Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (49 page)

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Stewart.

On April 2, in the midst of the tour, Terry Stewart announced that he was being promoted to a vice chairman position
*
and that Jerry Calabrese, a Marvel marketing executive with a magazine publishing background, would be the new president. The retail community knew Calabrese’s name, and didn’t like it: he had been the one behind Marvel Mart, a campaign to sell the company’s product directly to readers through mail order.

The environment at Marvel itself became increasingly chaotic, with the skeleton-crew editorial staff taking on a multiplied workload, and freelancers feeling jerked around. John Romita Jr. briefly returned to draw
X-Men
, and then found that a popular young artist was getting his assignments. Fabian Nicieza, who along with Scott Lobdell had become a major architect of the mutant titles in the post-Claremont era, saw his relationships with Bob Harras and Lobdell deteriorate as increasingly improvisatory changes in story direction replaced Nicieza’s long-term story planning. Last-minute dialogue changes, in which characters’ conversations turned from light banter to grim lectures, began to chafe. Nicieza resigned from
X-Men
in June, declaring publicly that his sizable paychecks weren’t worth “the lack of creative satisfaction and perpetuation of mediocrity.” Lobdell, though now a superstar making eighty-five grand a month, wasn’t immune to the micromanaging and second-guessing; his next issue of
Uncanny X-Men
had to be rewritten from scratch, four times, before everyone could agree on a story.

In the meantime, the Clone Saga continued to play out in the Spider-Man titles, but the initial mood-lightening objective had been foiled. At what was supposed to be the story’s climax, Peter Parker’s Aunt May finally died, having been on her deathbed countless times in the previous decades. (Stan Lee first gave his blessing to the turn of events, and then, just as he had with Gwen Stacy’s death, denied knowledge of the plan.) Then, when Peter Parker learned that he was a clone, he smacked Mary Jane in a fit of rage. Readers were appalled, but sales were good, and Marvel milked the cash cow with one-shot tie-ins that cost $4.95 a pop. A “Maximum Clonage” series that further extended the story featured a third Spider-Man clone, named Spider-Cide, and then, finally, an entire army of clones.

Spider-Man
writer Dan Jurgens, who’d been hired away from DC at great cost, gave an ultimatum: unless Peter Parker was restored as the one and only original Spider-Man, he was quitting. Of course, if Peter Parker was remaining Spider-Man, the editors realized, something had to be done about Mary Jane and her pregnancy—you couldn’t have a superhero
with a kid
. Amid all-day conference calls and flurries of memos, the writers and editors of the Spider-Man books argued over who had to be responsible for giving Mary Jane Watson a miscarriage.

J
erry Calabrese quickly found, to his dismay, that Heroes World didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support its business. There were billing errors, unfulfilled orders, and long wait times on the customer service line that ended with handwritten messages for someone who knew what to do. Calabrese told Matt Ragone to pack his bags for New Jersey and clean up what he could.

But much of the damage caused by the distributor wars was irreparable. Retailers who wanted a variety of publications were now forced to deal with at least two or three different distributors. “If you were a comic book specialty shop,” explained Tom Brevoort, “the way your finances worked is that you’d get a discount based on total sales volume. So if your order at the distributor was $100, that qualified you for x percentage off; if it was $200 you’d qualify for a higher percentage. Now your total order was the same, but your Marvel/Heroes World order by itself wouldn’t necessarily qualify you for the same discount, and your DC/Diamond order wouldn’t qualify you for the same discount. So suddenly the same product at the same volume was costing a lot more, and eked into a profit margin that made it untenable. A few bad choices on titles that didn’t move or didn’t show up at all—there was a lot of egregiously late shipping, particularly among Image titles—and you were tying up money. That put tons of stores out of business.” The number of comic shops, which had already fallen from 9,400 to 6,400 in just two years, soon dropped to 4,500.

