Brian Cronin

by Was Superman a Spy?

  So after the first three issues of the second X-Men title (the royalties on those three issues were perhaps a final parting gift), for the first time in seventeen years Chris Claremont was no longer the writer of The X-Men. Jim Lee was given full control of X-Men (and teamed with popular fellow artist, Whilce Portacio, on the other X-Men title, Uncanny X-Men). John Byrne was brought back as a scripter for the series, but he was given increasingly ridiculous deadlines (Lee and Portacio were slow to deliver their plots, so Byrne would have to script them extremely fast). Editor Bob Harras felt he needed to get someone else to replace Byrne. His choice was Scott Lobdell, a fairly new Marvel writer who had only written a few lower-level Marvel titles at that point. The amusing thing was exactly how Lobdell was chosen.

  It literally came down to the fact that Harras needed someone to script the book right at that moment, and Lobdell happened to walk past his office door. He gave the books to Lobdell to script, and Lobdell was able to handle the nearly impossible deadline (of course, in the confusion, no one bothered to tell Byrne that he was no longer the scripter on the book, which probably would have been nice). Soon after Lobdell signed on to script the books, however, Lee and Portacio both left Marvel to help cofound Image Comics. So after driving away the man who wrote the title for seventeen years, in favor of Lee and Portacio, Marvel was left without a writer for its two biggest books eight months into the new series. So Lobdell went from being the scripter for Uncanny X-Men to being the full writer (Fabian Nicieza took over X-Men), where he would stay for the next five years or so, going from an almost accidental hire to being the writer of Uncanny X-Men during some of its highest-selling years. Not bad for a guy who was in the office that day to talk to a totally different Marvel editor.

  9

  MARVEL COMICS MISCELLANEA

  As alluded to a number of times earlier, Marvel was in a particularly precarious position at the end of the 1950s, when it came to the distribution of its comics. In fact, when the Marvel superhero boom of the 1960s hit, Marvel comics were actually being distributed by DC Comics. No, really!

  During the early 1950s, when Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics, Martin Goodman distributed the comics through his own distribution company. However, toward the end of the decade he decided he wanted to expand the Atlas line of comics, so he signed a deal with American News Company, one of the largest distributors in the country, and a virtual monopoly. Actually, forget the “virtual” part, because in 1956 the U.S. government ruled that American News Company was a monopoly. Suddenly, Atlas was without a distributor, and since Goodman alienated all of his wholesalers when he made the move to American News, he could not go back to self-distribution. Therefore, his only recourse (besides shutting the company down entirely) was to go to Independent News, the distribution company owned by DC Comics!

  Independent News agreed to the deal, under the condition that Atlas not publish more than eight books a month. Atlas went to a bimonthly schedule for all its books, which allowed it to put out sixteen titles, and with a bit of finagling it was sometimes able to put out ten books in one month if it put out six in the next.

  This was particularly difficult during the early 1960s, when Marvel’s popularity was increasing and it had a number of characters who could carry their own title. Marvel’s only recourse was to split books between characters, which is why it had so many anthologies at that time, like Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense.

  Eventually, in 1968, Marvel negotiated a slightly better deal from Independent News, which was when a number of its heroes received their own solo titles, including Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man. That same year, Marvel was sold to a company that eventually became known as Cadence Industries. In 1969, Cadence bought its own distributor, so Marvel was then free to put out as many comics as it wanted.

  ARTISTS BREAK INTO working in comics in a variety of different manners, some stranger than others. But few have made as strange of an entry into the comic field as John Romita, the legendary comic book artist who, as noted earlier, was Steve Ditko’s replacement on Amazing Spider-Man and for many years Marvel’s art director. Romita received his big break by pretending to be someone else!

  The story began in 1947, when Romita graduated from the School of Industrial Art, and after doing one story for Eastern Color Press’s Famous Funnies, found himself without any work in comics. In 1949 he was making thirty dollars a week working in New York City for Forbes Lithograph, when he ran into a friend from art school named Lester Zakarin, who offered him the break he needed. Zakarin would pay Romita twenty dollars a page (almost as much as Romita was making in a week!) if Romita was willing to pencil a comic story for him and allow Zakarin to claim that it was his own artwork. Zakarin was an inker but could not pencil very well. Zakarin would ink Romita’s pencils and submit the work as his own. The assignments were mostly for Stan Lee at Timely Comics.

  One problem that arose was that Lee would often ask for corrections on the artwork from the penciller, and Zakarin could not make the corrections himself. The pair solved the problem by Romita going into the city with Zakarin and waiting at the New York Public Library, which was near Timely’s offices. Zakarin would tell Lee that he could not draw in front of people—he needed complete silence to work. He would then say he was going to the apartment of a friend and would bring back the corrections later, but he would really go to the library. Romita would do the corrections there, and Zakarin would bring them back to Lee.

