Probably one of the most unnecessary lines ever penned is: “I sincerely hope you like the strip.”—But I sure do!
—Stan Lee, in an October 3, 1957, letter to Robert Cooper of the Chicago Sun-Times syndicate, accompanying samples of the Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs comic strip
Nineteen fifty-seven was the beginning of the end. Again.
With the ringing alarms of anti-comics crusaders and the competition for time and attention that television represented, Stan Lee had already started looking for a way out of comics—or at least a way to supplement his comics-related income—at least a year or more earlier. Now, with four-fifths of the comics he’d been working on suddenly canceled, the idea of generating income outside his comic book work had suddenly become a lot more urgent.
Even without those menaces to his position at Atlas, it could be argued that Lee had started looking to expand, if not change, his horizons with the publication of his 1947 book, Secrets Behind the Comics, as well as with a couple of forays into syndicated comics.
The first was a short syndication stint: a month writing the Howdy Doody newspaper strip (the strips appeared in early 1951)—with art by Chad Grothkopf—based on the popular children’s TV show. That was followed by a short 1952 venture into the syndicated world via the My Friend Irma strip—a radio and TV series spin-off. Lee was a natural for it, since he (with Dan DeCarlo as artist) was already writing the comic book version of the character. But neither of those were long-term assignments.
But the “Timely Implosion,” as it has come to be known, was a wake-up call for Lee. This cushy staff gig that he’d been taking for granted might not be so secure after all. He needed to make other plans, and he had to make them quickly.
Lee referred to this period when he was working virtually alone in the office as his “human pilot light” phase, waiting around to see if and when circumstances would allow the comics line to expand.1 Some, including former Goodman editor Bruce Jay Friedman (who would go on to become a legendary novelist and screenwriter), whose Magazine Management office was next to Lee’s, have speculated that Goodman felt he couldn’t fire a relative and so was trying to humiliate him into quitting—if only Stan would take the hint and go.2
While Lee had dabbled in doing some writing and editing for Goodman’s magazines, doing a lot more of it didn’t seem to be an option for him at this point. Asked about it in 2017, Lee said, “I think I might have liked to [edit for the magazines], but they never asked me to do it. And I never asked him if I could do it. I think he wanted to keep me on the comics. He didn’t want me to do anything else.”3
So Lee stuck around, and Martin seemed willing to let him do so. But Stan was also busy making plans should Goodman decide there wasn’t a reason compelling enough to keep him around any longer. Starting in earnest in this period, Lee would spend the rest of his life—even after his and Marvel’s success were indisputably established—working on outside projects, perhaps in some way always waiting for a call telling him that the worst had occurred. In truth, Lee would never fully recover from the uncertainty brought on by this latest shake-up in the company.
It was during this period that Lee was hired to write promotional comics for the Bob’s Big Boy hamburger chain. Originally packaged by Timely Illustrated Features, Goodman’s small licensed comics (comics done for hire for other companies) division, the comic would then go on to be independently produced by freelance writer and artist—and future Marvel staffer and executive—Sol Brodsky, with Lee writing many of the stories, and art chores handled by such Timely veterans as Bill Everett and Dan DeCarlo. Well after Marvel’s comics had solidly taken off, Lee would continue this assignment for his friend and colleague Brodsky.
Lee also wrote “fun books” specialty comics through Timely Illustrated Features for Birds Eye foods (done with Maneely) that, in 1958, won the Best Tie-In Sales Premium Plan award of the Premium Industry Club and the Key of Achievement award, presented by the Student Marketing Institute, for “an outstanding activity designed to reach, influence and sell the youth of the nation,” according to an April 30, 1958, letter from Edward Tabibian, Birds Eye’s sales promotion manager.4 Not exactly an Academy Award, but better than not getting an award.
But the holy grail for many comics creators was getting a syndicated strip. The potential earnings—as well as some measure of mainstream respect—was much higher for those who succeeded in that arena. Syndicated cartoonists like Al Capp and Milton Caniff were treated like—and were—celebrities who earned like movie stars. Like many comic book people, Lee was always eager to enter this world. The near shuttering of his company was now an added impetus for him to try his hand at syndicated success.
Lee worked with various artists on proposals for syndicated newspaper comic strips. Through his agent, Toni Mendez, Lee, teamed up with various artists, pitched numerous strip ideas, some successfully. Riffing on popular strip genres of the era, he would put his own spin on them. A small-town vignette strip, done with DeCarlo, Willie Lumpkin focused on letter carrier Lumpkin and the kooky characters with whom he interacted. (Willie Lumpkin was a name Lee would use as a recurring Fantastic Four supporting character years later, even playing Willie in the 2005 Fantastic Four movie.) The strip was mildly successful. So was his suburban kid-comedy, Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs, done with Timely mainstay Maneely, one of Lee’s favorite artists. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Lyons herself was a dead ringer for Joan Boocock Lee. (As she was in Snafu, Joan was often Lee’s go-to model, sometimes for glamour photo shoots, sometimes as a representative of an “everyday gal,” be she married or single.)
