The Marvel Bullpen

The Marvel Bullpen: 60s and 70s by Edward Carey Marvel revolutionized comics in the 60s under the stewardship of Editor-in-Chief Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, but they were not alone, and some of the members of the old Marvel Bullpen attended a panel at the Big Apple Comic Con earlier this month. Comics historian Peter Sanderson moderated a panel that featured writer/editor Roy Thomas, and artists John Romita Sr., Joe Sinnott and Rich Buckler. They had tales to tell of the way things used to be at the intimate Marvel offices, as compared to the more business-like setting of today’s Marvel. By the time Sanderson arrived in the late 70s/early 80s, he said, “it was very corporate, with cubicles all over the place, and it began to look like an ad agency.” He then prompted the panelists to paint a picture of the Marvel Bullpen in the 60s.

Fantastic Four #45; art by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott

When Roy Thomas arrived at Marvel in the summer of 1965, he came fresh from DC Comics where everybody had their own cubicle or office, and the Marvel offices consisted of Stan Lee, his secretary Flo Steinberg, Marie Severin (who was not drawing comics yet), and a woman who did commercial comics. Everyone else worked freelance and sent in their work, or would occasionally drop by, including Kirby.

“Obviously, Joe Sinnott came before, but he never came to the office . . . John [Romita Sr.] came back about two weeks after I got there and I still remember the look on John’s face when I was introduced to him. I said, ‘Oh, you’re the guy who did all those great Captain America stories back in the fifties.’ He couldn’t believe I remembered those, because not too many people had remembered those stories,” said Thomas. Artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko would pop in every now and then, and he described Joe Sinnott as “this wonderful disembodied guy, who was just starting to draw Fantastic Four, and he was just the perfect inker of Jack Kirby.” John Romita wanted to ink upon returning to Marvel shortly after Thomas got there, intending to give up penciling after 15 years as a freelancer, but Stan Lee conned him back into it. Stan asked him to fill-in on Daredevil and Romita thought it would be for one issue.

“Wally Wood had left and they were having trouble replacing him. I thought he was talking about a fill-in issue, so I said okay, and 50 years later I’m still doing stuff that Stan can con me into,” said Romita. When he found out about what is now known as the Marvel method, where the artist plots an issue without a script, he said he almost had a heart attack. After doing romance comics at DC for eight years, he was not used to plotting superhero comics, and when Stan saw the first three pages, he called in Jack Kirby to help. Kirby drew a rough ten-page layout, with no faces, just labeling characters DD (for Daredevil) and MM (Matt Murdock), and though it was “strictly a pacing layout,” Romita said, “it was like a roadmap on how to do comics.” Kirby did another rough layout for the following issue, he said, “just in case I didn’t catch the drift of the first one.” “Issues 12 and 13 of Daredevil were done over Kirby’s quick panel layouts. He did one big panel, he must’ve been having fun, he finished it up almost, a huge set of rolling logs that these cavemen were riding down this raging river and it almost knocked my socks off. I had so much fun inking that, I can’t tell you. But, after those two stories, I was completely embedded in penciling again,” said Romita. After fifteen years of westerns, science-fiction, romance, and “what people call horror today,” Romita progressed to superheroes and much more.

Daredevil #12; art by Kirby and Romita

“In the first story I did with Stan in the 50s, [there was] one panel with somebody holding up a head and blood dripping from the neck, and I said, ‘what did I get into with this one?’” said Romita. The Marvel offices were so small, he said, Lee had to commandeer an office for him to work in. He described the business of comics as being “pretty hairy” with one good year followed by two bad ones and you didn’t know if you had a job the next week. Martin Goodman, publisher of Marvel, “was the kinda guy that, when things were good, he would tolerate you and when things were bad, he would cut you. He was a class act. And Stan Lee was our reluctant buffer. He tried to protect us.” “Stan Lee being an exuberant and exhausting guy to work with . . . I was foolish enough to do plots with Stan verbally. I never recorded them and I never made notes, and then go home and couldn’t remember which story we had agreed on. Those early years were very hairy and very exciting . . . I got very little sleep and very little money at the time,” said Romita.

