CHAPTER 13
In 1989, as President Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy prepared to return to civilian life after eight long years in the White House, CBS 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace interviewed the first couple just days before they left for their California ranch. The conversation touched on numerous topics, ranging from the strength of the Reagan’s long marriage to the trying times they spent in the nation’s capital. At one point, Wallace turned the discussion to an interesting but unrelated topic to give viewers a flavor of how the president lived a regular life, even while serving as the leader of the free world.
Wallace asked the president, “You read the comics in the morning?” Reagan then spoke about his morning routine, explaining that he first turned to the comics section, and then read the “serious stuff” to prepare for the day. Wallace revealed that Spider-Man was Reagan’s favorite comic strip, while the president spoke about how much he loved to read and couldn’t stand to be without a book at all times.1
Reagan’s critics may have joked that the syndicated Spider-Man comic may have been as much as Reagan could handle intellectually, but knowing that the president read his work gratified Lee, who had readily committed Spidey to a series of public service campaigns over the character’s long history.
Reagan’s admission that he read Spider-Man as he enjoyed his breakfast symbolized how influential the character, Marvel Comics, and Stan Lee had grown over the preceding decades. The leader of the free world started his day reading Lee’s words! That kind of news could get just about anyone through another boring meeting with a film production company or the idea that yet another big-name Hollywood actor wanted to play a Marvel superhero. When the world found out that the president read Lee’s strip, the writer had just turned sixty-six years old, but his exuberance matched that of someone half his age.
In the 1980s, Philadelphia native Ronald O. Perelman stood as one of the richest men in New York. Many considered him a leader with a King Midas touch, turning everything around him into gold. In an era characterized by financial jockeying, leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers, Perelman waged economic and corporate warfare with other tycoons in high-stakes chess matches with hundreds of millions of dollars hanging in the balance.
In early 1989, when New World Entertainment searched for a company to buy Marvel so that it could finance of fresh wave of television and film expansion, Perelman responded with an $82.5 million offer through MacAndrews & Forbes, a shell company that he owned in an intricate web of holding companies and parent firms that were all controlled by the billionaire. While Perelman served as the public face of the deal and put up about $10.5 million of his own money to finance the purchase, Chase Manhattan Bank actually took on most of the debt, a typical setup in the go-go capitalist takeover era.
Securing Marvel—including its iconic superhero characters and licensing rights—for less than $100 million seemed like a steal to many observers. The transaction seemed financially sound and potentially lucrative. “It is a mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property,” Perelman explained. “We are now in the business of the creation and marketing of characters.”2 On paper, the mogul seemed potentially the right leader to turn Marvel into an international media powerhouse. He had a solid plan to push the company toward a global audience and build off some of the world’s most recognizable characters. More importantly, Perelman had the resources and financial backing to build a team that could accomplish this goal.
Perelman took a chance on Marvel, because the comic book industry was riding a wave of resurgence in the late 1980s. But the financier knew the real money would come when he sold stocks in the company. Several factors merged to make its impending IPO (initial public offering) rewarding, ranging from a growing comic book store expansion to several aggressive price increases that seemed to push sales higher, rather than drive readers away. Simultaneously, comic books had transformed from cheap magazines to glossy, foil-covered collector’s items. Subsequently, Marvel’s sales per copy jumped over 30 percent year-over-year from the last half of 1989 to 1990.3
Overall, Marvel’s sales in 1990 eclipsed $70 million, with an addition $11 million from licensing. While insiders like Perelman stood to get even richer at the IPO, outside investors had to determine the risk involved, given that profits stood at a meager $5.4 million in 1990. The figure rose as sales increased, but as recently as two years before they had only been $2.4 million.4 Circulation and store sales were only one part of the Marvel puzzle, however. There were eighty companies that licensed Marvel characters and added to the earnings potential. The influx of technology at the time led to even more deals, including superhero-based video games and television and film productions on VHS.
