Jim Shooter's Blog, page 16

It's So Hard to Get Good Help These Days

JayJay here. Oops... I left a whole bunch at the end of the Dazzler story off when I first posted it. So if you read the Debut of the Dazzler before... please read the end. Here it is and it's also been added to the original post. Sorry!
- Continued from below the People magazine cover...



Alice was CUT OUT of this picture!  She was walking beside Bo!

Bo Derek was fresh from the success of 10, with Dudley Moore.  She was the hottest star in Hollywood, top of the "A" list of "bankable" stars.  Bankable means that the mere attachment of such a star guarantees studio financing.

Suddenly there was a BIDDING WAR among the studios for the project!

Now, the bad news, part 1:  Marvel commissioned a screenplay by Leslie Stevens. 

Why not me?  I was the horse who got us there.  But, suddenly, because it was Hollywood, for real and big time, I was "just a comic book writer."  They decided they needed a screenwriter.

Stevens ignored what I had written completely and wrote a piece of crap that defies description.  In those days, despite the reasonable success of the first Superman movie, comics were still thought of as silly and campy, so that's what Stevens went for.  It was moronic. 

Stevens also discarded the light powers and gave Dazzler the power to make people tell the truth.  Why the name, then?  Oh, well.

Bad news part 2:  At the height of the bidding war, Bo Derek decreed that her husband, John HAD to be the director.  Famous for behind-schedule, over-budget debacles, John Derek had to direct or no Bo.

Every bidder withdrew.

That ended Bo's involvement.  

Later, Marvel tried to shop the Leslie Stevens script around with Daryl Hannah attached.  No takers.

P.S.  Later, noting the strengthening of the still-fledgling Direct Market, I proposed to Galton that we publish a Direct Market exclusive issue.  Around that time X-Men and other top performers were selling around 30,000 copies in the Direct Market, in addition to their newsstand sales. 

The Sales Department resisted, fearing angering the I.D. Wholesalers (the newsstand distributors).  The compromise was that we would use a lesser known character, rather than a top seller, which the newsstand people might pay more attention to, and might be upset by. 

I picked Dazzler.  I figured that would provide a good test.

Dazzler #1 was the first all-Direct comic book (at least from a major publisher).  It sold 428,000 copies.

The Secret Parts of the Origin of G.I. JOE

(NOTE:  "Righting the Ship" will start tomorrow.  Here, now, by popular demand is some secret and not so secret intelligence on the origin of G.I. JOE.)


Marvel's involvement with G.I. JOE started in a men's room.

Marvel President Jim Galton and Hasbro CEO Stephen Hassenfeld met at a charity fundraiser in the men's room, or so Galton told me.  

They had a conversation that presumably continued beyond their coincidental visit to the comfort station.  Galton talked about Marvel.  Hassenfeld talked about Hasbro.  And, in particular, Hassenfeld mentioned that Hasbro was planning to reactivate the G.I. JOE trademark.  And that they were having difficulty coming up with the underlying conceit.  Who is this guy, what does he do and why does he do it? 

Galton pitched Marvel's creative services.  Raved to Hassenfeld about the creative prowess of my troops and me.  And sold him on the idea of letting Marvel take a crack at developing a concept for G.I. JOE.

This would have been in 1981.

Meanwhile….

Editor Larry Hama had been working on a reactivation of Nick Fury.  He had a lot of ideas.  Fury as the head of a top secret, elite strike force, a headquarters in sub-basements below the Chaplain's quarters.  I think.  Anyway, he had a lot of stuff going.  At some point, he'd told me what he was working on.  But I don't think it was ready to go yet, and we hadn't yet committed to it—that is, I hadn't circulated a new project memo and scheduled the thing. 

A few days after his fateful meeting with Hassenfeld, Galton asked me to accompany him to a meeting with Hasbro.

It was downtown somewhere.  Not at Hasbro's toy district office.  Way downtown.  I don't remember exactly.  Their lawyers' offices?  I don't know.

Anyway, there were a few people from Hasbro present, boys toys execs.  Bob Prupis was there I think.  Could be wrong.  I don't think anyone from Giffin-Bacal was there.  Could be wrong.  They were all eager to meet the Editor in Chief that Galton had apparently highly touted.

They showed me what they had.  A logo: "G.I. JOE, a Real American Hero."  That was about it.   They didn't want to revive the big doll.  Yes, I know it was verboten to use the word "doll," and I didn't in front of them.  They were thinking about three and three quarters inch figures, like the Star Wars figures, but they hadn't even settled on that yet.  And they wanted a line of figures, not just one.  Someone said, "So, besides G.I. JOE, do we have G.I. George, G.I. Fred…? 

