Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (29 page)

Byrne complained, loudly, about what he called “Chris-shticks,” and Claremont certainly had trademark tics—rampant italicization for emphasis in dialogue, confident women, psychic bonds, and characters who always took vacations in the United Kingdom. There were also the endlessly reflective thought balloons and somber monologues. “Chris’ idea of a perfect issue of the
X-Men
,” Byrne once said, “would be 22 pages of them walking around in the Village or at Scott’s apartment or something like that, where they sit around, out of costume, in jeans and t-shirts, and just talk.” Claremont, for his part, said that all he cared about was the emotional relationships. “To me,” he told an interviewer, “the fights are bullshit.” But at a time when so many superhero comics were devoid of personality, it was easy to cut some slack to someone who was investing so heavily in human interaction.
*

Jean Grey’s powerful reincarnation as Phoenix was at the flashpoint of many disagreements, and Byrne labored to eliminate her from the book, preferring instead to showcase Wolverine, his favorite. But although the writer and artist seemed to often be working at cross-purposes, by the time their collaboration reached the printed page, it was a mesmerizing, unified vision of sci-fi extravagance and human-scale tear-jerking. Sales climbed.

D
avid Anthony Kraft, who’d followed Gerber’s lead and begun to negotiate a royalty for the
Beatles
comic, soon heard from Sol Brodsky. Even with his VP title, Brodsky couldn’t shake the burden of being the hatchet man, bearing bad news that Stan Lee couldn’t—or wouldn’t—deliver.

“They’ve decided they’re not going to pay royalties on the Beatles book,” he told Kraft. Then he shut the office door. “I’ll deny this conversation,” Brodsky said, “but between you and me, you’d be a fool to let it go.”

Kraft visited Lee. “If this was a Marvel character and you did this,” he told his boss, “I’d be kind of stuck, wouldn’t I? But you don’t own the Beatles, and you don’t own me, so I’ll just take this project to another publisher.” He walked back to the office he shared with Shooter, and began making phone calls—to
Rolling Stone
, to
Circus
—before Lee shouted for him to come back.

Lee expressed sympathy. After all, he said, he himself had created so many of Marvel’s properties with no royalties to show for it. He sent Kraft up to meet with Galton. “How about you and Galton fight it out?” he said.

“It was a Friday afternoon,” Kraft remembered, “and Galton wanted to leave early and go golfing or whatever his weekend plans were. The crux of it was, he had contracts with the top creators, and their contracts said that their rates would automatically adjust upward to the best deal that was going. And his concern was if he paid me royalties, he’d have to start paying royalties to everyone at Marvel Comics.” But if Kraft and artist George Perez did business as an incorporated entity, a royalty deal wouldn’t transgress the other creators’ contracts. Kraft took the name that Gerber was no longer using, Mad Genius Studios, and via this loophole got his royalty deal.

Marvel, however, wasn’t about to make the same arrangement for its wholly owned
The Defenders
, which Kraft was also writing (and, rock-and-roll fan that he was, filling with constant references to Rush and Blue Oyster Cult). When it finally came time to sign the work-for-hire agreement, Kraft promptly quit
The Defenders
.

In the current climate, such courage was getting harder and harder to come by. On June 22, DC Comics, which had recently undertaken an ambitious but ill-fated expansion campaign, announced staff layoffs—and the cancellation of 40 percent of its line. The next day, Jim Shooter recalled, there was a line at the door of the Marvel offices, and he spent the entire day signing work-for-hire agreements for the resigned masses. Soon afterward he hired Al Milgrom and Larry Hama, both of whom had been editing for DC, to join Marvel’s growing staff of editors. DC’s art director even began sending younger talent over to Shooter. There weren’t a lot of new guys lining up for the dying industry, just the most driven and most in love with the art form, hungry for assignments and happily taking direction. Shooter put twenty-one-year-old Vermonter Frank Miller on a
Spectacular Spider-Man
story, and twenty-year-old Pennsylvanian Bill Sienkiewicz on stories about Moon Knight, a sort of ersatz Batman, that ran in the back of the
Hulk
magazine.