For a financier like Perelman, turning a part of his far-reaching empire into the next Disney would create a legacy unmatched in the entertainment business. Critics, however, thought that he really meant to just hype his new purchase, gussying it up as a way of prepping parts of it for sale or other forms of financial exploitation. Certainly, Perelman’s primary interest was fixed on making money, not reading Spider-Man comic books. In the quest to emulate Disney, corporate America’s master empire builder, the company needed a strong film division, which it created with Marvel Films.
Bill Bevins, Perelman’s top manager and former chief financial officer at Turner Broadcasting would run Marvel. He named Lee to head the new Marvel Films entity and surprised him by immediately tripling his salary. The move obviously pleased Lee, particularly after being marginalized by the Hollywood sharks at New World. In his view, Lee felt that he had received insufficient pay over the years. When Bevins announced the increase, it caught Lee off-guard. He even thought that he must have misheard his new boss. That evening he told Joanie about the exchange and admitted to her that he certainly must have been hearing things. The two of them spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what Bevins might have actually muttered. A couple weeks later, however, Joanie checked the mail. There was Stan’s paycheck. When Joanie ripped it open and saw the figure, she nearly fell over. Lee’s former salary had indeed been tripled. From that point forward, Lee had nothing but kind words for Bevins. More important than his own improved financial standing, though, Lee believed that the raise symbolized the way the new owners wanted to build Marvel into the kind of efficient corporation that could compete with any entertainment company in the world.
Lee’s future looked bright. Once again he had the power to oversee Marvel’s film and television expansion. He had long shared the notion that Marvel could transform into a modern Disney-like empire. Perhaps Perelman had the money and cachet to pull it off. Lee had never felt comfortable with the staff at New World. Perelman, ever on the prowl, would exact a bit of revenge several months later, buying New World outright when the company continued to slip. Now Lee had a larger playground to operate in as he attempted to build Marvel’s live-action and animated business.
Lee’s long relationship with Spider-Man never waned, even decades after he and Ditko had created the teen superhero with a mountain of real-life problems. Over the years, whenever Spider-Man would zip back to the top of the pop culture radar, there Lee would be, ready with a story and sound bite, whether providing comments about Gwen Stacy’s death in June 1973 or marrying the character to Mary Jane Watson in a live-action wedding before fifty-five thousand screaming fans at Shea Stadium in June 1987. Lee’s marketing mirrored Marvel’s efforts at keeping the web crawler at the heart of the company. Most observers felt that Spider-Man had become the most popular superhero in the world, displacing the competitor’s invincible strongman in the red cape and the scowling guy in the black mask.
In August 1990, Marvel released Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1, a highly stylized and visually stunning reboot, with a variety of colorful covers, meant to spark media attention and sing to the hearts of comic book collectors. The combination of the national exposure and cover variants led to the issue becoming the best-selling comic in history with about 2.85 million copies getting into readers’ hands. McFar-lane focused on the character’s visual identity, as he explained, “to break people of reading a comic book the way they’ve been used to for the last twenty years.”5 In other words, McFarlane hoped to start a new conversation with Spider-Man, the way Lee had been able to do at the dawn of the Marvel Universe.
Lee never gave up hope that someone in Hollywood would turn Spider-Man into a big screen hero. But in the early 1990s, he had to look to other characters first. Lee had become a fixture in Hollywood. Among his many tasks, he often served as a story consultant for Marvel-related media, like the 1990 NBC television film The Death of the Incredible Hulk, with Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby. Although it had been years since the original series aired, the live-action Hulk grew in popularity over time as fans looked back at the program with nostalgic longing. There was something magical and thoughtful about the Bixby/Ferrigno team that audiences coveted, particularly Bixby’s tortured loner persona and existence as a stranger in his own life.6 Several years later, when superhero comics in general were marked by extreme violence and action, the Hulk television series and its spin-off films seemed almost quaint.
