Mark Gruenwald

In 1982, when he was 29 years old, Mark Gruenwald moved into a private fort in a high rise office on Park Avenue South. He was at that time an editor at Marvel Comics (an exalted title — his pay was on par with any other editor), and he had been tasked with assembling the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: a comprehensive catalog of the biographies, appearances, powers, relatives, team affiliations, hair colors, eye colors, aliases, headquarters, vehicles, and chronological first appearances of every character then or formerly appearing in a Marvel comic.

During the course of the series’ preparation, Gruenwald and his team of recruits on the project — assistant and close friend Mike Carlin, and production artists Eliot Brown and Jack Morelli — constructed for themselves a secret headquarters within Gruenwald and Carlin’s office: requisitioning pillows from couches in neighboring offices; warming themselves with a running Xerox machine; and, during periods requiring consecutive all-nighters, secretly invading the private shower of Marvel’s president Jim Galton. The fruit of their labors, when it was finished, encompassed 15 monthly issues, totaled 330 pages of densely-worded content, became one of the highest-selling comics of 1983, and by the time it concluded was already obsolete. The year after it finished, Marvel immediately began publishing the whole thing again, this time under the title of the “Deluxe Edition.”

The private clubhouse, or treehouse, was something of a motif in the life of Mark Gruenwald. He had one in the early '60s, custom-built above his family’s garage in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which served as the headquarters of Gruenwald’s JLA Club, formed in celebration and imitation of the comic book heroes which, then and later, predominated in Gruenwald’s life.

Photo of Mark Gruenwald by Rick Parker

That same Oshkosh club house, illustrated and lightly fictionalized, would show up in the pages of a Marvel Comic 20 years later, when Gruenwald’s hero Quasar came home to Wisconsin and encountered a young boy named Billy, who spent his days in a treehouse lined with pictures and news clippings about Marvel heroes, and claimed to have secretly created them all. “When I say ‘create,’ I don’t mean like I created something out of nothing,” Billy tells Quasar. “Everyone knows matter can’t be created or destroyed. What I did was take people who already existed and turned them into super heroes whose names, costumes, and powers I invented. I just turned you into Quasar.”

Thus runs the origin story of Mark Gruenwald, and origin stories are always the most interesting ones, aren’t they? For a decade and a half, Gruenwald had an outsized importance at Marvel, but always just in the background. The right-hand man of two consecutive editors-in-chief, he never himself assumed that exalted post, dying young of a heart attack at only 43. In his brief biography, Paul Allen has written a slender volume of impressive depth and research, and at last given to Gruenwald the official handbook entry he deserved.

To begin with that origin: Gruenwald’s early years were not, as Allen tells it, those of a stereotypically outcast comics geek. Gruenwald did love comics, it’s true, and even drew some of his own, but always socially, and not seemingly at the expense of a normal life and personality. Gruenwald excelled in classes up through high school, bonded with like-minded friends, had a couple of steady girlfriends, and both wrote and starred in a rock opera musical in his senior year. Allen provides a picture of Mark just before graduation, looking handsome as a British mod in his natty suit, Clark Kent glasses, and mile-long sideburns.

Things weren’t quite as halcyon in college — Gruenwald’s golden age may, indeed, have been 12 — and his solution was to pour himself more and more into comics. The decision paid off as intended, but Allen quotes Gruenwald taking a surprisingly ambivalent view of his own choices: “By studying the masters and not-so-masters of comic art and disregarding other influences, I was ensuring that I would never become more than watered-down versions of the artists I admired … I should have drawn from life,” he said.

What he drew from instead were the lives of the saints, or at least the closest thing that would pass for them in 1976. The result was two publications, a fanzine called Omniverse and a pseudo-doctoral thesis called A Treatise on Reality in Comic Literature, both intended to comprehensively systematize the multiple universes of different comic book companies (the “multiverse,” a concept popularized by the author Michael Moorcock) into a single shared gestalt (the eponymous “omniverse”).

