by Sean Howe
Bill Bevins didn’t have time for meetings with the troops on the ground. When Marvel’s British division was running out of money, he and Stewart were summoned to London to discuss a last-ditch strategy. Shortly after the discussion began, Bevins paused to take a phone call. When he returned to the conference room, he was presented with Marvel UK’s one-million-pound plan. A furious Bevins quickly interrupted. “You brought me here for a million pounds? The call I just took was a ten-million-dollar deal. Why are you wasting my time? You want the money, you got the money.” He turned to Stewart, barked, “Come on, let’s go,” and headed out for an early flight back to New York.
Bevins’s modus operandi was to pick up his phone at the Townhouse, call a Marvel executive, and solicit an opinion about buying a new company or forming a new corporate partnership. “Write me a memo,” Bevins would say, and then hang up. Then he would swoop in to make the deal. There was always room for growth, even if it meant leaving old partners behind. When Bevins realized that the volume of Marvel’s action figure sales was limited by an exclusive license with Toy Biz, he set up a meeting with the manufacturer’s principals at the Regency Hotel in midtown.
“Listen,” Bevins told Toy Biz’s Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad over breakfast, “we have 4,500 characters, and you guys are a small company. There are just so many characters you can execute. . . .”
But Perlmutter and Arad weren’t about to release their stranglehold. Instead, in what would prove to be a fateful moment, they suggested that Marvel and Toy Biz strengthen their ties even further. In April, only days after The Return of Superman flooded into comic stores, Marvel added yet another business to its portfolio, assuming 46 percent interest in the high-grossing Toy Biz. In return, Toy Biz got the “master license” for Marvel characters—exclusive, royalty-free, and in perpetuity—and $7 million of working capital.
Arad, the toy designer who through his position at Toy Biz had served as a vocal producer of the X-Men animated series, joined Stan Lee as a liaison between Marvel and Hollywood; he would oversee “development of all animated and live-action television and film projects.” Upstart comic companies lapped Marvel in the movie game; cameras were already rolling on Timecop and The Mask, both based on comics from seven-year-old Dark Horse. Even Rob Liefeld had a lucrative development now, with Steven Spielberg. But Arad had gotten a lot of credit for the X-Men, the number-one-rated kids’ cartoon. It pulled in a sizable adult audience, as well, and had spun off into apparel, trading cards, video games, and fourteen million action figures and Pizza Hut meal deals. With Fox Kids already committed to a Spider-Man cartoon, James Cameron finally turning in script pages for his planned Spider-Man film,* Wesley Snipes lined up for a Black Panther movie, and Wes Craven set to direct Doctor Strange, maybe Arad would accomplish what Stan Lee had been unable to in the nearly fifteen years he’d been in Hollywood. If his track record as a toy developer was any indication, Arad figured, he would. “In baseball, if you bat .300 you are a superstar,” he told a reporter. “I’m batting in the high .800s.”
At the newly christened Marvel Films, Arad was as dependent on Hollywood studios as Lee had been. Perelman didn’t want Marvel to get into the risky business of film production. He just wanted to license the properties and make a killing on the merchandise that followed. But by October, Arad was off to a strong start, signing a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to do a live-action X-Men movie.
Then he heard about a low-budget Fantastic Four film that was nearing completion. Months earlier, only three days before producer Bernd Eichinger’s $250,000 option from 1986 was due to expire, Fantastic Four had begun shooting with borrowed cameras on a soundstage in the Venice section of Los Angeles; it was being directed by the son of Vidal Sassoon and produced by Roger Corman. Convinced that the movie would do damage to the brand, Arad called Eichinger and offered to buy back the movie for a couple of million dollars in cash. Then he destroyed every print of the film.
In late 1993, Marvel’s stock began to fall precipitously, by more than 60 percent. It had been a good ride, the last two years. “When we went public, all that frenzy of media attention—of course, Stan loved it, but that’s what killed us,” said Mary McPherran. “Wall Street is very fickle—Ha-ha, isn’t this trendy; look at you colorful comic-book artists!—and then their focus turns away, and we’re left with all these print runs of the same comics with different covers when it crashes.”