  Eventually, Romita went to visit Lee’s offices and told his secretary that while Lee did not know him, he had been working for him for over a year, and that he was the one actually drawing Zakarin’s artwork. The secretary went to see Lee and returned with Romita’s first assignment as John Romita. Of course, the kicker is that they assumed Romita was penciling and inking the comic, and Romita had never inked a comic before, but he was not about to risk losing the job, so he inked himself, for the first time ever. And he has never stopped working in comics for the past fifty years. Romita’s son, also John, even became a Marvel artist and just recently celebrated thirty years of working at Marvel.

  STEVE DITKO’S DISTASTE for Marvel (elaborated on pages 108-9) is well known. Even though he eventually did go back to working for Marvel in the late 1970s after Charlton, his preferred comic book employer, ceased to be a viable working choice, for a man who worked for Marvel well into the 1990s (when he more or less retired from regular comic book work), his displeasure with his past works for Marvel is so dramatic that he apparently even takes it out on his old work itself!

  Up until the 1980s, original comic art was not returned to the artists. It was considered property of the comic companies, and, at DC at least, old original artwork was eventually shredded (although certainly a number of pages “found” their way into the personal collections of DC staffers). During the 1980s, Marvel was in a dispute with artists over whether it owned the original work or was just paying for the production of the art, with the final ownership of the artwork belonging to the artists. Marvel eventually relented, under the following condition: it would give the artists back the art, but it would be as a gift out of Marvel’s generosity. Marvel still believes that it owns the work fair and square but magnanimously allows the artists to have it. Ditko disagreed with this position vehemently and would not acknowledge the returned art.

  This artwork, particularly when it features famous Marvel super-hero characters, can easily sell for hundreds of dollars (and the really popular stuff for thousands) if the artist is famous like Ditko or Jack Kirby. However, when comic historian Greg Theakston visited Ditko a number of years ago, he noticed that the cutting board (which is exactly what it sounds like—a board on which you cut things) Ditko was using was an original cover from the 1950s! When Theakston expressed shock, Ditko told him to move a nearby curtain—behind it was a stack of original art almost two feet tall. Ditko wanted nothing to do with this old work and was in fact using it for cutting boards! When Steve Ditko take
s a position, he takes it seriously.

  IN THE EARLY 1970s, the toy company Mego began to produce a line of action figures, licensing superheroes from both Marvel and DC, including Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, and Captain America. The title of the line was World’s Greatest Super-Heroes. Mego decided to apply for a trademark (and was granted one) for the term super-hero. DC and Marvel took issue with this and threatened legal action, which Mego avoided by giving up its rights to the term (some stories say it sold any rights it had for the nominal fee of one dollar).

  DC and Marvel then decided to register the trademark themselves. It was granted in 1981, and just recently DC and Marvel filed renewal papers for the trademark. The idea of two companies sharing a trademark is uncommon but not that out of the ordinary. The theory behind the trademark is that when someone thinks of the word super-hero, they will almost certainly think of either a DC or a Marvel property, and if a comic book or a toy product comes out with the term super-hero on it, consumers will presume it is a DC or a Marvel product.

  Marvel and DC have already kept one comic book creator from using the term super-hero in the title of his comic book (even though it was spelled differently). They sent Dan Taylor, creator of the comic book Super Hero Happy Hour for the comic company Geek-Punk, a cease and desist letter.

  While Taylor retitled the book Hero Happy Hour to avoid litigation, it would be interesting to see whether the trademark would hold up if anyone were to actually litigate the matter with Marvel and DC.

  IN FANTASTIC FOUR #52, published in 1966, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced the Black Panther, the first black superhero. T’Challa is the chief of the Panther tribe and also the ruler of the fictional African country Wakanda. His ceremonial title is the Black Panther. He wears an all-black costume with a panther mask and is a skilled fighter and one of the smartest men on planet Earth.

  In 1968 T’Challa left Wakanda for a time to become a member of the superhero team the Avengers and to live in the United States under an assumed name to see what living as a typical American would be like. Eventually, he left the Avengers to return to rule his kingdom.

  The Black Panther debuted in early 1966. In October of the same year, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. The group, which was initially designed to protect African American neighborhoods from police brutality, radicalized as time went on, as Newton and Seale’s vision of “Power to the People!” split with other party members’ view that the group should be about “Black Power!”

  While this was going on, the Marvel comic book character continued to appear in the pages of The Avengers, but when he left the book in the early 1970s, Roy Thomas felt it would be prudent for Marvel to change T’Challa’s name to something other than Black Panther. In Fantastic Four #119, the Thing and the Human Torch get caught up in an international problem when T’Challa, who is in pursuit of some bad guys, gets arrested in Rudyarda, a stand-in for South Africa. When Ben and Johnny free T’Challa, they are unprepared to hear him exclaim, as he knocks out a pair of guards, “You have done enough, Torch. Do not seek to do all of my fighting for me. Some things, after all, are best left to—the Black Leopard!”

  When the Thing questions the name change, T’Challa explains that he plans on someday returning to the United States, and when he does, he knows that Black Panther has political connotations, and while “I neither condemn nor condone those who have taken up the name—but T’Challa is a law to himself. Hence, the new name—a minor point, at best, since the panther is a leopard.”

