Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (19 page)

Amazingly, this was all conceived without the help of psychedelics. “He was one of those guys who was militant about not altering his consciousness,” said Steve Englehart. “Gerber’s weirdness came directly from his id.” In his early twenties, in St. Louis, Gerber had been on the sidelines of hippie culture, an observer. “I was always too academic, too conscientiously critical, to throw myself into it totally. There seemed to be a certain shallowness of philosophy, somehow, and beyond that, even, there was a lot of violence associated with that culture.” This outsider perspective meant that no ideology, left, right, or center, was safe. The Foolkiller, religious-nut vigilante with a “ray of purity” gun; Holden Crane, an obnoxious, rhetoric-spewing student radical; and F. A. Schist, a money-grubbing industrialist—they each met an early doom at Gerber’s hands. Where McGregor’s writing was passionately serious, Gerber was a born satirist, almost helplessly lampooning every segment of the population. Filling in on an issue of
Captain America
, he created the Viper, a bad guy whose day job in advertising had left him bitter. “For years,” shouted the Viper, “I labored in anonymity, selling other men’s products, making other men’s fortunes—laying waste to the values and environment of a nation from the privacy of my office . . . now I’ve left that grey flannel world behind!” After all the relentlessly earnest civic lectures of the past few years, readers encountering Gerber’s weird societal critiques were inclined to do a double take—was this for real?

Before long, he was trying his hand at
Iron Man
and the
Sub-Mariner
, and
Daredevil
, where one story line featured
Rolling Stone
editor Jann Wenner and an angry-hippie villain named Angar who blasted people with bad trips and primal screams. In
Marvel Two-in-One
, a series that teamed the Thing with various guest stars, Gerber demonstrated that he’d staked out his own corner of the Marvel universe, where he could have Daredevil and Wundarr coexist. Still, Gerber was at his best when he was freed from the constraints of closely watched properties.

When it became clear that Gerber would make a better full-time freelance writer than staffer—his sleep apnea led to restless nights, and so he regularly dozed off at his desk—McGregor welcomed a revolving door of proofreading partners: first Tony Isabella, and then Doug Moench, from Chicago, and then David Anthony Kraft, a seventeen-year-old from Georgia.
*
Each of them was a writer as well, and each of them shared an understanding: you leave alone my stuff, and I’ll leave alone yours.

R
oy Thomas’s hands-off, see-what-sticks approach had ushered in Marvel’s most unpredictable—and often downright subversive—era. Young creators, eager to refract the superhero world through a prism of boomer values, kept parading through. “It wasn’t a corporate environment,” said one former Cadence Industries lawyer who’d occasionally visit the offices. “I remember stepping over people sitting in the hall, smoking pot, ‘getting inspiration.’ ”

Artist Jim Starlin, a Detroit-raised greaser and Vietnam veteran who’d survived a helicopter crash in Sicily and explosions in Southeast Asia, created unsmiling, violent superheroes as a form of “anger management” and stuck them in his freelance work. Steve Englehart, who’d buried his best friend from basic training, marinated the stories he wrote in lefty politics. Where Stan Lee, a master fence-sitter, had managed to always stake out a safe middle ground, Starlin, Englehart, and their peers couldn’t help but have stronger, and angrier, convictions.

Of course, the new guys weren’t going to be allowed anywhere near
Amazing Spider-Man
or
Fantastic Four
or
The Incredible Hulk
or
The Mighty Thor
—those best-selling titles were reserved for Thomas himself, or for wunderkind Gerry Conway. Those comics were going to stick to their formulas, professionally executed to the point of monotony—and there was no longer any doubt that that was exactly how Stan wanted it. Conway learned this the hard way.

Casting for a way to shake up
Amazing Spider-Man
, Thomas and Conway had discussed the idea of killing off a member of the supporting cast. Aunt May—elderly, generically kindly, and seemingly always at death’s door anyway—was the logical nominee. But when John Romita got wind of the plans, he suggested a different victim: Peter Parker’s girlfriend, the lovely Gwen Stacy. Conway thought it was a stroke of genius.

