What’s gotten into Parker?? He used to be a
real little milk-toast! Who wised him up?
—J. Jonah Jameson in Amazing Spider-Man #33, February 1966, by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
On September 9, 1971, the Attica Correctional Facility inmate takeover in upstate New York began. Prisoners had taken forty-two guards and other staff as hostages. By the thirteenth, failed negotiations between the inmates and the commissioner of prisons—and Governor Nelson Rockefeller—resulted in an attack on the prison by state troopers. Forty-three people died during the assault, including ten hostages. All those who died were killed by bullets fired by the attacking forces. The debate raged—and rages to this day—as to who was responsible for the chaos and deaths during those four days.
For some reason, Stan Lee decided that those events would be the lead-in to his Soapbox for the April ’72 cover–dated Marvel comics:
These brief random thoughts are being written just a short time after the Attica State Prison tragedy. Now I’ve no intention of imposing my own opinions upon you about which side, which party or parties might have been right or wrong. Instead, I’d like to discuss the theory of “right or wrong” itself.
And he proceeded to do just that, pondering, “I wonder what life would be like if we weren’t so preoccupied with proving ourselves right and the other guy wrong.” Perhaps not the most hard-hitting editorial of all time, it was notable that it was coming from someone who had produced countless stories that could be accused of being about proving oneself right—through the use of force! Even more interesting was the thought that Lee would start the conversation by bringing up a topical but controversial event. In the context of the ’68 talk show pilot, the ecology-themed screenplay for Alain Resnais, and the attempts at social commentary in comics like Silver Surfer, this Attica-inspired piece can be seen as another step in Lee attempting to grow as a person, editor, and public figure.
The following month’s Soapbox was short and to the point: a brief plug for the new Luke Cage: Hero for Hire comic. Cage was Marvel’s (if not anyone’s) first comic book to feature a solo black superhero. Instead of ballyhooing that he was the first solo black superhero, Lee ran a picture of Cage and informed the readers that “he’s really somethin’ else!” The character’s origin was set in a maximum-security prison, where Luke, who’d been framed for a murder he didn’t commit, found himself given superhuman powers in an experiment sabotaged by a sadistic guard with a grudge against him.
The way comics timetables work, the character—credited to Archie Goodwin, George Tuska, Roy Thomas, and John Romita Sr. as creators—had to have been in the works for months before the Attica riots. (Lee had himself directed the quartet to come up with the comic book equivalent of hit action movies like Shaft as Marvel’s answer to the blaxploitation fad.) As Thomas has said on Facebook:
The success of that film [Shaft] … had led Stan to figure that, if we weren’t going to do a solo Black Panther title, partly because of the controversial connotations of that name [the same as that of the radical political group], it was time to devise a new character.…
Stan, Archie Goodwin, John Romita, and I brainstormed … all of us brought something to the table … but Stan was the ringmaster through it all … 1
Nonetheless, it’s still hard to not somehow connect Cage to Lee’s Soapbox from the previous month.
If nothing else, Lee’s feel for the zeitgeist was still switched on, processing what was going on in the world, making it into fodder for comics. Perhaps the brevity of the plug for Cage was the result of conflicted feelings: pride that Marvel now had an African American superhero title, perhaps mixed with some embarrassment at realizing that a well-intentioned Soapbox attempt at “relevance” through invoking the Attica tragedy had preceded the promotion of Hero for Hire by only a single month.
While Lee was cultivating his role and image as a thoughtful, concerned conduit of recent events, trying to keep Marvel topical, there was still some old business going on that he’d have to contend with, like it or not.
Jack Kirby was as busy as ever, turning out breathtaking, if idiosyncratic, material at DC. Even so, he found the time to invent and include, in Mister Miracle #6, which would have been on sale in October ’71, a character who was an obvious shot at Lee: Funky Flashman.
A self-involved hustler and promoter, Flashman—once his toupee and fake beard were in place—looked exactly like Stan Lee of the era. Funky was a pathetic character, self-involved, leeching off a relative, willing to sell anyone out in service to himself and to the primary villain of Kirby’s Fourth World, Darkseid. The intro copy to the story describes Flashman for us:
In the shadow world between success and failure, there lives the driven little man who dreams of having it all!!!—the opportunistic spoiler without character or values…!