The December 1957 issue of Editor & Publisher magazine featured an article promoting the February 10, 1958 debuting Mrs. Lyons and its creators. About Lee, it said: “Stan, editorial and art director of a New York publishing company, has authored more than 1,000 comic magazines, written and produced specialized magazines for the government and industry, and put in time as a freelance writer, publicist, and promotion writer.” The piece described him as “tall, Madison-Avenue-ish in appearance, with a smile that reaches across the room.”
Discussing the strip, Lee said in the article that, although he’d done much Cub Scout–related research, “there will be nothing pedantic about the strip—nothing dry, nothing self-laudatory.”
The article continued with this frank confession:
“I suppose we shouldn’t admit this,” Joe said. “But this is not our first attempt. Stan and I have worked out other strip ideas that didn’t get anywhere.”
“Yeah,” Stan agreed. “I remember one especially, that we thought was pretty good, but we never got it out of the shop. I pasted it up in my daughter’s room and forgot about it.”
And dramatically, the piece reflected that “They are young. This is the moment, the opportunity. You do it now or else. You understood how Stan Lee, writer, and Joe Maneely, artist, felt.”5
While a successful syndicated strip could make its creators literally rich and famous, à la Al Capp’s Li’l Abner or Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, less successful strips like Cubs might provide their creators a decent income, although by no means an extravagant one. So Lee continued to pitch other projects, while holding on to his comic book writing and editing gigs. Throughout his career, Lee would always hold on to the security of a staff position and title.
In early 1958, while doing his comic book writing and editing and also writing Cubs, Lee—with Vince Colletta, and through Mendez—shopped around For the Love of Linda, a soap opera strip about a young Manhattan woman who inherits a small-town newspaper. Despite Lee’s snappy prose and Colletta’s attractive artwork, the strip didn’t sell.
Interestingly, while one of Lee’s business stationery letterheads from the ’50s proclaims him to be the “managing editor, director of art, Timely Comics,” a contemporaneous letterhead he used merely listed his name and Timely’s office address, but without a company name or a title for Lee. And in various letters from Mendez accompanying Lee’s strip pitches, she refers to him as “the Editor and Art Director of Magazine Management Co.” Clearly, being the chief editor and art director of a comic book company was a credential to be used only in certain situations. This jibes with Lee’s tales of trying to avoid telling people at cocktail parties what kind of writing he did, because they would invariably walk away once hearing the “children’s magazines” he was associated with were comic books.6
While we’ll never know how many of Lee’s strip ideas went no further than a few scrawled words on random scraps of paper, Toni Mendez’s files contain many fascinating documents that tell us a good deal about the ones that succeeded, as well as a number of the misses.
Mendez, a native New Yorker, was the go-to agent for accomplished cartoonists and was highly regarded in the field. Starting her career as a Radio City Music Hall Rockette dancer, Mendez represented cartoonists and strip writers (as well as prose authors) continually from 1946 to her death in 2003 at ninety-four. She also helped found the National Cartoonists Society and was the aunt of Cynthia Weil, who cowrote—with Weil’s husband, Barry Mann—classic pop tunes, including “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and “On Broadway.” Mendez’s voluminous files are housed at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University. Her many clients over the years included Milton Caniff, Rube Goldberg, Ernie Bushmiller—and Stan Lee.
With his membership in numerous cartoonist and media organizations (including the National Cartoonists Society, the Newspaper Council, and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) and his not-insignificant record in publishing, Lee was able to enlist Mendez to represent him and the artists who would draw his strips. Among the first properties Mendez pitched for Lee was an advertising-industry-based strip called Clay Murdock, V.P, done with Colletta. Mendez was apparently quite enthusiastic about Lee. In a letter to Philip Steitz, editorial research director of Chicago’s Publishers Syndicate, she wrote, “Lee is an unusual type of individual and I’m sure you will enjoy working with him.”
From 1956 to at least 1961, Mendez regularly sent out packages of samples on Lee’s behalf, even when she and Lee (with Willie Lumpkin artist DeCarlo) were involved in a lawsuit over royalties against each other. Foreshadowing Lee’s 2002 “friendly lawsuit” against Marvel, he and Mendez maintained cordial relations even when they were, technically, adversaries. In one 1960 letter to her, Lee detailed specific language for a contract designed to not impede his right to sue her and closed with, “If lawyers got paid by the word, mine would be the highest paid in the business!” Cordial correspondence between them exists at least as far as the ’70s and ’80s.
Lee’s two successful strips—Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs and Willie Lumpkin—were both the beneficiaries of ad campaigns by the respective syndicates that were distributing them.
For instance, in an elaborate brochure for Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs, prepared by the Chicago Sun-Times syndicate—with Joan Lee–ringer Mrs. Lyons smiling knowingly at the strip’s logo, while the eponymous Cubs giggle below—we’re told that the feature is “a brand new daily strip and Sunday page, packed with appeal; ideas for Cubs and den mothers; chuckles for everyone!” We’re likewise informed that the strip is “approved by the National Council, Boy Scouts of America.”