Many of the most provocative and vital writers and artists of the previous generations, chased away by the industry’s paternalistic and/or just plain unfair policies, were off to other pursuits: animating Saturday morning cartoons, writing novels and screenplays, illustrating for ad agencies, producing lithographs for the nerd-collector market. It seemed like the mass exoduses that marked the 1950s might be just around the corner. A year or two earlier, when a teenage fan approached Marv Wolfman at a comic convention and asked for career advice, the candid response was startling: “Confidentially, everyone in the business is looking to get out, so my suggestion to you is . . . do something else,” Wolfman told him. “In five years there aren’t going to be any comics.”

Those who remained in the field would have to make a go of it within the strictures of the system, waiving royalties and reining in their more esoteric flights of fancy. Jim Shooter’s own stories for
The Avengers
, illustrated by George Perez, might have doubled as a manifesto of what he saw as the ideal commercial Marvel comic book: banter-heavy dialogue and small medium-shot panels that showcased the colorful costumes, all adding up to a staccato rhythm of adventure and whimsy.

It wasn’t all cold formula: sneaking into Shooter’s stories, almost helplessly, was a recurring motif of persecuted deities. Most notable was a yearlong
Avengers
story about “Michael,” a golf-shirt-and-short-shorts-wearing preppy in Forest Hills, Queens. Shooter revealed that Michael was actually the reincarnation of Korvac, a minor villain from Steve Gerber’s
Defenders
(a kind of techno-centaur, Korvac’s legs were replaced by a mainframe computer) who had transformed himself into an enlightened God. His blond suburbanite form gave way to a glowing, oversized, purple and yellow astral projection.

Korvac entered the pantheon of Marvel’s most powerful, and trippy, characters, like Kirby’s Watcher and Ditko’s Eternity, both of whom appeared in cameos and took notice of his actions, as if to ratify his very importance. “His position was unique,” the captions in
Avengers
#175 confided to the reader. “He would be free to make subtle alterations in the fabric of reality, eventually taking control—and correcting the chaos, healing the injustice that civilization had heaped upon a battered universe.”

But the suspicious Avengers attacked Korvac, tragically preventing him from eradicating the world’s cruelties. “I was in the unique position to alter that, to bring all of existence under my sane and benevolent rule,” he told the super-team. “I am a God! And I was going to be your savior!” Where others saw megalomania, Jim Shooter saw a beleaguered hero who only wanted to bring order to the galaxy.

B
y the end of the 1970s, Stan Lee was making over $150,000 as Marvel’s publisher, had signed a lucrative contract with Harper & Row for an autobiography, and was pulling in additional income through speaking engagements and television consultation. A
People
magazine article noted his self-described workaholism, and his expensive tastes: “On his wrist hangs a heavy link silver bracelet. His feet are contained in thoroughbred Guccis. Piercing green-gray eyes are hidden behind prescription shades, but their hip image is offset by a conservative Paul Stuart herringbone jacket and tan slacks.”

His wide smile now framed by a silvered mustache and sideburns, Stan Lee’s well-practiced anecdotes were an increasingly regular sight on television talk shows and in newspapers, where he never missed a chance to profess that his chosen medium was worthy of attention and respect. “Comic books are like the last weapon left against encroaching televisionitis, which is making non-readers out of a whole generation,” Lee told one university audience. “Most kids, if not for comics, wouldn’t read anything at all.” But in fact, he wanted nothing more than to change Marvel’s Hollywood fortunes, to get out of publishing, to get his vision of Marvel on television.

