Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (27 page)

Jack Kirby—who recognized similarities between his
Fourth World
creations (Mark Moonrider, Darkseid, and the Source) and elements of
Star Wars
(Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and the Force)—also had ideas to spare. The contract he’d signed with Marvel called for him to essentially package entire comic books independently, choosing who would ink his work, and getting no interference from the New York office. “Once Jack came in,” said Gerry Conway, “the attitude Stan had was, ‘If Jack wants to be his own boss, that’s what he’s going to be. Just leave him to himself.’ So that was Jack’s own corner.”

Kirby’s
The Eternals
was another variation on the ancient-aliens-visited-earth themes that had also informed his creations of the Kree in
Fantastic Four
and the New Gods for DC. But Marvel was more interested in Kirby building on his old ideas, and there was editorial pressure for Kirby to include references to S.H.I.E.L.D., and the Thing and the Hulk. “We felt, or maybe Stan felt, it should have been connecting more with other books,” Archie Goodwin said of Kirby’s
Captain America
. “We wanted Jack to use some of the villains that were current in other books so the kids reading this book would read
Avengers
, and the kids reading
Avengers
would read this book. . . . I guess we figured it could only help sales. But Jack said he didn’t want to do it.” Kirby roundly ignored the story lines that directly preceded his own; he made almost no reference, in fact, to anything that had happened in Marvel’s history.

The hermetic distance that Kirby tried to keep from the rest of the Marvel Universe caused some problems. In
Captain America
, assistant editor Roger Stern had to rewrite a Kirby reference to a flying saucer being “the first alien space craft ever to visit the Earth,” a description that would discount scores of Marvel adventures and not a few of the characters. Rumors circulated that the
Captain America
letters pages, which were edited in the New York office, had been intentionally tilted toward negative feedback—some of it fabricated by members of the staff.
*

S
teve Lemberg, the music-biz entrepreneur who’d secured exclusive television and movie rights for the Marvel characters, never got further than the Carnegie Hall show and the Spider-Man rock record. Out in California, Motown’s Berry Gordy took an interest in Lemberg’s plans and set up several meetings with movie studios, but there was one problem that everyone kept stumbling over: budgets. “They did not have the technology to make the film we wanted to make,” Lemberg said. “It would have cost a fortune.”

Cadence Industries’ legal team eventually managed to extricate Marvel from Lemberg’s open-ended options. “There are still companies . . . which have rights of first refusal,” read one strategic memo, “but we won’t let that delay us any longer.” Marvel sold Steve Krantz the rights to film live-action Spider-Man and Hulk movies, and a former Hollywood executive named Dan Goodman bought the rights for television in 1976. As the low-budget pilot was prepared for CBS with independent producer Chuck Fries, Lee found that his input was not encouraged. “I was supposedly the consultant,” he said, “but they really didn’t listen to me very much.”

Shortly afterward, Frank Price, the new head of Universal television, asked his son about the green monster on his sweatshirt, and decided that the Incredible Hulk would make good television. For $12,500, he secured the live-action television rights to twelve Marvel characters of his choice; as both Dan Goodman and Chuck Fries had done, Price took his pitch to CBS, preparing life-sized cardboard cutouts of the characters—including Doctor Strange, Captain America, the Human Torch, Ms. Marvel, and the Sub-Mariner—and arranging them around the network’s conference room. CBS agreed to finance two-hour pilots of eight of them, and in a matter of months
The Incredible Hulk
joined
Spider-Man
in production. For the first time in a decade, Marvel would be transmitted into American living rooms. Hopefully, the children in those living rooms would then buy some comic books.

Just in time, lifelines were being thrown to Marvel. The phenomenal success of the
Star Wars
movie translated into a sales bonanza for the tie-in comics, which went into multiple printings and pulled the company out of its immediate financial straits. On the heels of that triumph, the Kiss special sold more than half a million copies—unprecedented for a $1.50 comic publication. “For a while,” Gerber said, “they had one drawer for Kiss mail, and another drawer for all the fan mail on all the other Marvel books.”

T
here was also a lot of mail for
The X-Men
, for the first time in years. Claremont and Cockrum had carved out a corner of the Marvel Universe that was perfect for the blockbuster age, filled with plane, boat, and rocket ship crashes, and gleaming high-tech space odysseys that fell into place just as
Star Wars
fever started. But
The X-Men
had something else that played against the spectacle: intimacy. In their two years of collaboration, Claremont and Cockrum had already carefully defined their characters with familiar catchphrases, nicknames, and sound effects that would eventually turn into something like secret passwords for fans: “Mein Gott,” “fastball special,” “bub,” “muties,” “Elf,” “Bamf,” “Snikt!” Although the members of the X-Men were hardheaded individualists with diverse backgrounds, many of them flummoxed by American culture, they slowly came together as a surrogate family for one another. If Gerber’s Defenders were, as he’d said, an encounter group, Claremont and Cockrum’s X-Men were the members of a halfway house, where everyone tried to figure out how to live in close quarters without letting their emotional baggage get in the way.

It seemed that every issue brought major changes in the X-Men: death, departure, reunions, new costumes. But the biggest transformation was that of Jean Grey, aka Marvel Girl, who under Lee and Thomas had been a girly goof, the weak link of the team. “I don’t want to say anything bad against Stan,” Cockrum said, “but when he was creating the characters of the early ’60s, all the girl characters he created were simps—the housewife heroes . . . they were there to be looked at and rescued, mostly.”

And so Claremont and Cockrum proceeded to turn Marvel Girl into Phoenix, the most powerful female superhero in comics. After Jean Grey was believed dead in a plane crash, she reemerged with more power than she knew what to do with.
*
She had tapped into “the phoenix-force . . . a manifestation of a primal force of the universe which derives from the psyches of all living beings in the universe, and which therefore has limitless power.” Pretty soon she’d be blasting foes twelve miles away and opening portals into other worlds.

