Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

Author:Sean Howe [Howe, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780061992100
Amazon: 0061992100
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-10-09T06:00:00+00:00

13

Out in Sherman Oaks, California, Stan Lee presided in Marvel Productions’ ranch-style building on Van Nuys Boulevard, taking meetings at a glass-top table that occupied the sunny courtyard just outside his dark-paneled, high-ceilinged, leather-filled office. Things were cooking. The Academy Award–winning writer Stirling Silliphant had completed a draft of a live-action Daredevil pilot for ABC. There was talk of getting Tom Selleck for a Doctor Strange movie; Carl Weathers, fresh off the success of Rocky III, was eyeing a Power Man film; and disaster-movie mogul Irwin Allen wanted to put The Human Torch in theaters. Although CBS Theatrical Films had placed Fantastic Four in turnaround, now Roger Corman was taking out an option for a Spider-Man movie, and the Canadian animation company Nelvana had obtained the rights for a live-action film of The X-Men.

Lee had a lot to feel good about, then, when he visited New York in January 1983. The editorial staff was at the peak of its yuk-yuk, hand-buzzer giddiness. They’d been shooting photos of each other in superhero costumes for some of the covers—several staff members appeared on the cover of the last issue of Spider-Woman—and now they were putting together a comic that consisted wholly of photos of intra-office hijinks, and they wanted to include Stan the Man. Lee, the original ringmaster, jumped at the chance to pose for the centerfold. “I got Stan to agree to do it naked,” said Ann Nocenti. “We photographed him with a comic book covering his private parts, and then I got a call from his assistant or something in L.A., who said, ‘Stan’s wild. He should not have been naked for your centerfold. Please don’t.’ But he was going for it. He got to rip his clothes off and lay down on the couch.” (A Hulk costume was later superimposed over Lee’s body in postproduction.)

But if one thing was sure to puncture Lee’s good mood, it was what Jack Kirby was saying about Marvel—and Lee personally—in the new issue of Will Eisner’s Spirit magazine. The previous July, Kirby had taken a break from Comic-Con engagements to sit in a San Diego hotel lobby and give an unsparing interview to Eisner; now the bomb he’d set was going off. Of Marvel’s rejuvenation after the 1957 layoffs, he said, “I came back the afternoon they were going to close up. Stan Lee was already the editor there and things were in a bad way. I remember telling him not to close because I had some ideas. . . . I felt I had to regenerate things. I began to build a new line of superheroes.”

Kirby gathered steam. It wasn’t Lee and Kirby who came up with the ideas for superheroes—it was Kirby alone, fighting against Goodman’s resistance. “Stan Lee was not writing. I was doing the writing,” he insisted. “Stan Lee wouldn’t let me fill the balloons. Stan Lee wouldn’t let me put in the dialogue. But I wrote the entire story under the panels.” Again, he took credit for creating Spider-Man.

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