Exposed: Myths of Marvel's Silver Age - Part 2

OVER THE LAST FEW DECADES, a great deal has been written about the history of Marvel Comics, not all of it as well-researched as it could have been. And because of this, certain historians have chosen to lift anecdotes from earlier histories without bothering to check the sources of the material they're quoting.

Last time, I took a look at some of the legends that have appeared in successive histories of Marvel Comics and questioned whether they had been verified by the authors or simply repeated based on faith. As with many histories, it seems that opinion often triumphs over fact ... and fans of a particular artist or writer will insist that their hero tells the objective truth while all others lie and dissemble. But as my old friend and collaborator Phil Edwards always said, "There's three sides to every argument - his side, her side ... and the truth."

Back when I was a teenager, the first glimmer we comic fans had that there was an actually history to comics was these two books, both published in 1971. In retrospect, neither were very good. We wouldn't really get a decent history till Steranko's History of Comics (1970), a project sadly aborted before it could get to the Silver Age and the stuff I was really interested in.

I've already looked at the oft-repeated story that Marvel Comics was limited to just eight titles a month during the 1960s (not true), that Stan Lee only got his job at Marvel Comics in 1941 because he was related to publisher Martin Goodman (not true) and that Stan Lee was the cause of Simon and Kirby leaving Captain America in 1942 because Stan snitched about their moonlighting for DC to his cousin-by-marriage Martin Goodman (no evidence to support that).

This time, I'm going to look at a few more cases where it seems to me as if the historians have gone with "Print the legend."

STAN LEE'S FIRST STAB AT GROWN-UP COMICS

To be fair to the comics historians, I should say that this myth has largely come from Stan Lee himself. As far back as Origins of Marvel Comics (Simon and Schuster, 1974), Stan had alluded to the claim that he had a revelatory moment when he realised he was fed up with hacking out copycat strips for Goodman and wanted to do something that would raise both his game and set a higher benchmark for the comic book medium. 

Stan expanded on the story in his autobiography Excelsior; The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (Fireside Books, 2002). "For once I wanted to write stories that wouldn't insult the intelligence of an older reader, stories with interesting characterisation, more realistic dialogue and plots that hadn't been recycled a thousand times before. Above all, stories that wouldn't hew to all the comicbook cliches of years past."

So, The Fantastic Four was born ... right? Well, not exactly, no.

All that stuff about wanting to quit the business and Joan Lee telling Stan to just write comics the way he wanted to, because he had nothing to lose, didn't result in Fantastic Four. It resulted in Amazing Adult Fantasy. At the very least, Stan was working on both simultaneously ... but tellingly, only one had the word "Adult" in its title. Also, only one promised to be "The Magazine That Respects Your Intelligence", right there on the cover. And though both sported a logo that strikingly resembled that of the hit, liberal-leaning Twilight Zone tv show, only one was an anthology of fantasy tales.

In this house ad from Strange Tales 95 (Apr 1962), which came out between FF 3 and FF 4 and the same month as AAF 11, Stan puts Amazing Adult Fantasy and Fantastic Four together, emphasising their common logo style - though tellingly, he places AAF above FF, indicating that he thought the fantasy anthology book best placed to further his agenda.

It's for these reasons that I think I can make a case for Amazing Adult Fantasy being the title Stan thought would bring the older reader to the table.

The Twilight Zone had premiered two years earlier, in October 1959, to outstanding reviews. "Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I actually look forward to seeing. It's the one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily News. The New York Herald Tribune said it was "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year" and Variety called it "the best that has ever been accomplished in half-hour filmed television". 

From the outset, Serling's moral fables, with their liberal worldview and chilling observations about human frailty, won a strong audience following and, later, Emmy and Golden Globe awards. And when you compare the stories that Stan Lee was offering in his anthology titles, especially those drawn by Steve Ditko, you can see just how much of an influence on Lee Serling's series was.

It's not a coincidence that Amazing Adult Fantasy and Fantastic Four shared a similarly styled cover logo. And I think it's fairly safe to say that Stan thought looking to the title design for Rod Serling's intelligent sci-fi tv show The Twilight Zone for inspiration might be the fastest way to reach the readers he was looking for.

So when Stan Lee felt he should do something more worthwhile than the kiddy-fodder he'd been filling the Atlas/Marvel comics with, it seemed natural to beef up the presence of the Serling-influenced Ditko fantasy tales by giving them their own title. So Amazing Adventures' Kirby kaiju stories gave way to the humanist fables of Lee/Ditko. I also think it's significant that Stan Lee almost always signed his stories with Ditko, but didn't much bother with the Kirby monster strips. 

The only reason I can think of that Stan would later downplay the role of Amazing Adult Fantasy in his quest to bring a degree of sophistication to the four-colour comic book is that ultimately the title fell prey to poor sales and was cancelled by Marty Goodman before the new approach could establish itself. Far better to hitch your revolutionary game-changing approach to a success rather than to a failure.

I also can't help but observe that the first few issues of Fantastic Four followed the formula of the Kirby Giant Monster comics, almost as though Stan felt you just couldn't do grown-up superhero tales. Certainly issues 1, with the Mole Man's Godzilla-like subterranean creatures, and 3 and 4, with The Miracle Man's giant marquee monster and The Sub-Mariner's Giganto creature, didn't stray far from kaiju territory.

