Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (13 page)

The one new title that Kirby did contribute to was
Not Brand Echh
, in which Marvel, showing just how hip it was, satirized its very own characters. Five of the first seven issues of
Not Brand Echh
provided a rare showcase for Kirby’s surprisingly daffy sense of humor. By the end of 1967, though, he’d done the last of his wacky cartooning for Marvel. Maybe things just didn’t seem so funny anymore.

No one could have known it at the time, but the first flush of the Marvel Age was coming to an end. That winter, leaving a Christmas party, Stan Lee jumped up and clicked his heels in the air—and then fell, breaking his ankle. He spent the last weeks of 1967 in bed.

T
he popularity of the
Batman
TV show had faded, and with it the idea that publishers could cash in on a comic-book craze. Harvey’s Thriller line and Archie’s Mighty Comics both fell by the wayside. The American Comics Group folded entirely. Most of Charlton’s best talent followed editor Dick Giordano when he was hired at DC Comics. Tower Comics started to crumble, plagued by poor distribution that was, according to Wally Wood, a result of Independent News’ bullying tactics toward wholesalers. (Wood would commemorate the company’s demise with a fanzine cover that depicted Marvel’s Daredevil throwing Tower Comics’ Dynamo off the side of a building.) Myron Fass, who’d so proudly refused a $6,000 settlement the previous year, now agreed to drop the
Captain Marvel
suit for $4,500. It was still a good deal. “He was selling lousy, anyway,” Fass said.

DC Comics was going through its own changes. In the summer of 1967, president Jack Liebowitz had begun negotiations to merge with the Kinney National conglomerate, a business-gobbling behemoth that was eyeing not just
Superman
and
Batman
, but also DC’s lucrative Independent News, which distributed
Playboy
and
Family Circle
. By the time the deal was completed, nearly a year later, the editorial staff at DC had been thoroughly upended. While DC’s forty-eight titles had a monthly circulation of 7 million, Marvel, limited to a third of the output, was pulling in 6 million. DC set out on a mission to compete with Marvel for the hip-youth dollar. Work started drying up for older longtime writers and artists, a process that accelerated when a clutch of veteran writers started piping up about profit-sharing and health benefits. (Ironically, one of those outgoing writers had written a seven-page memo excoriating DC’s antiquated, by-the-numbers comics, and warning that Stan Lee would “eventually outstrip us.”) Carmine Infantino, the artist who’d been coaching DC on how to liven up its covers, became editorial director and replaced most of the editors under him. Now many of their comics were being written by Denny O’Neil and Steve Skeates—both of whom had been fired by Stan Lee. Skeates sneaked drug references into
Aquaman
, and briefly collaborated on
Hawk & Dove
with Steve Ditko (now also at DC) until their political beliefs proved irreconcilable.

The most notable new arrival at DC was Neal Adams, whose painstaking renderings were the closest thing to photo-realism that comics had ever seen. Like Jim Steranko (virtually the only other comic artist under the age of forty), Adams was a confident young man who utilized his background in commercial illustration to create innovative page layouts. Adams’s focus on hyperarticulated anatomy and facial expressions—furrowed brows, curled lips in mid-sentence expressions, foreshortened, pointing fingers—was the flip side to Steranko’s streamlined design.
*
Adams was the most visible break from tradition at DC, and his influence—and Infantino’s mandates—soon changed the look of just about everyone’s art at the company. The hard-core fans—the letters-column regulars, the fanzine writers, the burgeoning conventioneers—were ecstatic.

Although this hubbub did not have much impact on DC’s bottom line, it didn’t go unnoticed at Marvel, where more time was now spent meeting about cover designs. DC was still the biggest fish, and Marvel was the fastest-growing fish, but the pond was running out of water, and every splash counted. Even as Marvel’s sales gained on DC’s, even as it continued turning a profit, its rate of increase was slowing.

Martin Goodman kept a close watch on every trend. He had seen bubbles burst before. As ABC prepared the premiere of Saturday morning cartoons of
Spider-Man
and
Fantastic Four
, Goodman took out ads in news dealer trades trumpeting Marvel’s success with don’t-miss-out exclamations:

THE HOUSE OF MARVEL CONTINUES TO GROW . . .

