artist, had been kicked around plenty in recent years, already feeling underappreciated before Harlan Ellison and Gary Groth had a laugh about him as “the world’s worst artist” in a Comics Journal interview. More recently, after Jim Shooter accepted DC’s suggestion to hire Heck to replace George Perez on JLA/Avengers, Perez suggested that bluffing was afoot. “Shooter,” he said, “knows full well that Heck will never sell the book.”

  Jack Kirby wasn’t looking for new work from Marvel, but he was still looking to get his old work back, as he had since the 1970s, when Marvel had started returning new art page
s in exchange for the signing of a release statement. (At that time, he said, he’d “pleaded and cajoled” for some recent pages, “but when I told them I wanted the 60s stuff back, they said they were too valuable.”) In 1983, as the company went through its stockpiles of original art, and finally began returning older pages to artists, there was an additional release form that acknowledged its status as work-for-hire. But the warehouse was a mess, Kirby was told, and the inventory list had been lost. The salt in the wound was that pages were regularly turning up for sale at comic conventions.

  Kirby told the Comics Journal that no one at Marvel would listen to his problem, and he did so in uncharacteristically angry language. “They don’t give a shit,” he said. “I feel adamant; I feel like I’ve contributed a lot when people really needed me, and there’s a hell of a lot of ingratitude. It smells like garbage.”

  Kirby watched as vintage artwork was returned to Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers, and Don Heck, among others. Word got out that several pages had been stolen from the Marvel offices, while other pages sat on the rusty, collapsing shelves of a warehouse. And then, in August 1984, Kirby was sent a list of artwork that Marvel had recovered—only 88 of the 8,000 pages he’d sent them throughout the 1960s. Accompanying the list was a four-page form that no other artist had been asked to sign. He wouldn’t be allowed to sell the artwork; he couldn’t make copies of the artwork; he couldn’t publicly exhibit the artwork; he’d let Marvel access the artwork whenever it wished; and if Marvel wanted to modify the artwork, it was free to do so.

  Kirby refused to sign. His words got tougher. “I wouldn’t cooperate with the Nazis, and I won’t cooperate with them,” he said. “If I allow them to do this to me, I’m allowing them to do it to other people.” As the stalemate continued, Marvel would claim that the Kirbys, through their lawyers, were threatening to sue for the rights to characters Jack had created. “We’ve never tried to get the copyrights back from Marvel,” Roz Kirby told Shooter at a heated panel convention in 1985. “It’s you people who keep bringing it up.”

  By that time, though, the Kirbys’ lawyer had, in fact, broached the subject of copyright claims for Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four—after a Variety ad announcing Cannon Films’ planned Captain America film credited the character not to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, but to Stan Lee. Things deteriorated, and they got more personal. “I saved Marvel’s ass,” Kirby told an interviewer, and compared Lee to Sammy Glick, the backstabbing main character of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? When asked if he would ever consider working with Lee, he was adamant. “No. No. It’ll never happen. No more than I would work with the SS. Stan Lee is what he is. . . . He has his own dreams and he has his own way of getting them. I have my own dreams but I get them my own way. We’re two different people. I feel that he’s in direct opposition to me. There’s no way I could reach the SS. I tried to reach them. I used to talk with them and say, ‘Hey, fellas, you don’t believe in all this horseshit.’ And they said, ‘Oh, yes, we do.’ They were profound beliefs. They became indoctrinated. And Stan Lee’s the same way. He’s indoctrinated one way and he’s gonna live that way. He’s gonna benefit from it in some ways and I think he’ll lose in others. But he doesn’t have to believe me.”

  Apparently, Lee didn’t. After refuting Kirby’s versions of the creations of the Fantastic Four, Thor, the Hulk, and Spider-Man (“All of them came from my basement,” Kirby had said), Lee grew exasperated. “I don’t know much of what Jack is talking about these days,” he said. “I just feel I’m listening to the mouthings of a very bitter man who I feel quite sorry for. I don’t know what the problem is, really.”

  Twenty years after the Merry Marvel Marching Society record testified to the familial joy of the Bullpen, everything had fallen apart. Sol Brodsky had died in June 1984; Lee sent a eulogy from Los Angeles, but didn’t attend the funeral. On a Thursday night in March 1985, riding the subway home from the Marvel offices, Morrie Kuramoto died of a heart attack. Danny Crespi—Kuramoto’s closest friend and constant bantering partner—died two months later, at fifty-nine. He’d kept his leukemia a secret, continuing to come into the Bullpen every day without telling anyone.

  Almost immediately after the last issue of Secret Wars had shipped, Carol Kalish addressed a gathering of comic-book store owners. “Let’s be honest,” she said. “Secret Wars was crap, right?” (The retailers agreed wholeheartedly.) “But did it sell?” The room cheered.

  “Well, get ready for Secret Wars, series two!”