When you have a successful formula, you'd be nuts to abandon it. So Stan stuck with giant monsters for the first few issues of Fantastic Four, reasoning that if monsters drove sales on Astonish, Suspense and the others, then it would for FF, too.

It wasn't really until Fantastic Four 8 (Nov 1962) that the tone of the comic shifted a bit and Stan made an effort to change the direction of the title. He makes The Thing less angry, the FF start calling him "Ben" instead of "Thing" and Reed begins his quest to revert Ben to his human form. Stan also gets rid of the (rather odd) Reed-Sue-Ben triangle and introduces a new love interest for Ben, Alicia, who initially resembles Sue - though that idea is also jettisoned quite quickly. For me, this is where Stan made a concerted effort to make superhero comics a bit more sophisticated than the standard superhero mags DC were putting out under the editorship of Mort Weisinger - pretty brave, considering how well the Superman family titles were selling in 1961.

And as history would show, turns out Stan was right. Once Marvel got into its stride, sales began to climb and the previously unassailable DC began their decline.

STAN LEE INVENTED THE "MARVEL METHOD"

There is a prevailing school of thought out there, especially among Kirby Kultists, that Stan Lee invented the Marvel Method (of comics writing) specifically to gyp artists out of their plotting payments. The story gets repeated over and over, but without any real evidence to back it up.

I think the first hint I came across - beyond Stan's own explanations in the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins - of how comics were created during the early days was in Steranko's History of Comics, which I would have picked up around the age of 18. In volume 1, Steranko recounts how the classic 44-page battle between The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner (Marvel Mystery Comics 8 & 9, Jun & Jul 1940) was written and drawn over a weekend.

What's remarkable about this 44-page battle between The Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner isn't that it was the first such character cross-over, pre-dating the first appearance of the Justice Society by several months, but that it was conceived and completed over a weekend! Both books sold out.

"Carl (Burgos) and Bill (Everett) sat down at the drawing boards and composed the first two pages without having the slightest notion about the storyline. John Compton came in and began to plot out a script ... Breakdowns were pencilled as soon as page-by-page synopses were completed. Finished dialogue was written directly onto the pages, then lettered."

That process, with the art produced from a synopsis and the dialogue and captions written and lettered on the finished art sounds a lot like the Marvel Method to me.

More recently, I picked up a copy of The Best of Alter Ego, a compilation of the best articles from the pioneering fanzine of the early 1960s. In it, there was a short essay by Golden and Silver Age artist Paul Reinman, which first appeared in Alter Ego 4 (Oct 1962). Something Reinman wrote reminded me of that account from Steranko's History of Comics. 

"I remember when the artists were just a page, or a few boxes, ahead of the writer. We would come in in the morning and the editor, who mostly doubled as the writer, would say 'Sit down. I'll write an outline of the plot in a few minutes.' While the artist was working on the first page, the editor broke down the rest of the story and typed it for the artist. The dialogue was not written before the artist had finished his inkings. When the artist looked at the breakdown of his story and if the box showed a lot of action he would let his drawing take up most of the space of this box: if it was a close-up or very little action, he would leave more space for dialogue. Well, that's the way it was in the beginning of comics."

MLJ - which later became Archie Comics - had a spat with Martin Goodman over a Captain America villain called The Hangman. It was MLJ partner Maurice Coyne (also working as Goodman's accountant at Timely) who told Joe Simon that Goodman was cheating on the Captain America royalties.

Though Reinman doesn't give any dates, a quick check of his credits on GCD, shows that he spent the first two years of his career working for MLJ on strips like Hangman, The Wizard and Zambini, which appeared in their top titles, Pep Comics, Shield-Wizard and Zip. Though he moved on to DC in mid-1943, I think it's pretty safe to say that Reinman was talking about how they worked at MLJ.

Atlas was at its peak in the mid-1950s, publishing the most titles of any publisher. Sinnott was one of Stan Lee's mainstay comic strip artists, though only the real stars - like Joe Maneely and Bill Everett - got to draw the covers.

Different publishers worked in different ways, but during the 1950s, when Marvel was known as Atlas and Stan Lee was Editor and head writer, the artists worked from full scripts. Joe Sinnott was a prolific artist at Atlas and described the work routine in The Jack Kirby Collector 9 (1995). "I'd go down to the city on Friday, and Stan would give me a script to take home. I'd start on Monday morning by lettering the balloons in pencil. Then I'd pencil the story from the script and ink it and leave the balloons penciled. I'd pencil a page in the morning, and ink it in the afternoon ... I'd bring the story back on Friday and he'd give me another script. I never knew what kind of script I'd be getting. Stan had a big pile on his desk, and he used to write most of the stories himself in those days. You'd walk in, and he'd be banging away at his typewriter. He would finish a script and put it on the pile. Sometimes on his pile would be a western, then below it would be a science fiction, and a war story, and a romance. You never knew what you were getting, because he always took it off the top. And you were expected to do any type of story."