Funky was served by a valet named Houseroy, an equally unflattering version of Roy Thomas. In one instance, seeking to exploit Scott Free (a.k.a. Mister Miracle), Houseroy warns Funky of the dangers of Scott’s risk-taking. Flashman responds, “So he breaks a leg or dies!! I’ll just sip my martini by the ocean—and wait for the next fish to jump!!”
As the issue ends in disaster for Flashman, he watches his old “plantation” (a thinly veiled metaphor for Marvel, its owner, and its chief editor) burn down and muses:
There it goes!—everything—up in flames! The Mockingbird estate—and its happy memories!… Happy slaves singing for the family!
The issue’s cover copy—presumably written by Kirby—did offer a little ambiguity, posing the question: “Funky Flashman! Villain or hero—you decide!”
Funky’s portrayal cuts deeper than just lampooning someone’s vanity or speech patterns. It’s a biting interpretation of Lee as a mean-spirited phony, free of any values, self-aggrandizing and greedy. The not-so-subtle portrayals of Funky and Houseroy may have gone past much of the readership, but to those who knew anything about the people behind the comics, this shouted out a last “Screw you!” from Kirby. It would be hard to imagine him and Lee ever making up or working together again.
Thomas recalled about the story:
The Funky Flashman stuff bothered [Stan] a little bit, because it seemed, to Stan at least, somewhat mean-spirited.… even I was a little bothered the first time I saw the Houseroy thing, because it’s a reading of me that’s only partly true.… and I hated to see what a lot of us felt … was a cheap shot at Stan, and I would’ve felt that whether Houseroy existed or not.
Jack of course said, “Well, y’know, I was just making stories” when I talked to him … but we all knew it was a little more than that.… Stan said he never let it bother him, but the relationship [between Lee and Kirby] was never quite the same.2
Kirby associate Mark Evanier remembered:
I know Roy was more upset about it than Stan was, and Jack was actually a little—I won’t say sorry he did it, but he was sorry it came out the way it did, because what happened was that he started to do a story that was basically about [someone else] … but there was some interview that came out with Stan at the time that Jack took a lot of offense to. He thought it was really nasty. There were a bunch of those [kinds of hurt feelings on both sides] over the years, and the timing of them was never good. Jack got mad at Stan, Stan got mad at Jack.3
The real threat from Kirby, of course, was newsstand competition from the material he was producing. While the sales of his DC work weren’t as great as the company had hoped, they were still more than respectable. And even if Kirby’s scripting style was off-putting to some readers, the power of his drawing and visual storytelling, along with his novel characters and the sheer quantity of new ideas he was unleashing in every issue, were beyond impressive. He seemed to be fulfilling his aim to be an auteur, in charge of every aspect of his creations, so that, no matter what else, his DC work could be seen as a pure, personal vision, especially once he was able to pick the inker he wanted, Mike Royer. Of course, there was the small matter of DC changing Superman’s face to be more “on model” anytime Kirby drew the character, which was—especially in Superman spinoff Jimmy Olsen—quite a bit. Well, no situation is perfect.
Shortly after the appearance of Funky Flashman, Stan Lee took a major step to control and expand his brand. On January 5, 1972, A Marvel-ous Evening with Stan Lee was presented at, of all places, Carnegie Hall.
The brainchild of producer Steve Lemberg, who was also behind the album The Amazing Spider-Man: From Beyond the Grave—A Rockomic, it was a conscious effort by Lemberg—who had gotten the rights to many of Marvel’s characters from Chip Goodman for bargain-basement prices—to try to make Lee a celebrity, using the Marvel characters as a stepping-stone. The evening was a hodgepodge of eclectic elements and people, featuring dramatic readings of comics, on-the-spot drawing by John Romita and Herb Trimpe, and music by Chico Hamilton and his band (Hamilton had also signed on to do the score for Marvel radio programs that Lemberg was producing), as well as by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith. Alain Resnais, novelist Tom Wolfe, and actor René Auberjonois participated in readings from and about comics.