19
Amid the crossovers and the enhanced covers and the number-one collectors’ editions, there was one comic that seemed to please everyone, from the fickle fourteen-year-olds chasing the next hot artist to the patience-tested boomers who faithfully held out for Marvel Comics to return to the way they remembered it being when they were fourteen. A four-issue limited series printed on glossy paper at $4.95 a pop, Marvels was the creation of writer Kurt Busiek, who’d worked in Marvel’s sales department under Carol Kalish before launching an erratic freelance career, and Alex Ross, a young painter who had no use for the frowning-vigilante mode of superheroes that was now in vogue. The series was originally intended as a showcase for Ross’s artwork, in which the important events of the Marvel Universe would simply be retold, but then they touched upon the idea of following those key episodes through the eyes of one ordinary man, a photographer named Phil Sheldon. As the proverbial innocent bystander, Sheldon’s life was affected by each development, from the 1939 creation of the android Human Torch to the early 1970s death of Gwen Stacy. While the immortal heroes marched on, hale and undiminished, Sheldon, like the real-life writers and artists behind the scenes of the comic books, became an aging witness to history.
Busiek and Ross worked on Marvels for more than a year, under the radar, Busiek plowing through stacks of back issues and Ross photographing models on which to base his painted figures. “We were doing an up-priced series with an artist few people had heard of, a writer nobody cared about . . . and an elderly man with one eye and no superpowers as the lead.” Their editor begged them to include Wolverine, if only so the sales team would have something to work with.
As it turned out, Marvels was a hit anyway. Ross’s photo-realistic images—inhabiting some weird place halfway between Norman Rockwell and Leroy Neiman—left readers gasping, and Busiek’s sprawling, metatextual experiment carried the added charge, increasingly rare in comics, of humanism. It was comics’ answer to E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, a decades-spanning epic packed with guest stars—but through the character of Phil Sheldon, it also provided a poignant story of a man’s helplessness in the face of unfolding history. Sheldon was forever standing on the ground, watching nervously as the Sub-Mariner attacked New York City, trembling as the mutant X-Men struck fear into the hearts of ordinary humans. As a young man, he cheered at movie-house newsreels of Captain America fighting the Axis powers; in 1960s midtown Manhattan, he watched Captain America triumphantly return, to a world of convertible sedans and gray flannel suits: “There was so much energy in New York. As if fireworks had been going off for months. The birth of the FF—Thor—Giant-Man—the return of the Sub-Mariner—and, of course, the biggest blast of all—the show-stopper that lit up the world like a dozen Fourth of Julys rolled into one—like a force of nature in chain-mail. To catch a glimpse of him—always in motion, always moving forward.”
In this version of late-twentieth-century America, there was no mention of the Cuban Missile Crisis, no plague of race riots, no campus protests of the Vietnam War—even though the Marvel Comics 1960s and early 1970s had tackled political and social issues quite explicitly. Here, the great trials of the modern world were the appearance of the Sentinels (as seen in the X-Men in 1965) and the subsequent anti-mutant riots, and the arrival of Galactus (as seen in the Fantastic Four in 1966). You could choose to dismiss the story as hermetic escapism, a history void of reality—or you could admire the way it took the inherent sociopolitical metaphors always present in the comic books and fit them together into one digestible package.
Still, Ma
rvels’ most impressive achievement was to recapture, for a short time, the thrill that Marvel superheroes had once provided. And in this light, it was notable that the story ended shortly after Gwen Stacy fell to her death, and even re-created the sound effect that provided a sharply accented snap! to nail shut an era of innocence. Our protagonist, Phil Sheldon, who’d begun to dedicate his life to photographing the “Marvels” of the world in action, gave his camera to his assistant and told her to take over his work. He’d grown weary, had lost his eye for it, wanted instead to spend time in the real world. “No more Marvels for me. Time instead,” he declared, in words that could have doubled for those of the Marvelmaniacs who’d continued in vain to look for the magic they’d once known.
