Category: 03 Marvel Comics Page 3 of 9

Thank you very much for all the happy birthday wishes yesterday. I really appreciate it.

They’ll Always Have Paris

One Monday morning in early 1985, Chris Claremont came into my office in a foul mood. My door was literally always open. I hardly ever looked up when people came in because there was a steady parade of Marvel staffers and freelancers coming in all day to glom some free jellybeans from the gumball machine on my desk. If the visitor flopped down on my couch, I knew it was a casual, chatty visit or they were really tired. If he or she sat in one of the guest chairs in front of my desk, I knew it was business. If they stood in front of my desk radiating foul-mood vibes, like Chris, there was a problem.

Chris growled that he’d spent the weekend at a convention. I forget where. Mudville, Michiconsin or Dulltown, Ohiowa.

Dialogue represented more or less accurately:

“So, how’d that go?”

“The Avengers writer and artists got to go to a con in West Palm Beach!”

“Yep. So?”

“I write the X-Men! It’s the top book! How come I have to go to Sludge City and they get to go to West Palm Beach?!”

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I think that in the 70’s, people were so used to having Jack around that they took him for granted. I’ve read the letters pages in some of his 70’s Marvel titles like Cap, Eternals and Black Panther and he definitely gets a lot of negative feedback. It seems to me like a case of too much of a good thing. These guys had grown up on his stuff and his style at Marvel was kind of omnipresent, and if it wasn’t him drawing a book in a lot of cases it was someone drawing just like him, and then in the 70’s you had guys like Starlin and Barry Smith which for the fans were a new style and a kind of a breath of fresh air, and they didn’t want to go back. They were like teens who’ve gotten do drive and have some freedom for the first time, and now they don’t want to go to grandma’s house every sunday with the rest of the family.

I didn’t get into Kirby until the early 90’s when I was in my early 20’s. I ate up his 70’s stuff. The time was right for me to discover and fall in love with it. I understand how the kids didn’t want it at the time, but I wish they hadn’t been so mean about it. Anyway, I see every Kirby issue as gold.

ANSWER:

Jack’s titles got plenty of positive mail, too, especially early on, but because the people putting together the lettercolumns then used a lot of negative letters, that had the effect of generating more negative letters. In those days, it was a very cool thing to see your letter in print. Show the readers that negative letters are likely to get printed and you’d get lots of them.

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At the Chicago Con in 1986, Stan and I were among the guests. He was scheduled to do a one-man panel. He asked me to do the gig with him.

In those days, Stan’s office was at Marvel Productions, our animation studio in L.A. He spent all his time out there trying to generate film and TV opportunities. That, and writing the Spider-Man syndicated strip. He said that he always got a lot of questions at such panels about the comic books that he couldn’t answer. He was pretty much out of touch with what was going on in the comics.

So we went onstage together. It was a big room and it was packed.

We didn’t do any presentations, just took questions. I think nine out of ten questions were about the comic books.

Turned out we were a pretty good act. I’d answer the basic question and Stan would tag on a funny comment or an anecdote. We were a good tag team.

Toward the end, someone in the back asked Stan if he was ever going to have Spider-Man get married. A lot of people in the crowd voiced support.

Stan said that it was up to “Marvel’s entire editor,” and right then, right there in front of all those people, Stan asked me if I would allow Spider-Man to get married.

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Technically, the artwork was a “gift” being given to people involved their creation. Using the word “return,” implying that creators were getting back something they had any shred of a claim to whatsoever would have infuriated the lawyers, probably, but everybody used that term anyway.

Marvel gave artwork to creators at it “sole discretion” according to the formula developed by Roy Thomas, who was the one who somehow talked the brass into allowing artwork to be given away, returned, whatever, back in 1974 or so while Roy was Editor in Chief.

Pencilers got most of the pages, inkers substantially fewer and writers got the smallest share.

Pencilers and inkers grumbled because, without exception, they felt that writers shouldn’t get any pages at all. Writers grumbled because pencilers had first choice of the pages, inkers picked second and the pages left for the writers were usually the least appealing ones. Write a heavy-copy page, and guess what, writers, that one’s yours.

Personally, I felt that if the company was giving pages to anyone, they should be given to the artists. I wrote a fair number of comics in those days. When pages were “returned” to me, I gave one page to the penciler and one to the inker. Other writers did that, too. Archie Goodwin and Don McGregor, for instance.

Once I became EIC in 1978, as if I didn’t have enough disasters to deal with, I was suddenly the central figure in the artwork return policy debate. I got a steady stream of protests, complaints and appeals about it.

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At some point while Roy Thomas was Editor in Chief Marvel Comics began giving original artwork to the creative people who had participated in the creation of the pages. That would have been in 1973 or thereabouts.

I wasn’t there. I started at Marvel Comics as associate editor on the first working day of January 1976.  Before that I had done a freelance job or three, I think in 1974 or 1975, but I lived 400 miles away in Pittsburgh and worked through the mail, so I wasn’t exactly on top of what was going on in the office.

As I’ve said elsewhere in this blog, it seemed that no one cared what the companies did with the original art during the 1960’s and before. Pages were given away, thrown away or stored away and there was no hue and cry about it. By the early 1970’s however, creative people had a new awareness of an interest in original art.

Here’s my theory:

In the elder days of the comic book industry, until the 1960’s, comics were almost entirely made for children, or on the high end, adolescents. Yes, of course there were some exceptions, but not many, and if you were an adult who appreciated the medium or, perhaps, enjoyed the more sophisticated offerings, you kept that to yourself. Or risked ridicule.

From what I’ve heard and seen from the old guard people I worked with over the years, the publishers and professionals generally had indifference toward the audience. Distribution was through newsstands or subscription. There was virtually no contact between creators and readers. Who cared what six-year-olds thought, anyway?

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