Under New Management

Unlike any previous editor-in-chief at Marvel, Jim Shooter saw his job in terms of the entire publishing line.  This is not to say that his predecessors ignored this or that comic, or that they didn't try to develop new publication patterns or formats. And it certainly does not mean that they did not care about consistency. Marvel was the first comics company to really conceive of its characters as part of a (mostly) coherent universe.   It was under Stan Lee's reign that continuity became, if not king, then at least an occasionally valued ombudsman. Teaders who spotted inconsistencies could earn "no-prizes" (i.e., nothing) for pointing them out. If this spurred a particular type of obsessiveness among fans, well, it also sustained their interest. And it would rarely result in the solipsistic trap that DC would repeatedly fall into after Crisis on Infinite Earths:  an in-universe obsession with the nature and transformation of the comics universe and its continuity.  Marvel was more of an immersive storyworld than it was a coherent product line. 

Shooter took over Marvel at a time when the industry seemed to be in peril: years of expansion were being followed by a significant contraction (more dramatic at DC, but still felt at Marvel).  He instituted changes that homogenized and regularized the company's output with an eye to new readers:  each issue's splash page would feature a narrative box at the top, restating the book's premise.  Long, meandering plotlines and multiple issue arcs were strongly discouraged in favor of single-issue stories (with the X-Men always an exception--the comic was growing too successful to mess with a wining formula).  

Wait, who is giving this page to whom?

Perhaps the most corporate thing Shooter did was to remind his writers and artists, many of whom started as fans and had serious aspirations for their own work, that the characters and books they loved did not belong to them.  Of course they knew this in a logical, practical way (their meagre paychecks and job insecurity would have been early clues), but Shooter was dismissive of their emotional attachments.  As an editor, he helped encourage a trope that would quickly become cliche:  the hero abandons his costumed identity, which is taken up by someone new.  Such changes were almost always temporary, of course, but Shooter could be brutal about his demands for a shake-up when he was unhappy with a book's performance.  Along with his collaborators, Doug Moench had spent a decade developing Shang-Chi and his supporting cast; is it any wonder that he balked at Shooter's order to turn the hero into a villain and kill off everyone else?

Marvel in the 1980s did not eliminate a personal relationship with a given comic so much as it changed the parties involved.  Creators who did not want to follow Shooter's seemingly arbitrary edicts could either relent, walk away, or be summarily dismissed.  The changes he demanded may not have been emotionally rooted in the character development and previous ongoing storylines, but they had to be followed.  Steve Rogers would stop being Captain America (again), Iron Man would fall off the wagon (again) and hand the armor over to his friend Rhodey, Spider-Woman was abruptly (and temporarily) killed off when her book was cancelled, and Ms. Marvel's handling was so egregious that it gets its own section of Chapter 2. Shooter saw himself as the guardian of the company's intellectual property, but his editorship, though corporate, was not cool-headed and disinterested.  The personalized relationship between the creators and their comics was now supplanted by a personalized editorship. 

 Next: Portrait of the Editor as a (Very) Young Man

When Bad Comics Happen to Good People

Note: I just learned that Jim Shooter died today. Had I known, I would not have published this post at this time—it was never intended as an obituary.

My condolences to Jim Shooter’s family and friends.

What is the value of a bad comic? Not the market value, of course--plenty of terrible comics have become collector's items for one reason or another.  Rather, is there anything that can be learned from talking at length about a bad comic? And if so, how much?

As openers for a book on comics go, this does not sound particularly encouraging.  But I started my previous book on Marvel Comics in the 1970s with an extended discussion of a DC miniseries from the 1990s, so, if anyone is keeping score, I am building a solid track record for perverse introductions.  In any case, comics readers know that there can be a great deal of pleasure in dissecting (or trashing) a bad comic, and that there are plenty of reviewers online who scratch that particular itch.  This book's goals are different.

The question of bad comics is essential when considering Marvel's 1980s publications, thought not because the company's output was overwhelming or unusually bad. The decade saw numerous artistic and commercial hits (X-Men, Daredevil, Walt Simonson's run on Thor), against a backdrop of, if not necessarily badness, then concerted mediocrity. Marvel in the 1980s inadvertently asked and answered a number of questions about the comics industry: what makes a good comic, or a bad comic? What are comics for?  And how can they be produced more consistently, and with greater efficiency?

In Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, I focused exclusively on those few creators who managed to produce work that pushed the boundaries of the possible and the permissible, even if the results did not always age well. If there is an overall drama to the book, it is about the struggle of a few artists and writers to take advantage of weaknesses in the Marvel corporate structure that might allow them to tell stories that were personal, inventive, or absurd.   

Marvel's Eighties output was largely the result of a push in the opposite direction, and, like most generalizations about decades, its beginning did not coincide with the change in the calendar.  The Eighties began with the appointment of Marvel's ninth editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, in the early days of 1978. Shooter's ouster in 1987, one year short of a decade after he took the job, was an end of an era in itself.  But his replacement by Tom DeFalco, while welcomed by Shooter's many enemies, did not immediately result in a drastically different Marvel landscape. So while this book focuses primarily on the Shooter years, it does not use 1987 as hard stop.

Note: I just learned that Jim Shooter died today at the age of 73. This post was never meant to be an obituary—it would be a terrible one, and had I known, I would not have published today. My condol

It would be easy to cast Shooter as the villain of this volume. Fired, pushed out, or simply fed up, nearly all the creators who managed to produce innovative comics at Marvel in the 1970s left not long after Shooter took over, along with a host of other longtime Marvel stalwarts: Steve Gerber, Steve Engelhart, Marv Wolfman, Don McGregor, George Perez, and eventually Doug Moench, John Byrne, Gerry Conway, Gene Colan, Denny O'Neil, Roy Thomas and Mike Ploog. Never one to shy away from a fight, The Comics Journal editor Gary Groth published an essay in 1994 called "Jim Shooter, Our Nixon," which not only listed many of his affronts against creators' rights, but also asserts that "Jim Shooter was everyone's favorite villain" (The Comics Journal 171, September 1994: 17-21).

I bring in Groth not to dispute his assessment, but as a stimulus to reframe what Shooter's approach did to Marvel. Anyone interested in the corporate and office politics at the company during this period can get the details from Sean Howe in his excellent Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Howe's remit is historical, while mine is interpretive. I do not wish to rehash or relitigate Shooter's interactions with the writers and artists who left Marvel, but rather to think about Shooter's editorship as an answer to the questions with which I began: what makes for a bad (or good) comic? And what are comics for?  Shooter's answers changed the course of Marvel Comics, if not the entire industry.

When Shooter came to power, he put an end to Marvel's free-wheeling (some would say chaotic) editorial structure. Gone were the days of the writer/editor, an institution that, while facilitating such excellent books as Gerber and Colan's Howard the Duck, was also tantamount to an almost total absence of editing as such. In the 1970s, Marvel was plagued by deadline failures and produced a line of books whose quality was shockingly inconsistent.  The system that gave Don McGregor the freedom he needed to redefine the Black Panther also facilitated the production of a vast array of mediocre comics.  For every Tomb of Dracula there were three Marvel Team-Ups, Incredible Hulks (not a high point for Marvel at that time), or Ghost Riders.

One of the easiest labels to lob at Shooter's approach to the editor-in-chief (EIC) job is "corporate."  No doubt it is also accurate:  Shooter replaced a largely horizontal set of relationships and relatively flat org chart with a hierarchal system of bosses and rules. In an industry that runs on the efforts and imagination of what present-day corporate types now refer to as "creatives,"  "corporate" is an inherently negative term.   We have all seen this movie before (especially in the Seventies): the corporate stooge vs. the  gonzo radio station that doesn't want to have its playlist homogenized (FM, WKRP in Cincinnati); the military brass vs. the anarchic but top-notch field surgeons who will not play by the rules (M*A*S*H*); the slacker enlisted men who become heroes despite their disdain for military protocol (Stripes).  Even Shooter, who wrote his share of Marvel books during his time as editor-in-chief, gestured in the direction of these tropes in The Avengers 168,  with National Security Council  Official Henry Peter Gyrich objecting to the Avengers' lax security and chaotic procedures.  In Shooter's hands, Gyrich was an annoyance, but he was not entirely wrong. When David Micheline took over the book and, following Shooter's directive, was obliged to reduce the team's roster to seven, he had Gyrich issue the edict in a manner that showed Gyrich (and, by extension, Shooter, who created him) to be officious and unreasonable. 

