The “Devilish Competition” Pulls Off a Headline-Worthy Heist

“Carmine was trying to beat Marvel by getting Jack Kirby, their co-creator. He thought we could get there faster by having Kirby on our side.”

—DC editor Dick Giordano

“Possibly the biggest news story in Marvel history,” fan magazine Marvelmania breathlessly proclaimed at the time. Another fanzine, Newfangles, rushed an “extra” edition to press to cover the momentous event.

Jack Kirby was coming to DC.

The bombshell defection had been brewing for some time. Kirby and DC’s Carmine Infantino, two industry dinosaurs, had known each other for years, and Infantino’s brother, Jimmy, had worked with Kirby briefly back in the 1950s. When Infantino was put in charge of DC in 1967, Kirby phoned his old acquaintance to offer friendly congratulations.

“Carmine told Jack that if he ever wanted to leave Marvel, he could come to DC,” says Steve Sherman, who worked as Kirby’s assistant beginning in the late 1960s.

Toward the end of 1969 Infantino found himself in California working on DC’s upcoming Super Friends cartoon. He phoned Kirby, who had relocated from New York to California earlier in the year, to have dinner. The two talked business, and Kirby showed Infantino three covers for a line of interconnected comic series: Forever People, New Gods, and Mister Miracle.

“They’re sensational. When is Marvel putting them out?” Infantino asked.

“They’re my creations, and I don’t want to do them at Marvel,” Kirby said. “Would you make me an offer?”

No one had to ask Infantino twice. He had a contract quickly drawn up that would pay Kirby more than he was earning at Marvel. It required the writer-artist to produce fifteen pages a week—a crippling amount for most people, though not for the speedy Kirby.

“It was that simple,” Infantino later wrote.

Kirby sat on the news for a bit before finally phoning his longtime collaborator Stan Lee in March 1970 and dropping the atom bomb that he was going over to the “Devilish Competition,” as Marvelmania termed it. Lee was hurt and confused.

“I used to wonder why he left,” Lee said in 1993. “I said to myself that he was just sick of the credits always saying, ‘By Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,’ with me as the editor. I think he wanted to prove how good he was without me, but I have no way of knowing if that’s right.”

Kirby had been growing increasingly unhappy at Marvel and was especially dissatisfied with the new contract he was being offered. He was also becoming estranged from Lee, a man who had once been his errand boy but was now his boss. Kirby felt Lee was hogging all the credit for Marvel’s success, and Kirby also despaired that the company was distancing him from his creations. When a Silver Surfer solo comic had been launched in 1968, it was John Buscema who’s been tapped to pencil it, not Kirby, the character’s creator.

“At DC, I’m given the privilege of being associated with my own ideas,” Kirby said in 1971. “If I did come up with an idea at Marvel, they’d take it away from me and I lost all association with it. I was never given credit for the writing which I did. Most of the writing at Marvel is done by the artist from the script.”

Lee announced the shocking resignation in the September 1970 edition of Bullpen Bulletins, downplaying the importance. “That’s where we’re at—under-staffed, under-manned, and under-fed—but as bushy-tailed and bewildered as ever!” he wrote. “So watch for the fireworks, friend.”

“At Marvel they put on a brave face, but they were clearly upset and not quite sure what would happen,” Mike Friedrich says.

The idea of Marvel Comics without Kirby seemed almost inconceivable. “Jolly Jack” had had a major hand in creating so many of Marvel’s now-iconic characters—Fantastic Four, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, Doctor Doom. Stan Lee may have been the public face of Marvel, but Kirby was the heart. At that point in 1970 he was virtually synonymous with the publisher. And now DC had him.

Kirby’s reception was somewhat chilly.

“The problem was that not everyone at DC was happy to have Jack there,” says Kirby’s then-assistant Mark Evanier. “They worked for the company for years and years, and all of a sudden now they’re kissing the ass of the guy who was doing those books [at Marvel] that were supposedly inferior.”

Whatever animosity may have existed didn’t dampen DC’s full-court marketing press. “The Great One is coming!” shouted an ad from the spring of 1970. “People! Places! Things! So powerful in concept, it’s almost terrifying!”

Despite the hype, the announcement of Kirby landed with a bit of a thud.

According to Kirby, Infantino had initially asked him to “save” DC’s flagship title, Superman. The possibility is difficult for our puny brains to conceive. Marvel’s biggest, most recognizable artist on the world’s most recognizable superhero. Kirby was reluctant to take the job, fearing that someone else would lose work to make way for him.