Inside the brochure, where it’s further added that it’s “the only comic approved by the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America,” we see a reproduction of the October 30, 1957, letter that grants that very approval, signed by Rebel Robertson, the BSA’s director of public relations. (Correspondence in Mendez’s archives indicates that Lee and Maneely certainly earned that approval by, as indicated in the Editor & Publisher article, doing a great deal of research to get all the details about scouting right—but only after initially missing the mark.)
And just as Joan Lee would be instrumental in the legend of how, several years later, Marvel Comics came to be, she was also active in the promotional push for Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs. Doing telephone outreach the Cub Scouts offices couldn’t do (for, they claimed, ethical reasons) and the syndicate didn’t seem willing or able to do, Joan called numerous Cub Scout troop leaders around the country to inform them of the existence of Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs and inspired several of them, according to their letters, to buy the local newspapers in which it was appearing or, where it wasn’t appearing, to urge their papers to carry the strip.7
Whatever success Lee might have had in syndication, it was limited, so his staff job, along with his self-assigned freelance writing income, was not something to casually walk away from. Though he would have liked it if Martin had offered him a steady position on one or more of his non-comics magazines, such an offer was never forthcoming.8 Of course, Lee didn’t fit the profile of Goodman’s cadre of magazine staffers—Ivy League graduates and postgraduates that Goodman liked to hire and lord over, bragging about the high-class origins of his staff, hastening to point out that, despite their coveted educations, they were here, working for him, a man who had not even graduated high school, in his schlock magazine mill.
(It also seems possible that Lee, though highly intelligent, creative, and hardworking, might have had some form of ADD or ADHD, making him most suited to working on an endless stream of short-form pieces, as opposed to projects that would require much sustained attention.)
By the same token, perhaps Goodman figured that, indeed, his comics line would eventually be allowed to grow and that Lee, if he didn’t leave in shame, would be the right man for that return—and, also, that keeping him there would spare Martin family aggravation. By this point, Lee and his family were living near Goodman in Hewlett Harbor and saw the Goodmans socially. Lee often shared rides from and to the office with Martin.
Also possible was that Goodman might have simply felt that his familial duty began and ended with finding his relatives steady work. That the work might be fulfilling or prestigious was something that was, literally, not his problem. For his part, Lee had contemplated looking for work at publications outside Goodman’s sphere, but always felt as if his comics background would mark him as unqualified out of the gate. He imagined himself going up to a publisher like Simon & Schuster and saying, “I used to edit comics. Got anything for me?” It left him with “a nagging feeling of insecurity.”9
Lee has said that he also worked on numerous other types of material besides comic books and strips, but the record is vague about it. He recalled:
I used to write radio shows.… I can’t mention the titles, because I ghosted them under other people’s names.… I ghosted a number of television shows. I ghosted newspaper comic strips. I wrote the Howdy Doody newspaper strip.… I did some advertising work.10
Apparently, whatever extracurricular writing work Lee did, it didn’t earn enough to make him feel he could leave the security, however fragile, at Timely. So, convinced he had no choice, Lee stuck around, but he would keep on pitching ideas for syndicated strips and other projects.
When the backlog of Timely/Atlas comic book material was on its way to being used up and the company’s distribution issues were resolved by going with Independent, Lee would soon find himself with more to do at the office, finally allowed to commission new stories. Filling eight to ten comics a month—producing approximately two hundred pages of new material every thirty days—was a respectable workload for any comic book editor, especially when he was also writing many of the stories. Indeed, it was almost the perfect number if the editor were ever inclined to do more than just give a cursory look to the material that crossed his desk—but would, instead, give it some thought and consideration. Why, under those circumstances, a smart writer-editor might even start to think about themes and characterization, might even figure out some kind of strategy for marketing and advertising.
And, with a staff of artists to call on that included such talents as Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and especially the exquisitely talented and quick-drawing Maneely, maybe Timely or Atlas or whatever the hell the company was called (a lot of artists just called it “Stan Lee’s company”) could come up with some stories that might have a bit of substance, maybe even some meaning.
Of course, that was the kind of thing that dreamers like the legendary Will Eisner used to talk about—and Eisner himself had, by 1952, gotten out of producing regular genre comics, even his revered syndicated comic, The Spirit. Eisner was spending his time producing educational and instructional comics for the military, corporations, and government agencies, which provided him a nice lifestyle. His career path gave him the opportunity to spend quality time with his young children and the financial means to give them a pleasant suburban life, far from the turmoil of the New York streets he, like Lee, had grown up on. If that was good enough for a genius like Eisner, who was Stan Lee to aspire to more?
So Lee hung in, and by mid-1958, things at Timely/Atlas were on something of an upswing. The company had survived, and he was finally able to offer new work to freelancers. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs was moderately successful.
But on June 7, 1958, things would once again, suddenly and dramatically, change for Stan Lee.
On that day, Joe Maneely was killed while riding a commuter train from Manhattan back to his New Jersey home. Not wearing his glasses, which had recently broken, he took a fatal misstep and fell between cars while the train was moving.
Lee was devastated both professionally and personally. In terms of the former, between Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs and the numerous comic book assignments Maneely was handling, there was a sudden, gaping chasm in Lee’s world.
As if on cue, it was that same week that Jack Kirby chose to visit Lee’s office.