Tony Isabella's side of the Ghost Rider story, from his blog:

posted 9/9/2011:
"I’m told he [Shooter] also claims he was not the driving force behind the rewriting of my final issue of Ghost Rider, that he was acting under orders from the then-current Marvel editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman. This despite Shooter himself telling me at the time that my story offended him and that was why he was rewriting it. This jibes with the memories of other Marvel staffers at the time, who have also told me the issue was ready to go to the printers when Shooter abruptly pulled it back.

Marv Wolfman was one of three editors who approved of my two-year-long Ghost Rider storyline. He and I have talked on occasion about those years and seem to agree that we all made mistakes in handling our various positions of authority. Unless and until Marv himself tells me otherwise, Shooter gets the blame for undoing a two-year storyline in another writer’s book."

posted 1/24/2016:
"Without mentioning yours truly by name, Shooter characterizes me as “a Christian {who was] writing Christian comics instead of super-hero comics.” This is undoubtedly a reference to his tampering with the ending of my two-year run on Ghost Rider, a story designed to remove the supernatural elements from the title and make it more of a super-hero title. Shooter has been trying to either justify that action of his or blame it on someone else for years. He comes up short both ways. Read my earlier blog for the details.

Once the mystery of the benevolent lapping scam was solved, Financial V.P. Barry Kaplan made attempts to recover some of the money. A few creators who had benefitted from the advance-vouchering that had been going on actually worked off their debt, or paid the money back. Very few. Barry judged many to be hopeless cases, gave up on them and wrote the debt off. One creator allowed us to publish a story to which he owned all rights as a make-good for what he’d been advanced. A few of the clever and sleazy types, including one artists’ studio owner, realized that with John Verpoorten dead, she could simply deny everything, insist that all the work that had been paid for but never done had, indeed, been done and delivered. She couldn’t help it if inept Marvel comics had “lost” the work. She got away clean.

But anyway…. We thought voucher scamming was done with. Under the new rules, editors signed vouchers and accounting handed out the checks. No more opportunity for lapping. Ah, but we were dealing with creative people, remember. And a few of them got creative about ways to circumvent the safeguards.

Some freelancers vouchered jobs as they went along, two pages here, three pages there. Some delivered in small batches but waited till the issue was finished to voucher. So, of course, it occurred to a few, especially fill-in guys and one-timers, to do both. Voucher a few pages at the beginning, and then voucher the whole job at the end. It was easier than you think. An editor who is signing off on small batches of work from dozens of different freelancers, including writers, pencilers, letterers, inkers and colorists for as many as seven titles with three or four issues of each in progress at any given point could easily lose track of how many pages had already been vouchered when a job trickled in three pages at a time over the course of a month.

This happened often enough (a few times by accident—somebody forgot they’d vouchered part of a job. I did that once.) so that we made it policy that all work had to be vouchered when delivered. Deliver three pages, voucher three pages.

Oh, and by the way, even I couldn’t sign my own voucher. Nonetheless, one guy, a hall-of famer who shall remain nameless, who did a lot of work for Louise Jones (later Louise Simonson) managed to pull some trickeration on me. Louise, like most editors, usually came in a little late. Creative people, I think are more often the up-late type than the early riser type. Anyway, she’d come in around ten (then work way more hours than a human should have to). The freelance artist in question used to stop by the office early. I was always there early, and usually I was the only one. The artist would claim that he had to rush to the dentist/doctor/bank/dry cleaner, whatever, and couldn’t wait for Louise. Would I please sign his voucher? Sure. He would show me a batch of pages. I’d count ‘em. Yep. Twelve. I’d sign the voucher and put it in the interoffice mail to accounting. He’d say, “I’ll put these pages on Louise’s desk,” and hurry off. After a while, I finally figured out that he wasn’t putting the pages on Louise’s desk, and had been showing me the same twelve pages week after week.

Some extra devious types forged (or traced) editors’ signatures. One submitted vouchers with forged signatures for several no-existent jobs as “inventory,” which, being unscheduled, wasn’t easily checked. One artist, after his voucher had been signed, sometimes managed to sneakily write “redo” on vouchers for pages he was vouchering for the second time. Accounting usually didn’t question redo’s.