Unlike Terry Stewart, Jerry Calabrese did not read comic books—he was a “pure businessman,” in the words of one Marvel colleague. Still, he only needed a calculator to pine for the good old days of the early 1990s, the days of
X-Force
#1 and
X-Men
#1, the days when it seemed like Hollywood might come knocking. In San Diego, Calabrese approached Chris Claremont and asked him if he’d like to return. Claremont, who’d been writing for Dark Horse, DC, and even—along with Len Wein and Dave Cockrum—Jim Shooter’s Defiant, declined the offer. But Calabrese had more luck when he met with Larry Marder, the executive director of Image Comics, and asked if any of the ex-Marvel superstars at Image would like to take a shot at revising the origins of some of the company’s biggest characters. “Marvel knew that their core flagship properties were ill,” said Marder. “The properties that they had, had just failed over and over again to sell to Hollywood. Think about it, you go in, and you make a pitch that the world’s smartest man built a rocket ship and then went up with his family, and the world’s smartest man forgot to shield the rocket ship against cosmic rays. It’s laughable. The idea that Captain America was frozen in ice for 50 years was laughable in Hollywood . . . asking the Talmudic continuity scholars in Marvel editorial to throw away the holy litany of Stan and Jack to satisfy Hollywood was having no effect at all, they just weren’t getting anywhere.”

Todd McFarlane had no interest in helping turn Marvel into a moviemaking empire, and he couldn’t understand why anyone at Image would. “Why do you want to work for your competitor?” he wondered. “I’ve got a toy company; are you fucking out of your mind I would ever make a toy for Hasbro or Mattel? It would never happen.” Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, though, were intrigued. Negotiations began.

C
alabrese, no fan of Richard Rogers or the changes that he had championed, wanted to undo the moves of the preceding two years. He began by restoring Marvel’s editorial hierarchy. “I don’t like this five editors-in-chief system,” he told the five editors in chief during a meeting in his office, hinting of things to come. After the meeting, one of the editors turned to Bob Harras. “You’re going to be my new boss,” he predicted. Harras smiled slightly.

As supervisor of the X-Men line, Harras was already responsible for fully one-third of Marvel’s sales in the direct market. “Because of X-Men revenue, Bob was exposed to a lot more corporate push and pull,” said Matt Ragone. “He was willing to sit down and say, ‘How can we grow this, how can we make it better?’ We all had to sell our souls a little bit.”

Once it was made official that Harras would be the one and only editor in chief, he told Bob Budiansky not to end the Clone Saga just yet—it would compete with the attention that Marvel hoped to gain for an upcoming X-Men crossover. Budiansky warned Harras that this move would alienate writer Dan Jurgens, who’d finally been promised a resolution to the clone madness, but Harras’s word was final. Sure enough, Jurgens was furious. After a wave of screaming matches, he quit the title and returned to DC.

By now, another wave of title cancellations had been announced. Among those who lost work was Herb Trimpe, the longtime
Hulk
artist who’d been a fixture in the late 1960s Bullpen and who now was writing “I’m beginning to hate drawing comics” in his journal and, at fifty-six years of age, applying to take classes at a state college. “Went down to New York yesterday,” Trimpe wrote,

All the editors either in meetings or out to lunch. Talked to human resources at Marvel today. The lady seemed embarrassed. Said maybe I should consider retiring. I told her I wasn’t going to hold the gun to my own head. They’d have to shoot me themselves. With a family, I need the health care benefits and income.

Adding insult to injury, rumors were swirling about Jerry Calabrese’s overtures to Image: was it true that everything but Spider-Man and the X-Men was going to be farmed out to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld?