In Infantino’s telling, however, Kirby lobbied to take over Superman, but the editorial director was hesitant to give him such a high-profile job and wanted to slowly ease him into the DC pool.

Either way the result is the same: Jack Kirby, the greatest living comic book artist, got put on … Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen.

Say what, now?

The title starred the Man of Steel’s freckle-faced photographer sidekick and often featured goofy adventures, like the time Olsen collected Superman’s tears and ended up mistakenly building a bomb with them, or the time he was transformed into a superhero called Ultra-Olsen.

Kirby took over with #133 (October 1970) and immediately changed everything. He introduced far-out concepts and story lines that bore little resemblance to the inoffensive juvenile tripe that had come just an issue before. Straight out of the gate Kirby ran afoul of the DC corporate powers-that-be. His rougher, boxier style didn’t necessarily mesh with his new company’s smooth, polished look.

“There were also just some people at DC who didn’t like the way he drew,” Evanier recalls.

One who took exception was Sol Harrison, DC’s intimidating production manager and a member of the old guard who, now that Mort Weisinger had retired, most represented the conservative, immovable DC.

“When I first met Harrison in 1970, almost the first thing he said was, ‘Can you tell Jack to stop drawing square fingers? He should draw more like [DC’s favored Superman artist] Curt Swan,’” Evanier recalls. “But I thought to myself: Who do you think you just got? You guys just landed the top artist in the business, and you want him to draw like everything you’ve been publishing for twenty years?”

Kirby soon ran into trouble with his depiction of Superman. The character was a lucrative license for DC, appearing on lunch boxes and T-shirts, and the publisher insisted that the character always appear on-model in the comics; deviation or experimentation was not tolerated. But Kirby drew the Man of Steel in his own distinctive Kirby style—a bit less handsome, a bit more angular. After Kirby turned in his art pages DC ordered other artists, whose work was closer to DC’s preferred look, to redraw Superman’s face. For all of DC’s lip service about moving in a new direction, the company still couldn’t be nudged out of its comfort zone.

“We didn’t enjoy changing an artist’s work,” Infantino wrote in his autobiography. “It takes time and costs money, but sometimes it is necessary.”

The changes were potentially about more than just licensing. The higher-ups at DC hated the Marvel style so much that they simply couldn’t cope with a “Marvelized” version of their flagship character, according to Evanier. DC editor Mike Sekowsky once told Kirby’s assistant that, to Infantino, having Kirby’s Superman redrawn was about scoring a victory over Marvel. It was proof that Marvel’s star artist still wasn’t good enough to cut it at DC. (Infantino denied the accusation.)

Kirby was apparently unhappy about the touch-ups but didn’t protest all that much. After all, he hadn’t come to DC to draw Superman; he wanted to be free to unleash his own wild, original concepts that would harness his imagination and push the medium forward.

Late in 1970 the first of Kirby’s brand-new comics hit the racks. The so-called Fourth World was an ambitious cosmic saga made up of three connected titles set in the same world with overlapping characters. It began with Forever People and the New Gods, released December 1970, and it continued a few months later with Mister Miracle.

The family of titles involved a battle between godlike beings inhabiting twin planets created from the destruction of a larger world. New Genesis, a fertile, Utopian planet, represented good, while Apokolips, a fiery, barren dystopian world, represented evil.

“New Genesis and that demon’s pit, Apokolips, one drifting forever in the shadow of the other,” one character says in New Gods #1, describing an eternally binary relationship that, come to think of it, nicely encapsulates the state of superhero comic book publishing.

The series introduced a host of new characters, many of whom would become DC universe mainstays. Darkseid was the angular-headed ruler of Apokolips and one of the great comic book baddies. His son, Orion, was raised on New Genesis and grows to oppose his father. The Fourth World was a potent stew of myth, symbolism, and family angst. and it came loaded with a steady stream of concepts so heady that they were likely to induce 1960s acid flashbacks. Boom tubes? Whiz wagons? Mother boxes? So much crazy stuff was packed onto every page that, for the readers of regular superhero comics in 1971, it must have been bit like trying to drink out of a fire hose.

Once at DC Kirby’s animosity toward his former employer began manifesting in his work. In Mister Miracle #6, released in late 1971, the hero runs across a shyster named Funky Flashman, who is a dead ringer for Stan Lee, right down to the beard, toupee, and snappy banter. The character was originally conceived as a satire of a man who ran a Marvel fan club and ripped off its members, but once Kirby started drawing the story, Flashman morphed into Lee.