In an effort to shore up the defenses, we took steps to ensure that freelancers had no access to vouchers once delivered to the editor. All checks were mailed, eliminating shenanigans with the voucher hard copies. Eventually we got it under control.

From the above, it may sound like there were many cheats and scammers, but, really, it was only a few out of hundreds of freelancers. The same hall-of-famer who pulled that trickeration on me was responsible for half of what I mentioned above.

Barry eventually told me that while I could, in theory hire anyone I chose, and, in theory, Marvel was bound by my contract with the guy, he simply wouldn’t allow a check to be cut for that guy ever again. Could I have forced the issue? Yes, well, that would have gotten ugly. And he was right. Enough is enough.

By the time I finally got Marvel’s board to agree to allow a royalty program (and that was a tough sell), DC had already announced theirs. Easy for them. Only three or four DC titles sold enough copies to qualify for royalties under their plan, and one, Superman, just barely, because royalties started after the first 100,000 copies. Teen Titans was their number one book and it sold roughly 175,000 a month. So, their exposure was minimal. Unless sales increased dramatically, their program would cost them almost nothing. As I’ve mentioned before, Vince Colletta once showed me three DC royalty checks that did not total one dollar. They were hoping that their plan would help them steal talent from Marvel, which would theoretically boost sales, in which case they’d be happy to pay out some royalty money.

Meanwhile, at Marvel, our line AVERAGE was over 200,000. EVERY Marvel title would pay royalties from the inception of our plan, assuming we matched DC. Even Dazzler sold 140,000 copies a month. From inception, if sales stayed the same, our plan would take around a million dollars off of the bottom line. Make that make sense to a room full of business sharks who don’t give a rat’s ass about anything but the bottom line, I dare you. But I did.

After I got board approval, I laid out DC’s plan to Barry Kaplan. I said this is the bar we have to reach with our plan. Barry said, “We can do BETTER than that.” We matched DC’s plan as our base level, adding some improvements and modifications, and then Barry added a SLIDING SCALE. The more copies your title sold, the higher the royalty rate, up to double the base rate. With Barry’s help, the base plan and sliding scale feature became policy. I personally wrote the documents.

Some Marvel creative teams made sooo much money…! The X-Men team in particular.

When I first took the job as EIC, I did so on the condition that I could begin paying royalties. When I posed that condition to President Jim Galton back then, in 1977, he said, and I quote, “You mean we don’t?” He came from real world book publishing, so he wasn’t philosophically opposed to the idea.

Instituting the plan was delayed for years, for several reasons. For one, because of Kirby’s legal threats, our lawyers at K&K advised against it, on the grounds that royalties, or royalty-like incentives implied a creator ownership, or ownership stake in the work, which might bolster the claims Kirby’s lawyers were making. Sigh. For another, there was a great deal of back and forth between me and the financial types about how such a program should be structured. The final hurdle, as mentioned above, was board approval. DC announcing their plan forced our hand — thank you, Paul Levitz — and gave us a template structure to work from. We were always careful to call it a “sales incentive,” not royalties, by the way, to avoid ownership issues.

The Marvel plan didn’t take a million off the bottom line that first fiscal year. It took over TWO million. Which was fine, because when you’re paying those kind of royalties, it means that your sales are soaring through the roof, and the bottom line is many millions fatter...

RE: My piece in Dreadstar #1: You realize, of course, that in print I had to put the best face on goings on at Marvel. Talking about the thickskulls upstairs unflatteringly wouldn't do. That said, I encountered no resistance to EPIC Comics, largely because, at that time, I was the fair-haired boy. We were making so much money that the big bosses mostly left me alone and went along with whatever my crazy scheme du jour was. As long as it didn't cost too much. Publisher Mike Hobson was, indeed, enthusiastic, and I suppose he could be considered "upstairs," though his office was on the comics floor.

RE: Royalties: I believe the major companies have lowered the threshold for royalties. And still, very few creators earn any.

