by Sean Howe
Eliot Brown was offered the job of editing half the line. Almost immediately, though, he ran into trouble getting the writers and artists to make deadlines. John Romita Jr. was unhappy that he’d left X-Men to work on the Jim Shooter–penned Star Brand; Archie Goodwin, who’d always been notoriously slow anyway, was busy tending to the Epic line; even the usually prompt Tom DeFalco fell behind. It was, said Brown, “a clusterfuck.”
Brown wasn’t the only one having difficulties. “[Shooter] started pulling creative teams together and forcing certain people on books that the editors might not have liked,” said Bob Budiansky, who edited the New Universe’s Psi-Force, a series about a team of paranormals. “A lot of the editorial decisions weren’t met with agreement by the editors. Mark Texeira did a beautiful cover and Jim was upset because a character’s shoelaces weren’t clear. It wasn’t like the cover was a close-up of the shoe; it was a full-figure shot. And he got very focused on that, to the point where he wanted the cover re-drawn. We fixed it, but it became emblematic of the things that were going on.”
The first New Universe titles went on sale in July 1986 and sold an average of 150,000 copies, disappointing retailers across the country. By that time, Eliot Brown, too, had been fired from Marvel.
Stan Lee didn’t know much about the New Universe. In fact, he didn’t keep up with the Old Universe, the one he’d helped create. That summer, when Lee appeared on a panel with Jim Shooter at the Chicago Comic-Con, he was surprised to learn that, two years earlier, Mary Jane Watson had discovered Peter Parker’s secret identity. An audience member asked if Peter Parker and Mary Jane would get married. Lee turned to Shooter and asked if he would allow it.
The crowd went wild.
Afterward, Lee and Shooter began to take the idea seriously. Circulation of the Spider-Man daily comic strip was down lately; a big event like this might give it a boost. They agreed to coordinate the wedding to occur simultaneously in the comic book and the newspaper strip. John Romita voiced his concern—he still remembered, after more than thirty years, how quickly Li’l Abner went downhill after Abner married Daisy Mae. Romita was ignored.
For the rest of the comics industry, 1986 was the annus mirabilis, the point at which the rest of the world started to afford the medium a little respect. Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns led the parade in the spring, with splashy Rolling Stone and Spin articles that mentioned the artist’s recent return to Daredevil—but in passing, almost dismissively. How could Daredevil hope to compete with Batman in name recognition? And this new Batman had the novelties of jarring violence and a heavy-stock paper that screamed “art.” The Miller profiles suggested a few other acceptably hip titles worth investigation, including Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing (also DC) and Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg (which Epic had tried, and failed, to acquire)—but nothing by Marvel. That summer, as the New Universe titles sat on shelves, John Byrne sat down with Jane Pauley on the Today show to promote Superman.
Amid celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary, and intent on finding someone to buy the company, Marvel Comics attempted to control spin. As Viacom and Western Publishing sniffed around, Marvel VP Mike Hobson released a public statement on the matter of Kirby’s artwork controversy, which blamed the holdups on “a series of letters from Mr. Kirby’s attorneys during the past four years asserting claims of copyright ownership,” and asserted that Kirby had demanded “credit as sole creator of certain of Marvel’s characters, including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the Hulk.” On July 24, the television news program 20/20 provided a fifteen-minute overview of the House of Ideas, including interviews with Stan Lee and Jim Shooter.* Praising Lee as the creator of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, Thor, and Doctor Strange, the program made no mention of Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby.
Frank Miller continued to speak out for Kirby at every opportunity, as did many of the 150 industry professionals—including Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Don Heck, Doug Moench, Bill Sienkiewicz, Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, and future Simpsons creator Matt Groening—who’d signed a petition for the unconditional return of the artwork. After Jim Starlin arranged a brief, impromptu meeting between the Kirbys and Shooter at the San Diego Comic-Con, there were whispers that a settlement was on the horizon, but that hope dwindled quickly. Although much of the comics audience was outraged, there was little mainstream media coverage of Kirby’s plight. “The fact that 30,000 fans were pissed off didn’t mean anything,” said Tom DeFalco. “Nobody wants bad p.r., but the only people aware of the press were the comic book people. The rest of the company was not really paying attention to it. The lawyers weren’t really running up to the president saying, ‘We’re doing this, we’re doing that.’ In the fishbowl it meant something, outside of the fishbowl . . . I don’t think most people were aware of it.”