“In the shadow world between success and failure, there lives the driven little man who dreams of having it all!!!” read a caption describing Flashman. “The opportunistic spoiler without character or values, who preys on all things like a cannibal!!!—including you!!!”

(Kirby must have been getting paid by the exclamation mark.)

“I remember when he showed me the pages,” says Kirby’s former assistant Sherman. “He was laughing. We all were.”

Flashman runs the Mockingbird Estates, a slave plantation, and gets paid for admittedly doing nothing. As the story opens, Flashman is seen literally taking money out of the mouth of a bust that looks suspiciously like Jack Kirby. Flashman is joined by his obsequious sidekick, Houseroy, who is clearly meant to represent Lee’s then number two at Marvel, Roy Thomas. The two set out to scam Mister Miracle using Flashman’s slick verbal skills.

“I felt Funky Flashman was a nasty business,” Roy Thomas says. “I think Stan was a bit hurt by it, to see that nastiness coming out of Jack. In 1974, when I had a meeting with Jack when I was still editor-in-chief and Jack was thinking about coming back to Marvel, I told him that the Funky Flashman thing had hurt Stan’s feelings, but he wouldn’t hold it against Jack. Jack just laughed and said it had all been in fun, but I knew he was lying. And I guess he knew I knew. Nowadays I often call myself ‘Houseroy,’ but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it was a low point in Jack’s personal career.”

Although Kirby was a virtual one-man production facility—he wrote, penciled, and edited his comics out of his home in California—he still required an inker. The one DC assigned would prove to be a disaster and lead to yet another strange chapter in the Marvel-DC rivalry.

Vinnie Colletta was a Sicilian-born artist that the word “colorful” doesn’t even begin to describe. He was a Godfather type straight out of central casting, with a salesman’s charm and a Hollywood demeanor. His prematurely graying hair was immaculately styled at all times, and he dressed flashily, often with multiple gold chains. He once turned up at a convention wearing a white suit, white shoes, and a black shirt, unbuttoned nearly to his navel.

“Vinnie told me he thought comic book people were the dullest people in the world,” says veteran inker Joe Rubinstein, who began working for DC in the 1970s. “Whether he was or wasn’t, he tried to come across as a mini-mafioso, and a loan shark and tough and that he knew people, and all that stuff.”

Colletta had been working steadily since the 1950s on both DC and Marvel books and had recently inked Kirby on Thor. His reputation was less as a great artist than as a fast one.

“Vinnie took great pride in the fact that he solved everyone’s problem by inking a job in three days that should have taken ten days,” Rubinstein says. “He was a hero because he got the job done. One of the ways he did it was to erase backgrounds and black out figures. It’s like [artist] Gil Kane said: ‘Vinnie is the best inker in the business except for everyone else.’”

DC assigned Colletta to work on the high-profile “Fourth World” books in part because Colletta was cheap and the company was paying Kirby so much that it was forced to cut corners elsewhere. It may also have been a way to soften Kirby’s art and bring it more in line with DC’s house style.

Kirby worked quickly, and with the New Gods at least, the first issue was completed about six months before it went to press—a rarity in the frantic world of periodical comics. Working so far ahead is great for deadlines. On the downside it was not ideal for security. The Fourth World was Kirby’s splashy new original work for DC, and Kirby had major concerns that the pages would be leaked to his former employer.

“Jack was always either paranoid or cautious—whatever word you want to use,” Kirby’s former assistant Evanier says. “Jack didn’t want to have Marvel rush out imitations of [his DC work], which he thought was possible, so they were under lock and key.”

Even the other editors at DC were not allowed a peek at Kirby’s new titles before they were published. When Evanier visited the offices in 1970, Julie Schwartz—a fairly senior honcho at the company—begged him to tell what he knew about the New Gods.

Kirby’s paranoia might not have been unfounded.

“There were a number of cases where Marvel did stuff around that time that Jack was convinced were stolen from him, like covers and a couple of ideas for comics,” Evanier says.

In one case Kirby had drawn two pages of a proposed strip called Galaxy Green about warrior women in outer space. It was meant for an underground-style DC magazine that ultimately never saw the light of day. Marvel later did a tale similar in theme and style.

The May 1971 edition of Marvel’s Savage Tales magazine contained a strip called the Femizons, by Stan Lee and John Romita, about a race of futuristic Amazon-like women. Whether or not it was just a coincidence, Kirby believed his idea had been pilfered.

Kirby may have been paranoid, but the fact was that spying between the two companies was absolutely a concern at the time.

