Brian Cronin

by Was Superman a Spy?

  The strangest thing about the situation, which resulted in DC ostracizing Moore, was that DC Comics had already published the same story Moore had the characters discuss! In 1995 DC’s Paradox Press line of books had recounted the same story about Hubbard and Parsons in The Big Book of Conspiracies, and there was no lawsuit from the Church of Scientology.

  Part Two

  MARVEL COMICS

  Timely Comics was one of the many comic book publishers that sprung up in the wake of the success of Superman at National Comics. Martin Goodman, like Harry Donenfeld, was a pulp magazine publisher before getting into the comic business. In the very first comic published by Timely, Marvel Comics #1, Goodman used stories he purchased from outside comic “packagers,” who created prepackaged comic book stories to sell to the multitude of new publishers making superhero comics. Soon, though, Timely began producing its own stories, including its biggest success, Joe Simon (the top editor at Timely) and Jack Kirby’s Captain America, which became one of the biggest-selling comics in the business. After Simon and Kirby left Timely, a young relative of Goodman’s took over as the head writer-editor. His name was Stanley Lieber, but he wrote under the pseudonym Stan Lee.

  After the war, superheroes went belly-up, so during the 1950s Timely (now calling itself Atlas Comics) would follow whatever trend was popular at a given time. Westerns, romance, young adult stories, science fiction—whatever was selling in the industry, Atlas produced. Finally, at the beginning of the 1960s, inspired by DC Comics’ return to superheroes, Marvel (another name change) began introducing its own superheroes. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby spent the 1960s creating some of the most popular characters of the century, such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, and Spider-Man (Spider-Man was created by Lee with a different artist, Steve Ditko). By the early 1970s, Marvel Comics’ line of superheroes was outselling DC’s, most likely the first time since superheroes were introduced that DC was not the number one highest-selling comic book company.

  Marvel has been the highest-selling comic company ever since (with occasional surges by DC pushing Marvel temporarily to number two). After being purchased by Ronald Perelman in the late 1980s, Marvel Comics went public in 1991, then went bankrupt in 1996, but eventually Marvel’s subsidiary Toy Biz (now Marvel Toys) took control of the company and brought Marvel back into the black, mostly through money earned by turning Marvel properties into films. Recently, Marvel set up its own movie studio and has started producing its own films, starting with Iron Man in 2008 and planned films starring Thor, Captain America, and other Marvel heroes.

  4

  THE FANTASTIC FOUR

  The Fantastic Four was the fruit of one of the longest-lasting and most successful collaborations in comic book history. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby produced the first 102 issues of the series together, from the book’s debut in 1961 until Kirby left Marvel for DC in 1970.

  The Fantastic Four is the story of Reed Richards, a scientist who insists on testing a spaceship he built (in the original comics it was built to “beat the Commies to the moon”; later stories changed that to “the stars” and downplayed the whole “Commie” angle). Reed sneaks into the ship with his girlfriend, his best friend, and his girlfriend’s kid brother. While in outer space, the ship is bombarded by cosmic rays, and when the ship comes back to Earth, each of the four has gained fantastic powers. Reed can stretch his body like it is rubber; his girlfriend, Sue, can turn invisible; her brother, Johnny, can turn into living flame; and Reed’s best friend, Ben, has become a monstrous rocklike thing of a man. They agree to use their new powers to help mankind.

  The book was notable for two reasons. First, because the Fantastic Four was the first superhero team that was more like a family than other groups, partly because Sue (the Invisible Girl/Woman) and Johnny (the Human Torch) are brother and sister, but even more so because the four of them interact very much in the way families interact (including bickering). Second, the tragedy of Ben Grimm, who takes the name the Thing, gives the book a strong emotional core. Reed (Mr. Fantastic) is constantly searching for a cure for his friend’s condition, while Ben comes to terms with the fact that while he looks like a monster he is still a man.

