Summary
- Marvel comics had relatively little editorial interference in the 1970s, but the creators didn’t want to run afoul of Stan Lee.
- Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner pulled off a hoax to protect a controversial Doctor Strange story centered around the concept of God.
- Englehart and Brunner created a fake letter from a Reverend in Texas to appease Stan Lee’s concerns about the story’s content.
In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head back to December 1973 to see how Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner pulled off a hoax to help protect a controversial Doctor Strange story.
Now, generally speaking, there wasn’t a good deal of editorial interference going on at Marvel Comics in the early 1970s. More or less, you could get away with pretty much anything that you wanted. However, the reason for that is that Stan Lee ran a pretty loose ship. The only catch from Lee being such a relatively hands off publisher (while Roy Thomas was an Editor-in-Chief who fought for his talent when it was needed) is that you really WERE at Lee’s mercy. Again, that generally meant that you could do what you want, but if you ran AFOUL of Lee, then you were in trouble. I noted this in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed about how Jim Starlin was fired from Iron Man because Lee didn’t like what Starlin and Steve Gerber were doing on Iron Man (luckily, Roy Thomas stepped in and gave Starlin Captain Marvel instead, which worked out really nicely, and Lee eventually came around on Starlin, although Starlin still tore into Lee in the pages of the Warlock feature a few years later).
So Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner were naturally a bit wary of messing with Stan Lee when an issue of their run on Doctor Strange’s feature in Marvel Feature hit on some possibly controversial topics. Their way of handling it, though, was to pull off a HOAX! Read on to see how it all went down!
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What happened in the Doctor Strange story, “Time Doom”?
Soon after Doctor Strange had become Sorcerer Supreme for the first time, his arch-nemesis, Baron Mordo, acquired the Book of Cagliostro, which showed Mordo how to travel in time. Mordo head off into the past to change history so that HE would become the Sorcerer Supreme. Naturally, Doctor Strange followed him there. After Strange and Mordo battled for a bit, they then met the Cagilostro who nominally wrote the book, but it turned out that he was really a being known as Sise-neg from the future, who had written the book basically to brag about how much he knew about magic. Sise-neg then absorbed power from another reality, and began to travel back in time with the intent to restart the universe, and reshape it in his image.
In December 1973’s Marvel Premiere #14 (by writer Steve Englehart, penciler Frank Brunner, inker Dick Giordano, colorist Glynis Oliver and letterer John Costanza), Strange realizes that he can’t stop Sise-neg, but the best he can do is to perhaps INFLUENCE him. Mordo has the same idea as they travel back in time with Sise-Neg, and see him DESTROY THE UNIVERSE! It is just the three of them now, and then Sise-Neg reveals that he will restart the universe, when we learn that, naturally, Sise-neg is GENESIS in reverse!
And thus, we see that Strange influenced Sise-neg enough that he simply recreated the universe once more…
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What was the possible problem with this story, and how did Englehart and Brunner try to mollify Stan Lee?
The issue with the story is that it sort of suggests that PERHAPS this story was actually the origin of, well, you know, GOD. Somehow, Stan Lee found out about the contents of the issue, and he wasn’t thrilled. In one of my oldest Comic Book Legends Revealed ever (from EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO), I noted that in TwoMorrows’ Comic Book Artist #6, Brunner explained what happened:
We had just completed Marvel Premiere #14-well, I had just completed the pencils, most of the art, but for some reason or another, nobody took notice of what we were doing. When the book came out, Stan finally got a hold of it, and I don’t know, somebody pointed it out, or he read it, and he wrote us a letter saying, “We can’t do God. You’re going to have to print in the letters column a retraction saying this is not ‘the’ God, this is just a god.” Steve and I said, “Oh, come on! This is the whole point of the story! If we did that retraction of God, this is meaningless!” So, Steve happened to be on his way to Texas for something, this is when we were in California, and we cooked up this plot-we wrote a letter from a Reverend Billingsley in Texas, a fictional person, saying that one of the children in his parish brought him the comic book, and he was astounded and thrilled by it, and he said, “Wow, this is the best comic book I’ve ever read.” And we signed it “Reverend so-and-so, Austin Texas”-and when Steve was in Texas, he mailed the letter so it had the proper postmark. Then, we got a phone call from Roy, and he said, “Hey, about that retraction, I’m going to send you a letter, and instead of the retraction, I want you to print this letter.” And it was our letter! We printed our letter!
Here is that letter…
Dear Mr. Lee,
The other evening at our Church’s Christmas social, a young member of my congregation showed me a comic book you present called MARVEL PREMIERE (#14, March). he told me that it dealt with God.
I borrowed the comic from him, thinking that I would find another denigration of our Lord in the manner so fashionable these days. However, after reading this issue, I must commend you on the taste and perception you, your editor, and your writer showed in handling a very difficult subject. It is magazines such as yours which truly perform the Lord’s work, and open new eyes to His majesty.
I have since recommended MARVEL PREMIERE to many of my congregation and friends. Thank you, Mr. Lee, for your fine work.
Rev. David Billingsley
8794 East-West Highway
Denton, Texas
And sure enough, that was enough for Lee. Too funny. And since Englehart mailed the letter on his Christmas vacation (that was why he was traveling home), it happened in December 1973, as well, so this Look Back works for both the comic book AND the hoax!
If you folks have any suggestions for January (or any other later months) 2014, 1999, 1974 and 1949 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at [email protected]! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
