Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

by Sean Howe

  After Claremont’s wife reminded him that they had a mortgage to pay, he negotiated to write the first three issues of the new X-Men; this would be, in effect, his severance pay. He gave up on his last issue of Uncanny after eleven pages. No one—not Stan Lee, not Jack Kirby—had stayed on a title as long as Claremont had.

  There was no good-bye in the letters column, no announcement to the press. Almost overnight, Claremont was without illusions about corporate loyalty. When an interviewer expressed surprise at the seemingly sudden end of the sixteen-year tenure, Claremont reminded him that comics were exempt from the rules of “straight” publishing, in which genre-fiction authors owned their franchises. “What you have is a corporate disagreement between an employee and his supervisor. And in that light, the course of action becomes as clear as it is inevitable: the corporation instinctively supports its supervisors.” If Marvel had survived Kirby’s departure, why would it think Chris Claremont was necessary? Claremont couldn’t even draw.

  Walter Simonson, who’d been writing and drawing The Fantastic Four while his wife was being brushed aside from New Mutants, followed Claremont out the door. Years later, he characterized the company’s behavior as “abrupt, rude, and disrespectful,” and railed against the mothballing of veteran creators. “The atmosphere at Marvel was becoming less enjoyable,” he said, “the scope for good creative work more limited.”

  Without missing a beat, Bob Harras called up Claremont’s onetime partner and longtime rival, John Byrne, and asked if he’d like to write The X-Men. Although Byrne had been slow to embrace the independent-publisher model, he had just begun work on his own creator-owned title for Dark Horse Comics—with the winking title of Next Men—over which he would have complete control. But Byrne had been surprised by the low sales on his Sub-Mariner relaunch, Namor, and had no guarantee that Next Men would provide a cash flow. So he had more than just storytelling at stake when he took the job of scripting both X-Men books—in fact, he had the same thing on his mind that Claremont had upon leaving: “The X-Men,” Byrne volunteered to an interviewer, “are going to pay my mortgage.”

  But within a few months, Byrne, like Claremont, was faced with impossible turnaround times, forced to dialogue from last-minute faxes of Lee and Portacio’s artwork. The pages were arriving piecemeal, three at a time, and every time another fax came through, the plot would take an unexpected turn, so that Byrne would have to rewrite the previous pages.

  He found his breaking point when Harras called and asked him to script an entire issue overnight. Byrne refused. “Something’s gotta be done about this,” he told Harras. “This is insane.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” Harras assured him, then hung up the phone and hurried over to Nicieza’s office. “John’s not scripting this issue,” Harras said. “Can you do it for me?”

  “When do you need it by?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “There’s no way.”

  At that very moment, Scott Lobdell, a struggling stand-up comic who was always hustling for freelance writing gigs, walked by Nicieza’s office door. Nicieza, smiling, pointed his finger, and Harras looked up.

  Harras hung his head and let out a resigned sigh.

  Lobdell finished the issue overnight. Two weeks later, Byrne heard from a friend who’d seen Lobdell at a party. Lobdell had been given the regular X-Men writing assignment. “Years later,” Byrne said, “I was told you should always be careful when Bob says, ‘We’ll take care of it.’ ”

  Rob Liefeld, meanwhile, weighed his options. He and Nicieza had already begun introducing flashy, violent new characters into New Mutants—Deadpool, Domino, Shatterstar, Feral—the future members of X-Force. As he prepared for the launch, he wrote a letter to director Spike Lee, who had put out a call for people doing “extraordinary things” in their Levi’s 501 jeans. Liefeld, with his boyish good looks and bottomless enthusiasm, was chosen from a pool of 700,000 entries to appear on a national commercial. He and X-Force were going to be on television.

  Liefeld also thought back to a standing offer he’d had from a black-and-white comics publisher called Malibu Comics, to do his own independent comic. Testing the waters, he placed an ad in the Comics Buyers Guide for an upcoming title, to be called The Executioners. It was a team of “rebel mutants from the future come to destroy their past”—a plot familiar to X-Men readers. One character in the ad, Cross, looked a lot like Cable, the leader of X-Force; others resembled Feral and Domino. Harras called Liefeld at six thirty one morning and asked what he thought he was doing. Marvel would sue if Liefeld didn’t drop the plans.* The Executioners was put on the back burner.