The event was also the public debut of Lee’s epic poem, “God Woke.” Recited by Joan and JC Lee, this was the come-to-life version of Lee’s desire to, as he’d told Resnais, become a popular poet in the Rod McKuen mode. (Nearly forgotten today, McKuen was extraordinarily popular, appearing regularly on TV, selling millions of books of poetry.)
While the evening seems like it should have been a lot of fun, by most accounts, including Thomas’s and Gerry Conway’s, it fell quite flat. Perhaps the mistake was trying to make a multimedia extravaganza of Lee’s college and comic convention appearances, to literally orchestrate his usual off-the-cuff talks into a showbiz spectacle, but one largely consisting of people who—with the exception of the Hamilton group—were not (including Lee) professional entertainers. The punch line to this version of the old joke setup “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” was clearly not to have a bunch of writers, artists, and other amateur performers try to make a compelling evening of translating printed comic book characters into razzle-dazzle showmanship.
As critic Dean Latimer wrote of the evening in The Monster Times:
The audience left in stunned silence, after often yawning louder than the fabulously fraught activities.… all they got was lame sentimental drivel … you can understand why they were mystified. And bored.4
And, writing in Women’s Wear Daily, critic Peter Ainslie reported:
[Lee] introduced a host of New York celebrities including Tom Wolfe, Alex Bennett, Brute Force, Rene Auberjonois and others, but the show never really got off the ground.5
Conway recalled for Raphael and Spurgeon:
The producer didn’t know what he was doing.… Stan’s strength and his weakness is his ability to improvise in the moment. Unfortunately, you can’t improvise a two-hour show.6
Even producer Lemberg had negative memories:
It was really pretty much a terrible show. I feel very bad about the quality of the actual event.7
But at least one attendee, Scott Edelman—a future Marvel writer and editor, then a sixteen-year-old high school student from Brooklyn—enjoyed the show immensely. “I loved the whole night,” he recalled. Edelman believes many others also had a great time. “When people started writing [negatively] about it in the fanzines … I don’t know what they were expecting.… Maybe it’s not for them … It was a glorious night for me.”8
Lee’s epic poem, “God Woke,” which was recited that night, was—as pop poetry and, indeed, even as a meditation by a man in midlife trying to make sense of existence—not half-bad. The theme and subject seemed to be those that underlay Lee’s Silver Surfer stories: Why do humans always have to create conflict when, if they just cooperated and appreciated what they had, life could be so much better?
Considering Lee’s steadfast resolve to write a rhyming poem (he told philosophy professor Jeff McLaughlin that he didn’t care for poems that didn’t rhyme and that “I hated free verse”) and to deliver some kind of message (he also told McLaughlin he hated poems where “you didn’t know what they were saying”), “God Woke” sets up and delivers a long-form (around three hundred lines) poem that sets a mood and tells a story. And rhymes.9
The poem is clearly the product of an inquisitive, agile mind, written by someone who actually is concerned about humankind’s purpose on Earth. Although Lee has claimed to not have ever given much thought to religious concerns, as Dr. Thomas Mick has remarked, someone who doesn’t care at all about religion doesn’t write an epic poem called “God Woke.”10
As 1972 progressed, Martin Goodman’s tenure was winding down. All was going according to plan, and Chip Goodman was on deck, waiting to ascend to his father’s position as president and publisher of Magazine Management. As had his father before him, Chip was going to run the family empire, including Marvel Comics and Stan Lee.
There was, however, one person who had a significant issue with this anticipated turn of events.
While Lee was well paid by Cadence, Goodman’s promise to him of great wealth resulting from the sale of the company never came to pass. Even if it had, Lee had put in more than three decades not merely working in the trenches for Goodman but reinventing the comics line—not to mention the entire comics business! Thirty years. Now he wanted to do things his way. He had all sorts of ideas he wanted to implement for new publishing initiatives. And, rumor had it, he had even been in discussions with DC about going over there. Maybe that friendly lunch with Carmine Infantino he’d mentioned in the Bullpen Bulletins wasn’t held just to wax nostalgic over old times. (Kirby and Lee both working at DC at the same time is an alternate reality that would have been interesting, to say the least.)
