The world that Lee and Kirby created centered on the idea that human beings continued to evolve and some people were born with special powers that came to light when the person hit puberty. They reasoned that teenagers with amazing powers would delight young fans. Such mutants, like Cyclops, who shot laser beams from his eyes, and Jean Grey, who had telekinetic powers that enabled her to move objects at will, attended Professor Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. There they learned to harness their abilities and build on them for the good of humankind.
The X-Men series enabled Lee to explore the alienated feelings that many teens experienced, while also providing the group with kinship via their relationship with Professor Xavier, who provided a father figure for them. The school turned into an extended family for the youths, many of whom had faced discrimination for having abilities that “regular” humans did not understand. Their powers were a blessing and a curse. Only the wise counsel of Professor X and their experiences battling evil as a team could provide them with a semblance of normality, which always seemed fleeting.
Running from 1963 to 1970, X-Men never really generated strong sales, despite the high hopes Lee had for it. He and Kirby faced tremendous pressure to work on the comics that did sell, so when the artist asked for a replacement, Lee granted his request. Later, the writer moved himself off the book to concentrate on better-selling titles.
Once the superhero business took off, Lee created a system that centralized his control over nearly every aspect of the creative side of the comic books division. Some of these work responsibilities were the continuation of what he had been doing in art, editorial direction, and general management, but other aspects grew out of necessity, since Marvel changed as it became more popular. Lee may not have been trained to be a manager or talent scout, but his years in the business honed these skills.
Lee not only knew when to move an artist onto a different piece of work, like the critical decision to replace Kirby with Ditko on the early Spider-Man efforts, but he also respected the freelance artists who served as the backbone of the comic book world. He recognized talent and assembled a crew of artists to infuse Marvel with a new spirit. The superhero comics married the art and writing in a way that the business hadn’t seen before. Strong freelance artists served as visual partners for the snappy dialogue and personality traits that he and other writers used to differentiate the company.
Lee’s unique ability was to mirror the voice and style of the early 1960s and bring it into comic books. As a result, Marvel readers get the humor and satire that actor Peter Sellers brought to The Pink Panther (1963) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) while also appreciating the full-throttle heroic characters, like Ian Fleming’s James Bond, whose action-packed films like Goldfinger (1964) encompassed a mix of sophistication, violence, and superhero-like deeds. Popular culture was changing. Lee found a groove with realistic superheroes who balanced great power with existential angst, an idea surging through mainstream media. He explained:
We try to write them well, we try to draw them well; we try to make them as sophisticated as a comic book can be. . . . The whole philosophy behind it is to treat them as fairy tales for grown ups and do the kind of stories that we ourselves would want to read.12
As editor and art director, Lee guided the voice and style of the company by working with artists and writers he trusted. When he found a person who possessed first-rate abilities, Lee deliberately indoctrinated the artist or writer into the company’s distinctive process. For example, Lee quickly realized the beauty in the artwork of George Tuska, a stylist who some insiders felt had the most unique ability in all of comic books. It did not take long for Tuska to become one of Lee’s favorites. According to Daredevil artist Gene Colan, “Stan always would hold [Tuska’s] work up as the criteria of how he wanted the other artists to draw.” This kind of management style enabled Marvel to be distinctive, yet also gave his artists a template that emphasized the kind of work he needed done, and completed quickly.13
In a business that could often be cold and ruthless, Lee cultivated talent. He had to do so, since Marvel lagged well behind DC Comics, its rival perched at the top. He needed talented freelancers for his vision of producing quality comic books that people would hold to a higher standard to work, so Lee took chances on young artists and writers.
At the start of his career, for example, Colan could not get into DC, which had locked down its talent and locked out others who wanted in. For the venerable industry leader, he simply did not have enough experience. Colan recalls, “Stan could see something in my work that no one else could see. . . . That’s what really got me started, Stan’s faith in my ability. Although it wasn’t completely there at the time, I was too young and had a lot to learn.”14 The other harsh reality staring Lee in the face was the relentless publishing schedule that placed a real premium on not just speed, but efficient speed.
For artists who expected to get committed to a specific script (or were used to that treatment at other comics and magazine firms), Lee’s style changed their outlook. Colan remembered Lee giving the artists “such unprecedented freedom,” which translated to happier artists. “I’d talk with Stan about a plot over the phone, and I’d tape record his whole idea—it’d just be a few sentences.” Lee would tell him: “This is what I want in the beginning, the middle, and what I want in the end . . . the rest is up to you.” For Colan and the other trusted freelancers, this set a precedent. “I had all the characters work for me, what they looked like was up to me—except those that were already established. But whatever I did, I could do.”15
Despite his growing public persona that turned him into the face of comic books for the general public, the day-to-day Lee understood the volatility of the market and its consequences. As a result, many artists grew into big Lee supporters. The camaraderie that developed had important ramifications: they worked long hours to meet the company’s needs, but Lee rewarded them by keeping steady work coming their way. Colan, for example, spoke about the grueling hours necessary to produce two complete pages a day, which then translated to about two full books per month. Maintaining this schedule took much longer than forty hours per week. The artistic freedom represented by the Lee method, then, balanced the physical necessities.
