Sometime early in 1979, Marvel Comics President Jim Galton called me to his office to discuss an opportunity to license a toy property—ROM, the Spaceknight. We’d had some success with the Micronauts, which the legendary licensing/toy genius Stan Weston had pitched to me, and I had licensed, so Galton was immediately interested in a new Parker Brothers toy that he had somehow become aware of. Galton knew nothing about comics, and couldn’t care less about them—but he was very interested in making money. If one toy property worked, why wouldn’t another?The name “ROM,” by the way, comes from Read-Only Memory. It was one of the first toys with a chip inside that allowed it to do simple tricks like making sounds and flashing lights.

Galton and I flew up to Boston on the Eastern Airlines Shuttle—remember that?—and drove out to wherever Parker Brothers offices were—in a beautiful, wooded setting, as I recall—and met with their brass and licensing people. We worked out a deal. I’m certain we had a pretty standard licensing deal, except that the creator of ROM, Bing McCoy, had a significant participation. After Parker Brothers was out of the mix, I suppose we paid only Bing McCoy’s portion of the royalties.

I created the basic premise for the comic book series—the fundamental backstory (beyond what Bing and Parker Brothers had graven in stone). Bill Mantlo and whoever the editor was fleshed it out. For instance, Brandy Clark was definitely Bill’s creation, or at least he named her. On the other hand, Clairton (a small town in the Pittsburgh area, near where I grew up, transplanted for story purposes to West Virginia) and Galador are names I provided.

Getting the first cover done was a nightmare. The concept was simple—an apparently menacing robot terrifying the people of a small town—but, it took four tries, I think, to get an acceptable penciled cover. I don’t remember who did the first couple of tries…Sal Buscema…? Al Milgrom…? Not sure. But they weren’t impactful enough. Then, as we were coming down to the wire, I had another artist, name withheld for reasons that will become obvious take a shot. What he did, overnight, was completely wrong. I told him we wanted a Day the Earth Stood Still, eerie, terrifying tableau. What he did, described in his own words, thus, was: “…the townspeople admiring the magnificent robot,” in a picturesque, tranquil setting. He also drew himself, as Jesus Christ, complete with halo, Neal Adams as Moses, complete with halo, and Neal’s family prominently among the “townspeople.” Prominently featured in the background was a church. Those were strange days for him. Later, he got better. He did some work for me at DEFIANT, as I recall. Brilliant artist, good man.

So, I asked Frank Miller to do me a favor—and, in a tremendous hurry, he did the cover that was actually used. I think it was inked in the office—by Milgrom? Not sure—because it had to go out in a rush.

In those days, it was difficult to get top-tier creators to work on licensed-property books. Most creators wanted to do mainstream Marvel Universe books, because they were fans and because the likelihood of better sales/higher royalties seemed greater (with a few exceptions—Conan, for instance). Bill Mantlo, always hungry for work, would take anything. Sal Buscema, likewise, wasn’t too picky. Getting “names” to do covers was relatively easy because covers paid more and the artists were able to sell the originals for more money than one could get for interior pages.

After our initial meetings with Parker Brothers, we didn’t have much contact with them. They quickly lost interest in ROM and all to do with it when the toy didn’t do well, I think. I did meet once with Bing, though. I think he just dropped by Marvel’s offices and found his way to Galton’s office. I was called there quickly—largely because Galton had no idea what to say to the guy and had never so much as opened a ROM (or any other) comic book. I remember that Bing was dressed sort of like Kit Carson and had with him his toddler son, who proceeded to tear up Galton’s office. This was probably in early 1980, because Marvel was still at 575 Madison, before the move to 387 Park Avenue South.

When Steve Ditko came around looking for work, I made it a priority to find him something—after all, he was a founding father, and though I couldn’t set right all the injustices of the past, I could make sure he had work if he wanted it. ROM seemed like a natural. Sal had plenty to do, so no worries there. The reason ROM was right for Steve is that Steve refused to work on “flawed” heroes! No feet of clay permitted. His philosophy was (and probably still is) that heroes should be noble. Period. I asked him about Spider-Man, some of whose flaws were Steve’s ideas. He explained that when he drew Spider-Man, Spider-Man was still a kid, still learning, and therefore, allowed some foibles. Fine, then. ROM, the noble Knight it was. Steve did some good work on ROM.

Sales of ROM were never great. For years it hung in there, in the lowest tier, but above the cut-line.

I thought ROM was one of Bill Mantlo’s better series. Bill was generally a writer of last resort for most editors. When no one else was interested, Bill would take the job. Or, editors used him because they knew that he’d be on time, at least, and that meant one fewer deadline crunch a month; or if they were stuck for a script overnight—literally—they knew Bill would deliver. If it came down to words on paper, no matter what, Bill was the no-matter-what. The value of his speed was mitigated by the fact that, often, many changes/corrections were required to bring a script up to publishable quality. Bill was cooperative and willing to make changes/corrections if required—but, sometimes, there wasn’t time. Some editors would defend Bill because he had frequently saved their butts, but I hated to see a sub-standard script slip by.

Another good point about Bill, however, was that he was very free with ideas and created new villains and characters easily and often. That was another thing that endeared him to editors who were sick of stories about the thousandth return of Doctor Octopus or whomever. Anyway, I think Bill liked writing ROM and gave it a special effort. That was a big part of why it lasted so long, I think.

Because of the rights issues, I doubt that Marvel (or anyone) will be publishing a collection of the ROM Spaceknight series soon. Too bad.

