As I’ve mentioned before, I have long been associated with the world of comic book media tie-in writing, or what the layman calls “novelizations.” I wrote my first one in 1978, at a time when, as reading some of the material today might suggest, I had no business writing a grocery list, much less 50,000 words of story. But that’s neither here nor there, because in the very same series in which my novels appeared, there were nine other titles, some of which were pretty good.
Published between 1978 and 1979 by Pocket Books, these 11 books are known, collectively, as the Marvel Novel Series, beginning with the Spider-Man novel MAYHEM IN MANHATTAN by Marv Wolfman and Len Wein, and ending with my own effort, SPIDER-MAN AND THE HULK: MURDERMOON — an effort to read, that is … and that officially ends the self-deprecating humor.
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Sometime in the late-1970s, a once-third-rate Marvel Comics title that had been revived in 1975 was suddenly the hottest comic book in town. THE UNCANNY X-MEN had limped along throughout the 1960s, starting nicely enough under the creative direction of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but spiraled down to Werner Roth and mediocrity, to the point that even the last-ditch effort of putting Neal Adams — still riding the wave of his groundbreaking arrival in the field — failed to save the title from going all-reprint and then just going.
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From looking at this column, you’d think all I ever read is books, books, books. That’s not entirely true. I also read comic books. Not nearly as many as I used to — it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that most of ‘em these days … meh! — but still more than your average middle-aged American male.
But I must admit to the appearance of a little twinkle in my eye and a quiver of joy in my heart when, flipping through a comic book, I come across pages filled with nothing but words. I’m not talking about a letter column or blowhard editorial hype page — and they do blow hard — but an honest-to-goodness text piece: a story in words.
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Back in the olden days, when comic books were the purview of children — and we children reading them were getting too old, really, to continue doing so — we delighted when DC Comics came up with the slogan “Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!” Illustrated with superhero headshots and the smiling faces of adolescent readers, the slogan was slapped atop the spinner racks and wall racks from which we used to pluck our comics — always from the middle of the stack, to get the fresh copy no one had yet touched — found in every candy store, drugstore and Woolworth in the land. It was validation in a world in which THE NEW YORK TIMES had yet to anoint us as an acceptable art form (that wouldn’t come until about 1998; only took us about 60 years to get legitimacy).
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I’ve always had a thing for Wonder Woman. Get your mind out of the gutter, perv. There’s nothing hinky going on here. Lynda Carter aside, I know Wonder Woman — aka Diana, daughter of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons of Themyscira (itself with the aka, Paradise Island) — was a four-color comic book character and not flesh and blood. No, my connection with the first Princess Di* goes back as long as I can recall, to when I first began reading comic books, circa 1960 at age 5. There was a used book store around the corner on St. Johns Place in Brooklyn, run by a strange man named Dave Solomon, and coverless comics could be had for two for a nickel, or some such sum (say that three times fast).
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