Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe Read Free Book Online

was about wives, baseball, kids, broads—or about what a son of a bitch the guy you were working for was: office gas. The same as in any office anywhere, not a means of communication but a ritualistic discharge. The same release could be achieved through clowning: joke phone calls, joke run-around-errands for the office patsy, joke disappearances of the new man’s artwork. Everyone passed it off as good fun in order not to be marked as a bad sport.”
    With lowered morale, they continued to churn out product that shared shelf space with similarly antisepticized comics from industry leaders Dell (which held longtime licenses of Walt Disney and Warner Bros. characters) and DC (which had begun to reintroduce its superheroes as squeaky-clean citizens who worked by day as policemen, scientists, and police scientists in gleaming, modernist urban landscapes).
    In late 1956, at the advice of Monroe Froehlich, Goodman abandoned self-distribution and signed with the American News Company. But ANC—reeling from a Department of Justice investigation for monopolistic practices, and fighting lawsuits from its own clients—suddenly ceased its Wholesale Periodical Division in April 1957, leaving Goodman with a magazine and comic-book empire but no way to reach newsstands. Independent News, seeing the profitability of Goodman’s magazines, agreed to distribute Goodman’s publications. But because Independent News was owned by Timely’s rival, DC, there would be a catch: Goodman’s comic-book output could not exceed eight titles per month.
    The Timely line was decimated instantly. Goodman scheduled himself a vacation in Florida and told Lee to fire the staff once again. “It was the toughest thing I ever did in my life,” said Lee. “I had to tell them, and I was friends with these people. So many of them, I had dinner with them at their homes—I knew their wives, their kids, and I had to tell them this. It was, as I say, the most horrible thing I ever had to do.” After each conversation with a staff member, Lee left for the bathroom. Then he came back and fired another.
    John Romita, already impatient with his dwindling page rates, got a call from one of Stan’s lovely, soon-to-depart assistants: stop work immediately . He asked to be recompensed for the work he’d already done; she said she’d pass along the message, but he never heard back. “If Stan Lee ever calls,” Romita told his wife, “tell him to go to hell.”
    T he artists panicked. Some walked right over to DC Comics and showed their samples, but many ran as far from comics as they could. Bill Everett went to a greeting-card company, Gene Colan moved into advertising, and Don Heck began designing model airplanes. Mike Sekowsky, a cocky and lightning-fast penciler who’d been one of the stars of the Bullpen, got a job bagging groceries.
    Stan moved into a cubicle on the other side of Bruce Jay Friedman, a thin partition separating them. “I thought it was very brave of him to stay on, to go from those heights to one little desk and a secretary,” said Friedman. “It appeared that he was being pushed out and that he refused to be pushed out.” But Goodman had his own reasons for keeping his wife’s cousin on board. He’d seen comics rise and fall and rise again, and he was damned if he was going to give up the rack space now, only to be shut out of the game later on.
    W hen the inventory started to run out this time, there was no rehiring of staff. Only about a half-dozen artists stayed on Lee’s Rolodex for the required work. One of them, though, was his absolute favorite. Joe Maneely, who was speedy and astonishingly versatile, handling the Casper the Ghost facsimile Melvin the Monster and the western Two-Gun Kid with equal aplomb. Although he lived in New Jersey, Maneely became a regular guest at the Lees’ martini parties in Long Island, and by early 1958, Maneely and Lee were doing a syndicated comic strip, Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs , independently of