But what if, at least as a thought experiment, we concede that a corporation publishing comics might benefit from being a bit corporate?  That is, we can object to any number of Shooter's policies and decisions, and lament the death of the creative spirit found in the best of Seventies Marvel.  But it is also difficult to imagine a scenario in which Marvel would survive and prosper as a profit-making company without some form of inevitably alienating overhaul. Shooter's approach to the comics business was precisely the sort of thing that was anathema to Steve Gerber:  comics were to be seen as the company's product. 

Next: Under New Management

Preface

Marvel in the 1970s: The World inside Your Head  was my origin story as a comics reader.  Of course, I hope it was much more than that: the point was to showcase the innovations of a neglected period in the history of the medium. But it was also a passion project.   These were the comics that made me who I am.

It certainly had not occurred to me at the time to follow it up with a sequel, and I do so with a comics fan's hard-won awareness about just how disappointing sequels can be (I'm looking at you, Secret Wars II).  If the Seventies got me into Marvel Comics, the Eighties almost got me out (with the Nineties all but sealing the deal).  This was not only a result of changes at Marvel, but changes in my life.  I graduated high school in 1984 and college in 1988, going on to start my doctorate that same year. College nearly broke all my tethers to popular culture. There were no televisions in any of my dorms (we were all people who proudly "didn't own a tv"), and it took me another fifteen years for me to come back to that particular medium.  There were also no comics shops in a twenty-mile radius, though my hometown store held onto my selections until I came to visit. This included four months in Leningrad in 1986, when my isolation from American popular culture was at its peak.

This book keeps bad sequels and tragic hair to a minimum

If I stayed with comics at all, it was not because of Marvel (well, except for X-Men and Daredevil, but these were the exceptions that almost everyone made). It was because of the burgeoning independent comics movement, which ranged from fly-by-night publishers to self-publishing geniuses (Dave Sim's Cerebus and Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest) to companies that managed to last more than a decade (Eclipse).  And it was also because DC Comics, which had for so long been a backwater of unimaginative tedium, had become a hotbed of innovation (facilitated by refugees from Jim Shooter's 1978-1987 term as Marvel editor-in-chief and the famous "British Invasion" that brought Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Peter Milligan, and so many others to the American comics industry). Mainstream America would finally start to recognize the accomplishments and potential of the comics medium when Watchmen (DC), Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (DC), and Maus (Raw/Pantheon) were all published in 1986.  None of this was thanks to Marvel Comics.

There is a temptation to link Marvel's commercial ascendence in the 1980s to its retreat from both innovation and from comics that displayed the individual vision or voice of a particular creator or creative team.  Certainly,  strictures placed on corporate comics creators became less a matter of the comics code or industry structures than the centralized, top-down authority of a powerful editor-in-chief.  But the story is not that simple. 

Miller's Daredevil, as the work of a writer/artist with a strong, identifiable sense of what the comic should be, might be considered the exception that proves the rule, but that would be a mistake.  The X-Men would mutate into a sales juggernaut that, while not necessarily an example of the most profound artistic statement ever made even in mainstream comics, was nonetheless the triumph of a particular type of storytelling mastered by writer Chris Claremont, especially in his collaborations with pencilers John Byrne and Dave Cockrum (but also playing to the strengths of John Romita Jr, Paul Smith, and remarkable guest stints by Barry Windsor-Smith). In this regard, The X-Men is emblematic of one of the signal differences between the would-be auteurs of Marvel in the Seventies and the creators who followed them.  Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart, Marv Wolfman, Doug Moench, and Don McGregor would all be either fired or pushed out by Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, who issued sweeping mandates for Marvel comics and rarely hesitated to require changes in a team's storytelling decisions.  Claremont, though he would express dissatisfaction both with individual editorial interventions (the demand to kill off Jean Grey, followed by the decision to bring her back) and the line-wide trends that made planning more difficult (particularly crossovers), managed to incorporate virtually anything that was thrown at him and continue to tell the stories he wanted to tell.