There was another, more public failing for Marvel to deal with. The same August weekend that Shooter met with the Kirbys, Universal Pictures released its adaptation of Howard the Duck. “If the movie is as good as the trailers we’ll be in business,” Steve Gerber told an interviewer. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed.” But despite its $37 million budget—plus an additional $8 million spent on promotion—it bombed miserably, and received a critical drubbing that embarrassed everyone involved. Within weeks, there were rumors that Universal executives Frank Price and Sidney Sheinberg had exchanged blows in their offices, each blaming the other for the $45 million failure.
Stan Lee, who’d waited for two decades to see a big-budget Marvel adaptation conquer Hollywood, would have to keep waiting. The prospects of the front-runners—Spider-Man and Captain America, each in development with Cannon Pictures—were dim. The first draft of the Spider-Man screenplay had been, perplexingly, about a man who turns into a tarantula; Galton himself had deemed the Captain America script, cowritten by Death Wish director Michael Winner, “bloody awful.” And although Marvel didn’t know it at the time, Cannon itself was headed for trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Finally, in November 1986, word reached Marvel that the company had been sold. “I had a little office with a desk that had a broken leg that was kind of propped up,” said Tom DeFalco. “And I’m proofreading a comic, and this guy comes in, and he starts criticizing the desk and the office décor and everything, and I’m thinking he’s an interior designer. I look up at him and I say, ‘Listen, I don’t know who you are, but I’ve really got to get this book out to the printer.’ And he stands up with this big ‘Hi, I’m Bob Rehme! I’m president of New World!’ ”
Marvel’s new owner, New World Pictures, was Hollywood, through and through: in 1983, Harry Sloan and Larry Kuppin had purchased Roger Corman’s mean-and-lean production company and film distributor, and aggressively expanded it into a multimedia concern via loans and advances, buying their way onto television (they had shows on every major network), setting up a syndication division, and releasing thirty feature films a year. Sloan and Kuppin were lawyers who doubled as savvy entertainment-industry insiders, hardball players who’d helped to pioneer the concept of lead actors walking off the set to hold out for better pay. At New World they brought in the smiley and smooth Robert Rehme, the former head of marketing and distribution at Universal. Sloan, Kuppin, and Rehme were excited about the synergistic opportunities that Marvel presented; Sloane, in particular, was fond of saying that he wanted to be a “mini-Disney.”
Stan Lee was excited about the Hollywood connection, too, and he shared it with his readers. “The young, hip, fun-loving guys who run New World dig Marvel Comics as much as you do! That’s why they bought us! They want to make some real dynamite movies and TV shows based on all your favorite characters. . . . I don’t wanna sound like I’m trying to snow you, so I’ll just mention two of their latest smashes—the movie Soul Man and the TV series Sledge Hammer. ’Nuff said?” For Lee, the appeal was that Marvel would not merely license but also self-produce, and that he’d have some creati
ve control once again.
But once again, he would learn, Marvel’s fate lay in the hands of people who knew nothing about comic books. Out in Los Angeles, as soon as the sale was made, Rehme had summoned his vice president of marketing and proudly told him, “We just bought Superman.”
The vice president was perplexed. Warner Bros. was selling DC Comics?
“No, no, no—we bought Marvel!” said Rehme.
“No, Bob,” the vice president corrected him. “We bought Spider-Man.”
Rehme raced out of his office. “Holy shit,” he said. “We gotta stop this. Cannon has the Spider-Man movie!”