And so, Lee was promoted, in the spring of 1972, to be the president and publisher of Marvel Comics.
Looking back in 2017, Lee reflected on the promotion:
That was my one bit of revenge. Martin had his son working there, and he told Cadence that he wanted the son to be the publisher after he left. I said to Cadence, “If he’s the publisher, I’m quitting.” So I became the publisher.11
Or as Raphael and Spurgeon put it:
Cadence had no shortage of business-minded individuals. They were less well-stocked with pop culture icons whose outsized personalities could assemble a loyal fan following and headline at Carnegie Hall.12
But while Lee’s status was elevated—and he simultaneously stepped away from writing and editing monthly comics—Chip Goodman was himself promoted to be president and publisher of Magazine Management, which included Marvel. Lee had moved up but, at least on an org chart, still seemed to be reporting to a Goodman. Still, as late as March 27, 1974, Lee had sent a memo to Martin inviting him and Chip to a luncheon hosted by the Comics Magazine Association of America board of directors to honor someone named Bill Server for his years of service to the CMAA.13 The existence of the memo indicates that relations between Lee and the Goodmans were at least cordial up to that point. They would not be for much longer.
Now Marvel’s president and publisher, Lee took on what he thought should be the duties of his new role. After some infighting over job titles and responsibilities—a type of battle that would plague Marvel for the next several years—Thomas succeeded Lee as editor (the “editor in chief” title for the top editor at the company did not yet then exist), while Stan busied himself coming up with ideas for new types of comics—some different in format, others in content, some in both—from what the company had been putting out. He did this not just out of enthusiasm but because the old products were having trouble selling.14
It turned out that Goodman had indeed sold when the time was right. The comics business was then at the start of one of its regular crisis periods. Increased suburbanization meant that there were fewer mom-and-pop corner newsstands and candy stores where kids could drop in on the way home from school for a malt and a few comics. There were a few dedicated comics shops, but they were just beginning to appear, the very beginning of what would come to be called the direct market. That market was just getting started, as pioneers like Phil Seuling started cutting deals with Marvel and DC to bypass traditional distributors to get comics they could sell for a deeper discount, but without return privileges.15
The momentum of the so-called Silver Age of comics—first the revived superhero wave at DC and then the inspired Marvel hero comics—was fading. While Marvel had an unmatched record of creative innovation and excitement from Fantastic Four #1 and on, by the early ’70s, the company’s characters, and its approach to them, had lost their novelty. The Marvel superheroes were, by then, well known and established. Spider-Man was almost as iconic as Superman. The more realistic approach that had made Marvel’s characters new and startling no longer had that effect. The comics were now selling based on numerous factors, but novelty was no longer one of them—which was why Lee was so eager to try new genres and formats.
On one level, the question—as it would be for the next forty years—was: Who were these things for? Who was reading comics? It was no longer as simple as in the ’50s, when most kids—boys and girls—would read comics for a couple of years and then move on. Further, the very nature of what Marvel had ushered in—an interrelated fictional universe peopled with characters who behaved in a somewhat realistic manner—seemed to have become a cliché of its own. Even done well, by talented writers and artists, much of it seemed like it had been done before or, in some cases, was so idiosyncratic that it couldn’t attract a large audience.
Add to that the changes shaking distribution and the loosening of the Comics Code—not to mention the entire alternate aesthetic of the undergrounds, which teen and college readers were buying—and it was obvious that the definition of what a comic book should be was in flux. And could comics really compete with TV for access to viewers’ eyeballs, or with the movies for frank portrayals of sex and violence?
And while all parties—from creators to distributors to sales outlets to fans—were reevaluating comics’ place in their cosmos, things were in turmoil in the comics business itself, as exemplified by the presence in executive positions of Carmine Infantino and Stan Lee. A decade before, they would not have had the opportunity to fill those chairs. Lee would have been considered not serious enough, a lightweight compared to “real” publishing executives. Infantino would have been thought of as “just an artist,” his head too much in the clouds for him to come down to earth and figure out a profit-and-loss sheet. But they were now in charge and were hiring all these intense, driven young people to make their comics, and now they were putting out some driven and intense comics. But those weren’t selling especially well, either.