  Upon the publication of the first Secret Wars series, Shooter told reporters that he didn’t want to write a sequel—if there ended up being one, he said, he’d rather get Tom DeFalco to do it. For whatever reason, though, Shooter decided to keep it for himself after all, and DeFalco, who’d edited the first series, did not return. Bob Budiansky drew the short straw and was assigned as Secret Wars II’s editor. “The traditional thing to do if you inherited a book that Jim Shooter was writing,” explained Budiansky, “was to fire him immediately. And that was okay, he understood. He was a nightmare to work with on deadlines. His work came in really late, and created all sorts of havoc. By being so late, it demanded that the Bullpen stop everything to cut out every word balloon and paste them down on the board with rubber cement. So it would mess up everybody’s schedule because books with minor corrections would be pushed aside while everything ground to a halt to do Secret Wars.”

  Sal Buscema, a reliable workhorse, drew the first issue, but after the pages came back, Shooter hired Al Milgrom to redraw it from scratch. Despite urging from other editors, Budiansky refused to replace Shooter with another writer. “I figured Jim would inevitably get involved at the tail end of the process since it was his baby,” he said. “He’d review the book after it was all penciled and inked and lettered, and want massive changes and then it would be even worse if he wasn’t the writer.”

  The plot of Secret Wars II was a kind of inverse of its predecessor: the Beyonder, the ethereal force from the first series that had imported all those heroes to Battleworld, now came to earth, took human form, and yearned to understand what made people tick.

  The problem was that Secret Wars II took the big-event strategy of its predecessor and multiplied it exponentially, so the action spilled into almost every regular title the company produced. More than thirty issues of other Marvel comics—from Daredevil to Doctor Strange to Micronauts to Rom—had a Nabisco-like triangle marking them as a crossover, and although Shooter wasn’t the writer on those, he took a special interest in each of them.

  No one questioned Shooter’s instincts for storytelling craft. But his repeated iterations of rules had started to grate: there was the harping on the necessity of establishing shots, the pointing to Jack Kirby panels for instruction, and the citing of “Little Miss Muffett” as a story that contained the crucial elements of conflict and resolution.

  Roger Stern, the writer of Doctor Strange, called Peter Gillis, a fellow freelancer, and told him he was running out of ideas for the book. Would Gillis like to take over? When Gillis happily accepted, Stern told him there was just one catch—he’d start writing it with the Secret Wars II tie-in. “Every crossover got redone about three times because Jim just didn’t like it,” Gillis said later. “And that was no exception.”

  After Denny O’Neil was asked to integrate the Beyonder into an issue of Daredevil, editor Ralph Macchio relayed to him that Shooter didn’t feel he understood the character. “I kept the Beyonder offstage as much as possible,” O’Neil said. “That so offended Jim that he took the royalties away from me.” Shooter rewrote the issue himself, and, according to O’Neil, “Our relationship deteriorated pretty quickly.”*

  “There was a lot of criticism of the content,” added Howard Mackie, who was Mark Gruenwald’s assistant at the time. “And the requests for rewriting became more and more. There were times things were completely written, and you were told, you’re not getting it. There was an issue of the Avengers that Roger Stern had w
ritten, with the Beyonder. A whole bunch of it had to be redrawn, because there was a costume change on the Beyonder that no one had been told about.”

  “Shooter was bouncing a lot of the tie-ins,” said Mike Carlin. “He’d read the stories and say, ‘This doesn’t match what I was going to do’—but he hadn’t done it yet, so it was hard for anybody to imagine.”

  That the Beyonder spent most of Secret Wars II outfitted in shoulder pads, turned-up collars, jumpsuits, and Jheri curls was an early indicator that Jim Shooter had some quibbles with United States culture in 1985. For all the gripes that the series was another cynical cash-in, it possessed moments of truly biting satire, often aimed at mindless consumerism: the geeky Molecule Man returned, but instead of using his staggering powers, he chose to sit on a couch with his unitard-wearing girlfriend Volcana; the two would call each other “baby-kins” and “snookums” while taking in Hogan’s Heroes and Laverne and Shirley marathons. Meanwhile, the stranger-in-a-strange-land Beyonder fell in with a bad crowd of mobsters and hookers, and took joyrides in a Cuisinart-equipped Lamborghini. Ironically, the character strongly resembled Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’s poor-selling 1970s hero Omega the Unknown: a powerful, fish-out-of-water naïf corrupted by junk culture and vice.*

  The series petered out into an endless shaggy-dog tale, in which the Beyonder repeatedly destroyed and restored people and places, his own fulfillment always just out of reach. Despite appearances by the most cosmic of Marvel’s entities—Starlin’s In-Betweener, Ditko’s Eternity, Kirby’s Galactus and the Watcher—the story was grounded by odd, simplistic characterizations, and chirpy expositional dialogue that seemed to cater to small children even as it included references to prostitution. Worse, the superheroes—the characters Jim Shooter was so protective of—were by turns boorish and pious. “Aw, who cares? He’s someone else’s problem now!” shrugged Spider-Man, as the Beyonder escaped in an elevator, echoing the hubris that allowed Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben to be murdered years before. Had Spider-Man really learned nothing about being a hero?