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

while Lee had weathered the storms of the comics industry by holding tightly to Goodman’s ship, Kirby had earned top rates thanks to his track record and reputation as a guaranteed creator of hits. Now, with Lee’s titles on the wane, and Kirby’s disappearing connections, both of them had lost their sense of security.
    Along with a few surviving western titles, much of Kirby’s output was now movie-matinee-style monsters with names like Monstrom and Titano and Groot and Krang and Droom. Lee would feed plots to his younger brother, Larry Lieber, who would then write them into scripts and send them to Kirby. With every successive cover, they became more hilarious in their repetition: it was always a clutch of tiny, high-tailing humans shrieking, falling down, and pointing fingers as they announced the mind-boggling danger that pursued them. “They warned us—but we didn’t believe Monstrom existed!” “Help! Save us! He’s alive! He’s coming! IT’S DROOM!”
    “I would much rather have been drawing Rawhide Kid ,” Kirby lamented. “But I did the monsters. We had Grottu and Kurrgo and it . . . it was a challenge to try to do something—anything with such ridiculous characters.” He described his fate as “shipwrecked at Marvel.”
    Stan Lee felt the same way. “[Martin Goodman] goes by and he doesn’t even say hello to me,” he told one of his artists. “It’s like a ship sinking, and we’re the rats. And we’ve got to get off.”

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    T he editors of Men and Male and Stag paid little attention to the guy toiling on funnybooks, sitting alone at his corner desk at 655 Madison Avenue. There was no staff surrounding Stan Lee any longer, just the handful of artists who dropped off finished pages, and the occasional visits from Millie the Model penciler Stan Goldberg, who would stop by to pitch in on production work. “It was basically him and I on all those books that came out,” Goldberg said of Lee. “Jack Kirby would come up, and if I didn’t catch him to have a bite to eat or something, he would run home.” The click and clack of Lee’s two-finger typing continued.
    Martin Goodman’s fateful game of golf came in the spring of 1961. When Stan Lee rolled up his sleeves and went back to writing about superheroes once again—at the age of thirty-eight, and twenty years into a no-longer-promising career—nobody blinked.
    T he cover of The Fantastic Four #1 was nothing like the other superhero titles on the rack. There were no colorful costumes; the protagonists appeared small and helpless; a white background lent the whole scenario an unfinished look. The shakily rendered title logo looked almost like it had been drawn by a child. What it did resemble was the monster magazines that Stan and Jack had been churning out for Goodman. In fact, with its scaly skin, mouth agape, and right arm raised, the unnamed creature erupting from the city street and threatening the heroes could have been a relative of Orrgo the Unconquerable, the cover star of that same month’s Strange Tale s #90; the off-balance citizens scurrying away on each cover were identically panicky. Any special appeal of these new heroes was unclear. “I can’t turn invisible fast enough!” cried a well-coiffed blond woman in a pink blouse. “It’s time for The Thing to take a hand!” shouted an orange lump with his back to the reader. If you didn’t know (as you couldn’t possibly, yet) that the awkward man in the foreground had the ability to stretch his body as though it was rubber—just like Quality Comics’ old Plastic Man character—you might guess that Jack Kirby had simply never learned to draw elbows properly.
    T he inside of the comic was similarly shambolic, as though the narrative had been improvised. To a degree, it had been: in recent years, Lee had begun providing artists with mere plot synopses, rather than full scripts, to ease his workload and prevent a bottlenecking of the production schedule. As a