  Early in the book’s run, they encounter an old college rival of Reed’s who becomes the group’s most notable enemy, Doctor Doom. For the rest of their run, Lee and Kirby would constantly introduce new characters into the series, the most notable being the world-devouring Galactus and his herald, the Silver Surfer, who searches for worlds for Galactus to feed on until kindness from an earthling causes him to rebel against his master.

  The Fantastic Four have starred in numerous animated televisions series based on the comic, and recently they were featured in two successful motion pictures (a third film in the series may be forthcoming).

  THE GENESIS OF the Fantastic Four is one of the most widely told tales in the comic book industry. As the legend goes, Martin Goodman was out golfing with the publisher of DC Comics, Irwin Donenfeld (some versions have it as DC chief Jack Liebowitz instead), and while they were golfing, Donenfeld remarked that DC was having quite a success with its new superhero-team book, Justice League of America. As soon as they were done golfing, Goodman got on the phone to Stan Lee and told him that Marvel needed to create a new superhero-team book.

  The dates certainly work, as the Justice League had made its debut in the pages of The Brave and the Bold #28 in early 1960 before quickly graduating to its own book later that same year.

  However, both Donenfeld and Liebowitz denied ever playing golf with Goodman, let alone playing golf and bragging about the sales of Justice League of America. Film producer Michael Uslan has put forth the alternate theory—courtesy of DC’s production manager at the time, Sol Harrison—that it was actually someone from Independent News, the distributor for both Marvel and DC’s comics at the time, who told Goodman. Independent News would have had the sales figures for both companies, and Paul Sampliner, the head of Independent News, did know Goodman. That theory makes a good deal more sense.

  Whether the Sampliner version is true or not, the end of the story is accurate, which is that Goodman discovered that DC was doing good numbers with a superhero-team book, so he notified Lee and said that Marvel had to produce a superhero-team book as well. Lee produced the comic, but before he did so, he was already considering a move that would have dramatically changed comic book history.

  MARVEL COMICS (or Atlas Comics, as it was called at the time) suffered through a very difficult decade in the 1950s. Sales of the books had dipped very low, and costs were being cut all over the company. Artists were going from being paid forty dollars per page to twenty-five dollars per page. John Romita, who later became one of the more famous Marvel superhero artists, recalls being fired by Stan Lee via Lee’s secretary.

  Eventually, Marvel’s eight titles were, more or less, being written and edited by one man, Lee, and drawn by three or four artists—Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Joe Maneely being the most prodigious. These artists, while talented, were kept around mostly because they could produce work quickly—they would be able to draw an entire line of comics in a month. These working conditions are what led to what is now known as the “Marvel method” of writing a comic book. Since he was writing so many titles, Lee did not have the time to write out full scripts for each book. Instead, he would come up with rough plots that he would give to the artists to draw however they felt was best. Lee would then script the art they gave back to him.

  Understandably, this work was not the most gratifying for Lee. Writing eight low-selling comic books a month and overseeing a company that was in the pits was not where Lee saw himself. He chose to write comics under the pseudonym Stan Lee because he had planned on reserving his given name for “real” writing.

  So when Martin Goodman told Lee that he wanted him to come up with a team of superheroes to match DC’s Justice League, Lee’s instinct was to quit comics altogether. He was thirty-nine years old at the time and felt he was too
old to be going back to the type of stories he had told when he was literally a teenager. His wife ultimately talked him out of it by suggesting that, instead of quitting, he should just tell the type of stories he wanted to tell, and if it ended up failing, then he would be no worse off than if he had quit. Lee agreed to stay and went out of his way to create characters he himself would be interested in reading, and the result was one of most successful comic book series of all time (of course, it did not hurt to have a comic book legend like Jack Kirby creating the comic with him).