I said how about if "G.I. JOE" is the code name for the unit?  Call in G.I. JOE?"  They liked that.  I also said it should be an anti-terrorist team.  Not a "war" toy.  That was obvious to everyone, I guess. 

They were sold.  They wanted us to proceed and develop a concept.  Everybody shook hands and Galton and I took a cab back uptown.

Later, Marvel's licensing and business affairs people worked out the deal.  More on that later.

Back at the Marvel, I went straight to Larry's office.  He, with his military background, was the obvious choice to do the heavy lifting.  I told him what happened.  He thought, and I agreed, that much of what he'd already cooked up for Nick Fury could be adapted to the project.

G.I. JOE seemed important enough that I wanted to involve Archie, who by my reckoning was our best.  I assigned Tom DeFalco as editor of the book-to-be.  The four of us represented Marvel creative.

However….

It was really all Larry from that point.  The rest of us maybe kibitzed a little, but all significant creation, all the real work was done by Larry.  There were only two contributions, I believe, that were not Larry's, one minor and one notable. 

The minor one was mine.  Larry wrote the outline that was the basis for the series and, essentially, the plot for the first issue.  He wrote it like a regular Marvel plot, straightforwardly, just the facts.  I knew it had to be a pitch piece as well as a plot, so I rewrote it into a more dramatic presentation.  I changed not an iota of substance—I simply amped up the sturm und drang.  Hasbro loved it.

The notable contribution was Archie's.  He came up with the first bad guys, the Cobra Command and the Cobra Commander. 

We had a meeting or two, I think, with Hasbro people in New York.  We definitely flew up to Pawtucket further along in the development to see their prototypes and discuss the launch plan.  Possibly Mike Hobson was with us on that trip.

They explained the rollout.  They didn't plan to have any villains in the launch.  We protested.  "Who are they going to fight?  They need bad guys!"  Archie pitched his bad guy concept.  The Hasbro people resisted on the grounds that villain action figures "don't sell."  We persisted.  Finally, they caved in and included one Cobra figure.

Later, by the way, villains became 40% of their volume.

At some point along the way, we asked for female characters to be included in the line.  We had women in the comics, and it seemed odd that there were none (or very few) among the toys.  "Female action figures don't sell," we were told.  I suggested that they include female figures with the vehicles. That worked.  I probably wasn't the first one to suggest that.

Every year, the Hasbro boys toys team would come to Marvel.  On our conference room table, they'd spread out a bunch of prototypes and design drawings.  Sometimes they'd show us naked gadgetry—the mechanical underpinnings of something that would hop, spin, flip, crawl or whatever—without a clear notion of what it might be used for.  Larry would create an appropriate vehicle or weapon to use the technology, usually on the spot.  Hasbro would explain some new marketing tack or characters it intended to introduce and Larry would find a way to make it work.

It got to the point that I stopped going to the meetings.  Larry had it all under control.

Back to Marvel's deal with Hasbro.  Per the deal, Marvel did character and story creation.  Marvel published the comics.  Marvel Productions created the animation.  For the first year, Marvel handled the licensing of the property for ancillaries.  We did a pathetic job at that, so after the first year, Hasbro took the licensing away from us and did it themselves.  They hired away one of our licensing people, however, a woman named Leslie, whose last name I forget.  Sorry.

As part of the deal, Hasbro ran TV commercials ostensibly promoting the comic books, but not really.  Merely collaterally, in fact. 

Toy commercials were heavily regulated at the time (probably more so today).  Use of animation was severely restricted.  Actual children playing with actual toys for a certain percentage of the spot was required.  Etc.  However, there were no regulations whatsoever governing the advertising of comic books.  By making "comic book ads" that were, in fact, thinly disguised ads for the toys, Hasbro circumvented regulation.  And those were some exciting ads—the best toy ads on TV.

All in all, it was a mutually beneficial deal, at least for the comics.

G.I. JOE quickly became a top tier title and our number one subscription title.
Marvel Productions, however, overspent on production, and since MP was a W4H supplier it had no share of the back end.  They lost money.  A lot of money.

Bottom line, the comics were a big success, thanks almost entirely to Larry.  The toys were a big success, thanks in large measure to Larry.  The animation was, by most accounts, a critical success but a financial disaster.

Larry surely remembers a lot of details that I don't, but I bet there are a couple of things in this post even he didn't know.

Roy Thomas Saved Marvel

As previously mentioned, Marvel was a mess throughout the mid-1970's and during my two years as "associate editor," from the beginning of 1976 through the end of 1977.  Almost every book was late.  There were unscheduled reprints and fill-ins, and we still just plain missed issues here and there.  Many books, despite my best efforts to shore up the bottom were unreadable.  Not merely bad.  Unreadable.  Almost all were less than they ought to be. 

