Show Business: Marvels of The Mind

The comics go Hollywood

Looking at a newspaper’s entertainment page these days a reader might think the whole country had gone (POW! WOW! WHIZ!) comic crazy. Annie is S.R.O. on Broadway, Superman is the highest grossing movie, and prime-time TV looks like one vast kiddieland. The Incredible Hulk is breaking up the furniture, Wonder Woman is bouncing over buildings, Captain America is flexing his muscles, and Spider-Man is crawling up the wall.

Cynics, of course, might say that TV, where the trend is most visible, has always been one big electronic comic book. But now the comic book heroes are out in the open, and CBS, which has all the big ones, may soon be renamed the Comic Book Supplier.

The man chiefly responsible for all the TV superdoing is Stan Lee, 56, the mustached and irrepressible publisher of Marvel Comics. Ideas pop in and out of his head so fast that Lee keeps a tape recorder by his bed to catch them late at night. Probably the most familiar of Lee’s TV heroes is the Incredible Hulk, a pleasant enough physicist (Bill Bixby) who turns into a green monster (Lou Ferrigno) when he gets mad at some injustice or another, which happens predictably every Wednesday night. Another Lee creation is Captain America, who made his first appearance this month. Captain America’s mission is to fight all enemies of the American way of life, whatever that is. Though he has no regular hour, Spider-Man also creeps on to CBS from time to time. He is really Peter Parker (Nicholas Hammond), a postgraduate science student who was bitten by a radioactive spider and ever since has had arachnoid superpowers, which he uses against two-legged evildoers.

In addition to all his work for CBS, Lee is now negotiating a deal with NBC for the Silver Surfer, a cosmic comic messiah who floats above earth on his surfboard uttering windy profundities. ABC, meantime, is casting a covetous eye on a (no doubt) shapely Spider-Woman. Lee has optioned a dozen heroes to Universal, and is now thinking about setting up his own production company. “I’ve always thought of myself as being in show business,” he says. “It’s just taken the world a long time to realize it.”

Lee became his company’s editor in chief at 17. At first he followed the trends of popular movies: if cowboy films were big, he turned out western comics; if crime dramas were packing them in, well, he wrote cops-and-robbers stories. In the early ’60s though, Lee got bored and began creating his own characters. The result: superheroes with personality as well as power, saviors who suffered from human frailties.

When he is not saving the world from the likes of Doctor Octopus or the Vulture, Spider-Man, for instance, worries about more humdrum problems—like his dandruff and allergy attacks and how he is going to get a date. Dr. David Bruce Banner, the mild-mannered physicist, agonizes over his uncontrollable “hulkouts.” This mix of fantasy and foibles zapped teenagers, and by the mid-’70s, Marvel had become the world’s largest comic book company.

Marvel’s debut on the screen seemed inevitable. After all, Lee’s comics themselves used cinematic techniques like closeups, fadeouts and establishing shots. Says Marvel Editor Roy Thomas: “Unlike most comic artists, Marvel’s illustrators always drew their pictures first—before the writers put in dialogue. It was a very cinematic approach.” Italian Film Director Federico Fellini is a fan. He once paid a visit to Marvel’s New York office and pronounced that “Lee added his own kind of ironic parody to comics.”

So far, however, a certain Marvel magic has been lost in the translation to video entertainment. TV’s attempts at relevancy are encroaching on fantasy. On television the Hulk tries hypnosis therapy to cure his curious green condition and takes on such prosaic problems as teen-age alcoholism and child abuse. Similarly, TV’s Spider-Man battles familiar terrorists and assassins instead of his old intergalactic foes like Doctor Doom. Lee misses the fantasy of the printed page. “A lot of the plots on the Spider-Man show,” he complains, “are situations that Kojak could just as easily have handled.” Unfortunately, even Lee has yet to invent the hero who can overpower that archvillain called the TV programmer. But if he does, his name will almost certainly be Martini Man. I