RE: Dazzler: Of course, we loved having Bill Sienkiewicz do the covers, but the main reason that happened is because he wanted to do them. Couldn't hurt sales, always a concern. Yes, few people wanted to write Dazzler, and few really could. Her show biz/super heroine duality confounded most. Too hard, too much work. My vision of her was that she could be a unique and intriguing Marvel Universe star. It was difficult for me to keep up with the writing. My EIC job took long hours. Archie asked to do the book. I think he saw the same potentials as I did. He did great stuff. He worked as I did back at DC, doing small roughs for every panel. Way better than mine ever were. I wish you could see the layouts he did for Chadwick. One could practically blow 'em up, trace 'em off and ink them. Brilliant stuff. Ask Paul. Why didn't Dazzler take off? I guess we just didn't do it well enough.

Dazzler was created in hopes of making a deal with a record company to produce her music using studio musicians, ala the Archies. Almost worked. The Dazzler comic book sold well at first — 428,000 copies of the first issue, which was the first all-direct comic book from a major publisher. It continued to sell reasonably well for several years. Eventually, sales drifted down to near 100,000 copies an issue, cancellation numbers for Marvel at the time, and we ended the series.

We generally didn't think about things like targeting female readers or any particular age group. If I used the words "target audience" it was quickspeak for that's who we think is buying our comics. We believed, and I still believe, that good stories told well will find an audience, or at least have a good chance of doing so.

NOTE: Obviously STAR Comics were expected to appeal to younger readers, but usually any "targetting" done was by the creators, not in accordance with some publishing strategy. Trina Robbins intended Misty for young female readers. Louise Simonson and June Brigman probably expected that Power Pack might appeal to female readers. There are other examples.

Generally, however, following in Stan's footsteps, we just tried to create comics that we, ourselves, would find interesting. Female characters? Sure, why not? G.I. Joe? I was shouted down at the distributors' conference where we announced plans to do G.I. Joe. Nobody wanted it. But it worked out pretty well. We were open to trying anything we felt had potential. I always felt that if we did something new, or different from the norm, and did it very well, we could succeed. The fact is, however, that what the audience supported best and what most creators wanted to do was super-heroes. I tried to encourage experimentation within that genre, too.

DC also took some interesting stabs at experimenting. Everyone wanted to expand the medium. Easier said than done...

The Cobra Command, Cobra Commander and Cobra Commandos were created by Archie Goodwin, because, yes, Hasbro wasn't going to have any bad guys for the G.I. Joe guys to fight until we insisted. They grudgingly caved in and had one Cobra Commando in the launch.

In 1983, a toy company approached Marvel Comics seeking development of a toy property for comics, animation and other entertainment. The toys in question were cars and other vehicles that could be opened and unfolded into ROBOTS. Very cool. The toy company was KNICKERBOCKER TOYS. They called their toy property, based on technology licensed from a Japanese company, the “MYSTERIONS.”

Marvel Comics was their second choice as a creative services provider. They had gone to DC Comics first. The executive who approached us showed us what DC had created for them. It was a comic book. He only had photocopies. I don’t believe the thing was ever printed. It was awful. Apologies to whomever created that thing, but it was pathetic and wrong-headed to an unbelievable degree. The art was well-drawn, I’ll allow that, but the storytelling was chaotic. The story, as best one could discern it, was unnecessarily, excessively dark and violent. The dialogue was peppered with “Hells” and “damns,” and I can’t swear to it almost 30 years later, but I think there was a “bastard” or two in there. Need I mention that the primary target audience for toys is ages three through eight? Yes, sure, boys’ action figures and action toys skew a little higher, but still. (Aside: People like us really would warp the average, if we counted.) Though the DC story was convoluted, when you boiled it down it was vehicle/ robots battling each other. Not much in the way of motivation beyond “good” versus “evil.” All clichés, all the time. Bleh.

The Knickerbocker guy told me what they’d paid for this…item. Top dollar. He asked if we could do better. Our mailroom guys could do better. Our top executives could do better. And they were not very sharp. The execs, I mean. So, we made a deal and began work. I wrote the back story and the treatment for the first story. They loved it. The plan was for us to publish comics and for our studio, Marvel Productions, to produce a number of animated half-hours—six, I think. I forget. We would launch just before the pre-sale of the toys. Then follow it up in the spring when the initial wave of low price point items shipped. The usual.

