Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (43 page)

Meanwhile, the director of Marvel’s newsstand sales noticed that
Sail
magazine’s highest-selling issue was the one that came sealed in a plastic bag with its annual calendar. It wasn’t just the added value of the calendar—the poly bag made it stand out on the racks. Maybe that strategy could help
Spider-Man
on the newsstands, too.

“The direct-market retailers freaked,” said Kurt Busiek, who worked in Carol Kalish’s department. “ ‘You’re gonna put out a bag for the newsstand, and we can’t have the bag?’ ” The release of
Spider-Man
#1 had become a multiplication problem.

McFarlane’s comic itself was nothing special—twenty-two pages of a bare-bones plot in which Spider-Man battled a few criminals and visited with Mary Jane, while the Lizard bloodily dispatched three thugs and an innocent bystander, all of it delivered with overwrought narration and constant sound effects. But more than a million copies of the issue—a silver-ink edition, a regular-ink edition, and bagged versions of each—were sold at comic shops in late June 1990. One Los Angeles store rented footlights to welcome flocks of news media (and hundreds of customers) to its Midnight Madness sale. Before the issue even reached newsstands (800,000 unbagged copies; 125,000 bagged copies), Marvel already had a record-breaker on its hands. Collectors tried to figure out if they should remove the bag or not, then realized they’d better buy two if they wanted to read one.

Retailers wanted more. “They wanted to be able to sell everything,” said Busiek, “even if it was a stupid thing, like, oh,
this one’s in a bag
.” A gold-ink reprint edition was produced, and then, in an attempt to reward shop owners, Marvel produced a complimentary “platinum” version—their version of the record industry’s presentation of platinum records—which would be mailed out to each retailer. After various cover formats were experimented with, the platinum edition ultimately had to be printed on a heavier card stock to properly retain its special combination of inks. Estimated as an $8,000 promotion, it wound up costing more than $35,000. At first it seemed like a disaster—not just the cost, but the ways in which it failed to please retailers, who started begging for
just one more copy
of the instant collectible.

Marvel, meanwhile, had just opened a gateway to its future. The manufacturing department’s five months of experiments on the platinum edition had yielded various prototypes—foil stamp covers, embossed covers—that would be perfected and utilized on future titles in the months to come, and not just in limited editions, but for print runs of hundreds of thousands. Was it just Todd McFarlane that sold
Spider-Man
#1, or was it the covers? An issue of
The Incredible Hulk
was quickly produced with Day-Glo inks; sales spiked an astonishing 300 percent, and the issue was quickly reprinted. A shiny, metallic
Silver Surfer
cover and a glow-in-the-dark
Ghost Rider
cover followed, to equal success.

In retrospect, some would view this moment as the opening of a Pandora’s box. “I was taking advantage of the desires of the market and fueling speculator greed,” the sales director who’d developed the platinum edition
Spider-Man
wrote contritely, years later. “There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with creating product to fill demand; but taking advantage of the condition of a consumer base is akin to date rape, as far as I’m now concerned.”

S
ince Ron Perelman’s purchase of the company, new faces had gradually been showing up in the Marvel offices: corporate delegates focused on maximizing profit while maintaining a distance from the creative process. But Perelman and his right-hand man, Bill Bevins, couldn’t help but take notice of the publishing division’s recent triumphs, and soon that distance disappeared as executives began keeping a closer eye on their investment. The Andrews Group prepared to take Marvel Comics public. Vice presidents and consultants populated the halls more and more, and in October 1990, when Jim Galton—the quiet, reserved head of Marvel since 1975—retired at the age of sixty-five, Perelman had already groomed a successor.

Terry Stewart came from a mergers-and-acquisitions background, but another way in which he differed from Galton served to make him more palatable to suspicious comic cognoscenti: he was a fan. “Beneath this cloak of smokestack America that I wear beats the heart of a collector,” he told
Fortune
magazine, shortly before he was appointed president of Marvel. In the context of the Perelman regime, Stewart easily played the role of rock-and-roll rebel, wearing black T-shirts under his sport jackets.