Claremont began drawing on his own interest in the occult and religion
*
—when an insane space emperor attempted to destroy the universe with something called the M’Kraan Crystal,
*
Phoenix partook in cosmic kabbalah tree-of-life rituals to defeat him. The
X-Men
was now the closest thing Marvel Comics had to the glorious mind-fryings of Englehart’s
Doctor Strange
or Starlin’s
Warlock
, only a year in the past but worlds away from the new, kid-friendly Marvel of
Nova
and
Godzilla
and
Dynomutt
.

Cockrum loved working on the book—and especially on the swashbuckling Nightcrawler, whom he considered an alter ego of sorts—but once he joined the Marvel staff as a cover designer, even the bimonthly pace of
The X-Men
was a struggle to maintain. When Marvel decided that the title was selling well enough to go on a monthly schedule, Claremont’s friend John Byrne began licking his chops: “I made it known at Marvel,” he said, “that men would die if Cockrum ever left it and it didn’t come to me.”

Jim Shooter had seen how well Byrne worked with Claremont and pushed them together on the Spider-Man-plus-a-monthly-guest comic
Marvel Team-Up
. When
Iron Fist
was canceled and combined with
Power Man
(the new name for black badass Luke Cage) in the black-and-white-buddies book
Power Man and Iron Fist
, Byrne and Claremont took over the art on that as well.

The speedy Byrne added
The Champions
and a few issues of
The Avengers
to his workload (
Marvel Team-Up
and
Power Man
) while he circled around an irritated Cockrum, who’d gotten wind of his intentions. “John was the heir apparent to that book and he was panting to take it over,” Cockrum said. “But every time he came to the Marvel offices, he pissed everybody off. I stayed on a little longer just to aggravate him.” Even after he left the book, Cockrum continued drawing
X-Men
covers, just to annoy Byrne.

After introducing the Shi’ar Imperial Army and the Starjammers—he later estimated drawing more than fifty individual characters in his final issue—Cockrum finally left in the middle of 1977, exhausted and behind deadline. John Byrne was happy to step in.

A
s the writer and editor of
Amazing Spider-Man
,
Incredible Hulk
,
Fantastic Four
, and
Thor
, four of Marvel’s biggest titles, Len Wein should have felt on top of the world. But he was quibbling with John Verpoorten, going into a rage over such minor details as, say, which letterers were being hired. He was challenging Chris Claremont and Tony Isabella on the way they used characters borrowed from his titles. “I had become obsessively involved with the books,” Wein recalled. “I was watching my books with such a hawk-like eye that I had no sense of perspective on this stuff anymore.” He arranged to write
Detective Comics
for DC. It wasn’t expressly forbidden in his contract; still, when Archie Goodwin and Stan Lee found out, they told him he’d have to write
Detective
under a pseudonym. DC begrudgingly agreed. But after a long weekend of thought, Wein decided “it was a lot simpler to make a clean break of it, and start all over, than to sit there working for both companies and have nobody like me. My emotional make-up is just fragile enough that I couldn’t cope with that for very long. So I came back to Marvel the following day and told Archie that I was going to leave.”

Stan Lee didn’t take the news well. He told Wein that he would never again work for Marvel.

I
f Kiss could sell, thought David Anthony Kraft, why not the Beatles? “Everyone was for it,” Kraft said, “except for Jim Galton, who had to approve it, because it was such a high-profile, expensive project, and he just didn’t get that the Beatles were
the Beatles
.”

Lee called Kraft into a meeting in Galton’s office and instructed him to make the pitch. “I had long hair and I wore a black leather motorcycle jacket,” Kraft recalled, “and my knees hung out of my jeans. Even though there were three of us in that meeting, Galton would say to Stan, ‘Weren’t the Beatles sort of like the Monkees?’ and Stan would say to me, ‘Dave, explain that.’ And I’d respond, and then Stan would respond, and then Galton would respond to what I said
to Stan
without ever making eye contact or addressing me.”

Kraft stopped by Lee’s office afterward and announced that he was going to give himself a makeover to see if he could penetrate Galton’s corporate filters. By Monday, he declared, he’d be wearing a three-piece suit and a new haircut. With characteristic enthusiasm, Lee cheerily told Kraft where to shop: Saks, Barneys, Bloomingdale’s. “Lo and behold, when I had meetings following that, I just had meetings with Galton, not even Stan, and he could see and hear me, and everything. It made such a sensation. I remember Marie Severin following me around the office, effusive: ‘If only more people would do this . . .’ ”

J
im Shooter, who as associate editor regularly met with Lee to review makereadies, also started dressing up. Gone were short-sleeve shirts with T-shirts showing from underneath, replaced by long sleeves and ties. Although Lee appreciated the wardrobe upgrade, his relationship with Shooter was rocky at first, owing to the problems he kept finding in the flood of comic product.

“The fourth or fifth time around,” Shooter said, “we’re still seeing the same kinds of problems, and now he’s starting to think I’m a moron, and explaining it to me in one syllable words.
Don’t. Let. Them. Do. This.
I’m like, ‘Stan, there’s just so much I can do. I’m doing everything I can.’ And I’m trying not to throw Archie under the bus—because he won’t fire these people.”

When Shooter was drafted to provide plots to Lee for the
Spider-Man
newspaper strip, Lee patiently explained the process—“You see, every day, there’s a daily strip . . .”—as though Shooter were a child. When the first batch of plots was turned in, though, Lee was impressed.

“These are good.”