We were asked to come to a meeting at Knickerbocker’s offices out in the wilds of Jersey somewhere. Publisher Mike Hobson and I were the ranking officers on that excursion. Somebody else was with us. I don’t remember who. DeFalco? Maybe. I don’t think so, but… A licensing person? Maybe. I don’t know. Might have been two people.  Anyway, we rented a car and off we went.

I can’t run down that trip step by step, but I remember some highlights and lowlights. We ate a late lunch or dinner at a Ground Round, which was the classiest joint in the area. I put that first because, relatively speaking, it was a major highlight. We arrived on time for our meeting, but had to wait for THREE HOURS. The Knickerbocker execs we were supposed to meet with were “unavoidably detained.” There was something going on at that office. People seemed on edge, upset. We had no idea why. No one told us anything. They had a nice reception area. Comfy seats….

Finally, we were ushered into a room by an assistant to somebody’s assistant and shown the toys. I’d only seen a few of them up until then. Finally, we were shown to a large office. The Knickerbocker people were ashen faced and nervous. But we had our meeting. We talked about the launch, the toys and the story. They didn’t want to talk about elements or the business transaction that were still pending. I had the distinct feeling that they were just going through the motions.

Another highlight: Part of the meeting was a scheduled conference call with Dennis Marks, head of development at Marvel Productions. For reasons I’ll never understand, the people who ran Marvel Productions until Margaret Loesch took over hated us comics people. David DePatie, Head of Production, especially. They thought of us as amateurish morons, and our work as garbage. MUCH more on that, later. At any rate, we had provided the studio with my treatment and back story.

Dennis spoke about what the studio proposed to do with the Mysterions property, which was to completely ignore my work and do something completely different. And stupid. With cute, wacky kids and a goofy dog. That was the only time the Knickerbocker people showed any life. They told Dennis that they wanted what I had created, not what he was talking about. They couldn’t understand where he was coming from. Didn’t he read the treatment? Dennis was flabbergasted. Seemed he couldn’t believe that they were taking anything done by the comic book people seriously. Dennis’s said, exactly: “I’m completely at sea, here.” Yes, Dennis, you were, and maybe still are. That conversation ended in a muddle with Dennis making “we’ll see about this” noises, albeit reasonably politely. We in the office in Jersey sort of looked at each other after the call ended, in that way that people look at each other after a shared surreal experience.

So, we all shook hands and we Marvel types drove back to New York. Mike Hobson guessed that some kind of company shakeup was going on. The next day we learned that, just before our meeting, Hasbro had announced that it was acquiring Knickerbocker. Shakeup, indeed. The deal with Knickerbocker fell victim to the takeover by Hasbro. The Hollywood term for similar events is “turnaround.” Projects begun by previous administrations are automatically put into turnaround, that is, on hold—usually permanently. Here endeth the story of the Mysterions.

Some months later, the Hasbro exec who was Marvel’s main contact, Bob Prupis, came to my office. He pulled a few toy vehicles out of his bag and proceeded to open and unfold them into ROBOTS. They were bigger and much more complex than the Mysterions. Different Japanese technology, same general idea. Hasbro, he said, had the rights to the technology and toys based upon it. The problem, he said was story. He said that the Japanese storyline associated with the toys wasn’t useful. Japanese kids, apparently, don’t require much justification. Cars become robots, robots become cars. Well, of course they do. What do you mean, “why?” (P.S. To this day I’ve never read or seen any of the Japanese storyline.)

American kids, he thought would like to know why. Did I think we could develop this toy concept for comics, animation and other entertainment the way we developed G.I. JOE?  Sure. I didn’t mention the Mysterons, but, hey, if I could do it once, I figured I could do it again. I had to wonder, though, whether the Knickerbocker Mysterions somehow inspired Hasbro’s acquisition of the Transformers toys and technology.

