Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (30 page)

While lawyers moved toward settlements in that case, a Denver comic-store owner named Chuck Rozanski wrote a pointed letter to Marvel. The company was missing a great business opportunity, Rozanski said, by refusing to offer other sellers the same deal they’d given Seuling, whose demands of advance payment from store owners was discouraging bulk orders. Rozanski pointed out that industry-wide comic sales had dropped more than 50 percent over the past twenty years, that erratic newsstand distribution was costing the industry readers, and that comic-store retailers should be the publishers’ closest allies. He sent copies of the letters to three hundred of his peers.

Rozanski’s timing was perfect. He was invited to New York to meet with Galton, Shooter, and circulation director Ed Shukin, who considered his suggestions about setting up a credit line for direct purchasing, cooperative advertising, and better information about upcoming product. Shukin placed an ad for a direct-sales manager who would attend all the major conventions, and who possessed the “ability to structure, instruct, and assist in the opening and operation of new shops.” That summer, Shukin, Shooter, and COO Barry Kaplan flew out to the San Diego Comic-Con, where they met with about fifty retailers. Within months, Marvel announced that a number of “classy” projects with slick paper and cardboard covers were in the works; in time, they’d be called “graphic novels.”

S
hooter’s impact, which not only had expanded the editorial staff but siphoned power from the Bullpen, was undeniable. “With the other editors-in-chief,” he said, “it often seemed like they were sort of an appendix, a necessary evil. The company was really being run by John Verpoorten . . . technically, Verpoorten reported to the Editor-in-Chief, but he was, in fact, the man who was getting the stuff out.”

Those days were over. Shooter fired the production manager. He stripped Marie Severin of her art director title, and shuffled her over to Sol Brodsky’s Special Projects division.

Shortly afterward, Dave Cockrum, on staff as a cover designer, sent an excoriating letter to Stan Lee. When the Avengers’ faithful butler, Jarvis, resigned from his post in an issue of
Iron Man
, editor Jim Salicrup took Cockrum’s letter, changed the names, and inserted it into the comic:

To: Anthony Stark

This is to notify you that I am tendering my resignation from my position. This resignation is to take effect immediately.

I am leaving because this is no longer the team-spirited “one big happy family” I once loved working for. Over the past year or so I have watched The Avengers’ morale disintegrate to the point that, rather than being a team or a family, it is now a large collection of unhappy individuals simmering in their own personal stew of repressed anger, resentment and frustration. I have seen a lot of my friends silently enduring unfair, malicious or vindictive treatment.

My personal grievances are relatively slight by comparison to some, but I don’t intend to silently endure. I’ve watched the Avengers be disbanded, uprooted and shuffled around. I’ve become firmly convinced that this was done with the idea of “showing the hired help who’s Boss.”

I don’t intend to wait around to see what’s next.

Sincerely,

Jarvis

cc: The Avengers

No one would mistake Marvel for one big happy family now. Shooter replaced Rick Marschall, the editor of Marvel’s magazine line, with Lynne Graeme, who’d never worked in comics, and directed her to oversee the text features in
Tomb of Dracula
, on which Marv Wolfman had previously enjoyed autonomy. “I don’t want to continue working with chimpanzees,” Wolfman declared, and stormed off to DC, where his best friend, Len Wein, had recently been hired as an editor. A dispute between Shooter and Gene Colan over rejected
Howard the Duck
pages nearly ended in Colan’s departure after fourteen years at Marvel, until Lee stepped in and smoothed things over. One Marvel staffer suffered a recurring dream in which he pushed Shooter from an airplane hatch.