Let's see what Bill Mantlo said many years ago about this: "I went home and wrote up a proposal that was fucked up. It was ROM landing in England, and has mysticism, and witchcraft, and shit" Shooter, dissatified with the treatment, "in effect, plotted the first issue." Bill noted that Shooter's rewrite was basically an amalgam of the space Knight business ans the Silver Surfer's origin. "I said, 'Ah, shit, not this stuff again', and I wrote it, and for four issues i kinda went along, going, 'Oh, Silver Surfer. This turkey's going to die".

Bill's treatment was unacceptable for a number of reasons.

Except for the theme of self-sacrifice, I don't see much similarity between ROM and the Silver Surfer. And, the licensor required that ROM had been humanoid, tranformed into cyborg. Plagiarism? No.

efore I became Editor in Chief, from the beginning of 1976 till the end of 1978 I was associate editor. Anywhere but Marvel, the title would have been “editor,” because I was in fact the line editor, charged with the hands-on editing of the color comics. 45 of them a month. That’s about 40 more than a good editor can effectively cope with, by the way.

The EIC’s during that time — Wolfman, Conway and Goodwin — were so concerned about late books that getting books out overwhelmed other priorities, like whether they were any good or not, or even readable. Goodwin in particular was under pressure regarding the line’s chronic lateness and inclined to publish anything that was finished no matter how bad. Books out the door was the mantra.

I, perhaps naively, thought that the books ought to be good. I had no power to hire or fire creators, or have major revisions done that might “delay” a book. I would often take plots, scripts or art to Archie, show him what I judged to be egregious flaws and ask him what to do. Nobody knew comics as well as Archie, and Archie absolutely wished that every book could be good, but in all but a very few really extreme cases, he would sigh, put his head in his hands, say “Fix it up the best you can in a couple of hours, then let it go.” I know letting bad books go pained him. But he’d never even consider firing a creator who was fast, no matter how bad. Rapid delivery mattered way more than quality to him in the situation he was in.

A few creators, Chris Claremont notable among them, had pride in their work and would fix problems I pointed out themselves, rather than have me do minor rewrites or touch-ups. Many other writers and artists didn’t have such integrity. They were on to the next script or art job, couldn’t care less about the last one and were not about to waste a minute doing correx I requested. Remember, it was page rate only in those days. The more pages churned out the more money they made. So, often, I was forced to put a band-aid on a bad book and, as Archie commanded, let it go.

Bill in particular exploited the situation. He soon sussed out that Archie wouldn’t fire him no matter what, as long as he brought in words on paper for each book in a hurry. And that’s pretty much what he delivered, words on paper — some of the worst crap ever written. Granted, his scripts were done overnight sometimes, and granted, that sometimes kept us from missing shipping.

Bill knew I couldn’t do anything about his hacking except fix his scripts up a little. That was fine by him. He was actually kind of smug about it. Once he delivered words on paper and got the check, he had no interest in what happened to the book subsequently. It amused him, I think, that I took jobs of his home and late into the night worked to make them readable and make him look better! While he was churning out the next words on paper and making money hand over fist.

The one area I was really able to improve Bill’s work effectively was at the plot stage. I doctored up his plots as much as possible, always quickly, often with John Verpoorten looming over me, demanding the plot for an artist who was standing beside him waiting to get the thing so he could go home and start drawing. However, I was often able to fix some of the most inane plot points and eliminate the most outrageous mistakes in the plots, saving work later.

Starting sometime in mid-1976, I put every script and plot page of Bill’s that I completely rewrote into one of my desk drawers. If as much as one line of Bill’s remained on a page, it didn’t go into the drawer. By the end of 1997 their was well more than a ream of Bill’s pages in that drawer.

When I became EIC on the first working day of January, 1978, one of the first people to walk through my office door was Bill Mantlo. His opening remark was, exactly, “Well, I assume I’m fired.”

I said no, that today was day one for everybody. Fresh start. I asked him to bear down and use his obvious talent to produce a reasonable amount of good work, rather than lots and lots of bad work.

Bill did bear down, and subsequently produced some remarkable things. Micronauts and ROM, I think, are notable among them. He was the one who suggested I license Micronauts by the way. He created characters like crazy. He contributed. Did his own correx. And he was still fast, still made a lot of money. When I introduced royalties and other incentives, he made money like never before, doing less work...

[ROM] wasn’t a complete blank slate. A few small elements came from Parker Brothers. And I mean small. I wrote the foundation treatment and the back story. Bill elaborated on those things and did wonderfully well, I think...

I have spoken honestly about every creator I have mentioned. Good and bad. Archie, for example, see above, and elsewhere. I don’t remember who brought the subject of Bill Mantlo up, but I have absolutely told the story fair and square. Remember, I have been accused of responsibility for Bill’s plagiarisms. How do I set that straight without telling what really happened?

Thanks for your sincere sympathy for Bill. What happened to him is tragic. I think anyone who knew him back then and those who know him still share your feelings. Yes, he did some things that were not admirable. I suppose the same can be said of most people. However, his talent was remarkable. The industry benefitted greatly from his presence and suffers greatly from his absence.

P.S. In January, 1978, when I took office as EIC, there were books still in house that should have already been on sale — that means they were four months or more late. Marvel was supposed to ship 45 color comics that month. We actually only managed to ship 26.

By April, we had caught up to the point that we were shipping the correct number of books each month.

By the end of the year, we were completely on schedule. I have a letter from the president of World Color Press that says, “Congratulations. For the first time in its history, Marvel Comics is on time.”