The later, in the post-Atlas years, when Marvel Comics was only known by the tiny letters "MC" on its covers, Stan was still supplying full scripts to his artists. The seeds of the Marvel Method were sown when Stan began to ramp up output at the beginning of the 1960s and found he was struggling to do all the editing and scripting himself. So he began writing with his brother Larry Leiber, who was primarily an artist.

In an interview for Alter Ego Vol 3, No 2 (1999), Lieber explained how those early Marvel stories were done. "Stan made up the plot, and then he'd give it to me, and I'd write the script ... I was unsure of myself just sitting down to write a script. Since I knew how to draw, I'd think, 'Oh, this shot will have a guy coming this way... this shot we'll have a guy looking down on him,' and later I'd sit at the typewriter and type it up. After a while, I'd just go to the typewriter. I would follow from Stan's plots ... Jack I always had to send a full script to." [My emphasis.]

A few months later, dissatisfied with Lieber's scripts, Stan Lee hired some veteran scripters -  Robert Bernstein, Ernie Hart and even Jerry Siegel - to cope with the load, but in the end he realised that to get the kind of stories he wanted for the fledgling Marvel Comics, he'd have to write them himself.

However, there is an important clue here to how Stan arrived at the Marvel Method. He was giving plots to brother Larry to break down into panel-by-panel scripts with dialogue and captions. I've not come across any indication that Larry had any input into the plots. It is possible that, when Stan was working with Bernstein and Hart, he did allow some plotting collaboration but, again, I've not found any statements from the participants to support that.

The above Marvels were the last scripted by Hart, Siegel and Bernstein before Stan took over all the writing chores himself. It's not a huge leap to go from providing brief plots to hired scripters, to providing plots to pencillers, to co-plotting with pencillers.

The next step in the evolution came when Lee rightly realised that it was the characterisation in the script - and the emotions felt by his characters - that made Marvel tales more appealing to his young audience than the old-fashioned, plot-driven DC-style stories. Stan understood that the details of the plot were the least important component. So rather than sit down with some less talented scripters and feed them plots, why not sit down with the artists, thrash out a plot, then have the artist draw it up before the dialogue was written? Pretty much a reversion to how it was done in the early 1940s.

As 1963 rolled over into 1964, it seems likely that Stan found some pencillers were better at fleshing out a brief story synopsis into a 20-page story than others. Steve Ditko appears to have been best at it, and had likely worked that way with Stan during the pre-hero years. Jack Kirby  - even though he'd been used to full scripts from the Marvel Bullpen was able to adapt and add detail to the briefest of outlines. Others, like Gene Colan and Don Heck, needed more hand-holding.

What is interesting is that those who had the biggest issues with how Stan worked - I'm thinking Wally Wood, Joe Orlando and Gil Kane - were all from a background where they would be given some form of full script to work from.

Kane had worked for DC Comics most of his career, and the editors there would hold regular story conferences with the writers to create a plot, then have the scripters - John Broome, Gardner Fox - go home and type up a full script for the penciller. I'm pretty sure the writers didn't get paid for the plotting session.

At EC Comics, where Wood and Orlando cut their teeth, the discipline was even stricter. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein would plot and script the stories, then give the boards to a letterer to ink in the captions and dialogue. Only then would the boards go to the artist, who would have to fill the pre-ruled and lettered panels with drawings.

Here's a Wally Wood page and a Joe Orlando page - both from Weird Fantasy 13 (May 1952). The artboard was pre-lettered with the captions and balloons and the artists would have to fit their drawings in as best they could. Some artists would find this restrictive and impossible to work with, and others found it worked best for them. Wordy, aren't they?

So from Wally Wood's point of view, it may well have looked like Stan was getting him to "write" the story while taking the credit ... but that's only because Wood had never worked Stan's way before.

Interviewed by Mark Evanier, Wood said, "I enjoyed working with Stan on Daredevil but for one thing. I had to make up the whole story. He was being paid for writing, and I was being paid for drawing, but he didn't have any ideas. I'd go in for a plotting session, and we'd just stare at each other until I came up with a storyline. I felt like I was writing the book but not being paid for writing."

That doesn't really ring true to me. I just can't imagine Stan - the most talkative human being on the planet - just sitting and staring at Wally Wood. I rather think that Wood, like some others, is vastly overestimating the importance of the plot to a comic story. When Wood did actually write an issue of Daredevil by himself, Lee's criticism wasn't of the plot but of the lack of characterisation in the dialogue.

"I persuaded him to let me write one by myself since I was doing 99% of the writing already," said Wood in the same interview. "I wrote it, handed it in, and he said it was hopeless. He said he'd have to rewrite it all and write the next issue himself."

At that stage of the process, there was very little Lee could have done about the plot ... but he sure could fix up the dialogue. 

Joe Orlando, who preceded Wally Wood as Daredevil penciller, also had difficulties with Stan's way of working. After three issue - Daredevil 2 - 4 (Jun - Oct 1964) - he quit because he couldn't deal with Stan asking him to redraw the pages he was turning in.

The point is that every writer or artist has a different history and background. And each has different working habits. What works for some doesn't work for others. What drew Neal Adams to Marvel in 1969 is he'd heard that the artists worked from the slightest of plots and were free to draw the comic their own way.