Stewart had told the press that he would focus on getting movies made, and appointed longtime Cadence suit Joe Calamari as chief executive of Marvel Productions. The studio had, in fact, been noticeably quiet since New World had sold it to Perelman. President Margaret Loesch, growing restless under the new management, had only been let out of her contract after Fox’s Barry Diller convinced Perelman at a cocktail party that the sooner she started at Fox, the sooner she could work to bring
The X-Men
to television. Now Calamari would benefit from Loesch’s cooperation at Fox, but he would also be stuck trying to sort out the continuing legal tangles of the Spider-Man film rights.

There were other changes: Barry Kaplan, Marvel’s longtime CFO, was shuffled to the side. Kaplan had already discovered a difference in philosophies between old-guard Marvel and the Andrews Group. “I had these arguments with Perelman’s people, because they believed in full absorption accounting. I’d say, ‘Well, great,
Captain America
is losing money. Should I discontinue
Captain America
?’ Their attitude was, ‘Yeah! If you publish something else, it may make money!’ But it’s not like lipstick, where you come up with another color. You can’t just come up with another character. In the meantime, while you’re not publishing
Captain America
, you have writers, pencilers, inkers, and colorists who may not have enough work.”

In the sales department, Carol Kalish found herself reporting to a newly appointed executive with monogrammed shirts and zero interest in comic books, a calculated buffer between her and upper management. She bristled at the direction of the company’s latest sales strategies, which favored aggression over long-term success. Marvel giddily noted that a 33 percent hike in cover prices had not significantly reduced sales, and started planning another price increase. As the chief liaison between Marvel and comics retailers, Kalish was a crucial player—in 1990, comic stores accounted for 73 percent of Marvel’s sales—but following the other October management changes, she was quickly promoted out of the department and into a new position, vice president of new product development, where she would be less of an impediment. Lou Bank, a twenty-five-year-old from the sales department, took her place. “I think it was a lot easier to strip-mine a company underneath a naïve 25-year-old than it would have been underneath someone like Carol,” Bank said years later. “And I was much easier to manipulate.”

S
hortly after the reshuffling, as executives crunched sales numbers and strategized Marvel’s public offering, Tom DeFalco submitted his budget for the following year. The response from upstairs was that 1990 was terrific, and now they needed to top it. DeFalco met with his editors. “How the hell,” he asked, “are we gonna do better than that?”

DeFalco went to editor Bob Harras and told him it was time to expand the
X-Men
line. “I thought it was the worst idea on the face of the Earth,” said Harras. “I remember thinking, ‘How much more can we expand this thing? We have four
X
-books already:
Uncanny X-Men
,
Wolverine
,
New Mutants
and
X-Factor
.’ I thought that if we went to five, we were going to kill the golden goose.” Nonetheless, Harras and Claremont worked to differentiate the new title—simply called
X-Men
—from
Uncanny X-Men
. They’d merge the original 1960s lineup, now appearing in the pages of
X-Factor
, with the current cast of
Uncanny X-Men
, and then redistribute them into two rosters.
Uncanny
would feature the Gold Team;
X-Men
would feature the Blue Team.
X-Factor
, meanwhile, would feature a group of peripheral younger mutant characters who’d been introduced over the last few years.

If that wasn’t confusing enough, there was now the matter of
New Mutants
. As Louise Simonson reached the end of her rope, Liefeld had campaigned for a new writer—Fabian Nicieza, who also worked as Marvel’s advertising manager. When he was still a teenager, Liefeld had acquired Nicieza’s phone number, and called him up to compliment his script on the New Universe title
Psi-Force
. “I’m going to make it as an artist in the industry real soon,” Liefeld told Nicieza, and suggested they might work together in the future. Now, three years later, that time had come. “Rob had a million ideas, and no filter, and no maturity to know how to best present those ideas,” Nicieza said. “So he started to flood ideas to the point where, I guess it was starting to choke Louise’s ability to create the book. He wanted it to be muscle and power—and she wanted it to be about a group of kids growing up. And those two things are hard to reconcile.”

