Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (77 page)

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The first plot that Gerber submitted explained away Bill Mantlo’s late 1970s
Howard the Duck
stories as a hallucination. When Shooter raised the concern that Mantlo might be offended, Gerber next devised a story in which the events of the Mantlo issues had simply been black-and-white movies created by an alien “techno-artist” named Chirreep. (Mantlo, no stranger to metafictional games, had himself originated the techno-artist plot device in a 1982 issue of
The Incredible Hulk
to invalidate earlier stories by Doug Moench, then in the process of leaving Marvel for DC.) Finally, when Shooter requested multiple changes to this script, Gerber demanded that he once again be allowed to edit himself on
Howard the Duck
. Marvel refused, and Gerber withdrew his script.

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The
Daredevil: Love & War
graphic novel had begun as a two-issue fill-in for the regular
Daredevil
comic but was rejected as inappropriate for the monthly series.

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Cockrum had tried to work in this mode: “Kitty’s Fairy Tale,” in issue #153, had imagined Wolverine as a beer-guzzling Tasmanian Devil and Nightcrawler as a fuzzy-elf doll. Cockrum bristled when Claremont was credited for the issue’s change of pace.

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According to Jim Shooter, Claremont had wanted to dress Professor X in “transvestite gear” for the story. “He had this thing for bondage and fetish,” said Annie Nocenti. “He was always finding excuses to give the White Queen some kind of . . . the only thing with Chris was saying ‘That’s going too far.’ He wanted to run a story line where Xavier wanted to wear women’s clothes and I said, ‘No fucking way.’ There are certain things you do not do to heroes, if you want them to keep being heroes.”

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In an awkward bit of B-roll footage, Jim Shooter first appears pacing the Bullpen, then towering above one frantic artist, asking, “Are we going to be done today?”

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Later, in interviews, Shooter would state that the executives were cashing out the pension fund and trying to retroactively eliminate the royalties, and that he’d screamed threats of a class action lawsuit in the hallway outside Galton’s office.

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“Originally we weren’t going to do a big crossover the following year,” said Louise Simonson, “but ‘Mutant Massacre’ sold so well that Shooter told us to do another. That became ‘Fall of the Mutants’ and the next year was ‘Inferno.’ I think a lot of people wanted a play in that one.”

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This issue,
Legends
#5, was scripted by another Marvel expatriate, Len Wein.

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In the 1980s, Marvel couldn’t help but brush up against New York City’s cocaine culture. By sheer chance, the Spider-Man wedding at Shea ended up on the night of Dwight Gooden’s return from rehab; a reception afterward was held at the recently opened but already infamous Tunnel club, which had weeks earlier been the site of filming for the
Bright Lights, Big City
adaptation.

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As reward for his effort, Rabkin was allowed to submit his own script for the character of his choosing. He wrote a Mexico-set western starring Blade, the vampire hunter who was part of the supporting cast of Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s
Tomb of Dracula
, and who’d since faded into obscurity. Although there were meetings with Richard Roundtree to star, the project never got off the ground.

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Perelman edged out a competing bid of $81 million from a group of investors led by former Allman Brothers manager Steve Massarsky and, to the surprise of many, Jim Shooter. Soon afterward, Massarsky and Shooter would form their own comic publisher, Valiant/Voyager.

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In marked contrast to Byrne’s comment about getting out of the trenches, McFarlane said, “Right now, I still feel good about monthly comic books, and I want to stick to the trenches. Maybe in a few years I’ll get bored; I’ll go for the golden ring then.”

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In September 1991, Marvel would also send a cease-and-desist letter to Voyager Communications, where Jim Shooter was now editor in chief, for a new comic Voyager had advertised. “Your title
X-O Manowar
is confusingly similar to X-Men,” the letter read, “and suggests and mimics the titles of Marvel’s ‘X-prefixed’ series of properties.”

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Many of these copies, of course, never reached retail customers, but remained in boxes as investments.

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Steve Ditko’s artwork from the 1965
Amazing Spider-Man
issue that featured the first appearance of Gwen Stacy netted only $20,000.

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The previous December, a front-page headline in
Baseball Weekly
had asked “Is Card Collecting Going Up in Smoke?”

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Eventually, Marvel gave Tokar the green light to give an interview with
U.S. News & World Report
about Northstar’s sexuality. “I talked to them for a half hour, with the PR person there, ready to put her hands over my mouth if necessary,” Tokar recalled. “I went through all the stuff I’d been through with Terry about Marvel’s history of breaking ground. When the article came out, my quote was cut down to four words: ‘Superheroes are outsiders, generally.’ ”

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Carolco paid Cameron $3 million for a forty-seven-page treatment that included pages of dialogue.

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When Conway left Marvel for an editorial staff position at DC in 1975, his parting gift was a story in
Amazing Spider-Man
#149 about a cloned Peter Parker battling the real Peter Parker. Just who it was that walked away from the fight was ambiguous.

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The
Comics Journal
quoted Stewart as grumbling candidly from the stage, “You’re moved from position to position, and you’re really not sure what your job is and what your responsibilities are. . . .”

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David Schreff, who had once worked at Disney, suggested the staging of a “Marvel Macarena” production, which would feature a dancing Spider-Man.

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Before this deal was completed, there was the matter of settling Claremont’s claims of unpaid royalties.

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The new-universes strategy had been introduced in the courtroom before Icahn took over. “Okay, who are these new characters going to be?” asked a skeptical lawyer for the banks. “What are these new twenty-one comic books going to be about? Zip! They have no answers. We think there will be a descent into chaos, and there will be no plan here, if these people come in.”

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At Halloween, a member of the sales team dressed up as the Mount Rushmore of 1990s Marvel presidents, affixing blown-up head shots of Terry Stewart, Jerry Calabrese, David Schreff, and Joe Calamari (the costume-wearer’s own head took up one spot) to a piece of corrugated cardboard. Calabrese, president once again, was not pleased.

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“He was making faces whenever I’d look in his direction,” Wolfman said of Byrne’s appearance in the courtroom. “Because the comments I had to make referred to him, he would start to make faces. He would move up and down. There was a wall in front of him, a couple feet high where the witnesses are behind. He would, like, lower himself so I couldn’t see him then raise himself up. He would start shaking his head no as if I was making a mistake, and he flustered me, because I’m trying to remember specific events. He was acting very much like a two-and-a-half-year-old child who has not had any Ritalin.”

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Simon and Marvel settled out of court, once again, in September 2003.

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At Joe Quesada’s request, Chris Claremont had recently agreed to collaborate with John Byrne on an alternate-reality, one-shot X-Men story called “The End.” It would have been their first pairing on the characters in twenty years.

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A third title, the Batman-and-Robin pastiche
Ultimate Adventures
, written by frequent Howard Stern guest Ron Zimmerman, was later added to the contest. Peter David’s
Captain Marvel
was the winner.

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Jemas offered the job of scripting
Marville
to Steve Gerber, who declined because of the book’s portrayal of DC’s Paul Levitz. “I wasn’t prepared to participate in the character assassination of someone I’d known for thirty years and whom I value as a personal friend,” Gerber wrote later.

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Shortly afterward, Meth wrote that the royalties had stopped, but in a 2011 email he stated that “every dime” of the “generous settlement was paid by Marvel to Dave Cockrum.” The terms remain confidential.