  PERHAPS ONE OF the most controversial aspects of Marvel Comics’ great success in the 1960s is how much of the credit to attribute to the various creators involved in the production of the comics. A good deal of the behind-the-scenes workings were not publicized, and when readers hear about them now, they often get a false impression of how the process worked. In the ensuing discussions, Stan Lee often gets a bit of a short shrift, particularly from fans who believe that Jack Kirby was the sole writer of the later issues of The Fantastic Four.

  As noted earlier, since Lee wrote a great deal of the comics using the so-called Marvel method, that is how Lee and Kirby initially worked together on The Fantastic Four. In fact, at first the two would have long discussions over the plots of the issues, with both of them determining the general plot outline, which Kirby would then draw, and Lee script.

  However, as Marvel Comics became more popular, the workload for Lee increased, particularly in the fields outside of the writing arena. He had to take care of more editorial functions of the job. So the long plot discussions he once had with Kirby more or less vanished. Lee trusted that Kirby would come up with good plots on his own, and Lee would script those plots. The confusing part of this process to fans is that Kirby would include margin notes with his artwork. It would appear, from a glance, that Kirby was not only producing the plots but also giving Lee the dialogue, thus turning Lee into a glorified transcriber.

  That was not the case. Kirby’s margin notes were generally meant more as a mood indicator, telling Lee how Kirby meant a particular scene to play out emotionally. Was a scene meant to be funny, dramatic, sad—these sample dialogue notes by Kirby would get the point across to Lee when it came time to come up with the actual dialogue.

  Even with these notes, though, Lee would routinely scrap Kirby’s plans and do whatever he felt made for a better story. This grated on Kirby—he and Lee had diametrically opposed views concerning what it was that Kirby was delivering to Lee. Lee felt that he was being given a plot; Kirby felt that he was delivering a story and that Lee should not be changing it as he saw fit, which is exactly what Lee was doing. Lee would get his pages from Kirby, and then use the script he wrote to make changes, and since those changes would go into print, Kirby had to adapt the story in the next issue to accommodate them, because the changed versions were what the public was reading.

  So for most of their run together, they could be termed coplotters, and Kirby the sole plotter for the later issues. There is one famous idea, though, that was completely Kirby’s idea, and that was the Silver Surfer. Lee and Kirby came up with the idea of the world-devouring being Galactus, but there was no mention of Silver Surfer in that original plot. When he began drawings the pages, though, Kirby felt that someone as powerful as Galactus would have a herald, so he came up with the idea of the Silver Surfer flying ahead of Galactus to scope out worlds to eat. Lee loved the idea, and a star character was born.

  WHEN THE FANTASTIC Four first came out, there was some concern at Marvel about whether DC would object to Marvel suddenly publishing superhero comics of its own (see pages 160-61 for why Marvel would care whether DC approved of what it published), and at the same time there was most likely some concern about whether superhero comics would sell at all for Marvel, which was doing really three types of stories at the time—Westerns, romances, and monster comics.

  Whatever the precise reason for concern, the end result was an interesting approach to the covers of the first two issues of the Fantastic Four: Stan Lee very deliberately had Jack Kirby hide the fact that the Fantastic Four was a superhero comic. The covers of the first two issues are practically indistinguishable from the Marvel monster books of the time. Most notably, none of the characters wears a costume and both covers prominently feature monsters.

  The original version of the cover for the third issue of The Fantastic Four followed in this vein.

  It originally spotlighted the monster the group was fighting, but for whatever reason (perhaps sales determined that superheroes were workable, or perhaps after two issues and no complaints from DC, Marvel felt safe), the original cover was scrapped and a brand-new cover was created, proudly presenting the Fantastic Four as superheroes, complete with their matching costumes.

  Interestingly enough, there was also a notable change made to the Fantastic Four’s planned costumes. One of the notable aspects of the Four is that they are a rare group of superheroes whose identities are publicly known—they were the first celebrity superheroes. However, in the original version of Fantastic Four #3, where the group’s costumes debut, their costumes all have masks. Even the monstrous-looking Thing has a goalielike mask! Luckily, someone thought twice, and the masks were scrapped before the issue went to press.

