Casablanca Records helped to create the X-Men hero Dazzler. The record label, which produced hits for Cher, Donna Summer and the Village People, had approached Marvel with the idea of a Disco super-hero that they could cross promote. According to Marvel editor Louise Simonson, Casablanca said, "Hey, you make a singer and we'll create someone to take on the persona." However, the collaboration proved fraught and ended with both parties walking away from the deal.
Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant once worked for Marvel. Between 1975 and 1977, Tennant was an editor at Marvel's UK division, a job that required him to anglicise American spellings and indicate when the more scantily dressed superheroines needed to be redrawn decently.
The word 'sex' was concealed in the illustrations of New X-Men issue 118 at least 18 times - one almost every page. It surreptitiously appears in hair strands, bottles of whisky, a hedge, a puddle, tree branches, protest signs and, thanks to some conveniently placed garden tools, a lawn. The book's artist, Ethan Van Sciver, has said that he scattered the word throughout the book because Marvel was annoying him at the time and he thought it would be fun to inject a little mischief into his work. Weirdly, this was the sort of activity that the psychologist Fredric Wertham railed hysterically against in the Fifties. He thought that comics were corrupting America's youth, with their overt and covert depictions of sex and drugs, and his book on the subject, Seduction of the Innocent, led to Senate hearings and a strict moral code being imposed on the comic industry.
Marvel once owned the rights to the word zombie. As improbable as it sounds, Marvel attempted to trademark the word zombie in comic book titles after publishing Tale of the Zombie in 1973. By the time the trademark was approved two years later, the series was coming to an end. Marvel lost the trademark in 1996 but it wasn't long before it was once again trademarking the armies of the undead, registering the words Marvel Zombies to protect its comic series of the same name. With DC, Marvel also trademarked the phrase 'Super Hero'.
Artist John Romita Jr based the Daredevil villain Typhoid Mary on his ex-wife.
Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, found writing comics too difficult. Before he found fame as a novelist, Puzo eked a living writing for men's adventure magazines for Marvel's publisher. Short of cash one month he asked Stan Lee if he could try his hand writing a comic script. Lee readily agreed but Puzo couldn't deliver the goods. "He said it was too difficult," Lee recounts in his autobiography. Puzo told him: "I could write a novel in the time it would take me to figure this damn thing out." Puzo did eventually crack the superhero nut, writing the screenplays for the first two Superman movies.
Luke Skywalker saved Spider-man. Marvel's comic book adaptation of Star Wars in 1977 was a runaway success and the only highlight of very dismal sales year for Marvel. Roy Thomas, who wrote the adaptation, has said that Marvel almost lost the chance to do the comic series because Stan Lee, Marvel's then publisher, wasn't interested in the idea of doing adaptations of other people's work. "Stan whose memory about such matters is generally just this side of amnesiac, has since said since that he was sold on the idea the second time around because Alec Guinness was starring in it," Thomas said. "Still, adapting a movie into a comic because Alec Guinness was in it would hardly have been a logical move. His name had no marquee value to Marvel's readers."
En de meest verrassende:
Artist Dave Cockrum's resignation letter to Marvel surreptitiously appeared in Iron Man No 127. In the issue, Tony Stark's butler, Jarvis, resigns after a drunk and out of control Stark verbally abuses. The letter reads:
Anthony Stark,
I am leaving because this is no longer the team-spirited "one big happy family" I once loved working for. Over the past year or so I have watched Avengers' morale disintegrate to the point that, rather than being a team or a family, it is now a large collection of unhappy individuals simmering in their own personal stew of repressed anger, resentment and frustration. I have seen a lot of my friends silently enduring unfair, malicious or vindictive treatment. My personal grievances are relatively slight by comparison to some, but I don't intend to silently endure. I've watched the Avengers be disbanded, uprooted and shuffled around. I've become firmly convinced that this was done with the idea of "showing the hired help who's Boss". I don't intend to wait around to see what's next.
Three issues later Iron Man's writer, David Michelinie, explained to readers that this was the not the letter Jarvis had intended to write and that due to a production error the wrong text had been published. The letter that appeared was none other than Cockrum's own resignation letter, only someone had swapped "Marvel" for "Avengers".
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