There were a few exceptions.  Roy's color Conan and B&W Savage Sword.  Master of Kung Fu by Moench and Gulacy.  Wolfman's Tomb of Dracula, with Gene Colan and Tom Palmer art.  Those were good books.  Len's Fantastic Four, I think, was enjoyable, too.  A couple of others, maybe. 

A few books had parts that were great and things not so great about them that crippled them. 

We can debate the above at length….

However, what can't be debated is that sales were bad and falling.  It was almost all newsstand sales then, by the way.  This was before the Direct Market was a significant factor.  The comics overall were breakeven at best.  Upstairs, the cheesy non-comics magazine department was losing millions.  It seemed like the company as a whole was in a death spiral.

Then Roy proposed that we license some upcoming science fiction movie called Star Wars and publish an adaptation.

Jeers and derision ensued—um, not within Roy's earshot of course.  But he was in California. 

The Prevailing Wisdom at the time said "science fiction doesn't sell."  Adapting movie with the hokey title "Star Wars" seemed like folly to most.

By the way, Prevailing Wisdom also decreed:

"Westerns don't sell"
"Romance doesn't sell"
"Fantasy doesn't sell"
"Female characters don't sell"

And more.  You get the drift.

What sold, said the Prevailing Wisdom, were male super heroes and male dominated groups, especially the marquee stars like Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four.  Not so much the "third-string" characters like Daredevil.  And there had to be lots of action against marquee super villains interlaced with some soap opera.  That was about it.  That's what the "kids in Fudge, Nebraska" wanted.  Period.

The Great Proponents of Prevailing Wisdom were Marv and Len. 

As I said in an earlier post, a bunch of us hung out a lot after work, including them, a few other staffers, freelancers and me, and we talked shop a lot.  Hung out doing what?  Well, there were after work dinners, poker games, visits to bookstores….  Marv and Len were physically unable to pass any bookstore that wandered into their path.  Various geeky activities—for instance, Marv had the entire Prisoner TV series on film and hosted an all-night Prisoner marathon at his place one Friday night.  That sort of thing.

Anyway, when the Prevailing Wisdom reared its head, as in Len or Marv saying "Westerns don't sell" or whatever, I usually said, "Show me a good one."

That generally sparked jeers, derision and some debate.

One of the counters to my challenge was—and I am not making this up.  I cannot write fiction well enough to make this up—"Good doesn't sell."

Generally, proof was cited.  "Warlock is good, but it doesn't sell, nothing by McGregor or Gerber sells…."  Etc. 

My counter was that, while each of those examples had good, even excellent things about them, they also had negatives.  Even Warlock, which was sometimes a daunting read.  Sorry Jim.  It was colored murkily, too dense—too many words, too many panels—convoluted at times AND usually well off the Marvel mainstream.  I would have loved to have seen Warlock in a premium format with room to rock and a little more accessible.  No, I don't mean "simplified," "dumbed down," homogenized or compromised in any way.  I mean accessible.  Easier to get into, easier to hop aboard the ride.  And, no, I'm not suggesting "more Marvel mainstream."  Not necessary.

Anyway….

There was a lot of opposition to Star Wars.  Even Stan wasn't keen on the idea.

Even I wasn't.  I had no prejudice against science fiction, but wasting time on an adaptation of a movie with a dumb title described as an "outer space western?"

I was told—don't know for sure—that George Lucas himself came to Marvel's offices to meet with Stan and help convince him that we should license Star Wars.  I was told that Stan kept him waiting for 45 minutes in the reception room.  Apocryphal?  Maybe.  Roy would know.  But if so, it still reflects the mood at the time.

(ASIDE:  Lucas, by the way, again, as I am told, but I'm pretty sure this is true, was a partner in Supersnipe Comic Book Emporium, a comics shop on the Upper East Side.  A clue to his persistent interest in comics and a comics adaptation.)

I don't know how Roy got it done.  I was just the associate editor, and not privy to much of the wrangling that went on.  But, Roy got the deal done and we published Star Wars.

The first two issues of our six (?) issue adaptation came out in advance of the movie.  Driven by the advance marketing for the movie, sales were very good.  Then about the time the third issue shipped, the movie was released.  Sales made the jump to hyperspace.

Star Wars the movie stayed in theaters forever, it seemed.  Not since the Beatles had I seen a cultural phenomenon of such power.  The comics sold and sold and sold.  We reprinted the adaptation in every possible format.  They all sold and sold and sold.

In the most conservative terms, it is inarguable that the success of the Star Wars comics was a significant factor in Marvel's survival through a couple of very difficult years, 1977 and 1978.  In my mind, the truth is stated in the title of this piece. 

NEXT:  Righting the Ship