Meanwhile, throughout the line, the creative assignments began to resemble a laconic game of Whac-A-Mole, with each substitution having little effect on the acceptably bland quality that had defined many of the series throughout the 1970s. Bill Mantlo’s
Fantastic Four
and David Michelinie’s
Amazing Spider-Man
differed little from Wolfman’s workmanlike renditions; Mantlo’s
Incredible Hulk
was as aimless as Roger Stern’s had been; every issue of
Captain America
allowed different writers and artists to showcase nothing much at all. There was nothing new, of course, about a legion of journeymen filling page after page with standard-formula fight scenes and talky expositions, and, in fact, the bottom level had been brought up slightly. The difference was that, through all the strife with personnel, the high points had been noticeably attenuated.

By October 1979, morale at Marvel was low enough to attract the attention of
The New York Times
, which quoted anonymous staffers grousing about middling-quality comics and a focus on licensing toys and Slurpee cups and bath towels. Even Roy Thomas, the last remaining writer-editor, sounded off. “There is a feeling among most of the people I know,” he said, “that Marvel has become more callous and inhuman.” Stan Lee, who was spending most of his time in Los Angeles, had to call a meeting to reassure the staff that Marvel’s focus was still on publishing comic books. “I have the sense that he wants to be like Walt Disney,” said one writer of Lee. “Comics are sort of beneath him.”

S
hooter called the story “garbage” and denied that merchandising deals were overshadowing the comics. The direct-sales market, in fact, was already looking like a bright future; in 1979 the roughly 750 comic stores may have accounted for only 6 percent of Marvel’s gross sales, but those $3.5 million in sales had grown from $300,000 in 1974, and from $1.5 million in 1976. Even as newsstand sales continued dropping—and only 20–40 percent of issues shipped to distributors ended up in the hands of customers—nonreturnable sales to comic stores meant a far greater profit margin.

Marvel hired a full-time publicist for the first time, brought its licensing operations in-house, under Galton, and poured more energy into merchandising deals. All they needed to do now was to get people to buy their product. “The old Marvel needed comic books to sell so they would turn a profit,” wrote industry columnist Joe Brancatelli. “The envisioned new Marvel needs comic books to sell to ensure the profit potential of the characters portrayed within. Which means that the new Marvel and the old Marvel share one massive problem: how do you sell comic books?”

The staff continued to reshape. When Shooter hired Denny O’Neil back from DC to replace Wolfman, O’Neil noted how much things had changed. “Fourteen years ago,” he told an interviewer, “it was a three-person office. Stan Lee, Flo Steinberg, and Roy Thomas were it. You had a lot of day-to-day, minute-to-minute contact with what was going on. It was a small enough operation. Now there’s four or five editors, a magazine department, Epic, merchandising . . .” Roger Stern left his post to write freelance, and began a memorable run on
Captain America
with John Byrne; Jim Salicrup was promoted to replace him.
*
A few months later, Shooter hired Louise “Weezie” Jones, a beloved editor at Warren Magazines. The editor-to-writer ratio was growing.

C
orporate synergy drove the publishing decisions. In comic stores, Marvel’s most popular title was the first issue of
Rom
, based on a Parker Brothers toy; among the many titles that outsold
Captain America
were
The Micronauts
, based on a line of Japanese toys;
Shogun Warriors
, based on Mattel toys; and adaptations of
Star Wars
and
Battlestar Galactica
.

When Stan Lee became worried that Universal was going to try to create a female Hulk character for its television show, which it would then own the rights to, he hurriedly wrote a preemptive solution. In the first issue of
Savage She-Hulk
, Bruce Banner visited his heretofore-unmentioned criminal-defense-attorney cousin, Jennifer Walters, in Los Angeles. When Walters was shot by gangsters, Banner gave her a lifesaving transfusion of his Gamma-ray-tainted blood, and she became big and green when angered. Presto: copyright secured. “It was done under duress,” said David Anthony Kraft, who took over the writing of the series. “It was like, ‘We need to create a character called the She-Hulk, and we need to get it out in the next thirty seconds.’ If you look at that first issue that Stan did, there’s really nothing to it: Bruce Banner gives a blood transfusion to his cousin, she growls and runs around, and that’s basically it. I grew up on Marvel Comics, and remembered Stan making fun of how DC had endless iterations of the characters: Super-Monkey, Super-Horse and Streaky the Super-Cat and on and on. We were all pulling our hair out and wailing and bemoaning the day that Marvel had to create a She-Hulk.”