  But Liefeld had an itch now, and he began talking it over with some of his friends. Back in 1985, when he was just starting out, he’d created another team of superheroes, called Youngblood. Maybe it was time for them to see the light of day—and not at Marvel.

  Todd McFarlane never liked the idea of editors, and when the hands-on Danny Fingeroth replaced the laissez-faire Jim Salicrup as his boss on Spider-Man, McFarlane absolutely hated it. “You sell a million, I’ll listen to you,” he told Fingeroth. “If I can turn in 22 blank pages and the kids buy a million copies, who cares how comic books have been done for the past 50 years? I don’t care that there used to be words or pictures—if the kids are buying a million copies, then they’re happy, I’m happy and you’re selling comic books.”

  McFarlane, who’d always resisted authority, bristled at plenty now: not receiving a Spider-Man T-shirt that Marvel had sent out as a promotion, not getting invited to editorial summits that determined future plans for the comics, not getting to use the villains he wanted to use. He’d filled Spider-Man with stories about drug addiction, police corruption, and child molestation, but in the end it was a drawing of a sword in a villain’s eye that brought him to loggerheads with Fingeroth and Tom DeFalco, who assured McFarlane that the Comics Code wouldn’t allow the depiction.

  McFarlane quit, and didn’t even bother to line up more work. “There’s no reason for me to take over a monthly title when I could do a special project that would give me creative freedom, better reproduction, a bigger PR push,” McFarlane had told a brand-new comics magazine called Wizard, just before he took his exit. “Probably what you’ll see me do if and when I leave Spider-Man is special projects for a couple of years and then—if I do go back to monthly comics—I’ll self-publish. If I’m going to work day in and day out, I’ll do it for myself.” He’d talked about creating a series of hockey cards, and getting out of comics altogether, but now McFarlane started thinking about this idea that Rob Liefeld had, of publishing creator-owned titles through Malibu Comics. What if they could get a few other big names to join them—what kind of message would that send to Marvel and DC?

  In the past two years of expansion, Marvel’s sales had grown more than 30 percent, and its net income more than quadrupled. The company was now squeezing out profits everywhere it could, with editor-generated series like Tom DeFalco’s Darkhawk (which, according to Marvel, combined the “gritty realism” of Ghost Rider with the “urban vigilante tactics” of Punisher), and Bob Budiansky’s Sleepwalker. In March 1991, it made its first foray into the world of 1–900 telephone number rackets, with a “Help Me Save Mary Jane” touch-tone interactive audio trivia game that cost $2.70 for two minutes and earned the company about $20,000 in the first five days. But the real windfall was yet to come. Eight days after spinning the news of Claremont’s departure—he’d be taking a “sabbatical,” a Marvel rep said—Nicieza and Liefeld’s X-Force #1 went on sale. Its nearly four million copies was the new record-holder, leaving Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 in the dust. Double-sized and priced at $1.50, each issue was poly-bagged with one of five trading cards, unavailable elsewhere. Once-casual collectors tried their hands at investment purchases, stocking up by the hundreds. Skeptics wondered who would buy all these down the road—after all, there were only a few hundred thousand comic readers in the world. “It’s got that ’90s feel
,” Bob Harras told a reporter, and perhaps the straight-faced, ass-kicking, drill-sergeant barking, and heavy artillery of the one-eyed Cable did reflect some kind of zeitgeist, or at least a trend that had carried through Wolverine and the Punisher and the first Batman movie. Liefeld’s California smile appeared with increasing regularity in newspapers, in magazines, and on late-night television shows. It was rumored that his tax bill that year was more than most comic-industry salaries.

  The timing of Marvel’s July 16 public offering couldn’t have been better. A week earlier, following the $54 million opening of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron had spoken to Variety about his plans to tackle a Spider-Man movie, legitimizing the idea that Marvel could finally transcend four-color newsprint. Seeing the possibility of high returns were Wall Street number crunchers and hordes of collectors alike, and stock went from $16½ to $18 on the first day, trading at a volume of 2.3 million shares as a man hired to dress as Spider-Man walked the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Most of the money raised would not go back into Marvel, however—it would be split between MacAndrews & Forbes, a holding company wholly owned by Perelman, and Perelman himself, who enjoyed a $10 million dividend.