In 1994, Lee edited The Ultimate Spider-Man, a collection of short stories by a number of important comic book veteran writers and illustrators. His introduction provided readers with an insider’s glimpse into how the character came about, as well as Lee’s thinking at the time. He divulged, “no one at Marvel expected Spidey to become a cultural icon. . . . At that time, he was just one of many, many characters that were being continuously hatched, published, abandoned, and forgotten if they didn’t catch on.”7 So, instead of disappointing fans and journalists who asked about Spider-Man’s origins and expected a big, triumphant story, Lee admits that he “cooked up” a vision of the day in which he saw a spider on the window that hatched the idea. He later came up with “Amazing” for Spider-Man, just because he liked the way it sounded.8 Lee constantly moved between downplaying his own efforts and an overly confident guise that readers understood was (at least partially) tongue-in-cheek.
The straightforward, yet lighthearted and personal banter between Lee and the reader had been developed over decades and dates back to his initial stories in Captain America in the early 1940s. The consistent—some might say relentless—patter between Lee and comic book readers had a major upside: the bond of trust that resulted. Whether Lee’s story about seeing the spider at his desk on the fourteenth floor of the Empire State Building is true or an utter falsehood, readers lapped it up. They fully believed in “Stan the Man,” no matter the increasing criticism of hardcore fan-boys and comic book historians. Spider-Man newspaper strip fan (and eminent novelist) John Updike caused a national stir when he wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe for canceling the series (which the paper later rescinded). Lee sent Updike a Spider-Man sweatshirt for his wife and a framed, autographed copy of the strip—another satisfied fan.9
The centerpiece of the 1994 book was a novella by Lee that revised and expanded Spider-Man’s origin story. Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May are further explored and humanized. Lee’s playfulness is on display in the piece—Aunt May whacks a spider that gets in the way of her cleaning, exclaiming “I just can’t stand spiders, that’s all. Disgusting creatures.” She looks at the tiny dead arachnid to make sure it “was good and squished.”10
Lee’s new story is significant, because it reveals how he and later Marvel writers were willing to expand and revise a character’s origin story to develop with time. For example, Lee puts the infamous radioactive spider in Dr. Octopus’s lab at Empire State University and infuses it with thoughts and feelings, particularly after it is shot through with radiation. The spider later causes the scientist to set off a nuclear explosion and then, seconds after, land the bite that transforms Peter Parker forever. The accident not only leads to Spider-Man, but to Dr. Octopus having the metallic arms fused to his body. Spider-Man ultimately defeats the villain, but Uncle Ben still dies, and Parker battles with Flash Thompson. The final famous line is changed slightly to conform to the new origin story: “that with great power . . . comes great responsibility.”11
The Ultimate Spider-Man collection also played an additional role in Lee’s mythmaking. The biography section did not mention Kirby or Ditko, but stressed Lee’s role, explaining, “Hundreds of legendary characters, such as Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Daredevil, and Dr. Strange, all grew out of his fertile imagination.”12 Certainly, the bio is a form of publicity for Lee and the book, but these kinds of winner-take-all statements also alienated the comic book “true believers” who worshipped at the altar of the two great artists and co-creators. Granted, from Lee’s perspective, he didn’t directly make these choices, but since his name is on the book as editor, readers and comic book fans expected that he might demonstrate some level of modesty. A careful reader, though, may have noticed the Lee dedication: “To Steve Ditko, who was there at the beginning.”13
Under the leadership of Bevins and the strategic direction of Perelman, Marvel increased revenue and profitability. The mogul’s next move focused on taking the company public. That decision enabled him to extract more money from the company as investors bought up shares. The IPO resulted in about $82 million coming into Perelman’s coffers. He poured $50 million of that money back into a number of his parent companies, essentially guaranteeing himself a 500 percent return on his initial investment and a 60 percent stake in Marvel. As part of the public relations campaign, an actor dressed as Spider-Man appeared on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, waving and shaking hands with the traders.14
The stock market valued momentum, and Perelman fed the beast with news of director James Cameron (having recent successes with The Terminator and Aliens) writing and directing a Spider-Man film (which made Lee’s heart sing and started a long friendship between the two). The stock price more than doubled, trading at $35 per share by the end of 1993 when the company reported revenues of $415 million and earnings at $56 million. On paper, Perelman’s stake in Marvel reached $2.7 billion.15 It seemed another enormous success for the financial raider.