Martin Goodman had, it seemed, indeed timed everything perfectly. Soon he’d be gone, and, per his agreement with Cadence, Chip would be running the Magazine Management show.
So both Marvel and DC, as well as other companies, were inventing, publishing—and then canceling—dozens of titles in multiple genres. Marvel’s number of titles doubled from 1972 to 1974, from around twenty to around forty. But the company’s basic structure didn’t change. Thomas had inherited an editorial and production system originally devised to function when one editor was overseeing eight or ten titles per month. That system proved highly unwieldy when that editor—Thomas—had to supervise more than forty monthly comics. Because of the overwhelming workload, a system had evolved whereby the writers of the comics served as de facto editors of the titles they wrote, while Thomas and Lee tried to deal with more global issues of direction and philosophy. Lee or Thomas might decree that there should be a vampire series or a mystical motorcyclist series or a trio of comics featuring female superheroes. It was then up to Thomas (with Lee chiming in from the sidelines) to take those mandated or approved ideas and brainstorm them with writers and artists who would translate them into actual comic books that had to come out regularly and on time.
Bored by the minutiae of the business end of being publisher, Lee tried to focus on the creative end, trying new kinds of formats and subjects that Goodman had been hesitant about. At this point—four years after Goodman inked the sale papers—Marvel pretty much had nothing to lose through such experimentation.
Lee tried everything. A proposed series of comics to be written by literary heavyweights like Kurt Vonnegut and Václav Havel (who had a side job as president of Czechoslovakia) was discussed but never materialized. Stan invited Mad magazine inventor Harvey Kurtzman to do a new humor magazine, but Kurtzman wasn’t interested in producing just another Marvel-branded product. Lee discussed with Will Eisner having Eisner either package a line of comics or publish Spirit reprints or new Spirit material through Marvel, or even take over as Marvel’s publisher, while Lee would retain the president title.
According to Eisner biographer Michael Schumacher, Eisner wanted no part of being a cog in Marvel’s corporate structure. In addition, “Eisner informed Lee that if he was put in charge at Marvel, he’d want to initiate changes that gave writers and artists ownership of their work. Lee was in no position to negotiate such changes.”16
By the same token, Jim Warren, the eponymous owner of Warren Publishing—producers of Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella—wasn’t too pleased when Lee, who had supposedly promised to never compete with him in the black-and-white comic magazine arena, did just that. But Warren could hardly have been surprised. Survival was the name of the game. Warren knew his frenemy well enough to know that Stan would do what he had to in order to survive.
Lee had said to Rolling Stone magazine in 1974, tongue firmly in cheek, “He [Warren] despises me. If I had any sense, I’d hire a bodyguard.”
He continued, “I know he has often said to people we’re out to destroy him. It’s not that at all.… I figure if we do well, it has to help him.… I think he’s a nut, the way he carries on.…”17
In interviews done in 1998 and ’99, Warren reflected:
I hate[d] anyone who is taking our concepts, our ideas, and because they have the big machinery of a big company like Marvel, flooding the market.
Do I really hate Stan Lee? Who can hate him? Stan is one of the most loveable guys in comics—but if Stan Lee is going to go head-to-head with me … I’m going to get a glass-bottom car so I can look over his face when I run over him.18
Lee declared in the Bullpen Bulletins in the September ’72–dated comics (probably written in May), that this was the beginning of “Marvel, Phase Two.” He wrote that, with Thomas now editor,
it means that I’ll finally have the time … to devote myself exclusively to dreaming up new and exciting projects for the Bullpen, and new fields for Marvel to conquer in film, TV, books, and you-name-it-we’ll-do it!
Tireless in his efforts to improve comics’ image as well as trying to improve Marvel’s sales, Lee also became active in the ACBA (Academy of Comic Book Arts). His vision of the organization—as a group that would function like the Motion Picture Academy, handing out awards and spreading goodwill—was different from what some of the organization’s writers and artists, such as Neal Adams and Archie Goodwin, eager for some kind of a guild or union to advocate on their behalf, were looking for.