Jack Kirby, whose staggering number of creations and co-creations provided the bulk of the material to which Marvels paid tribute, might also have uttered those words dozens of times over the years. His relationship with Stan Lee had been, in later years, filled with acrimony. In 1989, two years after their awkward radio show encounter, Kirby raised the stakes in a Comics Journal interview. “Stanley and I never collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stanley write anything,” Kirby said. “Stanley had never been editorial-minded. It wasn’t possible for a man like Stanley to come up with new things—or old things, for that matter. Stanley wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories. Stanley was a guy that knew where the papers were or who was coming to visit that day. Stanley is essentially an office worker, okay?” Kirby said that Lee “didn’t know what the heck the stories were about” and that he had “a God complex”; he vehemently denied that his former editor had ever even asked for plot changes. “I should have told Stan to go to hell and found some other way to make a living, but I couldn’t do it,” Kirby told the interviewer. “I had my family. I had an apartment. I just couldn’t give all that up.”
Lee pushed back. “I think he’s gone beyond the point of no return,” he said after the interview was published. “Some of the things he said, there is no way he could ever explain that to me. I would have to think he’s either lost his mind or he’s a very evil person.”
But at a 1993 chance meeting in San Diego, the rhetoric melted away. “Jack said something strange to me,” Lee recalled. “He called me over and he said . . . and again, I felt Jack wasn’t fully with it, you know . . . he said to me, ‘You have nothing to reproach yourself about, Stan.’ And it was such . . . kind of a strange thing for him to say. I was glad to hear it, but I didn’t expect it. And that was about it. And then some people came over and interrupted us and he went away and I went away.”
That encounter, more than fifty years after they’d first met, was the last time that Stan “the Man” Lee and Jack “King” Kirby—the co-creators of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, the X-Men, and so many more—ever saw each other. Kirby finally retired from comics; his last published work, on a comic called Phantom Force, was done as a favor to a friend and, fittingly, published by Image Comics, which had often invoked his name as the prime example of industry mistreatment. He spent his days quietly with his wife, Roz, in their Southern California home until he died of heart failure on February 6, 1994. The King was dead.
After Kirby’s death, Lee reached out to Roz Kirby through mutual friends and cautiously asked for permission to attend the funeral. On the morning of the services, he drove north, parked outside the chapel, greeted Roz, and quietly took a seat. Later, he made a quiet exit out a side door. Roz called to him from the receiving line, but he didn’t hear her.
In June 1994, Frank Miller paid tribute to Jack Kirby, delivering a keynote speech at an industry seminar in Baltimore. “An age passes with Jack Kirby,” Miller said. “I can’t call it the Marvel Age of comics, because I don’t believe in rewarding thievery. I call it the Jack Kirby age of comics.”
Members of the Marvel staff, sitting at a table front and center, shifted in their seats as Miller declared that the only way to talk about the future of comics was to talk about its “sad, sorry, history of broken lives . . . of talents denied the legal ownership of what they created with their own hands and minds, ignored or treated as nuisances while their creations went on to make millions and millions of dollars.” After noting that “seventeen years of loyal service and spectacular sales didn’t buy Chris Claremont one whit of loyalty from Marvel Comics,” and scoffing at Jim Shooter’s claims that he’d “spent his whole life fighting for creators’ rights,” Miller turned the screws.
Marvel Comics is trying to sell you all on the notion that characters are the only important component of its comics. As if nobody had to create these characters, as if the audience is so brain-dead they can’t tell a good job from a bad one. You can almost forgive them this, since their characters aren’t leaving in droves like the talent is. For me it’s a bit of a relief to finally see the old “work-made-for-hire talent don’t matter” mentality put to the test. We’ve all seen the results, and they don’t even seem to be rearranging the deck chairs.
Creators who complained about defections to Image and other companies, he continued, were “like galley slaves complaining that the boat is leaking.” The age of company-owned superhero universes—the Jack Kirby Age—was over. “It’s gone supernova and burned itself out, and begun a slow steady collapse into a black hole. We couldn’t feed off the genius of Jack Kirby forever. The King is dead, and he has no successor. We will not see his like again. No single artist can replace him. No art form can be expected to be gifted with more than one talent as brilliant as his. It’s a scary time because change is always scary. But all the pieces are in place for a new proud era, a new age of comics. Nothing’s standing in our way, nothing too big and awful, nothing except some old bad habits and our own fears, and we won’t let them stop us.”
The crowd rose to its feet.