In 1971, when Kirby’s Fourth World was rolling out, DC discovered that it had a real-life supervillain in its midst. Late at night, after most everyone had gone home, a certain freelance employee was ransacking the company’s offices, rifling through desks and looking for corporate intel to leak to fan publications or, worse, to Marvel.

To catch the spy, DC’s senior staff launched a clever disinformation campaign that, like all proper top-secret operations, even had its own code name: Blockbuster. Infantino drew up a phony corporate memo to his editors announcing that DC was going to raise prices and start putting out five-hundred-page comic books costing $1.

“They put the memo under some papers in the ‘out’ tray of someone in the production department because that’s where [the spy] was working and basically just waited to see what would happen,” recalls former DC production manager Bob Rozakis.

The trap worked. Word of the new Blockbuster books mysteriously found its way to various fanzines and, of course, over to Marvel’s Manhattan offices. The next thing anyone knew, Marvel editor Stan Lee was talking about doing a five-hundred-page book for a dollar.

Neither company ever ended up producing the Blockbuster issues. As for the spy, he was soon caught after accidentally outing himself.

“He tipped his own hand by bringing up Blockbuster in a conversation with someone at DC,” Rozakis says. The freelancer was henceforth no longer allowed in the DC office after hours.

Around the same time Larry Lieber applied to DC Comics. On paper Lieber was a strong candidate. He was a seasoned writer with years of experience on high-profile titles, including Iron Man. He did have one major ding against him, though: he was Stan Lee’s brother.

“I sent the work over to DC, and I never got any word,” Lieber says.

Then one day he ran into DC’s Carmine Infantino at a Manhattan watering hole. “I reminded him that I sent over some work and never heard anything,” Lieber says. “He looked at me and said, ‘You mean, that was on the level?!’ They thought that Marvel was sending me over to spy to get their wonderful secrets.”

But Jack Kirby would soon become the victim of actual espionage involving his Fourth World books. One day while Evanier was visiting New York, Kirby’s assistant went over to the Marvel offices to hang out, where he discovered something shocking. There he spotted photocopies of as-yet-unpublished pages from Kirby’s New Gods #1 tacked to the wall. He was aghast. The pages that had been kept under lock and key had somehow found their way over to the competition.

“[Marvel art director] Marie Severin asked me for Jack’s address in Los Angeles, and I gave it to her,” Evanier recalls. “When I got back to LA I called Jack and I said, ‘You’re not going to like this, but New Gods #1 is up at the Marvel office. They’ve read it,’ and Jack says, ‘I know. I just got a fan letter from Marie.’”

The leak enraged Kirby, and they soon identified a culprit: Vinnie Colletta, perhaps the only man who had access to the work and could have given it to Marvel. The news came as little surprise to Kirby, who had suspected Colletta of being a Marvel spy.

It was also no huge shock to DC’s editorial director, Carmine Infantino. Colletta had once come to him with a peculiar offer. “I know Stan Lee, I know you well,” Colletta had said. “I can carry stories back and forth to you guys, whatever you want.” Infantino refused.

“[Colletta] tried to make himself something he wasn’t: important,” Infantino said in 2010.

Leaking the Kirby pages might have been about just that.

“In Vinnie’s case he was just trying to curry favor,” says Gerry Conway, who was working for Marvel at the time. “He was always trying to do that. It was not appropriate, but I don’t think it was part of a master plan at Marvel.”

For the breach Colletta was fired from the Fourth World books, and Mike Royer took over with New Gods #5, Mister Miracle #5, and Forever People #6. The change may have improved the finished art, but Kirby’s new DC books were unfortunately not long for this world.

The titles had sold decently enough in the beginning, with the excitement of Marvel’s biggest star’s defection stoking interest. The issue in which he took over Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen represented the biggest sales jump in DC history from one issue to the next of an established title. Hardcore comic book readers, whose numbers were growing in the seventies, seemed to be especially smitten with Kirby.

“We just followed him,” says Rick Newton, a comic book fan since the 1960s who preferred DC to Marvel but grew to love Kirby. “My Marvel friends would have followed him even if I hadn’t. They knew long before I did that he was what most artists and writers were trying to be in that medium.”

To many readers, however, Kirby was great with grand ideas and trippy concepts, but he needed a writer to dialogue his stories and an editor to focus his work. As much as it might have pained him, he could have used someone like Stan Lee. Without him Kirby seemed adrift.

“I remember pitching an idea to Julie [Schwartz] that would involve some of Jack’s characters, and Julie was highly resistant to it,” says writer Mike Friedrich. “There was a lot of reluctance to touch Jack’s stuff because they didn’t understand it. And who did? Most of it was incomprehensible.”