“She was a nonentity, a pretty face,” he said. “She brought nothing to the mix. It made no sense to me that Peter Parker would end up with a babe like that who had no problems. Only a damaged person would end up with a damaged guy like Peter Parker. And Gwen Stacy was perfect! It was basically Stan fulfilling Stan’s own fantasy. Stan married a woman who was pretty much a babe—Joan Lee was a very attractive blond who was obviously Stan’s ideal female. And I think Gwen was simply Stan replicating his wife, just like Sue Storm was a replication of his wife. And that’s where his blind spot was. The amazing thing was that he created a character like Mary Jane Watson, who was probably the most interesting female character in comics, and he never used her to the extent that he could have. Instead of Peter Parker’s girlfriend, he made her Peter Parker’s
best friend
’s girlfriend. Which is so wrong, and so stupid, and such a waste. So killing Gwen was a totally logical if not inevitable choice.”

Thomas then cleared the plans with Lee. “He was okay with it to the extent that Stan paid attention to anything,” said Conway. “At that time he was primarily interested in expanding the line, asserting his authority as publisher to the higher-ups that owned Marvel, and promoting his own brand and his own career. Once he stopped writing a given comic he stopped thinking about it. And so when he stopped writing
Spider-Man
, even though he had a proprietary interest in it, really, it was ‘Yeah, whatever you want to do.’ ”

Conway, Romita, and Gil Kane worked out a story in which Green Goblin kidnapped Gwen Stacy and threw her off the top of the George Washington Bridge; in a perverse twist, someone added a “snap!” to the panel in which Spider-Man’s web catches Gwen, implying that it was not the fall but whiplash from the catch that caused her neck to snap, that Spider-Man was implicated in the death.

The readership started hyperventilating as soon as the issue hit stands.

“Stan didn’t think about it until he went to a college campus and got yelled at by fans,” Conway said. “Instead of acting like he was in charge, he said, ‘Oh, they must have done it while I was out of town—I would never have done that!’ The pretty horrendous backlash that I received from the fan press, and the lack of support I got from Stan, who said we did it behind his back, had a huge impact on me in terms of my emotional state. He basically threw me to the wolves. This was the first time a beloved character had been killed off in comics. I couldn’t go to conventions.”

“The idea that the three of us together, or even separately, would have tried to sneak in the death of Gwen Stacy without Stan approving it is just so absurd,” said Roy Thomas. “Besides, he was never out of town that long.” It came back to what Stan had told Roy Thomas, years before: he didn’t want to fix what wasn’t broken; he only wanted “the
illusion
of change.”

During a speaking engagement at Penn State, Lee was again surprised to learn of a character death; this time, Len Wein had killed a member of
The Incredible Hulk
’s supporting cast. “I told them not to kill too many people,” Lee assured the crowd, and promised that Gwen Stacy would return.

J
ust as Conway was getting used to the idea that he couldn’t tweak Marvel’s intellectual property, he was also asked to whip up some merchandising synergy. After toy company Azrak-Hamway offered Marvel a licensing deal for a Spider-Man car, Lee handed down a decree to create something called the Spider-Mobile. Conway thought the idea was ridiculous. Why have a hero who could swing through the city on webs get stuck in New York City traffic? In
Amazing Spider-Man
#126, Conway, annoyed, had a pair of sleazy suits approach Spider-Man and ask him to drive their prototype, for publicity. They looked a little bit like Lee and Thomas, and the address on the business card they handed Spider-Man was 575 Madison Avenue—Marvel’s address.

Conway had hardly been the picture of the rebel—while Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart were trying to translate their psychedelic experiences into four-color adventures, Conway blamed Norman Osborn’s relapse into his Green Goblin identity (and his subsequent murder of Gwen Stacy) on his son Harry’s bad LSD trips. But Conway began sliding a patina of political content into his work. Drawing inspiration from Don Pendleton’s popular
Executioner
novels, Conway created a new character called the Punisher. Like Pendleton’s Mack Bolan, the Punisher was a Vietnam War veteran who exacted revenge on the mob after it murdered members of his family. But where Bolan—lusty, unrepentantly vicious, and charmless—was cast as a hero, Conway framed the Punisher as a paranoid and dangerous, if somewhat sympathetic, antagonist. It was the vigilante adventure as cautionary tale.