Whether (or how deep) Gruenwald had his tongue in cheek when he set out on his project is unclear, but Allen describes it with the reverence due to comics’ own Council of Nicea: “TORICL … was a bravura synthesis of and expansion upon the work of the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the willful suspension of disbelief), Jorge Luis Borges (“The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Aleph”), Larry Niven (“All the Myriad Ways”), Philip Jose Farmer (the six-book World of Tiers series), and David Gerrold (The Man Who Folded Himself).”

Well, maybe. It was certainly an expansion on Roy Thomas, who, along with fellow first-generation fan Jerry Bails, had played the formative role in cataloging, systemetizing, and rationalizing the hodgepodge of adventure stories they loved. It was an impulse fans could relate to in the 1960s and ‘70s (the more irrational and incomprehensible our real world seems, the more appealing a self-contained and entirely predictable comic book world becomes), and it brought Gruenwald to the attention of Marvel’s new editor in chief, Jim Shooter, who brought the Omniverse publisher onto Marvel’s staff in 1978. It would be his clubhouse for the rest of his life.

Like Shooter, Gruenwald had a mission and an ethos as editor, and Allen outlines it succinctly. “Fundamental to Mark’s approach was to treat Marvel comics as an ongoing account of real events that happened in some alternate reality,” he writes. “This meant that writers and artists were transcribers and interpreters of events, not creators of them … transcribers might occasionally make mistakes, whether due to imprecise insight, subjective bias, or an undisciplined grasp of the process of documenting realities. As both writer and editor, Mark took it upon himself to correct as many of those mistakes, inconsistencies, and confusions as he could and, in the process, connect seemingly disparate story threads.”

In editorial practice, this had mixed results. Allen somewhat euphemistically describes Gruenwald’s approach as a desire “to serve as an integral part of the creative team,” but from the creative teams’ perspective this could look like backseat driving, or worse. Allen mentions the conflict between Gruenwald and Avengers writer Roger Stern over Gruenwald’s insistence that team leader Monica Rambeau (a Stern creation) be removed from her post; he doesn’t mention that the leader who Gruenwald put in her place, Captain America, happened to have a solo series written by Gruenwald himself.

Alas, Gruenwald’s own record as a writer is harder to defend than his record as an editor, though Allen gives it the old college try. Gruenwald’s lamentation about not studying artists outside of comics might have extended to writers, too: his most celebrated work (his long run on Captain America and his dystopic self-contained maxiseries Squadron Supreme) is filled with scattershot interesting ideas, but always executed in the mode of a Stan Lee comic circa 1965.

But Gruenwald was doing it just at the moment when mainstream superhero comics (and their fans) were taking self-conscious pains to become respectable as grown-up literature. No surprise that Squadron Supreme (which really did, for all its limitations, explore the same questions about superhero authority that Warren Ellis would make a career on later) was mostly discussed at the time in unfavorable comparisons to Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, which debuted the same year.

But the Gruenwald we remember isn’t the writer, but the personality (both human and editorial) that served as the glue of Marvel Comics for a decade and change, and Allen is adept at giving us the man in full. “Mark brought a mischievous spirit and an infectious mentality to work with him each day,” he writes. “His sense of humor … tilted heavily toward the lowbrow, absurd, and punny. He reveled in slapstick and pratfalls, the more over the top the better. Scatological humor was always funny, especially farts, which mark called ‘making air biscuits.’”

This Gruenwald is happily preserved in episodes of Cheap Laffs, the public access sketch comedy show that Gruenwald made alongside Marvel colleagues Carlin and Brown, and guest-starring various other Marvel staffers. As sketch comedy goes, it’s at about the level you’d expect from New York Public Access (it was still better than Saturday Night Live in the Joe Piscopo years), and it can be painful to watch in large doses, but there’s no question he’s having fun.

And this was the jovial, prank-inclined, we’re-all-in-it-together Gruenwald known with affection within Marvel and among the fans to whom he wrote in his “Mark’s Remarks” columns. As Allen points out, what Gruenwald had done was to create from whole cloth the goofy, wild, comradely Marvel Bullpen that Stan Lee had only fantasized about 20 years earlier. For once, Gruenwald really had done the impossible: taken an imaginary universe from the pages of a comic book and made it real.