The core group of freelance writers Lee took under his wing received a master class in comic book writing. Dennis O’Neil, a former journalist who started his comic book career as a staff writer at Marvel and later became widely known for his work on Daredevil, Batman, and Green Lantern, explains, “That first year working for Marvel, my job was to, in effect, imitate Stan.” For the young writer and his colleagues, the message was clear and direct: “Stan’s style really was Marvel.”16
For O’Neil, Roy Thomas, and the other writers, Lee served as a commanding general, but with a level of benevolence that most driven leaders do not possess. He didn’t spend a lot of free time mingling with his staff—primarily based on age difference—but their admiration ran deep because they really were the first of Lee’s “true believers.” O’Neil says, “I learned the basics. I learned the basics by imitating Stan, and he was, by a huge margin, the best guy to imitate back then.” For O’Neil, they did revolutionary work and under the guidance and training of the industry’s pioneer: “The best comic book writer in the world.”17
Lee’s eye for talent, though, is clear, seeing what the writers and artists he commissioned would later go on to do in the business. In the years that Marvel began its ascent on the backs of the characters Lee, Kirby, Ditko and others created, the company served as a kind of comic book university, teaching the next generation how to build and expand what would become famous as the “Marvel Method.” The new style of creating a comic book actually grew out of Lee’s determination to keep freelance artists working. If they had to wait around while he finished writing a script, they were essentially losing money.
Marvel’s success with superheroes upped the pressure on everyone in the creative process to perfor
m at a faster rate, even Lee, who neared the limits of how quickly a person could write. He famously hired three secretaries and would dictate stories to them in order, running through one as the other two typed out the notes.
“In the beginning, I was writing almost all of the stories for Marvel. I couldn’t keep up,” Lee said. Comic book production demanded that all the various creators be kept busy at all times. For the freelance artists the need was much more basic: if you aren’t drawing pages, you aren’t getting paid. Lee developed a way to keep them active. He remembers that they would pace around after they dropped off their work, always wanting more. Too often Lee simply had no way to keep up with the demand, so he changed the system: “I couldn’t stop what I was doing . . . [instead] I would tell him generally what I wanted. He would go home and draw it any way he wanted, bring the illustrations back to me, and then I would put in the dialogue and the captions.”18
Without really planning a new system for creating comic books, Lee came up with the Marvel Method or, as he explained, it “happened purely through need.” The process played on the strengths of Lee’s freelance artists. He recalled: “These guys thought like movie directors. They were really visual storytellers.” As a result, Lee could give them lots of latitude to interpret what he wanted from a quick story conference or brief phone discussion. “When I would give them a plot, they knew how to break it down—how to begin it, how to end it, where to put the interesting parts.” When the artists missed the mark, Lee discovered that he could amplify the artwork with sound effects or extra dialogue. “It started as an emergency measure—it’s the only way to keep these guys busy—but I realized that you get better stories that way.”19
The unimaginable successes Marvel experienced in the early 1960s took place as Lee and Kirby cemented their creative bond. It put Marvel’s future directly on their shoulders. The most logical and straightforward aspect of their relationship centered on mutual respect. Later, it grew convoluted. There were inherent difficulties, certainly, even as they worked on the characters that would serve as the foundation of the Marvel cosmos. In the 1960s, Kirby worked for and reported to Lee, even though he had been Lee’s boss when the writer/editor started as a teenage office boy. Though their roles were reversed, the truth was they were dependent on one another.
Perhaps even more pointedly, neither realized the immense frustration each secretly held. They both detested many facets of the comic book industry and its seemingly continuous boom-and-bust financial cycles. Lee and Kirby were friends and had a long professional history, but their friendship did not carry over to the point where they would share intimate details about their hopes and dreams. If either had actually opened up to the other in this fashion, it might not have changed the way their relationship unfolded, but it might have enabled them to see that they had more in common than they ever believed.
Clearly they needed each other as professionals. After decades of keeping the comic book division of Goodman’s empire alive, Lee recognized talent and knew Kirby was one of the best pencilers in comics. As editorial and art director, he decided that Kirby’s style would serve as the company’s signature style, just as his own writing became the de facto voice. Artist Gil Kane, who worked for Marvel on and off for decades, most memorably drawing many of their covers in the 1970s, recalled:
Jack’s point of view and philosophy of drawing became the governing philosophy of the entire publishing company and, beyond the publishing company, of the entire field. . . . They would get artists, regardless of whether they had done romance or anything else and they taught them the ABCs, which amounted to learning Jack Kirby. . . . Jack was like Holy Scripture and they simply had to follow him without deviation. That’s what was told to me, that’s what I had to do. It was how they taught everyone to reconcile all those opposing attitudes to one single master point of view.20
The entire Marvel line revolved around the Kirby style. For example, Jim Steranko passed the Marvel employment test by inking two of Kirby’s penciled pages for S.H.I.E.L.D. He then worked with Kirby on three Nick Fury issues as a kind of apprenticeship. According to writer Chris Gavaler, “Becoming the Marvel house style seems to have required Kirby to regularize his layouts, presumably so they could be more easily imitated. Variation and innovation are not qualities easily taught, and they do not produce a unified style across titles.”21 Yet, Steranko built his later reputation on irregular page layouts, which introduced art deco, postmodernism, and new-wave impulses into Marvel’s pages.