So it turns out that Stan didn't invent the plot-art-script process of creating comic strips. It's a method that has been in use since the 1940s, which some artists prefer and some don't. I can see how Stan found his heavy workload - as Marvel Comics grew during the early 1960s - meant he had to find ways to get the comic stories completed faster. He tried several different processes before he hit on the one that gave him the best control over how the characters were portrayed. Because Stan was all about the characters and their emotions, just as DC were all about the plots and their resolutions, and thought characterisation was irrelevant ... And we know how that eventually turned out.

I was going to try to squeeze in an account of the 1971 "price war" between Marvel and DC and give some perspective on the sales numbers that have been quoted in a few accounts, but it's the end of the month and I just don't have the time to do it justice this month, so I'll leave it for now and try to publish the last part of this look at Marvel Myths and Legends in a week or two.

Next: The DC / Marvel Price War of 1971

Daredevil: Hooray for Wally Wood

THE VERY FIRST DAREDEVIL comic I ever saw - around Easter 1965 - was Daredevil 5 (Dec 1964), with its striking Wally Wood cover and interior art. It was also Wood's first work on the title, and for Marvel, taking over from his old EC colleague and occasional inker Joe Orlando.

Daredevil 5 was Wally Wood's first work for Marvel since the four stories he'd done for Atlas around the middle of 1956, shortly after the tragic collapse of EC Comics, and uncredited pencil job under Colletta inks for Love Romances 96 (Nov 1961), coincidently the same month that Fantastic Four 1 came out.

At the time I was mesmerised by the idea of a blind superhero and - not knowing Wally Wood from Adam - Stan's cover blurb trumpeting the arrival of "the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood" completely passed me by. This may not have been the first time Stan puffed up an artist on the cover of one of his mags, but he'd never done it with this much hyperbole before.

However, as much as I loved the very idea of Daredevil, I wasn't mad about Wally Wood's art in this issue. Admittedly, at the time, I certainly wasn't aware of the brilliant work he'd done on the EC science-fiction titles, but my sensibilities were more in line with the work of Kirby, Ditko and Heck, and this new guy, with his tiny figures and crowded pages, just wasn't ticking any boxes for me.

WHO THE HECK IS WALLY WOOD?

Wallace Allan Wood was born in Menahga, Minnasota on 17 July 1929. As a child he devoured the great newspaper strips, like Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant and Terry and the Pirates. In love with drawing, he once dreamed he found a magic pencil that could draw anything. Wood graduated from high school in 1944 and enlisted in the Merchant Marine. In 1946, he transferred to the US Army Airborne 11th Paratroopers and was posted to occupied Japan. After demob in 1948, Wood found work as a waiter, and lugged his bulging portfolio around New York, trying to get drawing work from any publisher who'd let him in the door.

Wally Wood

Wood's luck began to turn when he met John Severin in a publisher's waiting room in October 1948. Wood visited the Charles William Harvey Studio where Severin was working and was introduced to Charles Stern, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. Learning that Will Eisner was looking for artists, Wood hurried over and was hired on the spot to draw backgrounds on The Spirit. The following year, Wood became an assistant to George Wunder, who'd taken over drawing Terry and the Pirates.

A George Wunder Terry and the Pirates daily from 1949. This would have been the period that Wood was working as one of Wunder's assistants, inking backgrounds and perhaps lettering.

Also during 1949, Wood got a foot in the door at Fox Publications, doing lettering on romance comics. He quickly graduated to backgrounds, then inking. Towards the end of 1949, Wood was contributing illustrations to the pulp magazines Six-Gun Western, Fighting Western, and Leading Western, for Trojan Publishing's Adolphe Barreaux, as well as getting actual comics work from Fox. His first Fox art was a ten-page story, "My One Misstep", in My Confession 7 (Aug 1949). More stories followed in My Experience, My Secret Life (he did his first Fox cover for issue 23) and My Love Affair.

While at Fox, Wood turned his hand to any kind of comic ... romance, classics and crime.However, it wasn't long before his varied work for Fox caught the eye of other publishers in the field ...

Pretty soon, Wood was branching out into other genres, doing comedy (Judy Canova), crime (Martin Kane, Private Eye) and jungle (Frank Buck). "For complete pages, it was $5 a page ... Twice a week, I would ink ten pages in one day," Wood later recalled in a 1981 interview for The Buyers' Guide. It was inevitable that others would notice Wood's talent and with new art partner Harry Harrison, Wood started contributing art to the blossoming EC comics - at first on Pre-Trend titles like Modern Love 5 (Feb-Mar 1950) and Saddle Romances 11 (Mar-Apr 1950), and on the very earliest New Trend titles, starting with Crypt of Terror 18 (Jun-Jul 1950) and Weird Fantasy 14 (Jul-Aug 1950).

Wally Wood's first work for EC was good (Weird Science 5, Jan-Feb 1951), but within a few short months, his art style transformed into something phenomenal (Weird Science 13, May-Jun 1952). And at the very same time, his old boss, Will Eisner, hand-picked Wood to take over the art on The Spirit (27 Jul 1952) for a brilliant (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to update the strip for the Space Age.