It couldn’t last, of course, and Gruenwald’s constructed reality never could wall itself off from the real one completely. Quite happily in one respect: in 1992, he married Catherine Schuller, a total novice to comics but an eager convert, and a perfect complement to Gruenwald. One friend describes the change in Gruenwald’s personality after meeting her as, “like turning on a light.” His life with her and his daughter Sara became a refuge over the next few years, when the other reality of comics ceased to be one.

In 1994, Marvel Comics’ new ownership under Revlon magnate Ron Perelman put into practice what they grandly dubbed the “Marvelution”. What this actually meant was that the formerly tight-knit and coherent Marvel line that Gruenwald had overseen for a decade would be carved up into five semi-independent editorial fiefdoms, each with their own set of logos, branding, and internal continuities. Editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco was shown the door, and it went without saying that the notion of a company-wide “continuity cop” was wholly anathema to the new spirit.

It was a cruel blow for Gruenwald, and the truth of the matter was even crueler: it wasn’t only Marvel shareholders who didn’t much care for Gruenwald’s style anymore, it was the fans themselves. This was the world of Image Comics, endless relaunches, and collectible acetate covers: the most appealing text you could put on a comic in 1994 was the issue number 1, and there was no place for continuity in an all-relaunch world. The origin story had become the only story that mattered.

So, even after some rump version of a unified Marvel had been restored under new chief Bob Harris, Gruenwald’s world continued to contract. “Previously, when things were challenging at the editor level, Mark could take solace in the creativity of his freelance work,” Allen writes, “But even that stream had dried up.” You could find it echoed in Gruenwald’s own writing: Allen astutely notes a consistent motif of death and melancholy that runs through Gruenwald’s work, from the conclusion of Squadron Supreme to a darkly satirical Quasar storyline about a group of suicidal Watchers, the alien race tasked (like Gruenwald) with observing Marvel continuity as it happened. It was as though Gruenwald knew that the unstable gravity of his Omniverse could only hold together so long.

While on a family vacation in 1996, Gruenwald died suddenly of a heart attack. That summer, Marvel was preparing a high-profile effort to finally and formally sever several of its marquee characters from the mothership of the Marvel Universe, relaunching them under the aegis of Image Comics’ Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. Gruenwald, who had been editing those titles, would not be involved. In his book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Sean Howe writes that just before he left for his vacation, Gruenwald had picked up a preview copy of Liefeld’s Captain America #1.

And what now remains of Mark Gruenwald? Physically, famously, he willed that his ashes be mixed in with the ink on a trade paperback of Squadron Supreme – a final, Gruenwaldian morbid joke. But in spirit? The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe lives on as a nostalgic collector’s item, but its unapologetic excesses (“Blackagar Boltagon”) have become an affectionate punchline.

Gruenwald’s concept of the omniverse did have a brief but incandescent moment earlier this decade. The Marvel Cinematic Universe that had spun out of the comic line opted defiantly to make a multiplicity of universes the central premise of their films in the 2020s, and for a moment it seemed as though every movie in America had embraced the concept of multiversity (Everything, Everywhere, All At Once won an Oscar for best picture in 2022).

The pop culture moment came and went (though, if the trailers for Avengers: Doomsday are any indication, Marvel Entertainment remains firmly hitched to its chosen star), but while it seemed to matter, S.I. Rosebaum tried to understand why the multiverse notion seemed to resonate with audiences. In an article for the New York Times, Rosenbaum posited that our belief in a multiverse was rooted in our desire for a limitless set of alternate timelines and choices in which all our mistakes might have been corrected, and our lives might have turned out the way we once hoped. This was a pessimistic notion at its heart, and Rosenbaum suggested an alternative: “​​Instead of a linear, branching timeline with multiple, parallel possibilities — so much more vivid than my real life — I tried to imagine time as a sphere always expanding away from me in every direction, like the light leaving a star,” they wrote.

So instead of thinking about Gruenwald as a part of comics past, maybe it’s better to imagine him in his own perpetual present: ensconced in his clubhouse, surrounded by charts and first appearances, a singularity out of which a thousand universes can spring.

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