Thomas wanted to hear what Joe Sinnott thought of the Marvel offices, having worked from home, and said Sinnott was not convinced Marvel would last. Sinnott remembered a time in the early 60s in a building on Park Avenue when the elevator opened out on Lee’s office and he didn’t have a secretary. Marvel had gone “belly up” in ’58, called Atlas Comics at the time. Sinnott would go down to the office on Park to drop off his latest story (5-6 page short stories in those days, penciled and inked) and told his wife he would meet her at 11 o’clock. Lee would ask him to do some cover corrections, because they were understaffed at the time, with no bullpen. Before he knew it, Lee would hand him another and another, and he wouldn’t end up meeting his wife until about 3 or 4 o’clock. “Roy, that’s when I said I’m gonna mail in my work from now on. So, I didn’t go down for, would you believe, about 25 years,” said Sinnott. The next time he did see Lee was at a Marvel convention panel in 1975, which included John Buscema and John Romita Sr. Even though they spoke on the phone every week, Sinnott and Lee had not seen each other in almost 20 years. When Sinnott arrived late, Lee said, “it’s great to see you, Jack Keller, how’ve you been?” Keller was an artist who had done mostly westerns for Lee back in the 50s and 60s. As Sinnott remembers: Lee asked him, “how come you don’t come back to work with us?” Sinnott replied, “I would, if you paid decent rates,” which provoked raucous laughter from the audience. Sinnott thought Lee was pulling his leg the whole time, but after Lee kept glancing down the table at him, John Silver Surfer #1; art by John Romita told Lee who he was. Lee apologized, and then Buscema and Joe Sinnott proceeded to tell the story to everyone at the convention’s luncheon. Sinnott told this same story at the New York Comic Con back in April. He also spoke fondly of Jack Kirby, who he had not seen in all those years, even though Sinnott inked over Kirby’s pencils for over 100 issues of Fantastic Four. Kirby never once called or commented on Sinnott’s work. After Kirby had moved to California, he once called up Sinnott to ink a story called “Fighting American.” When Sinnott finished the piece, Kirby asked ‘how much do I owe you for it.’ The only thing Sinnott would accept for payment was a drawing for his son Mark, who was 11 years old at the time.

“Jack did a beautiful pencil drawing of the Thing in a cowboy outfit, he called The Cisco Thing. I thought it was such a great piece of art, I inked and colored it, and it’s one of Mark’s treasures to this day,” said Sinnott. The panel was asked if they ever had any projects they wanted to do that never got off the ground, and why it didn’t happen. Romita mentioned the Peter and Mary Jane wedding issue from Amazing Spiderman and not doing more Daredevil. After doing a few early issues of Daredevil, Lee interrupted him with a script done by Ditko on Spiderman, and the rest is history. “Between the wedding issue and not doing Daredevil for the next 20 years, I can’t complain, because Spiderman has done me pretty well; it’s sort of a mild frustration,” said Romita. Doc Savage and Iron Fist were about the only things Thomas said he would have liked to work on more, “when he was forced to quit one project for another,” and only working on part of the first issue of War of the Worlds. He “never wanted to get on anything or off anything” and liked all the characters he worked on. “Same thing. I figured everything I got was temporary. It was more about working with people you wanted to work with and there was a lot of that at Marvel. I came up through the fan ranks and I had all these characters in my mind . . . I wanted to draw all of them, so skipping around never bothered me,” said Buckler. Sinnott said the five or six issues of Captain America he did with Gene Colan, which he considered some of the best work of either their careers. They were split up for no reason. John Severin was “probably one of the only Captain America #120; art by people at Marvel that I never worked with” and he Gene Colan and Joe Sinnott wished he could have. Sinnott inked the first three issues of The Silver Surfer solo series over John Buscema’s pencils and said Buscema “was doing beautiful, full pencils.” “I really felt that John thought my inking was a little too slick for his style. I think he wanted his brother to ink the Surfer, which he did for a number of issues . . . We did some great Thor’s together. The best thing I did with John was those Thor stories,” said Sinnott. He spoke of Colan and Severin with great affection, as well, and lamented not getting to do more work with them. “Gene was a great penciler, and he needed a lot of attention; you had to do the fine work that Gene had put into his drawings. Same reason I would’ve loved to do one of

