How Stan Lee Drove Bernie Wrightson Away From Marvel

Welcome to the 907th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, our second legend is about what drove Bernie Wrightson from Marvel Comics in the early 1970s, and how he blamed Stan Lee for it all.

The late, great Bernie Wrightson was one of the most amazing comic book artists of all-time. Last year, when we did our Top 100 Comic Book Writers and Artists poll that we do every four years, Wrightson was ranked #33. Just making the Top 50 at all is an amazing feat. Wrightson was particularly well-known for his dark, moody artwork, specifically on his most famous creation, Swamp Thing, that he created with Len Wein, and then later collaborated on when the character got his own comic book series in the early 1970s. Wrightson was one of the biggest DC comic artists of all-time.

However, amazingly enough, Wrightson almost spent the 1970s working at Marvel, instead! However, due to a problem with the coloring of one of his first Marvel issues, Wrightson quit Marvel and went back to DC, not returning to Marvel until the 1980s. Wrightson blamed Stan Lee for his problem at the time, although he later changed his views about Lee. It’s still one of the great lesser-known What If…?s – what if Bernie Wrightson had remained at Marvel in the 1970s?!

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How did Bernie Wrightson come to work for Marvel?

In the excellent 1979 retrospective, Bernie Wrightson: A Look Back (and yes, it is kind of funny to have a retrospective on a career that was barely a decade old at the time), Wrightson recalled how he came to work for Marvel, including how he tried to work there BEFORE goin to DC, “When I first came to New York for a convention, I went up to Marvel’s offices and showed them my samples. I really didn’t care for the way they treated me. I wanted to see someone in charge – someone who could get me work. Instead, they sent some flunky out of the office to talk with me. He must have been some lover level person who assisted in writing advertising, or some such thing. This guy comes out with the glad hand, back-slapping. Everything was, ‘Oh yes, yes – very nice, very nice.’ He then asked me do something with the Marvel characters. by this time, I was very offended; even though as a green kid I wasn’t in much of a position to be offended. I just did not like their attitude.”

He then explained how he finally did come to work for Marvel after establishing himself at DC, “After I was at DC for a while, I had trouble getting a raise, and they would not let me color my own work. I didn’t like what DC was doing with a lot of their color. I ran into Marvel editor Roy Thomas at a party and mentioned the problem. He told me to come over to Marvel and he would let me do my own coloring. I went over to Marvel’s offices and made an appointment to see Marvel’s founder, Stan Lee. I talked with him and he said, ‘Well, we like your work, but we will still expect you to work in the Marvel style.’ He explained that they liked things with thicker lines, big things in the background to draw you into the picture, lots of junk and fascial expressions used in early silent movies and magnify that by twenty times. Again, it was a lot of smiles and back slapping and pep talk. I felt I was on a football team or something.”

Being able to color his own work being a plus for working at Marvel would soon become an ironic decision….

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What made Bernie Wrightson quit working for Marvel?

In a 1982 Comics Journal interview with Gary Groth, Wrightson explained what went wrong at Marvel, specifically having to do with his King Kull story for Creatures on the Loose #10, written by Roy Thomas (adapted from Robert E. Howard’s short story)…

He noted, “I colored it. Or rather I didn’t color it. The whole idea was trying to figure out some way to show sound draining from a soundless medium. So, I thought, of course, the lettering and the balloons become smaller. The balloons stay the same size and the lettering becomes smaller until finally you have people speaking in blank balloons. That’s good, but that’s not quite enough. Well, what if it’s a really brightly colored thing to begin with. Lots of primaries: reds, yellows, and blues, and all. And this all starts washing out, until it finally becomes black and white, as the color drains out, the color bleaches out of the thing. I thought, “Yeah, that’s interesting. I like that.” So that’s what I did. That’s the way I handled this thing. And I drew it that way in black-and-white with that in mind so that the pages where the sound was all gone were going to be in black-and-white, and there’d be lots of zip-a-tone and screens and stuff so there’d be some interest, some grays and stuff, but no actual color. Then I got the silver prints to color, colored those up, spent a lot of time on it. Really sweated on it, y’know. And paid close attention to the color chart and getting this thing just right. Turned it in, everybody said, “Oh, lovely! Terrific! We love it!””

The idea was that the story would slowly lose color until it was black and white…

At which point Kull would defeat the bad guy, and it would explode into a blast of color…

Obviously, that did not happen. Wrighton recalled:

I didn’t hear anything about it until the job comes out and when it comes out … in the first place, they obviously hadn’t printed from the originals. They had printed from low-grade photostats. So a lot of the line work, especially the zip-a-tone and the screens and stuff I had done fell out, was gone, completely. On top of that, they had gotten somebody to recolor it, so that all these pages, all this real careful orchestration where the color is bleaching out. If I’m going to put all that kind of work into it, and this is what happens, why bother? Of course, I got pissed off. I went in to Roy Thomas and Stan and raised hell: “What did you do this for? Didn’t you know what I was trying to do?” What I got out of that, was, “We’re doing color comics here.”

Wrightson was specifically irked at Lee, who he described at the time as having “Never really warmed up to Stan [Lee] a whole lot. I always thought of Stan as this kind of grinning idiot PR man that didn’t write real good comics, let’s face it. But he really knew how to sell them. And really knew how to sell himself. I’ve since changed my mind. Stan is a lot more than that. But at the time I kind of had a chip on my shoulder.”

Thomas, for his part, made a point to quickly reprint the story in black and white in Savage Tales #2, explaining years later in Barbarian Life, “…Bernie Wrightson and I had been disappointed by the color reproduction of our adaptation of the REH King Kull story “The Skull of Silence,” though against all reason Bernie blamed the screw-up on Marvel (and, ultimately, on me). This was why I made the decision to republish it almost immediately in Savage Tales #2.” Thomas, therefore, thinks that it wasn’t Stan Lee’s fault at all, but obviously, Wrightson disagreed at the time, and wouldn’t return to Marvel to do interior art for quite some time.