Month: June 2011 Page 2 of 4

Once the mystery of the benevolent lapping scam was solved, Financial V.P. Barry Kaplan made attempts to recover some of the money.  A few creators who had benefitted from the advance-vouchering that had been going on actually worked off their debt, or paid the money back.  Very few.  Barry judged many to be hopeless cases, gave up on them and wrote the debt off.  One creator allowed us to publish a story to which he owned all rights as a make-good for what he’d been advanced.  A few of the clever and sleazy types, including one artists’ studio owner, realized that with John Verpoorten dead, she could simply deny everything, insist that all the work that had been paid for but never done had, indeed, been done and delivered.  She couldn’t help it if inept Marvel comics had “lost” the work.  She got away clean.

But anyway….  We thought voucher scamming was done with.  Under the new rules, editors signed vouchers and accounting handed out the checks.  No more opportunity for lapping. 

Ah, but we were dealing with creative people, remember.  And a few of them got creative about ways to circumvent the safeguards.

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dailypop said…

“Speaking of the Hulk I was wondering if you could shed some light where the idea of the child abuse story came from. There has been much speculation about this from different people including Barry Windsor Smith. I have never heard your side of the story.”

Dear dailypop,

Barry came to me with a completely penciled and written graphic novel. It was the about the development of the “mighty, raging fury” inside Bruce Banner, who, he revealed, was the product of an abusive home. I looked it over. I thought it was brilliant, one of the best comics stories I’d ever seen. I offered Barry a contract and an advance. He turned me down — temporarily. He proposed to finish the thing — then, if I would agree to publish it as created, no alterations whatsoever, he would sign a contract and take the money. I was willing to agree to that in writing on the spot, but he said, no, when it’s finished. Okay. Fine by me. I already knew, from what he’d shown me, that there’d be no problem.

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During my time at Marvel the people that held the position of Art Director were John Romita, Sr., Marie Severin (briefly), and John Romita, Sr. again.  Dave Cockrum shared duties with John Romita for a while, as did Don Perlin toward the end of my tenure.

First of all, the title “Art Director” at Marvel during the 70’s and 80’s is completely misleading.  It was a staff artist position.  Of course, it made sense to have a really outstanding artist on staff.  Things came up constantly for which a quality piece of art was needed, for presentations, PR, whatever, and if you had to track down a freelancer each time, it would be a nightmare.  Stan trumped up the title “Art Director” so he could pay outstanding, versatile artist John Romita more money.  The brass above Stan would never have agreed to pay a “staff artist” as much, but an “Art Director?”  Sure.

Fortunately, the brass was completely ignorant of what went on in the comics creative department, so they were easily fooled.  Seriously—most of the upstairs execs and the brass of parent company Cadence Industries had never opened a comic book, and they were proud to say that.  Few had ever even ventured onto the floor we occupied.  We scared them, I think.

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The Benevolent Lapping Scam – Benign Malfeasance

Around the beginning of December, 1977, Marvel President Jim Galton offered me the Editor in Chief job, replacing Archie Goodwin.  (How that came to pass is another wondrous strange tale, coming soon.)  Archie was going to step down as EIC and become a contract writer-editor.

The plan was for Archie to finish out the month and for me to begin on the first working day of January, 1978.  Stan thought it would be best not to announce the change until just before it went into effect.

The month of December, 1977 was a traumatic time for Marvel.  John Romita resigned as Art Director to work full time on the Spider-Man syndicated strip.

And, Production Manager John Verpoorten died at the age of 37.

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While Stan Lee was the editor, from 1941 till Roy Thomas took over as Marvel’s first Editor in Chief in 1972, Marvel Comics was run like a mom’n’pop operation.  Stan was the boss, and did or governed all things creative.  For a while during the 1950’s, and again from the early 1960’s through the early 1970’s, his “right hand man” was Sol Brodsky, Production Manager.  Besides overseeing the mechanics of getting the books created and printed, Sol handled anything legal, financial, technical or complicated, that is, anything Stan didn’t want to be bothered with. 

In 1972, Roy Thomas took over from Stan, who had been made President.  That didn’t work out.  The bureaucratic crap and administrative duties involved didn’t suit him, so Stan became Publisher instead.  

By then, Sol had left for a while to start ill-fated Skywald Publications, which promptly failed.  Sol needed a job, and approached Stan, but a new Production Manager had been hired in Sol’s absence—John Verpoorten.  Stan convinced the Cadence Board to create a new position for Sol, “V.P. of Operations.”  Essentially, he was Stan’s right hand man again.  More on that later.

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