Very, very quickly, Wally Wood went from being a jobbing artist to a master craftsman. The speed of his improvement was simply astonishing. And even more incredibly, despite the ever-increasing amount of detail in his pages, he turned out art faster and faster. He would be one of Harvey Kurtzman's go-to artists for the new MAD comic (which would become vitally important later on in his career), where he'd craft pitch-perfect parodies of the great comics strips he'd loved as a kid, like Superman, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant. And in his spare time, he managed to find time to draw a couple of classic comics for Avon ... 

Even while working almost flat-out for EC Comics, Wood moonlighted at Avon, producing high-adventure, science fiction and horror stories with equal ease. The quality never faltered ...

By mid-1952, Wood was working exclusively for EC, earning a princely $50 a page (by contrast other publishers were paying $15-20 a page). For the May-June 1952 issues alone, he contributed:

• seven pages to Two Fisted Tales 27, 
• cover and seven pages to Shock Suspenstories 3, 
• a six-pager and an eight-pager to Weird Fantasy 13 
• a cover plus an eight-pager and a six-pager to Weird Science 13. 
• And, of course, four weekly eight-pagers for The Spirit newspaper strip. 

That's 76 pages - pencils and inks over an eight week period ... 38 pages a month ... all of it finished to an incredible standard. No artist today could compete with that schedule. Wood was like an unstoppable machine. 

His value to EC was cemented by Editor Al Feldstein, who wrote a love-poem to Wood, "My World", illustrated by Wood himself, which ran in Weird Science 22 (Nov-Dec 1953)

No other artist at EC was treated with the level of respect that Wally Wood enjoyed. His work got better month-by-month and Wood ultimately became the star of his own strip in the last issue of Weird Science.

In his mid-twenties, Wood was having the time of his life. He was earning an eye-watering amount of money. His work jags lasted for days until he collapsed at his drawing board. His marathon art sessions were fuelled with alcohol. But he was young and his body could take the extraordinary punishment.

Even when EC crashed and burned in 1955, after the the Comics Code killed the horror books, and Bill Gaines' attempts to do the sanitised New Direction books (including Aces High, Extra, M.D. and Valor) failed, there was still MAD. Gaines turned his comedy comic into a 25c magazine, raised the page rates even higher than they were on the EC colour comics, and for the next ten years, Wood cruised straight on as MAD's star artist, winning "Best Comic Book Artist" two years in a row at the 1957 and 1958 National Cartoonists Society Awards. But even that wasn't enough ...

For about 12 glorious months, Wally Wood inked Dave Wood and Jack Kirby's Sky Masters newspaper strip, selected for the job - no doubt - because of his stints on the Weird Science/Fantasy comics for EC and of course "The Spirit on the Moon" for Will Eisner.

In 1958, Jack Kirby asked Wood to join a space-oriented newspaper strip project as inker. The strip had begun life as "Space Busters" devised by Kirby and scripter Dave Wood (no relation), but they'd been unable to find a home for the strip. Early in 1958, DC editor Jack Schiff was approached by an agent, Harry Elmlark, who was looking for a syndicated space strip for the newspapers. Kirby and Dave Wood showed Schiff Space Busters, but he wasn't that impressed. But he did encourage Kirby and Wood to take another swing at it, very likely offering some ideas of his own. The project morphed into Sky Masters of the Space Force and that was when Kirby asked Wally Wood to ink the strip.

In the late 1950's, Wally Wood was still MAD's busiest artist, and was creating gorgeous illustrations for science fiction market-leader Galaxy. It was probably the very pinnacle of his career. But trouble was just around the corner ...

By this time, Wally Wood was working almost exclusively for MAD, but was also providing high quality illustrations for men's magazines and science fiction magazines like Galaxy. It all went well for a while, but then Kirby had a falling out with Schiff over payments and the whole thing turned legal. So Wally Wood left them to their squabbles - and dumped Challengers of the Unknown, which he'd also been inking over Kirby - and once again concentrated on his MAD work and his science fiction illustrations. But as the 1950s drew to a close Wood was feeling restless and a bit put-upon. He was suffering from chronic headaches and was drinking ever-more heavily to dull the pain. This, coupled with the crash of Sky Masters, led to him becoming tetchy and in 1964, as his art was beginning to suffer, MAD rejected one of his strips, Wood's first rejection since around 1950. Making matters even worse, the editor who rejected his art was Al Feldstein, the same guy who'd written "My World" ten years earlier. Feeling crushed, Wood phoned the editorial offices and quit MAD.

Artist Russ Jones, who'd been assisting Wood at that time recalled in a later interview, "MAD sent Woody a rejection slip on a comic strip lampoon, and it about killed him. Yes, the job was covered in liquid paper, but it was great compared to what Bob Clarke produced. I think the guys at MAD were just kidding around, but it backfired! I stood rooted when Wally called Bill Gaines and quit. Poor Bill ... he called many times to try and talk Woody back ... but no go. Poor Wally ... he threw out his biggest client. The whole affair was sad. No winners."