. . . And we do mean GROW! Like, from 22,530,000 copies sold in 1963—to 27,709,000 in 1964—to 34,000,000 in 1965—to a mind-staggering
40,500,000
in 1965! But that’s just for OPENERS! We’re on our way to over
50,000,000
circulation!

Goodman’s magazines, single copy sales: 25 million

+

Marvel Comics, single copy sales: 40 million

=

65 million single copy sales every year

OVER 175,000 GOODMAN PUBLICATIONS SOLD EVERY DAY

Independent News—under Kinney ownership, and with a new perspective on exploiting profits—finally allowed Marvel to begin to expand its line. After years being held hostage to the distributor’s limitations, the superheroes still ghettoized as ten-page features in
Tales of Suspense
,
Strange Tales
, and
Tales to Astonish
would finally get their own full-length titles.
Captain America
;
Iron Man
;
Doctor Strange
;
Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
;
The Incredible Hulk
; and
Prince Namor, The Sub-Mariner
began rolling onto racks in the early months of 1968, joined by
Captain Marvel
and even a new, conspicuously derivative war title,
Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders
.
The Silver Surfer
,
Ka-Zar
, and
Dr. Doom
, it was announced, would soon follow.

Of these titles, Lee would script only
Captain America
and
The Silver Surfer
. Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich had taken on more responsibilities as associate editor and assistant editor, respectively, and while Lee was still a very hands-on boss for three days a week, the roles of showman and emissary increasingly dominated his time. He’d taken to writing half-serious editorials on the “Bullpen Bulletins” page, for something he called “Stan’s Soapbox.” Aside from a handful of generalized denunciations of bigotry, it mostly served as one more platform to hype the goods. “I guess I treated the whole thing like a big advertising campaign,” he said later. “I wanted to give the product—which was Marvel Comics, and myself in a way—a certain personality.” He grew a beard to complement the toupee he’d starting wearing. He posed for a snapshot in his office; eight-by-ten glossies—“Excelsior!” he signed at the bottom—were printed and sold from the classified ads in the backs of the comics. “Collect an entire series of Bullpen blow-ups,” the ad shouted. “Watch for our next nutty announcement!”

No further Bullpen photos were published.

L
ee started work on
The Silver Surfer
. He and Kirby had already attempted one solo adventure for the character, intended at first as its own comic but shuffled into a
Fantastic Four
annual. They’d disagreed about the direction of the character. Now, instead of hiring Jack Kirby—who’d created the Surfer on his own—Lee went to John Buscema, and continued to push the character away from the original concept of Spock-like alien coldness. Pining for the spaceways but grounded on our planet by Galactus, the Surfer was forever hurling himself in vain against the earth’s atmosphere, Sisyphus recast as a fallen angel. So he became a hyperempathetic wanderer, encountering human foibles and spouting homilies with puppy-dog eyes. (Like the X-Men and Spider-Man, he was misunderstood and feared by the citizenry; he just got tearier about it.) Buscema’s imagery was grand and imposing, with monumental panels that ran a quarter or a third of each page, but there was a lachrymose drudgery to the Surfer’s constant shoulder-hunching re-creations of
Le Penseur
.

Lee didn’t know it, but Kirby, anticipating involvement in the
Silver Surfer
series, had worked out a very different origin story of his own for the character, which he’d even started drawing. Frustrated, Kirby put the pages aside, and wondered what his career options were. Jack Schiff, the DC editor who’d been the reason for Kirby’s departure (and continued absence) from Marvel’s chief competitor, was no longer around. DC’s new editorial director, Carmine Infantino, who had known Kirby for years, got in touch. Maybe they could work something out. Or maybe, Kirby thought, he could finally get Goodman to improve the terms of his employment at Marvel.

Either way, he didn’t want to end up like the sixty-three-year-old proofreader working quietly at the corner desk at the Marvel offices, thrown a job because Lee couldn’t bear to see him so down on his luck, spat out by the industry he’d helped to build. Although Jerry Siegel didn’t bring it up with people, a swirl of whispers followed as he made his way in and out of the office:
That guy co-created Superman. DC Comics won’t even let him in their offices anymore
. Kirby refused to meet such a fate.