[Severin’s] westerns or one of his British war stories set in the Sudan . . . nobody could do anything like Severin did,” said Sinnott. When asked about the flip side, if there were any favorite stories/works, Romita said he worked with The Children’s Television Workshop for five years on a series called “Spidey Superstories.” “We tried to make it as entertaining as possible, but the whole thing was predicated on scientific research and the studies of eye movement of youngsters. They used an apparatus to track where they looked on the comic page first; at the first character on the left side of the panel, then read the first balloon, then go back to the other characters and read the second balloon. Their reading habits were dictated by this instinct. So, we had to tell the letterers to lay out the balloons in a scientific-preferred way; this went on for five years and when we found out it was having a good effect on the youngsters, it was the proudest moment of my life,” said Romita. They received “a commendation by a group of educators who gave us the credit of triggering the reading habits of an entire generation in the 70s.” Spidey Super Stories #1; cover by John Romita Sr.

Thomas said it was All Star Squadron, with Conan coming in second, though he wrote well over a hundred issues of Conan the Barbarian, because “they might find somebody else who could write it and I just wasn’t gonna take that chance.”

The only person who ever tried to take it away from him was author Harlan Ellison, who called him up and asked if he could write the 100th issue, but Thomas said he would muddle through, having written the previous 99 issues. Rich Buckler, who came to Marvel in the 70s, said his favorite series was Deathlok, because he and writer Don McGregor were doing “stories with substance.” “There was no roadmap, no guidelines, no ‘you can’t do this, you can’t do that’ and it was just good stories about things that we cared about and there were no writers’ conferences, nobody had to have everything figured out,” said Buckler. McGregor would give him the stories in pieces, and he said even he didn’t quite get it at times, because what they were doing was so new and different. The stories were interwoven with rich themes and social critiques. They also worked on Black Panther together.

“It seems he always looked for the opportunity to step into hot water,” said Buckler. Thomas edited many of those stories, and added that someone told him a story about how McGregor called up once to get reference on an area of Hell’s Kitchen for a story, spending an hour on the phone to get the history and all kinds of info. When Thomas picked up the book, there were only two panels of Hell’s Kitchen, and one had a huge caption blotting out a good portion of the background. “He was very enthusiastic with people like that,” said Thomas. He would put a writer like McGregor on a series that didn’t sell huge numbers, leave him alone with it, and as long as it sold at a certain level, keep it going. Marvel is planning a new Deathlok series, and editor Axel Alonso contacted Buckler to do an alternative cover, but he wanted to know why they didn’t contact him to do the actual cover or the series. “They sure don’t work the way they used to, and it was lots of work, lots of pressure, and you would be crazy to do what John did, what I did, and all the people up here, but it was so much fun and it didn’t feel like work most of the time. You got to work with people you wanted to work with. It’s changed now. I miss having the opportunity to do what I wanted to do with the Deathlok character,” said Buckler.

Astonishing Tales #25; art by Rich Buckler and Klaus Janson

As for Joe Sinnott’s favorites, he said, “he was very fortunate to work on some very important books,” including the introduction of Dr. Doom in Fantastic Four #5 and the first appearance of Thor with Jack Kirby, and the first issues of Nova and Silver Surfer with John Buscema. His all-time favorites, though, were the comics he did with John Tartaglione: The Life of Pope John Paul II and Mother Theresa of Calcutta. “The detail John put into his work was fantastic and the artwork . . . I got so much satisfaction out of working on those two books,” said Sinnott. They only had time for one question at the end of the panel, and it was directed at Roy Thomas, asking about the reason his stint as Marvel Editor-in-Chief was so short [only 2 years]. “I was never thought of as a company man, because I was always talking about things in terms of the artist; you weren’t supposed to mention that if you were a company man. Of course, to the artist, I’m sure I was a company man, because I couldn’t say yes to them all

the time. It was frustrating always being caught in between . . . so I just decided after a couple of years that it wasn’t worth it,” said Thomas.