For Monster World 1, Wood wrote and drew an adaptation of the 1932 Universal horror, The Mummy. The next issue of the magazine continued the Mummy adaptations, but Wood was conspicuously absent, turning the work over to assistant Russ Jones and former EC stablemate, Joe Orlando.

With all his bridges burnt, Wood had nowhere else to go, so he returned to four-colour comics, first working for the lowest payers in the field, Charlton, on war books like D-Day 2 and War and Attack 1 (both Fall 1964), then a quick eight-pager for Warren's Monster World 1 (Nov 1964) - an adaptation of the Universal horror movie The Mummy, with assistant Russ Jones. It was at this low ebb that Wood - probably on Joe Orlando's advice - turned to Stan Lee for work and was assigned Daredevil. And that's why Stan was trumpeting the arrival of Wood on Daredevil as though it were the Second Coming ...

THE ARTIST WITHOUT FEAR

With his second job on Daredevil - issue 6 (Feb 1965) - Wood seemed to have a better grasp of what Stan Lee was looking for, but for my money, the pacing was still off. Too many pages in the story are covered in speech balloons, making me think Wood hadn't devoted enough space to the character exposition that Stan liked to include in his books. On the other hand, the action sequences were very well thought-out. Wood had wisely cut back from the amount of detail he would have included in his EC science fiction strips, rendering his fight scenes in a clean, spare style that far better suited the material.

Wood's work on Daredevil 6 was a slight improvement over the previous issue, but the civilian scenes were still way too wordy and the fight sequences, while well crafted lacked variety.

But something wasn't quite right. It was as though Wood didn't get the Marvel way ... Was he just phoning the work in? Probably not, though long-time collaborator Dan Adkins said of that period, "[Wood] got the highest rate in the industry. $200 per page at MAD magazine where he was the most popular artist. When he quit MAD magazine and went over to Marvel Comics, Marvel's starting rates at the time were $20 per page to pencil and $15 per page to ink. Out of respect to Wally, they paid him $45 per page to pencil and ink, but not the bonus money he was looking for."

When viewed as single units the Daredevil pages looked, well, same-y. Where Kirby or Ditko would mix long-shots and close ups depending on the needs of the scene and the emotion to be conveyed by each panel, Wood framed everything at the same distance.

Some time later in his career, I wasn't able to determine when, Wally Wood created the legendary 22 Comic Panels That Always Work ... but I wasn't seeing any evidence of that thinking in Wood's Daredevil stories.

The story itself united two b-class villains - The Ox from Amazing Spider-Man 10 & 14 (Mar & Jul 1964), and The Eel, last seen battling The Human Torch in Strange Tales 117 (Feb 1964) - with a new villain, Mr Fear, whose "fear gas" can turn anyone into a nervous wreck. It's an interesting idea, pitting The Man Without Fear against Fear itself ... but what should have been a definitive clash of opposites ends up being a fairly pedestrian filler issue. Fortunately, the title would move up a gear with the next issue.

Daredevil 7 (Apr 1965) was where Wally Wood took hold of the character and began to make Daredevil his own. First, he redesigned DD's costume, using the devil part of the character's name to inspire a more streamlined approach, and giving the hero a satanic look.

Daredevil 7 introduced a new costume for DD and demonstrated that the hero's will was almost as powerful as The Sub-Mariner's sea-born super-strength.

Next, Wood's story breakdowns and page design seemed much more confident. Yes, he was still using sequences of mid-distance shots for most of the fight scenes, but there was a much more concerted effort to mix up the long-shots, close-ups and splash panels.

The plot has Sub-Mariner return to the Surface World to bring a civil lawsuit against the air-breathers for depriving his people of the right to live on land. And he decides that Nelson & Murdock are the lawyers for him. But the attorneys tell him that there's no one to sue, as no individual, company or nation represents the entire human race. So Namor decides that causing a bit of mayhem and getting arrested will get him his day in court. This part of it sounds very much like a Lee plot device.

No sooner has The Sub-Mariner surrendered himself to the police and is arraigned for his crimes than word reaches him that the craven Warlord Krang has instigated a rebellion against Namor in their native Atlantis. The Sub-Mariner decides the needs of his realm are more pressing than his legal case against the humans and leaves the jail as though the bars were so much cardboard. The final battle, in which a hopelessly out-matched Daredevil fights Namor until he passes out, pretty much defined the hero's character for the next couple of decades.

But already, Wood was feeling he was being taken advantage of. The Marvel Method used by Stan, which worked pretty well for his other artists at this time, was rankling Wally Wood. He felt that he was doing at least half Stan's job without getting the credit or the payment that he deserved. Later, in an angry editorial in his self-published Woodwork Gazette, Wood described an editor he called Stanley, who "came up with two surefire ideas... the first one was 'Why not let the artists WRITE the stories as well as draw them?'... And the second was... ALWAYS SIGN YOUR NAME ON TOP... BIG."

Here's something interesting ... Wood's original layout for Daredevil 7 page 4. You can see that Stan has asked for changes and the finished art is slightly different from the first pencil rough.

Nonetheless, Wood sucked it up and carried on as, at this point in his career, he didn't have that many options open to him. 