After his promotions, Lee’s celebrity status, unsurprisingly, continued to grow. For some examples:
In April 1972, he and Kirby appeared together at the Cartoon Symposium at Vanderbilt University in Nashville—along with Gahan Wilson, Garry Trudeau, Dave Berg, and others. No mention was made of Funky Flashman.
On May 3, 1974, he was awarded the Popular Culture Award of Excellence for Distinguished Achievements in the Popular Arts at the Popular Culture Association’s Fourth National Convention in Milwaukee. His fellow award winners included Count Basie, James M. Cain, Agatha Christie, Howard Hawks, and Irving Wallace.
One speakers bureau promotional flyer of the period (which included him along with accomplished figures, including Richard Leakey, Norman Lear, Ramsey Lewis, and Art Linkletter), described him thus:
King of the Comic Books, publisher of Marvel Comics … writer, illustrator and guiding force behind the most popular comics on campus today. Offers observations on how a man in his 50s, catering to a youth market, can “buck the system” to become the most published writer in America.
But celebrity or not, Lee still had that day job he needed to attend to.
At that day job, though Lee was president as well as publisher of Marvel Comics, Chip Goodman was president and publisher of Marvel’s owner, Magazine Management. Technically, he was still Lee’s boss.
But there was court intrigue going on around Lee and Chip. Onetime Goodman business associate Albert Einstein Landau—his namesake’s godson—maneuvered himself into the position of president of Magazine Management and hence of Marvel, as well. Lee was made publisher of Marvel and of Magazine Management. Landau was both Stan and Chip’s boss. In 1974, when Chip’s contract was up, it was not renewed. Now, neither Chip nor Martin was employed by Cadence.
While it’s hard to believe that a businessman as savvy as Martin Goodman would not have had the arrangement regarding Chip put into a contract, so that his son would be guaranteed some kind of executive position for more than just a few years, that was apparently what had happened. Martin, enraged at how Chip had been treated, plotted revenge. He would hurt Cadence—and Lee—and he and Chip would triumph over them. The relationship between Stan Lee and Martin Goodman was coming to seem more and more like a Marvel superhero comic.
While this corporate and family infighting was going on, Marvel was experiencing growing pains, along with some pleasures. An entire generation of new artists and writers was entering the field, bringing the consciousness of the boomers to the creative side—as opposed to the consuming side—of the comics. Largely rising from fandom, names like Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes, Steve Englehart, Frank Brunner, Jim Starlin, Mike Friedrich, Linda Fite, Mimi Gold, and many others were adding their visions and broadening the idea of what a Marvel comic could be. While Marvel’s superheroes would continue, horror, sword and sorcery, romance, science fiction, and other genres would be included under the Marvel umbrella. The nature of the business—including the shift in how comics were sold—meant that many of the experiments would fail. But the sense was there that Marvel was willing to try and that what Stan said in that Soapbox that he would do—devote himself to “dreaming up new and exciting projects for the Bullpen”—he would indeed do. The fact was, he really had no choice if the company were to survive. It was an exciting but scary time for Marvel and for comics as a whole.
While Marvel was busy trying out genres with imagery and story lines that they would not have dared to—or been allowed to by the Code—just a few years earlier, it was, as one would imagine, when they messed with their beloved superheroes that the most noses were put out of joint.
Looking for a way to boost sales on Amazing Spider-Man, someone—most recall it as art director John Romita Sr.—came up with the idea of killing a beloved supporting character as his artistic hero, Milton Caniff, had done years earlier by killing off Raven Sherman in his Terry and the Pirates syndicated strip. After discussions between Lee, Thomas, Romita, and series writer Gerry Conway, the decision was arrived at that it would be Peter Parker’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, who would be murdered, which happened in issue #121, released in March 1973.
