Domain not in remote thumbnail source whitelist: staging.cohostcdn.org
from https://cohost.org/lurkjay
Wein struggled with the constant cycle of cancellations and launches ordered by Lee and Landau. Iron Fist, a kung-fu hero whose origin was mostly lifted from an old Bill Everett creation that predated Timely, was given his own title, as was Black Goliath, in another attempt at an African-American audience… and also Red Sonja, and the Scarecrow, and Skull the Slayer, and Bloodstone, and on and on. “You’d go into the office one day,” said one assistant, “and the thirty books you’d edited last week would all be canceled, and even though they were in various stages of production, none of them was published yet, and thirty new books would be there for you to work on.”
There was also the chance that Lee would swoop in, look at a page, and offer an offhand remark that would send the office scrambling. Near the end of Roy Thomas’s tenure, Lee had taken a look at Iron Man pages in which the hero’s faceplate was so flat that it didn’t look like Tony Stark’s nose would fit. “Shouldn’t he have a nose?” he asked Thomas. In the decade since his creation, Iron Man’s faceplate had never included a nose, but Lee was the boss. In the next issue, Stark redesigned his helmet to include a big metal triangle in the front. Months later, Iron Man pages by Mike Esposito landed on the desk of Production Manager John Verpoorten’s brand-new assistant, Bill Mantlo. “I’m looking at this book and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, I must be hallucinating!’ ” said Mantlo. “ ‘Iron Man doesn’t have a nose.’ So I sat there, very innocently, with a tube of white-out, and painted out all the noses, and maybe an hour later, I hear screaming. ‘Esposito, are you out of your mind?! What happened to his nose?’… Mike comes in and he’s raging, ‘Goddamn it, the nose is there!! You can see the little dot of white over each nose!’ ” Mantlo went through and dutifully scraped the Wite-Out from every panel.
To help writers keep track of the flood of new and changing characters, Thomas had kept a plastic box of index cards noting where characters had last appeared, and what their powers were. That would no longer do. Now there was a gigantic database, an alphabetized list on five pounds of perforated computer paper printouts.
Coordinating the increasingly complex story continuity between titles was also becoming a burden. One of the Marvel Universe’s hallmarks was that it was all one grand narrative, that everything that happened in one title had a potential impact on all the others. This was manageable when Stan Lee had personal oversight of eight comics a month, but nearly impossible when a cadre of excitable twenty-somethings wanted to let their imaginations wander—or when the bottom line called for franchise expansion. How could Spider-Man be everywhere at once? “The problem at Marvel,” said Wein, “was that we suddenly became a business with a bunch of books that Stan, I don’t think, ever in his heart expected to last more than a couple of years.” Complicating matters further were the proprietary battles for character use. “Gerber would want to have Hulk do one thing in The Defenders,” said Claremont, “but Englehart would say, ‘I’ve got him doing this other thing in the Avengers. Who has priority?’ ”
“There was a definite hierarchy,” said Bill Mantlo, who was drafted from the production office to write during a deadline crunch, and began getting regular assignments. “It seemed at that time that the key to being a successful Marvel writer was that you had worked for two companies, that made you better than all the hacks like me and Claremont and Moench who’d begun at Marvel, stayed with Marvel, and were loyal to Marvel. In fact, financially, if you quit Marvel and went to DC, you could come back to Marvel at a higher rate than somebody who stayed at Marvel. It was a sign of success to shit on the company, go somewhere else, and then come back, and Chris, Doug, and I, and maybe Tony [Isabella] at that point, were left cleaning up the manure, without thanks, without reward. That went on for quite a while. There was also a theory that if you were Editor, you were supposed to write The Hulk, Spider-Man, and Thor. Maybe Fantastic Four. It fluctuated, depending on who your favorite characters were when you were fifteen. That was what ‘Editor’ meant at Marvel. Not that you were someone who was officious, not that you were someone who was efficient, who was a good administrator, or who was an excellent writer in his own stead—being an editor at Marvel meant that now you should be able to write whatever the top books were considered to be, and everybody else got what was considered the dregs.”
J❀y
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.