Daredevil and the X-Men were the brightest stars in a dismal sky, but they were not alone. Two other writer/artists did well for themselves at Marvel over the course of the decade: John Byrne and Walt Simonson.  Byrne came off of his groundbreaking run on X-Men to revamp The Fantastic Four, a comic whose better days seemed behind it.  It was here that he showcased his retro sensibility while still managing to tell stories that were far more engaging than most of the books on the market at the time. Simonson performed similar magic on Thor, but in a much more foreword-looking fashion.  Taking over a sleepy title that had enjoyed a strong run at the beginning of the decade (when Roy Thomas crafted a complicated and fascinating years-long storyline), Simonson gave the book a grandeur it had not seen since the last years of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby run, and with the mythological complexity thatThor so richly deserved.

As in the 1970s, the value of some of Marvel's comics in the Eighties is as much about the uniqueness of their failures as it is about their successes.  Even as Shooter drained the variety out of the comics in Marvel's main continuity, under his leadership, the company made room for some fascinating experiments.  Following DC's movement to direct market sales as an alternative to the newsstand, Marvel produced comics aimed at hardcore fans and older readers. Even if some of them, such as the last years of Bill Mantlo's run on Micronauts, were not exactly awards-baiting material, others, such as Bruce Jones' and Brent Anderson's Ka-Zar, brought a surprising maturity to characters who had previously lacked it.  The Eighties also introduced comics such as Larry Hama's The 'Nam (a non-superhero series about America Soldiers during the Vietnam War) and Peter Gillis and Brent Anderson's Strikeforce Morituri (a near-future story about people whose superpowers come at the cost of a drastically shortened lifespan).  Miniseries and maxiseries also brought new excitement, particular Mark Gruenwald and Bob Hall's Squadron Supreme.

Starting in the 1980s, both Marvel and DC would experiment with the creation of specialized imprints that would feature genres besides superheroes; in some cases, they would also allow for creator ownership or rights' participation.  DC eventually landed on a long-term critical and commercial success with Vertigo (1993-2020, 2024-), the home of its most prestigious comics and graphic novels.  Marvel would take much longer to hit on a successful framework for a new imprint, and it would do so by doubling down on both its superheroes and on corporate IP:  the Ultimate Marvel (later rebranded as "Ultimate Comics") imprint that lasted from 2000 to 2015.[1]

The Eighties at Marvel present a diverse collection of imprints that could be qualified as failures, but their lack of longevity does not diminish their importance. Some of these imprints were a haven for talent that could not comfortably be expressed in the company's mainstream publications during the Shooter Years (or, for that matter, during Tom DeFalco's term as Shooter's replacement, from 1987-1994).  Three publication experiments stand out for their importance:  Shooter's short-lived "New Universe" (1986-1989), a doomed attempt at creating an entirely new stable of superhero characters in their own continuity; the Marvel Graphic Novel (MGN) line of oversized, stand-alone stories that ran from 1982 to 1993; and Epic Comics (1982-1996), which, under the leadership of Archie Goodwin and Al Milgrom, combined a wide breadth of genres, freedom from the restrictions of the comics code, and creator ownership in a manner that now looks familiar thanks to DC's Vertigo.  Epic Comics was never the comics phenomenon that Vertigo would be, the reasons for which will be discussed later in the book.  Nonetheless, both Epic Comics and Marvel Graphic Novels published a small amount of enduring work that rewards rereading and is worthy of sustained critical attention.

One of those works, Moonshadow, is a whimsical and philosophical coming-of-age story with echoes of both Dickens and Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Written by J. M. DeMatteis with gorgeous painted art by Jon J. Muth, Kent Williams, and George Pratt, Moonshadow survived the collapse of Epic Comics thanks to the imprint's creator's ownership structure, leading to republications by Vertigo and Dark Horse Comics.  Moonshadow is DeMatteis' finest achievement, although it finds good company in some of the writer's other, more personal work. DeMatteis never quite gained the cult/auteur following of Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore; his vast, varied output over the course of four decades includes much that is forgettable.  But his work at Marvel in the 1980s stood out from the crowd. In addition to Moonshadow, his run on The Defenders, a comic that had never really found its way since Steve Gerber was kicked off the book in the late 1970s, brought a focus on character development and interiority that most of Eighties Marvel lacked, while his run on the various Spider-Man titles (particularly a six-part storyline called initially called "Fearful Symmetry" before adopting its more famous name, "Kraven's Last Hunt").  DeMatteis revives the absurdity of Steve Gerber and the spiritual seeking of Steve Englehart that also relies on the writer's unfortunate tendency to double down on New Age philosophy.  At its best, the result is Moonshadow (and, much later, Abadazad with Mike Ploog), but at its weakest, the results can be mawkish and predictable (as we will occasionally see in The Defenders and associated titles).