Fan reaction to her demise, especially as voiced at Lee’s campus appearances, was largely negative. It didn’t help that, the way the death was staged, it seemed as if it might have been Spider-Man who inadvertently killed her while trying to save her from the Green Goblin. Lee would tell audiences—and perhaps truly believed—that the decision was made without his input while he was away on a business trip, although everyone else involved has denied this was possible—that even if he were away for a few days, he was enough on top of things that he had to have known about, and approved of, this crucial moment in the characters’ lives.19
By the same token, and in many ways more significant to the company’s core DNA, Lee did take responsibility and a strong stand regarding classified ads that had been running in the comics. In a letter found in Lee’s archives at the University of Wyoming, dated July 3, 1974, a reader had written an alarmed letter to Roy Thomas, outraged that
something has come to my attention that has caused me to seriously consider boycotting Marvel on moral grounds. Specifically I am referring to the neo-Nazi ads that you run in your classified ads section for a company called “Adolf’s” that sells Nazi decals, ensignia [sic], etc.
Thomas had jotted a note to Lee on the letter that said: “Can we insist that [our ad people] refuse to accept such ads in the future?”
Lee sent a memo on July 11 to the company handling Marvel’s classified ads that read:
Effective immediately, please accept no more ads of any type which may be considered Neo-Nazi. Such as the one referred to in the attached letter which takes umbrage with the ad run by a company called Adolf’s.20
The ads stopped running.
Aside from his work in the office and on the lecture circuit, Lee was also working on Origins of Marvel Comics for Simon & Schuster. While largely composed of reprints of the origin stories and more recent adventures of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and several others, the book also contained Lee’s—and hence, Marvel’s—official versions of how the characters were created, versions devised more to be entertaining than accurate and, seemingly, to make Lee as central and important to the characters’ creation as possible—not surprising given that his two most important collaborators had abandoned him and the company.
In the book, as well as in several sequels, Lee was, to be sure, effusive in his compliments for Kirby and Ditko, but the narrative made it clear that it was Stan Lee who was the major creative force behind Marvel and its characters. One could imagine that, aside from enshrining Lee’s own legend, Marvel would rather have an official history that came from someone under contract to the company rather than from people who were working for other companies and who might even sue for ownership of the intellectual property at some point.
Whatever contractual obligations might have prevented Martin Goodman from competing with Marvel and Magazine Management must have run out by mid-1974. That summer, Martin and Chip started up a new publishing venture, housed literally around the corner from Marvel’s Madison Avenue offices. The company would publish a variety of magazines, as well as color and black-and-white comics. The comics part of the company would go head-to-head with Marvel and DC and everyone else. The company was called Atlas Comics—also known as Atlas/Seaboard—appropriating the name of Martin’s ’50s distribution company.
Mid-1974, however, was not a good time to be starting a new comics enterprise. It was as if Martin Goodman, the shrewd businessman, who had sold out at just the right moment before the comics market had started to stumble, had lost his golden touch or was perhaps simply blinded by anger.
In the midst of a comic book circulation crisis, and a questionable national economy, the man who had played and won circulation and distribution wars since the 1930s, who had ridden the zeitgeist along with Stan Lee (and before that with Funnies Inc. and Simon and Kirby), who seemed to always know when to zig and when to zag, who had known exactly the right time at which to sell Marvel …
It was then that that Martin Goodman decided to take a nap.
The Martin Goodman that chose to start an all-new comic book company seemed to have been instead the guy who had made one uncharacteristically poor decision in 1957 when he decided to stop doing his own distribution and signed on with the soon-to-be-bankrupt American News, which led to his nearly going out of business.
The Martin Goodman that was now starting a new comic book company for himself and Chip seemed to be carelessly running on spite and anger, looking for payback for something that he had failed to protect himself from in the first place.
The new Atlas offered significantly higher rates to writers and artists, as well as perks such as the return of artwork to its creators and participation in licensing revenues. This strategy did indeed make Atlas appealing to a number of prominent creators, but it couldn’t increase the size of the comics-buying audience.
Multiple factors unrelated to the quality of the line’s contents (many fans recall Atlas’s output fondly) seemed to almost guarantee Atlas Comics would not succeed. The question was not whether the Goodmans’ new comics entity would fail. The question was, when it did, would it take the rest of the precariously perched comic book industry down with it?