"Pope John Paul II was extremely popular in the world at the time; he was traveling much more than the old popes did previously. And he was actually coming to Japan."
John Paul II was the first pontiff to visit the country. The pope arrived in Japan in February 1981, to a small but enthusiastic welcome.
The pope's visit galvanized Pelc, who was still riding high on the success of the St. Francis comic. He began looking into the possibility of producing another religious-themed comic for Marvel.
A friend of Gene's introduced him to Father Mieczyslaw Malinski, who was a friend of the pope's back in Poland during the war. Fr. Malinski apparently consulted with the pope himself about what he thought about the idea of turning his story into a comic.
According to Pelc, John Paul II was supportive of the idea, as long as Fr. Malinski himself worked with the comic book team on the project.
So, the Marvel team was off to the races yet again. The first step? Research. And a lot of it.
Most of the information came from Fr. Malinski, but the story still had to be adapted to fit into the panels and speech bubbles.
That task fell to Steven Grant, a young freelance comic book artist who at the time was living in New York and working for Marvel. He had heard that Marvel was producing a second religious-themed comic, but he didn't think much of it- he assumed that Mary Jo Duffy would be tasked with writing this one, too.
Instead, Marvel's editor-in-chief called Grant into his office and asked him to take on the task of writing the John Paul II comic book.
"I got involved because I was expendable at the time," Grant told CNA.
"I wasn't one of the artists they particularly wanted writing the Fantastic Four that month," he laughed.
"And they knew I was Catholic- that was my big credential."
For Grant, working on a comic book about John Paul II- which the team always referred to as "the Pope Book"- was both ordinary, in the sense that the writing process was not markedly different than other comic books; and extraordinary, given that the subject matter was not only a living person, but also the leader of a 1-billion strong worldwide religion.
"No one was worried about offending him, but there was a lot of room to offend a lot of people if we did a bad job with it," he said.
Bumps in the road
The project experienced two major roadblocks the year before it was released, the first of which was the attempt on John Paul's life in May 1981, in the midst of the comic's production.
Instead of dropping the project, the Marvel team wrote the events of the assassination into the book itself.
In addition, communicating with Fr. Malinski would prove more difficult than the team at Marvel had expected.
On Dec. 13, 1981, a general named Wojciech Jaruzelski appeared on television sets throughout Poland. In a video message repeated over and over again, the general declared martial law, and ordered troops to suppress the Solidarity movement, a trade union rooted in Catholic principles that opposed Communism.
Many striking Solidarity workers would die in the next few days, as Polish troops fired into groups of them.
After John Paul's visit to his native Poland in 1979, it would be another decade before the Solidarity Party in Poland, with the pope's encouragement, would finally gain a majority in Parliament, and, largely peacefully, the country would shrug off the shackles of Communism.
To make matters worse, the turmoil in Poland was taking place in the middle of the comic book's production schedule, and the Marvel team needed Fr. Malinski's insights in order to get the comic book written.
The Communists restricted much of the communications in and out of Poland during that time. Pelc said he remembers receiving smuggled communications from Fr. Malinski, which he brought to his father in New York to have translated from Polish to English.
Apart from Fr. Malinski's contributions, Grant says he simply put his nose to the grindstone and read up on as much as he could about the pope's life.
"It was a little pre-internet," Grant chuckled.
"I figured anything I found three or four references to was probably accurate."
His total research spanned about two months, he says, but the actual writing process was only a couple of weeks long, spurred on by Marvel's tight production schedules.
Legacy
Finally, in 1982, the comic book hit the shelves. Thanks in large part to Catholic agencies buying up the edition, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million copies made their way into the world.
For a young comic book artist, it was quite the windfall. Grant said he was able to pay off his student loans when he received the royalties for the comic the following year.
So, did the pope himself ever get a chance to see himself as a Marvel hero? According to Pelc, he did. A Marvel executive flew to Rome and presented the pope with a leatherbound edition.
The success of the first two religious-themed comic books led to a third, this time about another future saint- and friend of John Paul's- Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
Although Pelc was not able to assist with that project, that comic also proved successful, though it was the last of the major religious-themed comics that Marvel produced. That comic even won a Catholic Press Association award in 1984.
In the four decades since the John Paul II comic book's release, several members of the team that worked on it, including the artist who created the drawings, have died.
Pelc and Grant have gone their separate ways. Grant is still a freelance comic writer, and does writing work for Marvel "once in a blue moon" when they call him up.
Though the "Pope book" remains just one of the hundreds of projects that Grant has worked on over the years, he said he remembers walking into his local laundromat in New York a few months after the comic's release, and being surprised to see the comic's cover framed and hung proudly on the wall.
Though Grant never told the owners of the laundromat- clearly devout Catholics- that he was the author of the comic, he said it brought him pride that they valued it so highly.
Pelc, who still lives in Tokyo, owns a company that sells merchandise for musical artists. He said he still gets asked to this day- mostly by parishioners at the Franciscan Chapel Center- about Marvel's religious comics, he says.
On the side, Pelc still has a passion for telling compelling Catholic stories. He is currently working on a book about the late 16th-century 26 Christian martyrs of Japan, and hopes eventually to adapt the story into a screenplay.
For his part, Pelc says he thinks it unlikely that a company like Marvel would produce something like this again. But he's glad that by means of the "Pope book," he and Grant and the entire team were able to tell a good story, in a world inundated by bad stories.
"That man deserved to be known by more than just people who go to church. He was an everyman pope, and I, being Polish, loved him," he reflected.
Note: This story was adapted from an episode of Catholic News Agency's podcast, CNA Newsroom. Click here to listen to the full story.
Jonah McKeown is a staff writer and podcast producer for Catholic News Agency. He holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and has worked as a writer, as a producer for public radio, and as a videographer. He is based in St. Louis.