I
n June 1968, Martin Goodman’s lawyer was approached by a hyperfocused, five-foot-eight, cigar-chomping lawyer named Martin Ackerman, who ran a Manhasset, Long Island–based concern called the Perfect Film & Chemical Corporation. Ackerman was a minor-league version of the new moguls that were beginning to gobble businesses in the 1960s, men like Gulf + Western’s Charlie Bluhdorn, ITT’s Harold Geneen, and Kinney National’s Steve Ross. But even a minor-league conglomerate was formidable: Perfect Film was itself a snowballing amalgam of photofinishing stores, pharmacies, and other smaller companies. Ackerman’s specialty was to buy properties, dismantle them, absorb what he liked, and sell off the rest. (
The Gallagher Report
, noting that he’d once been a major shareholder in a chain of Kansas cemeteries, nicknamed him “Marty the Mortician.”) In April, when Curtis Publishing was floundering, Perfect had swooped in with a $5 million loan—with the understanding that Ackerman would become Curtis’s president. “Good evening,” he’d addressed the Curtis staff in his first meeting with them, “I’m Marty Ackerman. I am 36 years old and I am very rich.” As president, he spun off the publishing company’s distribution arm, Curtis Circulation, and annexed it to Perfect Film. Of course, there was no better way to maximize a magazine distributor’s profits than to own some more publications to go with it, and that’s where Goodman’s Magazine Management came in. If comic books were part of the deal, well, that was fine, too.

M
artin Goodman was conflicted about selling the company, according to his son Iden. “It was a difficult thing for my dad to do. I think he felt, on one hand, extremely proud that he’d created this thing that could bring him so much money. And really pleased that he felt he could provide for a couple of generations of Goodmans through the sale of it. The business and golf and his family—that was really his life. He’d built this thing that was paying a lot of bills for a lot of people.” Once Goodman made up his mind, though, the sale happened quickly. He wanted everything in cash. Ackerman came back with an offer for just under $15 million—roughly the amount that the company pulled in annually in sales—and threw in some Perfect Film bonds. Goodman signed a contract to remain on board as Marvel’s publisher. His younger son, Chip, signed a contract as editorial director, with the idea that he’d eventually replace his retiring father as publisher.
One thing, though
, Ackerman said—
we need to know that Stan Lee, the public face of Marvel Comics, will stay, too
. So Goodman drew up a five-year contract for his star editor, with a provision for a raise. According to a member of Goodman’s legal team, Lee was disappointed. “All the employees, Stan Lee included, didn’t understand why they didn’t get a significant proportion of the sales. Martin very quickly disabused them of that notion. I was shocked—Martin had taken all the risk publishing, they had taken none of the risk, and here they thought they should profit from the sale.” But what could Lee do about it? He signed in July. The next night, after dinner at the Goodman home, Goodman put his arm around his wife’s cousin. “Stan,” he said, “I’ll see to it that you and Joanie will never have to want for anything as long as you live.”

“W
e’re going to make a fortune in publishing,” Ackerman predicted. He spent $1.5 million on a corporate jet, and moved his office into a fancy Park Avenue spread that he termed “the Town House,” where he did business behind a polished antique desk. An oil painting of Ackerman clutching the
Wall Street Journal
hung in the foyer. Across town, though, in the cramped spaces of Marvel’s offices, where smudged pages were tacked up over yellow-painted walls, the divides between labor and management seemed greater than ever. Flo Steinberg had quit in the spring, when the Goodmans refused to raise her hourly wage. “They didn’t believe in giving raises to people in certain jobs,” she said, “because they could be so easily replaced.” In May, instead of a contract, or residuals, Jack Kirby had received a loan from Magazine Management, with a 6 percent interest rate. When Roy Thomas added a day to a vacation to elope with his girlfriend, he returned to a lecture from Lee and Brodsky and the news that they’d removed him from “Doctor Strange” and hired Archie Goodwin to replace him.