Free Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe Page B

a fist came down on a desk, it should be thunderous, and when someone was punched, they should be sent through the air. Speaking characters should be drawn with mouths wide open. Discussing a fight scene, he’d act out the action for artists, standing on his desk, or jumping on the couch, or making voices, as they craned their necks up in disbelief at the balding, exuberant, forty-two-year-old human action figure. Despite Lee’s enthusiastic calisthenics, some of the artists agonized at the sparseness of the plot outlines, which required them to conjure scene-settings and determine pacing (working in the Marvel Method was “like digging into my insides and pulling it out,” one of them groaned, years later). The obvious solution, Lee figured, would be to find artists with writing experience who were used to heavy creative lifting and didn’t need everything spelled out for them.
    He quickly ran through his options. An attempt to collaborate with original Human Torch creator Carl Burgos on solo adventures of the new, teenage incarnation of the character ended quickly. Lee next enlisted Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, now forty-six years old and working as an art director in Massachusetts, to see what he could do with the name “Daredevil,” which was once another company’s trademark but had since fallen out of use. The concept for the new “Daredevil” was not remarkable: Matt Murdock, the hard-studying son of a down-and-out single-father boxer, saves a blind man from an oncoming Ajax Atomic Labs delivery truck—and is then blinded himself by a radioactive cylinder. This being Marvel, however, the radiation also heightens his other senses, which come in handy later when he has to avenge his father’s murder. Murdock grows up to be a defense lawyer, satisfying Lee’s somewhat forced “justice is blind” hook and providing Daredevil with easy access to criminal happenings.
    But Everett didn’t come through on the deadline, even after getting a hand from Kirby on the character design. “I was putting in 14 or 15 hours a day,” he said later, “and then to come home and try to do comics at night was just too much.” He delivered the two-thirds of Daredevil #1 that he’d completed to a panicked Sol Brodsky; as luck would have it, Steve Ditko was in the Marvel offices, and Brodsky corralled him into finishing the issue at an available desk. It would be another year before Everett would work for Marvel again.
    The second issue of Daredevil was given to Joe Orlando, who’d done impressive science-fiction and horror comics for EC. “The problem,” admitted Orlando, “was that I wasn’t Jack Kirby. Jack—or Ditko, or just a couple of others—could take a couple sentences of plot and bring in 20 pages that Stan could dialogue in an afternoon or two. When I drew out the story my way, Stan would go over it and say, ‘this panel needs to be changed’ and ‘this whole page needs to be changed’ and on and on. I didn’t plot it out the way he wanted the story told so I wound up drawing at least half of every story twice. They weren’t paying enough for that so I quit.”
    Now Daredevil went to Orlando’s mentor, the brilliant but mercurial Wally Wood. His slick space tales in Weird Science and parodies in Mad had made him one of the brightest lights of the EC Comics stable, and Jack Kirby had personally chosen him to ink his work on the Sky Masters comic strip. Like Kirby, he was a workhorse. But it wasn’t just a punishing schedule that was wearing on Wood. He suffered from a chronic migraine, battled depression, drank heavily, and pulled all-nighters in his studio, subsisting on caffeine and cigarettes.
    Shortly before Marvel came calling, Wood had angrily quit Mad for good after an editor rejected one of his stories. He needed the money, and he’d quit drinking, but that didn’t mean he would just fall into line for the company. He was stubborn, and given to playing little games. “Even though there