“To my ear he couldn’t write,” says Steve Englehart, a Marvel writer at the time. “I’ve said for a long time: I wish that DC would republish the Fourth World in English.”

Infantino finally swallowed his pride, accepted defeat, and did what needed to be done. New Gods and Forever People were discontinued with their eleventh issues. Mister Miracle lasted to #18, and Kirby was moved to other projects within DC.

“When they stole Kirby away from Marvel in 1970, Carmine told Kirby he could do whatever he wanted,” says former DC production manager Rozakis. “And he did for a while until they started getting the sales reports, and then they thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.’”

Kirby’s acquisition may not have worked out as well as DC had hoped, but DC was hardly cowed. The company also attempted to poach someone more synonymous with Marvel than its star artist: Stan Lee.

Sometime in the early seventies the bosses at DC’s parent company contacted Lee about becoming their new editor-in-chief. If Kirby’s defection had rocked the industry like an atom bomb, this news would have been like a supernova.

Lee had been growing increasingly restless at Marvel as founder Martin Goodman ceded more power to his son, Chip.

“Stan was intimidated a little by Martin because it was his uncle by marriage and Martin was the publisher, but Chip was just this young kid who got a job because he was the son,” Roy Thomas says. “Stan didn’t want to work for Chip, so he was thinking about leaving and leveraging himself a good deal at DC.”

Lee had at least one meeting with DC about switching teams. It may simply have been a negotiating tactic with Marvel. Some months later in 1972 he was elevated to publisher, and his right-hand man, Roy Thomas, became editor-in-chief and largely responsible for the day-to-day operation of Marvel.

Who knows how different the industry might have been had Lee decided to leave. DC could have used the help. Marvel was on the verge of doing what seemed unthinkable a few years earlier. The little upstart company that had grown from a basically one-man company was closing in on DC in sales, and the impetus that finally put them ahead would involve a double cross so wicked that it was nearly Shakespearean in its grandeur.

Both Marvel and DC used the same Illinois-based printer back then, and the printer informed the companies that prices for paper and printing were going up. To keep up, both companies would have to jack up the price of a standard comic book from 15 cents.

Instead of a small, incremental increase of a few cents, as it had done previously, DC—driven by the boss at its distributor Independent News—decided to go for a more radical change. Beginning with the August 1971 cover date, the publisher increased its page count from thirty-two pages to forty-eight pages and jacked the price to 25 cents—a whopping 67 percent increase. The new package contained an original story as well as reprints of old stories from DC’s archive.

Three months later Marvel did the exact same thing, converting its line to the larger 25-cent package. How did Marvel know what changes DC was going to make? That’s the $64,000 question.

It’s possible the printer told them. Infantino has said that the printer’s rep would keep DC abreast of the changes its competitors were planning.

There is another more interesting possibility, however: the two companies got together and mutually agreed to raise the price and page count. In short, collusion, which would most likely have been illegal though perhaps not out of the question in such a small and insular industry.

“I don’t know what kind of collusion there was, but I can’t imagine there was this amazing coincidence when they both changed the price at the same time,” Roy Thomas says.

Legend has it that Marvel’s publisher, Martin Goodman, agreed to the price change with DC, but then after just a single month at the higher price, he suddenly dropped his line back down to a thirty-two-page comic for 20 cents. The new cover price was 5 cents higher than it had been two months previously, but compared to DC’s 25 cents, it looked like a bargain.

A price war was what Goodman wanted, and a price war is what he got. The Marvel boss confided to Thomas that DC was about to “take a bath” if it didn’t immediately follow Marvel’s lead and lower its price to 20 cents.

“Carmine thought he had a deal with Goodman, and Goodman just couldn’t wait to stick it to him,” says historian Robert Beerbohm. “That’s when Marvel really started stomping on DC, because you could get five Marvels for a buck to four DCs.”

Marvel applied the killing blow by increasing its discount to distributors from 40 to 50 percent. The change made Marvel’s wares a far better value and put DC at a severe disadvantage, rendering their comics suddenly as attractive as syphilis to the people whose job it was to get them to market.

“[The distributors] were throwing our books back in our face!” Infantino recalled in 1998. “They were pushing Marvel’s books, so it really became a slaughter.”

“There are indications that DC is in serious trouble,” the fanzine Newfangles wrote at the time. “Dealers are not too keen on the 25 cent comic book, sales are skyrocketing for Marvel.… DC’s titles are also reported to be dying in droves on the stands, if they get that far—wholesalers prefer to handle the 20 cents books, apparently.”