  THE FANTASTIC FOUR made many enemies over the years, but rarely did they take on an adversary with as much bite as when they ran afoul of the Nixon administration in the mid-1970s.

  As noted earlier (on page 39), comic companies tried to do everything they could to avoid raising prices. They would reduce the size of the comics, they would cut the page count, but what they tried not to do was to raise the price of comics, and indeed it stayed at ten cents for well over two decades. Finally in the early 1960s, the price of comics went to twelve cents. By the early 1970s, comics were fifteen cents at both Marvel and DC, but that’s when a bit of a controversy stirred up.

  Inflation was considered out of control in the early 1970s. The inflation rate in 1970 was 6 percent, and in the middle of 1971 it was 4 percent. Historically, those were abnormally high rates, and to deal with the out-of-control inflation President Richard Nixon instituted a wage-and-price-control policy in August of 1971. For ninety days, there would be a complete price freeze.

  Soon before the policy was put into place, Marvel raised the price of its entire line of comics from fifteen cents to twenty-five cents (DC did the same around the same time). The next month, Marvel lowered the price back to twenty cents.

  So there shouldn’t be a problem, right? A price freeze would only affect raising prices, so Marvel would appear to be in the clear. However, when Marvel went from fifteen cents to twenty-five cents, it also increased the page count of the comics to make up for the price increase, but inflation had driven the costs of production up so much that Marvel could not afford to produce the extra pages, even at the higher price points. So it was now twenty cents for the same page count as their fifteen cent comics. Sneakily, Marvel had slipped in a percentage-price increase.

  This did not slip past the Nixon administration, and after some back and forth, it determined a punishment for Marvel: in Fantastic Four #128, released in 1972, Marvel would include a free four-page insert in the middle of the comic, made out of glossy paper. That would serve as Marvel’s way of giving back to its fans.

  An interesting side note regarding the price changes is that this is where Marvel really benefited by being a smaller company. Since it was smaller, it was able to change prices extremely quickly. DC, as part of a large corporation, was much slower in moving, so it was stuck at the higher price point for almost a full year, causing it to compete with Marvel during that whole time while charging five cents more per book. It is likely not a coincidence, then, that early 1972 is when Marvel officially passed DC in total sales.

  THE FANTASTIC FOUR have appeared on television in a variety of animated forms, but probably the strangest take on the concept was the 1978 animated series, produced by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises for the
NBC television network. The series starred Mr. Fantastic, the Thing, Invisible Girl, and H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot?! Yes, this series did not feature the Human Torch, but instead placed a robot as the fourth member of the team (the robot was cocreated by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, at least—the last time the two men worked together on a project). H.E.R.B.I.E. stood for Humanoid Experimental Robot, B-Type, Integrated Electronics.

  Most viewers guessed that the reason for the exclusion of the Human Torch was that the producers of the show feared children might attempt to emulate him by lighting themselves on fire. And in the 1980s, in an issue of The Fantastic Four, writer John Byrne had a child do just that, as an homage to the rumors (it also made for a powerful issue, starring Johnny, as he deals with his guilt over the incident). A producer who had worked on a Fantastic Four cartoon series even cited this as the reason why the Human Torch was not used (which was odd because, while he was a producer for a Fantastic Four cartoon, he was not the producer for this Fantastic Four cartoon, and on his cartoon the Human Torch did appear).

  The truth was much simpler. After the success of The Incredible Hulk, Marvel licensed out a number of other heroes to Universal Studios for possible television series or made-for-television movies. One of these heroes was the Human Torch. The project went as far as to have a script written, but nothing was ever filmed (most likely due to the extreme difficulties of depicting a man on fire in the 1970s—it is difficult today, even with the aid of computer graphic effects, so it was incredibly difficult back then). Universal was not involved in the cartoon, and it would not make a deal to allow the Torch to be used, so he was omitted from the series.