Partnered with DePatie-Freleng, the animation studio that created the
Pink Panther
cartoons, Marvel began developing more Saturday morning shows, starring Spider-Woman and the Silver Surfer; Hanna-Barbera spun off a member of the Fantastic Four for the unfortunate
Fred and Barney Meet the Thing
. But when it came time to package a cartoon based on the current X-Men lineup, nearly the entire team was unfamiliar to Lee (“I didn’t know we had any Russian superheroes,” he told one interviewer) and he had to summon Jim Shooter for help.

“Sol Brodsky got pictures of all the X-Men, old and new,” said Shooter, “and they were sitting on the couches in Stan’s office, but they didn’t have any names on them. And he had a list on paper with the names and powers, but there were no names on the pictures. So he called me in, and he said, ‘Okay, look. I know the old X-Men. Now who are these guys?’ ”

“I
should have gotten out of this business twenty years ago,” Lee told
Circus
magazine in 1978. “I would have liked to make movies, to be a director or a screenwriter, to have a job like Norm Lear or Freddie Silverman. I’d like to be doing what I’m doing here, but in a bigger arena.”

The CBS president who’d purchased rights for Marvel characters had been fired before any shows had aired; the CEO who fired him said he didn’t want “CBS turning into a cartoon network.” Although the
Hulk
show garnered respectable ratings, plans for other properties began drying up. After
Man from Atlantis
bombed, a
Sub-Mariner
series was deemed too similar and scrapped. A
Human Torch
show was abandoned because CBS feared it would lead children to set themselves on fire. A
Doctor Strange
pilot aired opposite
Roots
, and bombed. When indifferent producers ignored Lee’s notes on the
Spider-Man
show, he publicly complained about the writing.

Lee and Galton, worried that the days of the comics industry were numbered, wanted an escape hatch. They convinced Cadence to investigate the purchase of a small studio, only to then be told it would be too costly. Finally, after Warner Bros.’
Superman
movie became a runaway hit, Lee was sent out to California to work out a permanent partnership with DePatie-Freleng. He stayed in Los Angeles for most of 1979 and fantasized about settling there permanently. While he was there, he shopped around his
Silver Surfer
treatment—based on the book he’d done with Kirby. It was optioned by producer Lee Kramer, with Kramer’s girlfriend, Olivia Newton-John, attached; a budget was set at $25 million.

Marvel began taking out a series of full-page ads in
Variety
, attempting to pimp their characters to the highest bidder . . . or any bidder, really. One featured a head shot of Daredevil: “Daredevil is but one of over 100 exciting Marvel Characters ready right now to star in your next motion picture or television production,” it read. “All Marvel Characters have their own identity—their own
personal
story—and the potential for outrageous stardom.” Nothing happened.

B
ack in New York, Galton and Shooter discussed the launch of
Epic
, a science-fiction comic magazine in the vein of the popular European publication
Heavy Metal
. It would continue the trend of high-quality color printing begun with
Kiss
, and even better, there would be royalties for the creators. If they couldn’t turn around the downward spiral of sales of regular thirty-five-cent comics, maybe they could succeed with higher-profit upscale magazines aimed at readers with disposable incomes and pretensions of sophistication.

The idea of producing a range of higher-quality product for the fan market had been kicking around for a while. “With a new approach to distribution,” Archie Goodwin had mused three years earlier, “you could think in terms of new formats for comics and start tailoring them for particular audiences instead of producing for the wider mass sales. You could possibly have comics that are right for the bookstores.” Even as overall sales of new comics had slumped, the fan/collector market had grown—Marvel’s nonreturnable sales had increased twentyfold in just five years—and others had figured out how to benefit. Phil Seuling, the former high school teacher who was buying directly from Marvel and DC at a 60 percent discount, had made a small fortune over the past few years; he was now supplying to more than three hundred comic stores, which were popping up at lightning speed. Other dealers had followed his lead of purchasing directly from publishers at a low rate, but no one managed to snag terms quite so favorable. So in November 1978, one such distributor filed a lawsuit against Seuling’s Sea Gate Distribution, as well as Marvel, DC, and other publishers, alleging they’d formed a monopolistic distribution operation.