  The name change did not last that long, and by the next time T’Challa showed up in a comic he was being called the Black Panther again. It probably had something to do with the Black Panther Party really coming apart a bit during the early 1970s. If it had remained more of a cohesive, active unit, it is likely that Marvel would have continued to distance itself from it, but by the early 1970s it was more or less nonexistent, as far as a serious radical party goes. The Black Panther, meanwhile, has had a few series since then, including a current ongoing title, in which he has taken the X-Man Storm as his wife and the new queen of Wakanda.

  LUKE CAGE, HERO for Hire was a Marvel comic that was one of the first books to star an African American superhero. Carl Lucas was thrown into prison as a young man for a crime he did not commit.

  He agreed to participate in some experiments in exchange for his parole. The experiments were nominally designed to help cure illnesses but instead resulted in Lucas gaining skin that was bulletproof and becoming a great deal stronger. After being cheated out of his parole, Lucas decided to escape from prison, and once on the outside, he took the name Luke Cage and made himself available as a superhero for hire (although he usually turned down payment when it came to that point).

  After a while Marvel decided to help the book’s sales by giving Lucas an official superhero name, Power Man. This still did not help sales that much, so Marvel decided to team him up with a similarly low-selling title, the kung fu comic Iron Fist. Power Man and Iron Fist was a success, lasting six years.

  Luke Cage made an impact at Marvel, being its first comic starring an African American hero, but it also had an impact in an area outside of comics, namely in the world of acting.

  Aspiring actor Nicolas Coppola was concerned that wherever he went there were sneers and cries of nepotism because of his famous last name, courtesy of his uncle, the legendary film director Francis Ford Coppola. So the young Coppola decided to pick a stage name. He had always been a big fan of superheroes, ever since he learned how to read by reading comics, so he ended up taking the last name Cage, perhaps seeing something of himself in the streetwise hero. In later years, Cage would note that he also enjoyed the work of the avant-garde composer John Cage, and some people presume it was he whom Cage took his name from. But in recent years, Cage has made it clear that, while he enjoys the work of John Cage, it was Luke Cage that inspired his name.

  From the Marvel Comic adapted film Ghost Rider.

  Cage’s interest in comics did not end there. He put together an extensive comic collection, which he sold (after he married Lisa Marie Presley) for 1.6 million dollars. In addition, his son with his current wife, Alice Kim, is named Kal-El, after Superman’s Kryptonian name. Cage even played a superhero recently in the film version of Ghost Rider.

  AS NOTED EARLIER (on pages 140-41), Steve Englehart was a popular writer for Marvel who was not one to shy from controversial topics, including the story line he did for Doctor Strange during the early 1970s, which got so touchy that he felt it necessary to fake a letter from a minister to support himself!

  Doctor Strange was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and it tells the story of a rich and powerful surgeon named Stephen Strange who has a callous disregard for humanity. When a car accident causes his hands to shake too much to do surgery anymore, Strange searches for a hermit known as the Ancient One who could cure him. When he finds him, the Ancient One refuses to cure him but offers him an apprenticeship in the mystic arts. Strange refuses, but after discovering that the Ancient One’s current apprentice, Baron Mordo, is trying to kill the Ancient One, Strange’s humanity finally returns. He takes the apprenticeship so that he can learn enough magic to stop Mordo. A new man, Strange becomes the most powerful magician in the world, the Sorcerer Supreme, as it were, and dedicates his life to helping humanity.

  Englehart began work on the character in 1973, with artist Frank Brunner, in an epic story in which Doctor Strange follows around a being called Sise-Neg (genesis backward) who turns out to be God, and Strange is there when God creates the universe. When the issue was released, Stan Lee was frantic. Marvel needed to print a retraction to say the character was not God, just a god. Englehart and Brunner felt this would ruin the story, so they came up with a plan. Englehart happened to be traveling through Texas for one reason or another (a comic convention perhaps), so they created a fictional person, a Rev. Billingsley in Texas, who wrote a letter saying that a young boy in
his parish had given him the comic and the reverend felt it was the best comic he ever read!

  Marvel then told Englehart that he did not have to print the retraction. Instead, it was going to print the letter in the letters column as proof that the story was not offensive!

  NOT ONLY DID Luke Cage’s name have an effect on Nicolas Cage, but his superhero name, Power Man, led to a bit of an amusing spat between Marvel and DC over the word power.

  In 1964 Marvel introduced a new member of the Avengers, Wonder Man. He turned out to be a bad guy in disguise, but in the end he became a good guy, sacrificing his life to save the Avengers. Apparently, though, DC was miffed that Marvel was using the word wonder, because it felt that it took away from its character Wonder Woman. Wonder Man dies in the issue in question, so it was not a pressing matter, but Marvel agreed anyway not to have a character named Wonder Man.

  A decade later, Marvel gave Luke Cage his new superhero name, Power Man. A year later, though, former Marvel employee Gerry Conway introduced a new member of the DC’s All Star Super Squad—Power Girl, Superman’s cousin.