Ms. Marvel had also been conceived as a trademark strategy (and an empty gesture toward feminism), but Chris Claremont had transformed her into a carefully shaded character by dwelling on her relationships with her parents and the challenges of her career. “We’re trying to appeal to a female audience, trying to make her a hip, happening, 70s woman striking out on her own,” Claremont recalled. “We say to the artist, ‘ . . . and we need her to look sexy.’ Well, his interpretation of sexy was derived from the ’40s, so what we got was a continuous series of crotch shots.” Claremont lobbied to get his old
X-Men
partner Dave Cockrum on the title, and they went through several dozen costume redesigns, trying to get it just right. No one had invested so much energy into a female superhero before, and, as Cockrum observed, no one else much cared. “When I brought in the one that was ultimately approved, Stan said, ‘why didn’t you bring me this one first? This is what I’m after . . . tits and ass.’ ” It wasn’t what the readers were after, though. Just as Claremont found his rhythm,
Ms. Marvel
was cancelled abruptly, without resolution, after the twenty-third issue.

Meanwhile, plans were in the works to reteam with Kiss’s label, Casablanca Records, for an ambitious cross-pollination experiment: Marvel would create a comic for the adventures of a new character called the Disco Queen; Casablanca would produce a record by a singer who would take on that persona. And Casablanca’s new film division would produce a Disco Queen motion picture.
*

Since John Romita’s son, John Jr., frequented disco clubs, he was given the task of designing the character, which was renamed Disco Dazzler. “They said, ‘let’s do a character that’s a nightclub girl and a dancer and a disco queen,’ ” said Romita Jr., “and all I thought of was Grace Jones, a very statuesque, international-looking model with short hair.” Blue makeup—in a mask pattern not unlike that sported by members of Kiss—was added to her face.

A committee of employees—including Stan Lee, Jim Shooter, and Cadence attorney Alice Donenfeld—all contributed ideas to the character, and the record label gave plenty of notes in return. “At one point Casablanca decided they wanted her to talk ‘funky black,’ ” said Tom DeFalco, a former Archie Comics writer, who was assigned to script the first issue of
Dazzler
. By the time Bo Derek expressed interest in playing the character onscreen, Romita Jr.’s long-legged black roller-skater had transformed into a white girl named Alison with aspirations of pop stardom. Her super-power was to transform sonic energy into powerful blasts of light, which not only made for an impressive stage show but stopped criminals as well.

Even as the project was getting off the ground, though, disco was fading. In the summer of 1979, nearly a hundred thousand people had shown up for Comiskey Park’s Disco Demolition Night in Chicago. Casablanca, plagued with financial troubles, soon pulled out of
Dazzler
; there were multiple rewrites, and five cancellations and reschedulings, as Marvel scrambled to find new corporate partners to make the
Dazzler
film. “I swore that I would not believe that it was going to be published until I saw it on the newsstands,” DeFalco said. Although it would be another year before the first issue of
Dazzler
saw print, the character was quickly rolled out as a high-profile guest star in
The X-Men
and
The Amazing Spider-Man
.

Marvel creators bristled at the rampant shilling. As soon as the
Fantastic Four
cartoon went off the air, Bill Mantlo and John Byrne gleefully used the comic book to explode the NBC-sanctioned character of H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot, much as Gerry Conway and Ross Andru had once demolished the Spider-Mobile. As a triumph of creative purity over bottom-line concerns, though, it was a pyrrhic victory. Elsewhere in that very same issue, Johnny Storm sauntered into the Studio Infinity discotheque and ran into a special guest star: the Dazzler.