While the future looked promising at Marvel, the boom market showed signs of cracking, and simultaneously Perelman’s purchase of trading card company Fleer in mid-1992 for $286 million took place at a shaky moment in professional sports. Fans responded by staying away. Then, Marvel gave toy maker Toy Biz, which specialized in action figures, a royalty-free license to its characters in exchange for a 46 percent stake in the New York-based company led by Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad.
Neither Perelman nor his management team realized how the collector craze artificially propped up store sales. The 1989 Batman film, starring Michael Keaton, and the 1992 Death of Superman comic book, which had sold six million copies, had reinvigorated comic books, but that mania soon fizzled. The decline left Marvel vulnerable, despite its recent successes, especially when Perelman concentrated on profits, not reinvesting money into product development. His team attempted to correct the slide by buying a sticker company, another trading card company, and two small publishers: Welsh Publishing Group, which published children’s magazines, and Malibu Publishing, a small West Coast comic book company that DC had been courting (the directive at Marvel was to buy Malibu regardless of cost, because DC would have become the market share leader with the acquisition). The bloat from these acquisitions actually rocked the delicate infrastructure even more. By 1995, Marvel reported its first loss under Perelman’s control, losing $48 million, despite sales of $829 million. The debt swelled to about $600 million, which forced the company’s banks to put the company on watch. There wouldn’t be any money for new developments, like a much-needed Internet division or other projects that might help the company generate revenues.
Perelman had issued a number of junk bonds to continue the shopping spree. Fellow corporate raider Carl Icahn, even richer than Perelman, saw the company ripe for a hostile takeover and gobbled up the bonds, about $40 million worth. Eventually, when Marvel had trouble paying its debt obligations, Perelman offered to grant $350 million in exchange for more shares, but Icahn owned 25 percent of the company and refused the deal. Suddenly, in the midst of a downturn in the comic book market, two of America’s richest men went to war over the future of the company. Though Icahn seemed to want to save Marvel, few believed that he wouldn’t just buy it as cheaply as possible and then later sell it off piecemeal.16
On December 27, 1996, just a day prior to Lee’s seventy-fourth birthday, Perelman took the only step available and plunged Marvel into bankruptcy in a last-ditch effort to thwart Icahn’s takeover attempt. “The news release was short and not so sweet,” said Shirrel Rhoades, a Marvel executive during the tumultuous period. The comic book world shuddered: “It sent ripples of fear throughout the comics industry.”17 The two sides swapped reorganization plans, neither acceptable to the other. Ironically, the publishing part of the company held Marvel afloat after the bankruptcy announcement, while the trading cards continued to strain the budget, as well as advertising and licensing deals that disappeared.
In February 1997, the bankruptcy court allowed Icahn to take control of Marvel, and then in June, he won control over the company’s board of directors, thus enabling him to oust Perelman and his crew for good. Various estimates place Perelman’s profit during his ownership of Marvel at $200 to $400 million. While Icahn started to put a management team in place, suddenly, little Toy Biz, led by Perlmutter and Arad, jumped into the negotiations and put forth its own plan for rescuing Marvel. The company wanted to protect its no-royalty license agreement, particularly since more than half its toys were based on Marvel characters.