Conway reserved his greatest scorn not for Doctor Octopus or the Kingpin but for newly created bad guys who’d sold out their left-wing compatriots, like Ethiopian supervillain Moses Magnum (who, a caption revealed, had once made a deal with Mussolini), the onetime South American revolutionary known as the Tarantula (who betrayed his fellow rebels to a dictator’s army), and the French villain Cyclone, a NATO engineer who’d begun developing weapons on the side.

These flourishes may have sailed over the heads of
Spider-Man
’s adolescent readership. But soon after Stan Lee rapped his knuckles for writing Gwen Stacy’s death, the twenty-year-old Conway found the next-best way to traumatize legions of twelve-year-olds, this time in the pages of
The Fantastic Four
: divorce proceedings for Reed and Sue Storm. Decades later, novelist Rick Moody would describe the story line in
The Ice Storm,
his roman à clef about familial disintegration: “Sue Richards, nee Storm, the Invisible Girl, had been estranged from her husband, Reed Richards. With Franklin, their mysteriously equipped son, she was in seclusion in the country. She would return only when Reed learned to understand the obligations of family, those paramount bonds that lay beneath the surface of his work.”
*
(They would later reconcile.)

J
ust as the furor of Gwen Stacy was starting to die down, Roy Thomas saw Howard, the talking duck that Gerber and artist Val Mayerik had placed in
Adventure into Fear
. The book’s scary vibe, he thought, was compromised by the inclusion of a funny animal. “Get it out of there as fast as you can,” he told Gerber. In his next appearance, Howard made a clumsy step off a rock and fell into oblivion.

The fans reacted instantly. “The office was flooded with letters,” Gerber recalled. “There was the one wacko who sent a duck carcass from Canada, saying, ‘Murderers, how dare you kill off this duck?’ There was the incident at a San Diego Comics Convention where somebody asked Roy whether Howard would ever be coming back, and the entire auditorium stood up and applauded. Stan was being asked about it every place he went on the college circuit.”
*

This time, the fans were on the side of the writer. Marvel would bring Howard back.

“I
don’t have time to edit,” Roy had told Steve Englehart on an early assignment, “so we’re hiring you to write this book. If you can turn it in on time and can make it sell, you can keep doing it. If you can’t, then we’ll fire you and hire somebody else.”

In this sink-or-swim spirit, Jim Starlin was tapped to plot and draw an issue of
Iron Man
, a comic that his roommate, Mike Friedrich, had been writing for six months. Figuring he might never get another shot, he convinced Friedrich that they should stuff the issue with the characters Starlin had dreamed up while taking psych classes at a Detroit community college after his Navy stint.
*
Thomas was pleased, and paired Starlin with Steve Gerber for the following issue; however, Lee happened to see that story, deemed the results terrible, and immediately removed Starlin from the title. Then Starlin and Alan Weiss were offered a quick-turnaround art job on the final issue of
The Claws of the Cat
. For two days, Starlin’s girlfriend kept them supplied with wine and pot; in a celebratory mood, they filled the margins with smart-alecky comments and in-jokes. By the night before deadline, though, the fading duo had to recruit a third artist, who snuck in his own unsolicited suggestion to the narration:
The Cat gets an ovarian cyst!
After the pages came back to Linda Fite to add her dialogue, she went straight to Lee and complained. The next day, Starlin got an angry call from the office.

But Thomas thought Starlin had promise. He offered him a chance to work on
Captain Marvel,
a faltering title that Thomas had written himself, before editorial duties pulled him away. The conveniently named Mar-Vell, a warrior of the alien Kree race, had defied his own people to protect Earth; now he worked in tandem with Rick Jones, the former teenage sidekick to the Hulk, who had blossomed into an annoying wannabe rock star. The characters had agonizingly bland personalities—but that turned out to be just the blank slate Starlin needed. At first, as he found his footing, he larded the comic with guest stars and big fight scenes, just to make sure it would sell enough to keep going. Then he got adventurous.