Despite the uneven quality of the company's output, the Eighties were a huge decade for Marvel, in terms of volume, sales, and cultural impact.  As in the previous book, I see no point in devoting extended analysis to comics that are simply mediocre or dated, unless they hold a significance that is disproportionate to their quality.  Instead, the focus will be on work that is outstanding, or work that is strong, but flawed.  There is not enough room in this book to cover every good book the company managed to put out. [2] Peter David began his twelve-year run on The Incredible Hulk in 1987; to my mind, this is therefore material that would be a better fit for a book on the Nineties.  Shooter's brief return to The Avengers included a number of fascinating stories and plot points that would have repercussions for decades to come (particularly Hank Pym's abuse of his wife, Janet Van Dyne (The Wasp), but, like so much else in the decade, it was rather hit-or-miss, and in any case, the limited length of his run (16 issues spread out over more than five years) does not leave much to work with. The Introduction briefly treats these works about which i have not chosen to write an entire chapter, as well as the controversies surrounding key stories (such as the misogynist treatment of Carol Danvers at the end of her career as Ms. Marvel).  Also covered in the introduction are some significant trends inaugurated in the Eighties that did not result in storylines of particular significance in their own right. These include the now-familiar trope of passing the mantle from an established hero to a usually temporary replacement (who most often goes on to create a new costumed identity of their own); Peter Parker's costume change, his marriage to Mary Jane Watson,  and the creation of fan-favorite villain-turned-anti-hero Venom; Tony Stark's alcoholism and the generally strong extended Iron Man run by David Micheline, Bob Layton, and John Romita Jr.; Marvel's production of comics about characters and toys licensed from third parties; the Punisher's rise from relative obscurity to fan-favorite;  and the rise of the crossover event. 

As with my previous Marvel book, I do not pretend that my choices are not guided at least in part by my personal taste. which is in turn a function of my age.  I am a great deal more forgiving of the flaws in the comics of my childhood than I am in those I read as a young adult, and it is quite likely that I would be able to form an attachment to characters who leave me cold (Venom, for instance) if I were ten years younger.  But I have always taught my students that the pleasure one gets from reading a particular text can provide the first step for a more analytical approach, in the hopes that they can move from simply saying that they liked something to figuring out what it is about the text that grabbed their interest and talking about it in a way that is less dependent on their personal reaction.  I do not stick precisely to this approach in my own work, just as I allow myself to talk about myself and to write in the first person even though I usually beg my students not to. [3] This, too, is a function of age (and experience). 

This book is not meant to serve as a thorough history of Marvel in this particular period; like its predecessor, it is a reading of a set of Marvel texts.  Choosing such texts can never be truly impartial; nor, for that matter, could the readings really be the product of a faux journalistic view "from nowhere."  Instead, I am trying to provide a series of coherent and engaging approaches to a particular set of Marvel comics whose cultural, aesthetic, and ideological values are worthy of sustained examination.

Plus, not forget the obvious: a lot of these comics are a lot of fun. I hope that, if this book convinces you to read or reread some of the best of them, you will come away agreeing with Mary Jane Watson's signature catchphrase : Face it, Tiger, you've hit the jackpot.

Notes

[1] The Ultimate line was revamped and revived in 2023.

[2] Those interested in a more comprehensive overview should take a look at the first book to use the title Marvel Comics in the 1980s, by Pierre Comptois (2014).  In addition to thematic overviews, it consists of capsule summaries of numerous issues published during the decade, from the outstanding to the run-of-the-mill.

[3] For what it's worth, I explain to them that both the first person and self-reflective writing have their place, but that it is important to learn how to write about something other than oneself. 

Next:  Introduction: When Bad Comics Happen to Good People