All DC could do, despite its own iconic superheroes, was try to keep pace with Marvel. By the time DC recovered—sort of—by producing its own colorful, exciting covers, the leap Marvel had taken created the foundation for Goodman’s firm to eventually take over the top spot in the comic book business. In the battle between Marvel and DC, fans were voting with their nickels, dimes, and quarters.
As a result, an innovative, colorful, and exciting character like Metamorpho, created by DC mainstays George Kashdan and Bob Haney in late 1964, seemed like a Marvel clone rather than a new superhero. But there was reason to think that DC simply attempted to mimic Marvel. The Metamorpho cover (The Brave and the Bold #57) mirrored the kind of language that Lee popularized, exclaiming: “See the amazing powers of the world’s most fantastic new hero.” The book also used dynamic imagery and colors, yet Marvel had already created a beachhead in the war over the comics fans would determine to be “hot.” It took some time for the upstart to displace the market leader, but few doubted the excitement that Lee and Kirby created down on Madison Avenue. Once Marvel had a couple hit titles on the books, Lee wanted to add to its roster to keep the forward progress. “I was like a crapshooter rolling one great pass after another,” Lee said. “You just don’t stop when you’re on a winning streak.”22
In the back of his mind, Lee believed that the superhero boom would eventually crash, just like all the other cycles he had experienced. As a result, he moved fast to generate new titles and new characters to capitalize on the trend. He kept his freelancers hopping, driven by his own seemingly endless supply of optimism and energy. Under relentless publishing deadlines, Lee had to live and breathe the constant balance of creativity and commerce, artwork versus commodity. Under his leadership, Marvel would spend the rest of the decade solidifying its universe.
CHAPTER 9
MARKETING THE MARVEL UNIVERSE
“FACE FRONT!”
Not subtle or paternal, Stan Lee’s demand that readers snap to attention kicked off the “Marvel Bullpen Bulletins” a feature page that ran in the back of all the December 1965 issues. It replaced the “Merry Marvel Bullpen Page,” which had debuted earlier in August. Filled with “news” and “gossip,” along with a checklist of current issues for sale with synopses, the yellow shadowboxes quickly became a familiar mainstay for Marvel readers.
No matter where comic book readers lived or whether they could even envision what the Marvel headquarters might look like, the bulletins made them feel like a part of the family. Some readers might gravitate to the insider perspective to see who inked a particular magazine or to find out the latest scoop on an artist’s personal life. Others yearned for the merchandise offers, like the Spider-Man or Dr. Strange T-shirt that a kid could get by mail for just $1.50. Certainly more than a few young readers viewed the missives as personal letters from Lee, the coolest guy in the country.
Regardless of why comic book buyers loved the Bullpen Bulletins, the page showed off Lee in all his glory. On one hand, the notes gave him a place to really craft his voice as the main Marvelite. At the same time, the columns demonstrated his savvy strategic sense—Lee knew that deepening audience engagement would result in greater dedication to Marvel’s books. From reading thousands of letters, the editor knew that his interaction, which seemed personal, increased sales.
The voice that emerged became a hallmark of Marvel Comics in the 1960s. “It was a little thing,” Lee said, “but it was trying to give a feeling of warmth, a feeling
of friendliness. . . . It seemed to work.”1 For teens and college-aged fans, the wink-wink, tongue-in-cheek tone spoke to their antiestablishment notions and seemed discernibly different from the voice they were used to hearing from adults. “It was all spontaneous,” Lee remembered. “When I was writing a story, I’d think of something. So I’d throw it in.”2 His success with superheroes and their angst-ridden personas proved that if he trusted his instincts, good things would happen.
The chance to buy Marvel merchandise drew other readers to the Soapbox page. The cost was pretty meager at a buck or so, which seemed just within (or maybe outside) their reach. Just how many days of lunch money did a kid need to secret away in order to afford that Dr. Strange shirt? Others gravitated to the list of new members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club to see kids from all over the country who shared their same interest.
Most important, Lee’s Bullpen Bulletin gave him a forum to speak directly to all Marvel readers. The insider perspective turned Lee into the comic book nation’s favorite uncle. He described the thriving relationship with Marvel readers as “part of an ‘in’ thing” or that they were “sharing a big joke together and having a lot of fun with this crazy Marvel Universe.”3
With this singsong, chatty style, Lee turned up the wattage on his own celebrity status. The “Stan the Man” voice and personality came through in the dialogue of the comics and in the editorial content: “If I got a kick out of it, maybe a reader would, too,” he reasoned. “Even in writing the credits, I’d try to make them humorous, because I enjoyed doing that.”4 Lee also awarded select fans who wrote intriguing letters or otherwise caught his fancy a “Marvel No-Prize,” literally no prize for their effort. He sent them an empty envelope, even mockingly stamping “Handle with Care” on the outside. The sillier he acted, the more fans gobbled up the shtick. More importantly, sales continued to climb.
Stan Lee Page 15