Daredevil 8 (Jun 1965) introduced a new villain who, though a little bonkers, I always quite liked ... The Stilt-Man. It was also the second cover in a row to feature a newspaper headline as a way of explaining what was going on. Maybe Wood wanted that to be a thing, but it didn't pan out, or perhaps it was just coincidence.

Daredevil 8 gave us a cut-away plan of Daredevil's billy club. Later in the issue, it's also revealed that Daredevil's cowl contains sophisticated radio equipment to monitor police wavebands. Later in his career, Daredevil's powers would let him do that without the need for electronics. During the battle, Wood gives us some nice images of Stilt-Man towering above the city skyline.

The story has Matt Murdock engaged by a scientist who says his invention has been stolen by his employer. But as Murdock investigates the claims further, it becomes apparent that whoever has the invention is also The Stilt-Man. No prizes for guessing who the real baddie is ...

At the same time, Stan (I'm sure it was Stan) is planting seeds, suggesting that it might be possible to restore Matt's vision. In fact, Karen Page is shown suggesting that Matt consults an eminent Boston eye specialist, Dr Van Eyck. But Matt is reluctant, fearing it may compromise his powers, and Karen gets angry with him and storms out. And this sets up the situation for the next issue ...

Daredevil 9 drafted in Giant-Man artist Bob Powell to help Wally Wood by doing finished pencils over Wood's layouts. I'm not sure how that helped Wood, given that he was still (to his mind) co-writing the comic without credit or payment. The tale itself is fun, pitting Daredevil against knights in armour, a common Wood trope.

Some changes were in effect with Daredevil 9 (Aug 1965). Even though Wood was a proven speed-demon, he's assisted on this issue by Bob Powell, with whom he'd worked on the notorious Mars Attacks gum-card series. Powell had also stepped in when Joe Orlando found himself unable to work with Stan Lee on the Giant-Man strip a few months earlier.

The plot contrives to send Matt Murdock, at Karen Page's instigation, to a European dictatorship, run by an old college acquaintance of Murdock's Klaus Kruger, the Duke of Lichtenbad, whence eye specialist Dr Van Eyck has emigrated. Once there, Daredevil is caught up in a peasants' revolt and battles Kruger's palace guards, who are all togged up in medieval armour. It's quite a fun issue, and I was always a sucker for knights in armour ...

Issue 10 brought more changes in the creative duties. With Wood increasingly disgruntled with Stan Lee's way of working, Stan credited Wood with writing as well as drawing the story, with Bob Powell providing layouts. But the way Stan did it only served to enrage Wood further.

It seems likely that Wood was agitating behind the scenes to be given proper credit as co-writer on the Daredevil comic. And with this issue he gets his wish. Continuing his fondness for cutaways, this time round Wood gives us a diagram of The Organizer's headquarters.

The intro of the splash page of the issue says, "Wally Wood has always wanted to try his hand at writing a story as well as drawing it, and Big-Hearted Stan (who wanted a rest anyway) said okay. So what follows next is anybody's guess. You may like it or not, but, you can be sure of this ... it's gonna be different!" It's not the most gracious announcement I've ever seen, but there's another caption box at the end of the story that might give further insight into Stan's tone.

Apparently, after campaigning to be credited with writing Daredevil, Wood declined to script the second half of the story, leaving Stan to sort out the plot threads as best he could. "Now that Wally got writing out his system," says Stan's closing caption, "he left it to poor Stan to finish next issue. Can he do it? That's the real mystery! But while you're waiting, see if you can find the clue we planted showing who the Organiser is! It'll all come out in the wash next issue when Stan wraps it up. See you then!" So I can begin to see why there might be some growing acrimony between Stan and Wally. It's likely this is the point where Wood had told Stan that he was quitting

All that aside, Daredevil 10's not half bad ... there are a few stylistic differences, but broadly Wood does a pretty good job of making the characters all sound like themselves. And with Bob Powell doing the layouts, there's much more variety in the framing of each panel. 

The plot has a mysterious character, The Organizer, recruiting a quartet of crooks and giving them animal costumes and powers to carry out a series of crimes. They are Cat-Man, Frog-Man, Bird-Man and Ape-Man. Given Stan's penchant for animal-themed villains, I suspect he may have had something to do with the casting. Curiously, though there is an Ape-Man featured as one of The Owl's henchmen in Daredevil 3, Ape Horgan, this one appears to be a different person, Monk Keefer. Even more confusingly, the Cat-Man character in this tale has the civilian name of Townshend Horgan. Was he intended to be a relative of the first Ape-Man? Or did Wood (and Stan) just get a bit muddled with their characters' names? It's the sort of continuity glitch that Roy Thomas would obsess about fixing in Marvel's later years.

There's further dissension in the letters column. One reader, Larry Brown, complains that Daredevil is turning into Gadget Man and that "all these gadgets detract from the credibility." In the response, Stan says, "Want us to let you in on an inside squabble, Larry? Sturdy Stan agrees with you - he is also opposed to so much gadgetry. But Winsome Wally really digs those hoked up appurtenances, and - being Wally's the guy who has to draw them, Stan went along with him. But we'll see how the future mail goes." Thus were the battle lines drawn. There probably wasn't any walking back from this point.