Jim Shooter, too, was optimistic about the sale, and he saw the change in management as his chance to get out from underneath Galton, with whom he was increasingly in conflict. “When New World came,” said one editor, “Shooter right away wanted to talk to Bob Rehme, hang out with Bob Rehme, and kind of make his play.” Immediately he began strategizing about how to cut back production levels, which he saw as a strain on the editorial department. “We were doing like fifty titles a month,” said John Romita. “The main titles would suffer, because we were spending so much time and effort on comics that were second-rate. Every time comic companies expanded to too many titles, they generally cut their own throats. Shooter and I agreed, ‘When we first get together with New World, we’ve got to tell them we want to cut down to 24 or 25 books, and do the best job we can.’ They sent two representatives,” Romita said. “One was a lawyer, one was a producer. Shooter told them, ‘We’d like to cut back on the amount of titles—we’re treading water, and the best books are not getting the talent and attention they deserve.’ The guy listened calmly, and after Shooter finished his presentation, they said, ‘We hate to disappoint you, but our plan is quite different. We’re going to add ten titles to the schedule.’ And the air went out of the room. Shooter and I looked at each other like we wanted to commit suicide. Not only were they going to create ten titles, they wanted to create the names and the premises for the ten titles. That was the beginning of the end for Shooter; it was probably the most traumatic period of my life. They sent in logos that looked like they were done by amateurs. They sent in characters that looked like they were out of some junior high school kid’s sketchbook.”
Shooter put on a good face, and he and Romita tried to make a go of it. But the writers and artists despised the mandated titles, despised the costume designs that New World told them to follow, and Romita’s own attempts to make improvements were met with refusal. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “They were so out of touch, and so lacking in taste.”
Nonetheless, when it came time for Shooter to write a state-of-the-company memo to Rehme, it wasn’t New World that he blamed. Instead, he described in scathing detail his opinion of Marvel’s executives, and insisting that he be put in charge of New York operations. Before sending it off, he read the memo aloud to a room of editors. Two of the editors, sensing that Shooter was on the verge of making an enormous mistake, locked eyes, sprung out of their chairs, and yelled in unison, “Don’t mail that letter!” The rest of the room quickly crowded around Shooter and convinced him not to act rashly. He relented.*
A few weeks later, Tom DeFalco was headed to the West Coast to meet about movie adaptation for New World’s House II: Second Story. “Jim says to me, ‘You’re going to New World? I have to go out for a management meeting, why don’t we fly out together?’ We go out, have dinner. The next morning we’re driving into New World, and Jim turns to me and says, ‘Oh by the way, I did send that letter. And you and I have a meeting with Bob Rehme this morning.’ Just as he said that, we hit the hump of the New World parking garage. I turned to him and said, ‘What?’ He explained to me that he was crashing the management meeting, and going there to explain to Rehme and give an ultimatum that basically unless they put him in charge of the company, everyone was going to quit. I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna quit? How many people know about this?’ He said, ‘You and me.’
“We got out of the car, went up the elevator, and into the reception room, he goes, ‘Jim Shooter and Tom DeFalco to see Bob Rehme.’ I turned to the receptionist and said, ‘No. Jim Shooter to see Bob Rehme. Tom DeFalco to see publicity.’ We were separated, I never heard from him or saw him again until we were both back in New York.”
Shooter and DeFalco had their own disagreements. DeFalco had begun challenging some of Shooter’s calls for redrawing and recoloring various comics, not realizing that the arguments were carrying out to the Bullpen for all to hear, or that editors were gathering in the office next to Shooter’s and listening through the heating system. Then DeFalco would lose the argument, and have to go out and play the role of hatchet man.
“It was like there was this thundercloud hovering over the office,” according to editor Carl Potts. “And you knew lightning was going to strike. You didn’t know when, but you knew somebody was gonna get fried.” Rewriting increased to unprecedented levels. “The watershed moment,” said Ann Nocenti, “was when Shooter said every single comic had to have a ‘can’t-must’ moment: I am not a thief . . . I don’t want to steal. But I must steal because my grandmother is starving. Every comic had to have that in the first three pages. Literally, a panel where the superhero had to say, ‘I can’t steal—but I must, for my grandmother.’ Or, ‘I can’t kill Mephisto—but I must, because he has my soul.’ He was sending comics back to the Bullpen to have the ‘can’t-must’ panel squeezed in, in the middle of the page.”
