Mary Skrenes

"....As it was, he barely looked at the comics. He took a look at Iron Man for the first time in over a year, saw the triangular nose that had been added to the helmet on his own orders, and said,

"What's this — why is this here?"

"You don't want that?"

"Well, it looks kind of strange, doesn't it?" Lee zoomed away, on to the next thing.

Everything was big-picture now : synergy, demographics, partnerships. Lee called at least one meeting to remind writers not to make major changes to characters, lest those changes jeopardize deals with licensees. 

Decisions were being made, Steve Englehart said, "not by Stan Lee as the top of a bunch of creative people, but by Stan Lee as the bottom of a bunch of businessmen. And he began to really put his energy up into the business end of it rather than down into the creative end below."

As out of touch as he was with the creative process, by now even Stan Lee knew that fans were clamoring for more of Howard the Duck. Howard's sporadic appearances, in the back pages of the tremendously titled Giant-Size Man-Thing, produced an avalanche of mail, and Steve Gerber found himself meeting with Lee about Howard getting his own title. 

Accompanying Gerber was Mary Skrenes, a college friend of Alan Weiss who'd moved to New York and easily fallen into freelance comic writing. Skrenes found that she loved comics, but it took some time getting used to the man-child comic pros that surrounded her. Gerber, whom she met on a visit to the Marvel offices, was an exception: "I came in," she said, "and everybody clustered around me. Some of these guys weren't used to girls. So they were all around me, saying things like, 'I've been having trouble... I hate to go to sleep….. I hate to wake up, and I looked up and I saw this big head bouncing toward me from the other room. It was Steve Gerber. He took my hand, and led me out of the room. All these guys are like, 'What?""

She quickly became Gerber's muse - the inspiration for Howard the Duck's go-go dancing girlfriend, Beverly Switzler — and writing partner. They began dating and soon moved in together. Her sensibility was every bit as skewed as his. When she was asked to take a crack at conceptualizing a superheroine with the name of Ms. Marvel, she turned in a proposal about Loretta Petta, a petite, dyslexic waitress who'd moved from a trailer park to the big city. "When she would get pissed—in the first issue, somebody robbed her diner-she would get super-adrenaline strength. They didn't want her to be tiny and dys-lexic; they wanted her to be statuesque. Stan just didn't like it."* 

( * A different version of Ms. Marvel would eventually see the light of day, written by Gerry Conway: Carol Danvers, a security agent at Cape Kennedy Space Center, was a bystander during a battle between Captain Marvel and his Kree enemy; when an exploding piece of Kree technology radiated her, she gained the strength of ten men and "the knowledge and instincts of a Kree warrior." She left her security job to edit Woman magazine for the Daily Bugle's J. Jonah Jameson. )

But she and Gerber had better luck together. In the pitch meeting for Howard, they'd also brought along their idea for another comic, about a character named James-Michael-"a real twelve-year-old," as he put it, "a human being poised on the edge of puberty, facing all the enormous (and enormous seeming) problems adolescence would bring." Not, in other words, another stupid kid sidekick.

Of course, it wasn't quite vérité-in the first issue, James-Michael's parents die in a horrible auto accident and are revealed to be robots. James-Michael, hyperintelligent and nearly autistic in his cold manner, is adopted by a kind nurse and her hip roommate, who live in the Hell's Kitchen section of Man-hattan, and he's haunted by dreams of a mute, caped alien who shoots lasers from his palms and leaves a trail of destruction that's still there when James-Michael awakes. But what would they call it?

"Omega the Unknown!" Lee shot back. He put both titles on the schedule.