Following the success of G.I. JOE, these toy developments had become a regular thing. When possible, I gave the development job to an editor or key freelance creator as a perk. Developments paid very well. I thought that it was time to give Denny O’Neill a crack at one of these, and Denny was always up for making extra money.

I met with Denny and gave him some foundation concepts. Fed him his lines a little. I always did that with these toy gigs, because I had been the one meeting with the client, and also I had the most background working with toy companies. I had learned to think “toyetically,” as they say. What I proposed was completely different from my Mysterions story. And, better, I think. If the Hasbro people had read my Mysterions treatment, well, I didn’t want them to think I was a one-trick pony.

Denny wanted the job, wanted the dough, but I don’t think his heart was in it. He had a disdain, I think, for “toy books.” The Marvel mainstream characters were modern mythology. The toys were, well, toys. What Denny delivered was unusable. Cranked out, pithless stuff. I paid him anyway. There’s also a proper way to write these things that’s part pitch piece, part story. You have to convey the sizzle, write it with some sturm und drang, with Flight of the Valkyries playing in the background. A few football clichés help. “He would not be denied!”

So, I wrote the backstory/treatment. Free. I usually did such things no extra charge. I considered it part of the Editor in Chief job. I think my treatment is floating around on the web somewhere. And, I actually have the original around here in one of the many storage boxes piled up in my living room awaiting sorting. The cats just love scratching those boxes into cardboard confetti, by the way. It’s a constant struggle to protect the contents from errant claws…. But I digress.

As stated, the treatment was all new, unrelated to the Mysterions treatment. And, the only thing of Denny’s I kept, as I recall, was the name of the Autobots’ ship, “Auntie.” I have become convinced, also, that he named Optimus Prime. It’s not unlike a name I might come up with, but it’s very much in the style of the erudite Mister O’Neill, full of scope, dignity and power. By the way, “Transformers,” “Autobots” and “Decepticons” came from Hasbro. (See below where a respondent rebuts this.) Bob Prupis and the Hasbro troops liked the treatment.

(ASIDE: I had the pleasure of meeting the real Holly Hobbie once, creator of the eponymous character. Brilliant, talented woman. I have an autographed copy of her book.)

Once Hasbro signed off on the treatment, we began work on the comics. I assigned the series to editor Bob Budiansky. Bob was (and probably still is) smart, hardworking, creative, organized, detail-conscious and above all a good editor. And then I’m a little fuzzy on the details. I’ve heard that Bob says a number of names we (Marvel) proposed for the robots were rejected by Hasbro. I don’t doubt Bob, who is a solid citizen as well as a talented creator and effective editor. I just don’t remember. Maybe Bob or Jim Salicrup, if you read this, can shed some light. I don’t think I was very hands-on at that point. At any rate, Bob eventually was pressed into service creating names and dossiers for the robots and he did a terrific job.

Meanwhile, treachery was afoot…. Hasbro’s advertising agency was Griffin-Bacal. They had great aspirations regarding the Hasbro account. They wanted to run Hasbro’s entire marketing effort. And they wanted to be Hasbro’s go-to creative resource, which WE were rapidly becoming. This isn’t pure speculation. Tom Griffin and Joe Bacal were fairly clear about that at several of our meetings. I seem to recall that there was a personal relationship between one of the Hasbro top brass and either Tom or Joe. College roommates or some such. Whatever. There was a connection that tilted the playing field.

Griffin-Bacal increasingly insinuated itself between Marvel and Hasbro. We found ourselves dealing less and less with Bob Prupis and the Hasbro boys’ toys guys and more and more with G-B and Sunbow, their executive production arm. Sunbow had been founded, I think, to oversee the production of the G.I. JOE commercials a couple of years earlier. Sunbow not only came between Marvel and Hasbro, but also between Marvel Comics and our animation studio, Marvel Productions. Sunbow’s creative efforts, as near as I could tell, consisted of removing our cover sheets from whatever we created and stapling on their cover sheets.

