Now dont get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed my years at Marvel. However ... Marvel Licensing – I’ve met many really stupid people during my life but the goldbrickin’ meatheads who really take the literal cake have to be the Marvel Licensing Dept. I first realised their capacity for gormlessness in my second week at Marvel. At that time I was writing a couple of strips for the Daily Mirror. While at a Mirror lunch, their strips editor told me that he had been trying to talk to Marvel’s Licensing Dept regarding running the Spidey strip, but they wouldn’t return his phonecalls. Back at Arundel House I headed for the top floor. The Licensing Dept lurked there with their curtains and carpets while editorial had floorboards and broken chairs and desks. I told the Head of Marketing about the Mirror and they replied with a disinterested: ‘Oh, okay.’ They never did get back to the Mirror. This proved to be typical of their working methods. A few weeks later I had a call from them at my office desk, 2 flights down. It was a complaint. ‘Tim, every time we bring a client up to our office in the lift we pass your floor and we see scruffy people dressed in t-shirts and jeans. It’s really not a good first impression for new clients.’ Moment’s silence as I tasted last Saturday’s lunch. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I replied. ‘That would be our artists and writers. You know? The people without who none of us would have a job.’ That was it. From that moment, they loathed me and the feeling was mutual. I got Jane Asher to bake a cake for Spidey’s 30th anniversary. What a hoohah that created. They demanded to see Jane’s cake designs before she baked. Jane didn’t work from designs. ‘That won’t do,’ say the spotted dicks. ‘Make her draw up designs or the whole thing is off.’ Now the promise of the cake had allowed me to secure a place on 7 TV and radio shows to spread the Marvel word. Also, the press had agreed to turn up to photograph Spidey and Jane with the cake. That’s a whole heap of promotion for the price of a cake. The feel in the editorial dept was that they were a bunch of talentless jerks but that we could humour them by getting one of our artists to sketch up a cake design. And so they did. My nemesis upstairs, a broad named Vicky, studied the design as if it meant something, and gave me the okay to proceed. There were many other cake hiccups along the way which resulted in us getting Jane to make 2 cakes in case one of them ‘wasn’t right’. Jane was lovely and shared my opinion of the Licensing Dept. I ended up telling her to charge the earth for Cake #2 as I no longer cared about saving Marvel pennies. The upshot of the whole thing was that Sainsbury’s decided to market the Jane Asher Spider-Man cake. Alas, Marvel stuck their stupid Licensing nose in again. To waste ever more money they had brought in Freud Communication to help them with their marketing plans. Freud charged the earth for doing bugger all. None of these idjuts had a clue about what Marvel was or could be. Anyhow, next thing I know is that I get this letter from a charming lady at Sainsbury’s. Freud had written a crappy press release about the cake that was utter garbage (the press release not the cake which was delicious). Just another day in the life of the Marvel Head of Special Projects. I remember when I got Melvyn Bragg to produce a show on Marvel and Marvel UK for national TV, the Licensing Dept said: ‘It’s not the right time to do this. We would have waited another 2 years before doing it.’ Number 1) They could never have done it, and Number 2) 2 years later Marvel UK was dead and buried in Tunbridge Wells.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 22:53:39 +0000
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