Louise Simonson finally quit, after ten years at Marvel. “She got fucked out of a job by Rob,” said Chris Claremont, but Simonson herself laid most of the blame at Harras’s feet. “He would change plots, and blame it on the artist. He would change dialogue, and then say, ‘I’m sorry, but I tried to call you and you weren’t home’ or ‘I’ll be sure and tell you the next time.’ He would change some of the dialogue, but not other parts, so the things people said wouldn’t make sense. It was his way of letting you know he was wishing you’d go away.”

With Simonson gone, Liefeld had told Nicieza and Director of Marketing Sven Larsen that he wanted
New Mutants
to relaunch under a new title, and the three of them began campaigning DeFalco for the change—perfect timing, since DeFalco needed a second big book for 1991. Canceling a Top 10–selling comic and relaunching it under a new name went against everything Marvel knew about brand strategy, and some worried that yet another number-one
X
-issue would look like a cash grab, but Liefeld was insistent. How long could you go on calling something “
New
”
Mutants
? “I guarantee you we will sell more,” he promised, and DeFalco finally went along with the plan.
X-Force
#1 went on the schedule, to be published two months before
X-Men
#1. The summer of 1991 would be the summer of X.

INTERVIEWER, 1988
: What would you do if Chris Claremont walked in and said he was off “The X-Men”?

BOB HARRAS
: That is almost an unrealistic question. I can’t even contemplate Chris doing that. I think if he did I’d have a nervous breakdown. (
Laughter.
)

With the franchise-wide changes, Harras now had an opportunity to solve a problem that had been nagging at him: Claremont’s stories about aliens and magic just weren’t pleasing him; they didn’t seem like the kind of tales that
The Uncanny X-Men
did best. In the five years since the return of Jean Grey had ruined Claremont’s happy ending for Cyclops, the book had gone through radical changes: Dazzler and Longshot had joined; the X-Men had been presumed killed in battle and spent time in Australia, where they depended on a mute Aborigine to teleport them from adventure to adventure; Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde, its most playful and bighearted members, had left. Professor X and Magneto, the opposing poles of the title’s philosophical quandaries, were nowhere to be found. “Times have changed since Charles Xavier founded this school and created the X-Men,” Storm declared in one issue. “Changed even since he brought in myself and my companions to be the team’s second generation. Now there is a third, and we must answer, my friends—are we fit caretakers any longer, for Xavier’s school and his dream? Or has the time come to turn that role over to others . . . ?”

Some wondered if Chris Claremont was asking those questions of himself.
The Uncanny X-Men
was still, of course, the number-one-selling title in the entire industry, but retailers—who were, by and large, aging fans themselves—had complained to Marvel’s sales representatives about the dangling plot lines, wondering when Claremont was going to get back on track. With constant whisperings in his ear, Harras made his move.

He’d held brainstorming sessions while out to dinner with Rob Liefeld, Whilce Portacio, and Jim Lee, and found that they were on the same page as to the direction that should be taken. “It just happened that Bob hated anything that Chris said,” recalled Portacio, “and anything that we said, fifty percent of the time, was a match-up with what Bob was thinking.” Portacio and Lee would now plot the X-Men stories together, with Chris Claremont writing the dialogue over their artwork—Portacio on
Uncanny X-Men
, and Lee on
X-Men
. After shepherding the characters from throwaway sales gimmick to international stardom over the course of sixteen years, Claremont’s role would be reduced to typing dialogue fit to order. Aghast, he tried to get control of just
one
of the two titles, much like how Byrne had been handed
Fantastic Four
when he’d come to loggerheads with Claremont a decade earlier. No dice. “It wasn’t even a case of ‘Jim will handle
X-Men
, you can take
Uncanny
,’ ” Claremont said. “No one on the editorial side wanted to talk about it, it was just a take it or leave it situation.”