  Of course, as USA Today noted the following day, “revenue growth depends on Marvel producing a blockbuster issue every year,” and the company wasn’t taking any chances. On August 16, the first of four $1.50 editions of Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 hit stands. Every week a different cover was shipped to stores, building up to a fifth version, a $3.95 bonanza with a foldout of the previous four covers. When the smoke cleared, nearly 8 million copies had been sold—roughly seventeen copies for every regular comic book reader.*

  Retailers were split on the wisdom of such bonanzas—for some, it seemed like money in the bank; others worried about getting stuck with inventory. But other Marvel initiatives were unanimously troubling: serial-numbered, sealed blister packs of comics, aimed at the collector market (“You are on the ground floor of one of the major collectibles of the 90s”) were sold to Wal-Mart at a cost lower than what the direct market paid. A line in the Marvel prospectus that mentioned plans for a Marvel retail chain also had shop owners squawking. Where was the company’s loyalty to those who had been selling its products through the tough times?

  In September, Carol Kalish, who’d been a crucial component of Marvel’s success in the direct market, died at the age of thirty-six after suffering a coronary embolism on the way to work. Her death sent shockwaves through the industry. “Comic-store owners saw her as one of them,” said Sven Larsen, who had worked under her as a distributor liaison. “She’d come from the fan background, and she was sort of Champion of the Geeks, as far as they were concerned.” The affection and trust that the retail community felt for Kalish would not easily be replaced.

  Differences of philosophy began to fracture Marvel’s sales department. While Kalish’s successor, Lou Bank, wanted to branch out into nonsuperhero genres, Sven Larsen wanted to get the most out of the company’s existing franchises. Larsen, who had been spending more and more time developing special covers, wrote a lengthy memo to Terry Stewart warning that Marvel had to work harder on brand property strategy, to better leverage big-event releases. Up until now, Larsen argued, sales and marketing had been entirely driven by content. There were dozens of different formats for paperback books; why not for comic books? Larsen proposed that Marvel begin a marketing department, which he would head.

  Stewart agreed, got Larsen a marketing budget, and brought in a marketing superstar named Richard T. Rogers as a consultant. Rogers could boast of masterminding the introductions of red- and green-colored M&Ms and king-size bags of candies—getting customers excited about buying the same old thing in a new package, and getting them to buy in bulk. Now he would do the same thing for Marvel Comics.

  As Marvel’s stock climbed to forty dollars a share, Stan Lee hit the publicity trail from coast to coast. On Larry King’s radio show, in the pages of the Chicago Tribune, on cable news programs, he tirelessly promoted a coffee-table history of Marvel Comics and gushed excitedly about the prospective James Cameron Spider-Man movie. Occasionally he’d be asked about the current line of comics. “We’ve been accused of being too commercial, you know, trying to make too many editions for the collectors and so forth,” he told the Washington Times. “But there’s a self-leveling effect: When we start doing it too much, they’re going to stop buying them. The readers seem to want these things, and they buy them in great numbers.” When the reporter asked if Marvel was pushing whatever the market would bear, Lee’s carefree exterior cracked for a moment. “It’s a negative way to word it, and I didn’t word it that way,” he said, showing annoyance before he settled on a better way to phrase it. “It’s giving the public what they want.”

  Lee had never been one to publicly question Marvel’s publishing strategies, even when it directly affected him; now that he was in Los Angeles, detached from the comic business, he had even less incentive to rock the boat. Privately, though, he’d grown ever more tired of seeing Marvel’s Hollywood projects derailed by forces out of his control. At Cannes that year, the Perelman-owned New World had announced plans for a Punisher sequel and a She-Hulk movie starring Brigitte Nielsen; a two-hour Power Pack pilot, based on the Louise Simonson series, was filmed. But New World was withering, and in October Perelman sold most of the company’s operations to Sony. The Punisher 2 and She-Hulk were never filmed; and Power Pack went unsold. So Lee had quietly begun a film-producing venture with a former New World executive and an agent for cartoonists. Their first project was Comic Book Greats, a series of videotapes in which Lee interviewed legends and rising stars. Profiled alongside Will Eisner and Bob Kane would be some of Marvel’s hottest commodities, including Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, and Rob Liefeld.