In December 1997, Marvel’s fate was in the hands of a trustee named John J. Gibbons, appointed by Delaware U.S. District Court Judge Roderick McKelvie. Marvel execs questioned the Toy Biz deal, which lit a fire under Perlmutter and Arad. They put together a group of investors and made a $400 million offer to purchase Marvel outright. Over Icahn’s objections, Judge McKelvie approved the Toy Biz proposal. The newly merged company would pay creditors a portion of the debt and offer equity claims.18 Arad convinced many of the financial leaders involved in the proceedings that Marvel’s future as a film company warranted a gamble on its future. His impassioned overture would later prove prophetic.
While business titans and corporate raiders battled to control Marvel in the late 1990s, Lee played good company soldier and continued to weave his way through Hollywood and a variety of animation, television, and film deals. The only time the bankruptcy hurt Lee was when production companies grew leery about working with Marvel when the future seemed undetermined. Previously, Bevins generally let him work independently, only interfering once when Lee had different networks approve animated shows for Black Widow and Daredevil. The overall uncertainty regarding Marvel’s fate caused Bevins to squash the deal.19 A portion of Lee’s efforts also harkened back to his editorial days, primarily ensuring that writers for the animated programs understood Marvel standards for character development and plot. “I spend most of my time in the office working on movies, television shows and animation,” Lee said.
The fate of Marvel seemed to hang in the balance as courts and judges determined who would own the company after it emerged from bankruptcy. The outcome had little personal consequence for Lee, who was too valuable a property to be discarded, no matter who won control. He more or less stood above the fray. “I stay out of all that business stuff because my area of concern is the creative ends of things,” he said.20 And, the company saw a payoff for Lee’s supervision of the production line: Spider-Man, X-Men, and The Incredible Hulk drew significant viewers as part of the children’s television lineup. “Our shows generally do very well. . . . That’s the most important thing as far as I’m concerned,” Lee explained.21
Although often overlooked as part of a larger Marvel strategy, Lee’s work in building the animation arm of the company vastly expanded the fan base. For a lifelong movie buff like Lee, however, the real glitz and glamour came from the big screen. While a Spider-Man feature film seemed less likely, because of legal wrangling and disputes over who controlled the character’s film rights, other characters moved closer to production, including the X-Men and Hulk.
Surprisingly, the first Marvel feature to really break out of the pack turned out to be based on a lesser-known, supporting character: the vampire hunter Blade, created by Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan. The film version, starring Wesley Snipes, was released in late summer 1998 to mixed reviews, but fan acclaim. After opening strongly in the United States and abroad, the film eventually brought in about $70 million domestically and $131 million worldwide. Although Lee’s brief cameo ended up on the cutting-room floor, Blade confirmed his long-standing notion that Marvel characters would do well on-screen.
As the 1990s closed, Lee wrapped up an odd decade for him. His aspirations for bringing Marvel superheroes to life on film or television had either happened or appeared on the near horizon. Yet, Marvel itself seemed to tread on shaky ground. The company had a seemingly endless supply of characters, and its core superheroes were among the most well-known properties in the world, but the various corporate conglomerates that acquired it didn’t have a sense of how to make it work or a strategy that took advantage of its assets. Only Perlmutter and Arad at Toy Biz seemed to comprehend how to turn Marvel superheroes into cash, capitalizing first on the royalty-free agreement and later parlaying that into taking full control of the company.
Although in his seventies, Lee kept his eyes on how technology began to change the comic book industry. He investigated a whole range of options, from video games to electronic comic books delivered via CD-ROM or the burgeoning Internet. Lee starred in some of Marvel’s earliest Web work, answering fan questions on an AOL homepage in the late 1990s. He didn’t understand how the Web worked, but Lee knew that it presented the next significant entertainment channel for surfers around the world.
Few writers, musicians, artists, or other creative icons remained relevant at Lee’s age, but he refused to retire, imagining that the lack of work would sap his will to live. The constant buzz that followed him at comic conventions, media opportunities, and celebrity interactions in Los Angeles seemed like a magic elixir for the iconic writer. It wasn’t that Lee simply didn’t want to stop—he genuinely couldn’t.