It’s possible that the sudden price change wasn’t an intentional double cross by Goodman. The impetus for switching back to the smaller, lower-priced comics after just one month might have been driven by Marvel’s lack of material that could be reprinted on the extra pages that were suddenly available in the new 25-cent format. DC had a massive library of back matter, going back decades, all meticulously preserved on film. Marvel did not.

“Marvel was always gearing up to fill those extra pages, and they somehow discovered in the midst of that first issue that they couldn’t do it,” says writer Englehart. “Or they got an immediate negative backlash. I think Martin Goodman probably backed out of an agreement that was there, but I don’t know that it was premeditated.”

As Marvel sales soared, Lee began taunting DC with cover bursts touting Marvel’s lack of musty reprint material. “All new, all great!” advertised a colorful box on Fantastic Four #118 (January 1972).

In late spring 1972 DC was finally able to follow suit to decrease its page count and lower its price to 20 cents. But the damage had already been done.

That year it finally happened. Up became down, east became west, the poles in the comics world reversed, and suddenly the former underdog became the top dog.

Marvel passed DC in sales.

It had taken just eleven years from the launch Fantastic Four #1.

“There was definitely a sense that we were becoming the big boys on the block,” says Marvel writer Conway. “The cachet of working for Marvel was no longer just about doing interesting work; it was about being the bigger company—the company that was growing faster, the company that was taking more chances, that was expanding rapidly.”

To celebrate the victory Goodman gathered up the entire Marvel office and treated them to dinner. And his choice of eatery could not have been more laden with meaning: he took the Marvel staff to Friar Tuck’s, located just across the street, from DC’s offices, then located on Third Avenue at 55th Street and DC staffers’ favorite watering hole.

“We all went there, and a fine time was had by all,” says Englehart. “I’m sure from Martin Goodman’s standpoint, overtaking the monolith on the block was quite satisfactory to him. I’m sure going to DC’s favorite restaurant was a personal thing. He wanted to stick his finger in their eye. We were in competition with them, and we won, so we’re going to their restaurant, and that’s it.”

Over at DC the news of Marvel’s ascension was met with the usual dismissals.

“I was in an editorial meeting the first month that Marvel sales overtook DC’s, and some of the old-timers were saying this was a temporary thing and we’d be back on top in a month or two,” says Denny O’Neil. “Well, that was fifty years ago, and DC has never been back on top, except for an isolated month here and there.”

Marvel could smell blood, and the company increased its output, deploying another tried-and-true publishing tactic designed to push a competitor off the stands. From 1971 to 1973 Marvel’s releases exploded, going from 270 issues a year to 513. New titles and reprints soon abounded. Spider-Man got a second title with Marvel Team-Up. Doctor Strange, the Hulk, and the Sub-Mariner were joined into a team known as The Defenders. With so many magazines there would literally be no room for DC Comics on the newsstand racks. The company was in danger of being squeezed into oblivion.

DC’s Carmine Infantino wasn’t having any of it. “Screw them,” he groused, vowing to match Marvel “book for book.” He upped DC’s output by reviving Doom Patrol and Metal Men as reprint titles and launched new series, such as Sword of Sorcery.

No one seemed to welcome the glut, from readers to dealers to the publishers themselves. At one particular meeting of the Comics Code Authority—one of the few times reps from Marvel and DC were together in an official business capacity—the printer’s representative complained that there were too many comics. Infantino offered a bold compromise. Marvel and DC would cut back their titles to just twenty each and see who would come out on top. The proposal seemed agreeable to the printer and the others in attendance. Everyone, that is, except Stan Lee.

“My books sell, so I’m not pulling back,” he said.

Many of the new offerings failed to connect, however, and were quickly canceled. (Champion Sports and Black Magic, anyone?) One of the few books with a lasting impact to come out of the flood was DC’s Swamp Thing. The scientist-turned-tortured-muck-monster would become one of the company’s mainstays and eventually star in movies and a TV show. The character was part of a horror boom kicking off in 1972, and it provides one of the most bizarre intersections between Marvel and DC since the X-Men–Doom Patrol conspiracy back in 1963. That was weird enough, but Swamp Thing’s unintentional ties to Marvel might be even weirder. It all started with an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.

In 1970 the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare wrote Stan Lee, asking if he might put out an antidrug comic book. Lee agreed and wrote a story destined for The Amazing Spider-Man #96 (May 1971) with a subplot involving a teenager hopped up on pills who walks off a roof before being saved by Spidey. Subsequent issues revealed that Peter Parker’s roommate, Harry Osborn, was struggling with drug addiction.