Industry sentiment against Marvel gathered steam as sales continued to plummet, dropping 36 percent in the first six months of 1994. Marvel executives, in turn, laid blame at the feet of comic retailers and distributors, who they felt were not adequately pushing Marvel product over those of smaller, more fashionable start-ups, and were even daring to publicly criticize Marvel’s business decisions.
So the sales department masterminded a plan: What if Marvel cut out the middleman and sold directly to stores? It could take the money it was currently sinking into co-op advertising and promotional events with ungrateful distributors and invest instead in a team of field representatives, each of them unwaveringly committed and dedicated to Marvel policies and product. After a series of top-secret, off-site meetings, the idea went up the chain to the Townhouse. Meanwhile, the marketing department developed an initiative for an in-house mail-order venture, which would bypass not only distributors but retailers as well. Over several months, as the company quietly cast about for a distributor to purchase, it continued to evoke ire and paranoia in retailers, who were already on the lookout for ways in which they might be squeezed out. Marvel raised the price of its comics another quarter, to $1.50—representing a 100 percent increase in the five years since Perelman acquired the company. Terry Stewart revived plans for a Marvel outlet based on the Disney Store model, and announced plans for a Marvel restaurant chain and a Marvel theme park, each of which would also sell T-shirts and other items that had previously been the jurisdiction of comic shops. When ads for an in-house mail-order venture called Marvel Mart—which included promotional items that retailers had been forbidden from selling, as well as otherwise out-of-print paperback reprints—began running in the comics, one distressed distributor sent out a cautionary newsletter to retailers, suggesting that they promote other publishers and reduce the importance of Marvel sales to their business. Marvel eventually pulled the catalogs, but not before cutting off the distributor’s supply of Marvel product.
The House of Ideas had, it seemed, turned into Big Brother. “Unfortunately, if people who are in the know talk about [Marvel], they will be terminated if they are an employee, or punished in some o
ther respect if they are not,” one ex-staffer told the Comics Journal. “There is this incredibly threatening atmosphere [at Marvel] that lets you know you just can’t get away with anything.” A document that required employees to report coworkers suspected of violating company policy was distributed, although Tom DeFalco reportedly rallied the editorial department to refuse to sign.
DeFalco, by now, had a target on his back. He’d had shouting matches with Stewart, had resisted when it was proposed that the marketing department begin designing the comic-book covers. The rest of the company felt that the editorial department was closing ranks, just when its cooperation was most needed. One executive characterized editorial’s attitude as “Leave us alone. We don’t have time to deal with you people. Creative people can’t be burdened by the mundane responsibilities of the numbers. The only thing we have to worry about is if the freelancers are happy, and making good books. If the numbers are there, that’s great; if not, that sucks for you.”
“Tom was willing to take all the shit from management and protect editors,” said Director of Sales Matt Ragone. “Tom would go to meetings and get kicked around, and just absorb it, would shield the editors from the intense pressures that existed. But people felt . . . if things were going to change, we had to change the structure, and get these guys to take ownership of the process.” Stewart approached Fabian Nicieza, who had experience with sales and marketing, and told him there was going to be a change coming, and wanted to know if he had any ideas.
But Nicieza’s response—an organizational chart that funneled more power to the editor in chief position—was exactly the opposite of what Stewart, and the sales and marketing departments, had in mind. They wanted to find a way to circumvent any editorial resistance, to dictate corporate goals directly to the line editors. Shortly after Nicieza’s plan was rejected, Marvel rented a sports bar across the street from the offices and invited the entire staff to dinner, where Terry Stewart unveiled a strategy dubbed “Marvelution.” Tom DeFalco would be promoted to a senior vice president position and replaced by five editors in chief, who would report to Stewart. This plan, Stewart explained with the help of a slide show, would strengthen the “sub-brands” within the Marvel brand—so that, say, Captain America and Daredevil wouldn’t languish in the shadows of the X-Men and Spider-Man. Each EIC would be responsible for a family of titles: Bob Harras (X-Men); Bob Budiansky (Spider-Man); Mark Gruenwald (“Marvel Classic,” which included the Avengers and Fantastic Four); Bobbie Chase (“Marvel Edge,” focused on grittier characters); and Carl Potts (“General Entertainment,” which consisted largely of licensed properties).