  McFarlane and Liefeld were the first guests. But to Lee’s surprise, by the time McFarlane showed up at the Burbank studio with his wife and newborn daughter, the superstar artist had turned in his last issue of Spider-Man. He and Lee didn’t talk about this during the episode—nor was any comment made about the McFarlane artwork on the wall behind them, a drawing of a new character called Spawn.

  When Liefeld visited the studio, he showed off some new characters, too—in fact, he drew them for Stan Lee while the cameras rolled. One was named Diehard. Liefeld didn’t mention that Diehard was going to be a member of Youngblood, the super-team that he was planning on publishing with Malibu. The other, Cross, was the astonishingly Cable-like creation that he’d advertised in Comics Buyers Guide as a member of the Executioners.

  “Have you ever drawn him before, or are you making him up now?” Lee asked.

  “This is the world premiere.”

  “Really? So I’m in at the beginning of a new superhero called Cross . . . obviously, if our lawyers are tuning in, you and I are creating this together, so we both share the copyright,” joked Lee.

  Liefeld smiled. “Have your lawyer call mine.”

  After Marvel nixed the idea of The Executioners, Liefeld and McFarlane bonded through their determination to stand up against Marvel. Liefeld in particular felt threatened by all the foil-embossed covers, and thought that Marvel was trying to use gimmicks to take the spotlight away from the artists. He started whispering in the ear of Jim Valentino, who was penciling Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel, and Erik Larsen, who’d replaced McFarlane as the artist on Amazing Spider-Man—and who also had an ax to grind with Marvel. Larsen’s proposal for a new Nova title had been trashed when DeFalco decided to put the character in New Warriors; now Larsen was also frustrated with the Amazing scripts he was being asked to draw. He wrote a bilious letter—he asked his name to be withheld from publication—to the widely read Comics Buyers Guide: “More artists writing won’t spell the end of good comics, just as it didn’t when Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko started doing all their own scripting. What it may mean is that fewer mediocre writers will find themselves with work or decent artists
to work with—but then the repetitious, rehashed, reworked hackwork of these tired writers is likely to drag this industry down, anyway.” If McFarlane and Liefeld were going to jump ship, Larsen would join them.

  McFarlane had taken Liefeld’s curiosity about alternate options and transformed it into something like a military strategy. He began calling for a mass exodus, one that would hit Marvel where it hurt. “Quitting one at a time doesn’t work,” he insisted. “Neal Adams and Jack Kirby quit one at a time, and they replaced those guys, but if Neal, Jack, Gil Kane, John Buscema, Jim Starlin, and Don Heck had all quit at the exact same time and started their own company, they probably would have been somewhat successful.”

  But they still had to collect another superstar, he figured, someone that Marvel would never expect to leave the comfortable confines of work-for-hire. He and Liefeld began to work on Jim Lee from both sides. “Marvel Comics felt they could lose me and Rob, because we were uncontrollable,” said McFarlane. “Here’s an idiot and an asshole. But Jim was the company man. They felt they would have won the war if they lost us and kept Jim. Jim ended up being the cornerstone piece.”

  Lee had reasons to hesitate. He was getting along fine with Bob Harras, still enjoying working on the X-Men, and his wife was pregnant with their first child. But he wasn’t as thrilled about all the money he wasn’t getting from T-shirts and posters, and when he was asked by Marvel to fly to New York for Sotheby’s first auction of comic-book art—which would include the complete pages of X-Men #1 and X-Force #1—he was surprised to be told that his wife’s airfare would not be covered by the company. “That’s the wrong thing to say to a guy like Jim,” McFarlane said. “Jim does his homework. He knows he’s probably brought in 22 million dollars in the last three months. . . . They can’t even spring for a $200 plane ticket? When they started saying that kind of stuff, that’s when they pushed the wrong buttons.”