By today’s standards it’s all unremarkable soap-opera stuff. Back in 1971, however, the comics code forbade any depiction of drugs, even with a message as heavy-handed as the one found in Amazing Spider-Man. When submitted for approval, the Code Authority rejected the antidrug issues of Marvel’s top title. But instead of making changes or yanking the stories, Stan Lee forged ahead, publishing issues #96, #97, and #98 without Code approval. The move was a first for Marvel and any mainstream comic book—sort of like Disney releasing an NC-17 movie—and proved controversial. To Marvel’s crosstown rivals, at least. DC was aghast at what they viewed as a breach of decency.

“You know that I will not in any shape or form put out a comic magazine without the proper authorities scrutinizing it so that it does not do any harm, not only to the industry but also to the children who read it,” Infantino said at the time.

After the issues were published, Lee claims to have received congratulations from ministers, teachers, and government agencies, and the decision helped cement Marvel’s rep as a purveyor of mature, cutting-edge material. Perhaps annoyingly for DC, it could have gotten there first.

A few months before the Amazing Spider-Man drug controversy, Neal Adams had penciled a cover for Green Lantern/Green Arrow with a shockingly realistic depiction of Green Arrow’s young sidekick, Speedy, shooting up heroin like he’s the fifth member of the Doors. Adams and writer Denny O’Neil had taken over the struggling series in 1970 and were trying to boost sales by steeping their superhero tales in real-world social issues such as racism and pollution.

Adams brought the heroin cover to Julie Schwartz, who at first “dropped it like a hot potato.” It was too much of a stretch for the old-school editor. A few weeks later Schwartz softened, and DC staffers began debating whether to run the cover. And that’s when Marvel’s Spider-Man drug issue appeared.

The controversy forced the Code Authority to reexamine its rules, and in a February 1971 meeting the censorship body voted to loosen restrictions on comics, including allowing the depiction of drug use. That summer the heroin issue of Green Lantern/Green Arrow was finally published. The irony was not lost on its creators that it had taken Stan Lee to get it printed.

One byproduct of the Code’s revision was that they also lifted the longtime prohibition on monsters. Publishers were now free to release books about werewolves, vampires, and other creatures that made their homes under small children’s beds, and they took advantage.

Which brings us back to Swamp Thing.

Writer Len Wein, who had been tasked to come up with concepts for DC’s mystery books, dreamed up the idea for the monster. Swamp Thing popped into his head while riding the subway to work one day. The creature made his first appearance in House of Secrets #92 (July 1971), just a few months after the Comics Code was altered. Bernie Wrightson drew him as a walking clump of green draped in vines and vegetation—a plant in human form. Something about the story caught readers’ fancies, and the issue was DC’s best-selling of the month. Swamp Thing soon graduated into his own title, though he was hardly alone in wandering the alligator-infested bayous.

Two months earlier Marvel had offered a tale of its own swamp monster called Man-Thing in Savage Tales #1 (May 1971). The idea had come from Stan Lee, who’d told his assistant editor Roy Thomas to write a story about a scientist working with experimental chemicals who falls into a swamp and comes out a monster. Thomas later passed on the plot to Gerry Conway, who wrote the first appearance.

The similarities between Man-Thing and Swamp Thing were impossible to ignore. Their origins, locales, character designs, and alarming lack of pants were nearly identical. Confusing matters even more, the principal architects of both creatures—Wein and Conway—were then roommates.

“There are some really obvious correlations between the first issue of Man-Thing and the first issue of Swamp Thing,” Conway says. “It happens that I had the artwork from the first issue of Man-Thing at the apartment while I was sharing with Len and while Len was plotting the first issue of Swamp Thing. I don’t say that he stole it, but there’s the influence of seeing something, it’s in the back of your mind and it comes out in another way.”

Neither DC nor Marvel was particularly happy with the coincidence. Lee sent Infantino a threatening letter asserting that Man-Thing had predated Swamp Thing by a few months and if DC didn’t drop the character, Marvel would sue. Infantino countered by pointing out that both characters were derivative of the Heap, a muck monster that first appeared in 1942. And, he asserted, a case could be made that so was Marvel’s Incredible Hulk. He no longer heard any complaints about Swamp Thing from Lee.

Conway recalls the saber rattling being the other way around.

“DC was threatening a lawsuit,” Conway says. “Marvel countered with the fact that, ‘You do know that Gerry and Len were roommates?’ And the lawsuit went away. Because what are you going to do?”