Stan Lee flew to New York for the official announcement. Since Avi Arad’s ascent at Marvel Films, Lee had distracted himself with projects like Excelsior Comics, a modest-sized imprint of titles to be packaged from the company’s West Coast offices. But most of his public appearances of late—like popping up on
Conan O’Brien
to promote
Best of the Worst
, a low-budget book of trivia and one-liners—were the extraneous gestures of celebrity life, and had little to do with current Marvel Comics business. Now he returned to his old rah-rah mode: “We’re matching some of the best talent in the industry, with some of the best characters in the industry, to change the status quo and create the stuff of legends!” he beamed to the gathering of journalists at the Grand Hyatt on Park Avenue.
The Avengers
,
Fantastic Four
,
Captain America
, and
Iron Man
would now be created completely by the California studios of Jim Lee and Liefeld. The news that Marvel was removing control of its characters from its own staff and handing million-dollar contracts (plus profit sharing) to those who’d recently walked out on the company was, in the words of one editor, “catastrophic to morale.”

Even the fictional world of the Marvel Universe was being disassembled. For a multi-title event called “Onslaught,” the outgoing editors, writers, and artists of
The Avengers
,
Iron Man
, the
Fantastic Four
, and
Captain America
were charged with implementing their own obsolescence. The heroes would be destroyed, and then re-created in a “pocket universe,” an alternate world where Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld’s reimagined versions would take over. The “Heroes Reborn” titles, as they would be called, would be renumbered as #1 issues for the first time since the 1960s. Other titles—including
Thor
,
Doctor Strange,
and
Silver Surfer
—would be canceled outright.

“This is a turning point,”
Marvels
writer Kurt Busiek told a newspaper. “The Marvel reader is essentially being told that Marvel’s long-term history is more or less irrelevant. It’s secondary to what will make the characters more popular and what will make the company more money.”

The day after the press conference, Trimpe made another journal entry:

No matter what I say or who I call or write at Marvel, I can’t get assigned to another book. I’ve tried reason, outrage, guilt trips and begging. Nada. I haven’t been able to scrounge together enough work to meet my monthly quota. The place is a shambles. When I press, they admit sales are down and so is morale. The scuttlebutt is that more layoffs are coming.

Pictures of the smiling old Marvel Bullpen now carried the weight of irony. Don Heck, who’d died of lung cancer earlier in the year, had been ignored by the company for years; when one employer asked him if he had any work lined up with Marvel, Heck barked, “You think they want their fucking grandpa working on their goddamn books?” Marie Severin, who’d given Marvel decades of service, couldn’t get regular assignments as a colorist; her contract was soon terminated. Fabulous Flo Steinberg, Trimpe’s old pal from the 1960s Bullpen, summed up the feeling among the veterans: “Herb, they just don’t care. Don’t you get it?”

John Romita and his wife, Virginia, still worked in the offices, but over the past year found the workplace turning intolerable. “Virginia had about thirty people in the bullpen working under her; I had five people working under me,” he said. “We were coached by outside consultants on how to let people go. You know that movie with George Clooney? We lived that. It was the most horrible time of our life, to have to lay off people we had just given a raise to six months before, because they were doing so well. We would get them in a room and tell them, ‘We hate to do this, but the company is cutting back, and we have to let you go.’ And to see their faces—friends of ours, people we had worked with for years—Virginia and I just dreaded going into work.” The first day after Christmas vacation, the sixty-four-year-old Romita—who’d drawn
Captain America
in the 1950s, whose artistry had delivered Spider-Man to a mass audience, who’d co-created Mary Jane Watson—put in three weeks’ notice for himself and his wife.

A week later, after Marvel tallied a loss of $48 million for the year, word came that 40 percent of the workforce was going to be eliminated. On January 3 and 4, 275 Marvel employees—including Carl Potts and Bob Budiansky, who only months earlier held editor in chief titles—lost their jobs. One by one, editorial staffers were called in to Bob Harras’s office, where Harras gave them the bad news. One even fainted. As Carl Potts walked back to his desk to call his wife, he passed Mark Gruenwald’s open door. The perpetually upbeat and cheerleading Gruenwald had, only weeks earlier, been forced to break the news to the creative teams of
The Avengers
,
Fantastic Four
,
Captain America
, and
Iron Man
that Lee and Liefeld would soon be taking over. Although Gruenwald had kept his job, Potts recalled, “He looked like he was taking it harder than any of those getting the axe.”