We probably shouldn't be that surprised to see Stan taking potshots on the Daredevil letters page. He must have been pretty ticked off with Wally Wood. And while it's not like Stan to be anything other than gentlemanly, he couldn't have been best pleased at Wood's attitude, considering Stan likely saw himself as trying to help out an artist he admired who was going through a bad patch. And given the circumstances, Wood's tetchiness is not that surprising either, as from Wood's point of view, Stan was getting him to co-write the comic - perhaps more than co-write - take all the credit and pay him just $45 a page. After all, at MAD they gave him full scripts and paid him $200 a page.

Daredevil 11 was plotted and scripted by Stan, pencilled by Bob Powell and inked by Wood. In the circumstances, the most surprising thing is that Wood stuck around long enough to ink the story at all. In the event it's not a bad issue, and benefits from some of Powell's characteristic touches, like the cinematic four panels across the top of page 17 (above right).

Daredevil 11 (Dec 1965) left Stan trying to finish a story begun by Wally Wood. He actually does a pretty fair job, though at times there looks to be a bit to much text on the page. The pacing of the hectic story is much helped by Bob Powell's layouts and pencilling, as he is more adept at bringing variety to the panel framing than Wood had been. 

The issue closes with Matt announcing he's taking a leave of absence from Nelson & Murdock and Stan announcing that next issue there'll be new villains and a new artist, though he gives no hint as to who either might be.

Meanwhile, though Wood had inked this issue of Daredevil, he had already planned his escape route. A former Archie Comics editor, Harry Shorten, had approached Wood during 1965, trying to recruit him for a new venture, Tower Comics. Tower Publications had been a publisher of erotic and science fiction paperbacks from 1958, established by one of the co-founders of Archie Comics, Louis Silberkleit, and now, seeing the success of Marvel, wanted to get into the comics business. Wood called Shorten's offer "a dream set-up. I created all the characters, wrote most of the stories, and drew most of the covers. I did as much of the art as I could... But it was fun."

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents 1 (Nov 1965) was the first of the Tower Comics line. Much of the interior art was by Wood, and it betrayed the same limitations I saw in his Daredevil work, with nearly every panel being framed as a mid-shot. Most of the scripting in this issue was by Len Brown, though Wood co-scripted the Dynamo story in the back of the book.

Wood hired old colleagues from his EC days - Al Williamson and Reed Crandell - to help out with the art, and commissioned his own wife Tatjana Wood to colour the covers. He created the characters T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, NoMan, Menthor and Dynamo. Pretty soon, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, George Tuska and Mike Sekowsky joined. Scripts were by Len Brown (who had worked with Wood on Mars Attacks and had helped conceive the THUNDER Agents), Larry Ivie and Wood himself. And the comics were mostly 25c, 64-page giants.

The only problem was ... the stories were just dull.

Tower Comics lasted from 1966 to 1969, when distribution problems cause Tower Publications to fold the line.

NOW WHAT?

To me it seems quite apparent that Stan was angry and disappointed with Wood's behaviour. It was highly unusual for him to contradict or criticise any of his team in print, but he did - however mildly - with Wood. You can see that, for Stan, the prospect of Wood joining the Bullpen was a big event. Though as my esteemed fellow Marvel blogger Nick Caputo mentioned in the comments last time, Stan did namecheck artists on Marvel covers before this, I think we can agree that line on the Daredevil 5 cover, "under the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood", goes a bit beyond the customary Lee hyperbole.

Add to this that many have said that Stan would often give work to those who needed it, whether Stan (or Marvel) needed it. There's a story that one day during the 1950s, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman found a stack of "inventory" stories that Stan had commissioned to help out freelancers financially, but hadn't published. Goodman got angry and told Stan he had to stop commissioning until the backlog was used up. In the early Sixties, Stan had given Joe Siegel, creator of Superman, work scripting Human Torch stories for Strange Tales, but that hadn't worked out so well. By 1968, it was getting hard for Siegel to find work, so Stan hired him as a proofreader in the Bullpen.

What would the Sub-Mariner solo strip in Tales to Astonish have looked like if Wally Wood had drawn it instead of Gene Colan? And why wasn't Everett asked to draw Sub-Mariner? After all, he created it. Or had he blotted his copybook (at least temporarily) with his deadline issues on Daredevil 1?

Stan probably saw Wood as being in a similar situation in the late summer of 1964, right after Wood had recklessly quit MAD magazine. So he gave the guy a job. This wasn't just charity. Stan knew a legendary artist when he saw one. And not only did he want Wood drawing Daredevil, but legend has it that he was going to give Marvel's new Sub-Mariner strip to Wood as well. In his Alter-Ego magazine, Roy Thomas said that, “Wally was slated to go from Daredevil onto the then-up-coming Sub-Mariner solo series in Tales to Astonish [#70, Aug. 1965].”

So it must have stung that Wood was so disgruntled with Lee and Marvel from the get-go, and by the time Wood quit, I'm fairly sure Stan wasn't that sorry to see him leave.

However, in the end, it didn't work out so bad for Stan and Marvel. The very next issue of Daredevil featured the art of John Romita - albeit over Kirby layouts - and that association worked out pretty well over the years.

Next: The Fab Four