“Len and Bernie made Swamp Thing into a better comic than Man-Thing in many ways,” Thomas says. “In the end they were different enough. Once we got past it, an origin is just an origin. This is not the thing of which good lawsuits are made.”

Swamp Thing wasn’t DC’s only legally problematic expansion title in the early 1970s.

Fawcett Comics introduced Captain Marvel in 1940 during the initial superhero boom, and the title was once just as popular as Superman. Like the Man of Steel, Captain Marvel sold millions of copies, and the character headlined his own popular radio show.

He was Billy Batson, a child who transforms himself into an all-powerful caped hero by uttering his magic word, “Shazam!” The premise sounds like it has little in common with Superman, but the unforgiving eyes of DC’s legal team saw enough similarities between the two characters to sue for copyright infringement. The suit dragged on for years until Fawcett agreed to settle, assenting to cease publication of Captain Marvel. In 1953 the hero disappeared from newsstands.

Maybe a resurgence in a lawyer’s billable hours. Marvel would by no means just sit back and allow DC to publish a title called Captain Marvel.

After Fawcett had stopped printing Captain Marvel back in 1953 the trademark was eventually abandoned. In 1966 a schlocky comics company called M. F. Enterprises attempted to squat on the Captain Marvel name by rushing out a quickie title called Captain Marvel but not starring the Fawcett character. (This one’s alter ego was Billy Baxton, not Billy Batson.)

Marvel was understandably none too pleased with the idea of another publisher using its company name in a competing title. Legal wrangling followed, and the upstart publisher was made to go away for $4,500.

To solidify its right to Captain Marvel, Stan Lee—on the orders of Martin Goodman—quickly folded a new character with the same name into Marvel’s quickly expanding universe. First appearing in Marvel Super-Heroes #12 (December 1967), this Captain Marvel was a warrior from an interplanetary race called the Kree who wore a green-and-white costume with a planet symbol on his chest. He was awarded his own series in 1968 that ran for two years.

When DC got around to licensing the Fawcett Captain Marvel in 1972, it ran into a pretty major problem: DC may have owned the rights to publish Captain Marvel, but Marvel owned the name.

“We couldn’t put the words ‘Captain Marvel’ as a logo on the cover,” says Denny O’Neil, who wrote the first issue.

The legal quandary forced DC to change the magazine’s title to Shazam!, the magic word Billy Batson utters to change into Captain Marvel. As a cheat on the first few issues, a prominent subhead was added, reading, “The Original Captain Marvel,” but even that was disallowed. It was later tweaked to “The World’s Mightiest Mortal” with #15 (December 1974).

Years later, with the launch of a new Captain Marvel project, DC tried again to obtain use of the title. No dice. The 1994 graphic novel was instead called The Power of Shazam.

“Die-hard Captain Marvel fans were always so mad that it couldn’t be ‘Captain Marvel,’” says Jerry Ordway, The Power of Shazam writer and artist. “I still hear about it on Twitter. People are so up in arms over it.”

DC would get a modicum of revenge a few months after Shazam’s first issue in 1972. In Marvel’s Fear #17 (October 1973), writer Steve Gerber—a former advertising copywriter who would become known for his more oddball creations, including Howard the Duck—introduced a new character named Wundarr. Gerber intended Wundarr as an homage to Superman, but in this case the line between homage and simply borrowing everything about Superman to make your deadline was blurred.

Like Superman, Wundarr was an alien from a distant planet who, as an infant, had been blasted into space by his parents just before their planet’s sun explodes. He ends up on Earth, where he develops superpowers. Wundarr even dressed in a red-and-blue unitard. Man-Thing discovers his ship buried in a swamp, and the two slug it out to a draw.

When the story hit stands, DC was understandably miffed. The company claimed plagiarism. Stan Lee agreed and was just as ticked off with Gerber as DC was—he had not read the story before it was published.

“I had seen this character before it went out and told Steve, ‘It’s gotta be changed.’ And Steve didn’t change it, or he changed it very little,” Thomas says. “Stan was displeased with me, and he was ready to root Steve out of there as a sacrificial lamb, partly to mollify DC but partly because he knew that Steve knew better.”

After a few angry phone calls the two sides agreed to a truce. Marvel could continue using Wundarr if his origin were altered enough to differentiate him from Superman.

The threatened lawsuits along with Kirby’s defection made the early 1970s a time of friction between the two companies. Soon, however, Marvel and DC would enter into a new era of detente that would see them doing something fans never thought would happen: collaborating for the first time in the pages of the same comic book.