“We would put together the book and it would have to be signed off on by the editor in chief before it could go to print,” said Terry Kavanagh, Nocenti’s assistant editor. “And then he’d come in with his comments. They could be criticisms or compliments. In some cases he’d say fix this, in some cases he’d say make sure not to repeat this. That graduated, not all that slowly, to him coming in and yelling about things not being right, and being angry. And then, him coming in and yelling, ‘This isn’t right, do it better,’ and then eventually, him coming in and yelling, ‘This isn’t right and you knew it wasn’t right, and you did it anyway.’ And then finally, ‘This isn’t right and you knew it wasn’t right, and you did it on purpose just to drive me crazy, just like all the other editors.’ And he would do this very loudly; he got very close to her face and was very red in the face and I would’ve been scared if I were her.”
“He liked to say he’d put together the best comics editorial team ever,” said Potts. “Then he shifted to, everybody was clueless. What flipped that switch?”
By the end of 1986, Stan Lee’s plan to marry Spider-Man had gotten New World’s interest. Plans stormed ahead on promoting it as a live event the following summer. But Sal Buscema had a blowup with Shooter after the editor in chief sent detailed instructions on how to draw the special issue—including references on how to draw human anatomy—and quit. When a less established freelancer was offered the gig, he took it—because he’d heard that Shooter was going to blackball the next person who refused him.
At the end of March, a group of freelancers and editors decided to demonstrate an organized complaint. Walter Simonson, Louise Simonson, and Michael Higgins knocked on office doors, gathering editors—“like villagers with torches,” in the words of one staff member—and made their way toward Jim Shooter’s office.
When he heard voices stirring in the hallway, Tom DeFalco, tired of all the arguments and ready to leave comics for good, was sitting at his desk, on the phone, negotiating salary and moving costs for a job on the West Coast. He tried to settle the crowd that had amassed in the hallway.
Standing by Shooter’s secretary’s desk, he put his foot up to block people from streaming between the desk and the office wall. Walter Simonson stormed past, while others went behind DeFalco, around the desk. They stopped at Shooter’s door. It was shut. “At one point,” DeFalco recalled, “Mike Hobson showed up and said, ‘What’s going on?’ Everybody said, ‘We want to confront Shooter.’ ‘You guys want to talk to Shooter? Ok
ay, let’s go.’ And everybody went in.”
“We need to talk to you,” Simonson said, opening Shooter’s door.
“I’m in the middle of a meeting with Mark and Ralph,” Shooter told him.
Everyone barreled in anyway, as Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio, whose meeting had already been a tense one, began slouching downward in their chairs, so far down that their heads were invisible. DeFalco stood behind Shooter, ready to go down with his captain.
Bodies packed into the office. Assistants crowded around the door, or gathered in the office next door, listening through the heating duct as editors took their turns confronting their boss with complaints. Hobson looked on, amused, as Shooter turned red, and challenged the accusations.
“I felt at any moment Jim might just eat me,” said one staffer. “I said, ‘Oh God, he might just start gnawing on my bones.’ Even though, I have to stress, he’d never even raised his voice to me.”
On Saturday, April 4, John Byrne hosted a party at his house in Connecticut, attended by several Marvel staffers and freelancers. In the backyard, a suit was stuffed with unsold issues of New Universe titles, a picture of Shooter’s face was affixed on the head, and the editor in chief of Marvel Comics was burned in effigy. “In retrospect,” says one of the staffers who was there, “it’s a little macabre, a little offensive, probably overkill. But it seemed that everybody needed it at that time. It was becoming increasingly oppressive. We all knew how to do our jobs well; we all knew how to do comic books. We were putting together the best comic books we could. But now, every stage of the way, when you’d be talking to writers about how to tell the story and you’d say, okay, we know ‘this is the right way to tell the story,’ now we had to look and see ‘What are the things that Jim might go insane over?’ It was really an unnecessary step to making comic books. And probably in some cases didn’t serve the stories and made for weaker stories and issues. Because our sole focus should’ve been getting the best comic books out. Instead it became getting out the best comic books that we could get past Jim. And in some sense we were probably able to rationalize that it really was our moral obligation—because we all took ourselves a little too seriously—that in order to make the best comics for our fans, Jim had to be out of the equation.”