As described earlier, there was generally a strained relationship between Marvel Productions and Marvel Comics anyway. Possibly because we brought in almost all their business, we did the foundation creative work for everything they worked on and we were successful, making money. Meanwhile, they created little that was useful and they were losing money by the truckload. Jealous, maybe? Whatever.

P.S. The studio actually managed to keep their staggering losses hidden for a while. More on that later.

David DePatie, in particular, for some reason, hated the comics. He hated the fact that the word “Marvel” was part of Marvel Productions’ name. While he was top dog at Marvel Productions, he refused to have Spider-Man’s image as part of their logo or trade dress. He wanted nothing to do with comics or comics people. Therefore, I believe, he was delighted to have Sunbow elbow its way in between us.

In 1984, President Jim Galton hired an experienced children’s programming executive named Margaret Loesch, at first as Marvel’s liaison with the studio and the TV business. She worked at 387 Park Avenue South with us publishing types for a few months.  I liked her. She was (is) scary smart, knew her business like we knew ours and she liked the comics! She respected our creativity. After a while, she was moved out to the West Coast and installed as the President and CEO of Marvel Productions. Over DePatie. Heeheehee. Margaret “Marvelized” the studio, making Spider-Man part of their trade ID. She even had installed a sculpted FIGURE OF SPIDER-MAN CRAWLING UP THE SIDE OF THEIR BUILDING! Hoo-ha!

After a while, realizing how deep the animosity toward the comics people ran among some of her execs, Margaret invited me out to spend some time at the studio, and see whether we could forge more cooperation between our people and her people. I think I tied it in with the San Diego trip that year. 1984? 1985? I don’t remember. Possibly, I had one or more of our editors along with me.

Margaret called a meeting. It included DePatie, Margaret, me and a few other people of hers and ours. Margaret stated the goal: working better together. I said that I thought we comics people could be a good creative resource for the studio, that we could, perhaps, do some development work for them. DePatie, who had been simmering from the moment he walked into the room, blew up. He launched into a diatribe about how ugly, amateurish, unreadable and stupid our comics were. Complete crap. There was nothing useful that we could possibly do.

I pointed out that we had created G.I. JOE and TRANSFORMERS. DePatie said that we had NOTHING TO DO WITH TRANSFORMERS. That took me by surprise. I had my Hasbro file with me. I pulled out my TRANSFORMERS treatment. I said I wrote this. HE CALLED ME A LIAR, insisted that SUNBOW had written that treatment, that Sunbow had done all the development. He got up and stormed out of the room. So much for cooperation. Margaret apologized. She said she’d address the situation. But nothing much changed during the rest of my time at Marvel.

P.S. As far as I know, with regard to G.I. JOE and TRANSFORMERS Sunbow never created or contributed anything.

"By the way, 'Transformers,' 'Autobots' and 'Decepticons' came from Hasbro."

Not quite. These names were coined by Griffin Bacal, the advertising agency working for Hasbro at that time. Joe Bacal's son Jay is said to have introduced the name "Transformers".

I intereviewed Hasbro's former head of R&D, George Dunsay, a few years ago. Here's his side of the story.

I find it interesting to see how he still viewed things strictly from a "product" side of things. That was in fact one of the main problems Hasbro had in those early years. They viewed "characters" as easily disposable marketing packages, and were taken by surprise when young fans were upset by the 1986 animated movie, which killed off established characters in an almost cynical manner to make room for new "product".

During the interview, Dunsay (who showed a surprisingly sharp recollection of details) still showed his incapability of understanding that it was mainly the characters that sold the Transformers brand to kids, not the products. (Although, of course, ultimately both had to be good for the brand as a whole to have lasting power. There's a reason why Transformers is still successful today, whereas GoBots have become a footnote in history.)

There's also the aspect of the cartoon, which occasionally flat out ignored aspects of the mythos as developed by Marvel. I'm looking at you, "janitor of Cybertron" Shockwave. Having read your recollection of the cartoon folks' attitude to you comic guys, I don't find it hard to see why. There's also one of the cartoon's writers (Donald F. Glut) who has repeatedly shown a very cynical, dismissive attitude when looking back at his work on the show. (I also happen to find his episodes to be among the worst, coincidentally enough.)