Wrightson did very little work for Marvel. In the 1980 book, A LOOK BACK, collecting his work and retrospective of his career to that point, he explains why:
"When I first came to New York for a convention, I went up to Marvel's offices and showed them my samples. I really didn't care for the way they treated me. I wanted to see someone in charge --someone who could get me work. Instead they sent some flunky out of the office to talk to me. He must have been some lower level person who assisted in writing advertising, or some such thing. This guy comes out with the glad hand, back slapping. Everything was 'Oh yes, yes, very nice very nice.' He then asked me to do something with Marvel characters in it. By this time, I was very offended; even though as a green kid I wasn't in much position to be offended. I just did not like their attitude. "
"After I was at DC for awhile, I had trouble getting a raise, and they would not let me color my own work. I didn't like what DC was doing with a lot of their color. I ran into Marvel editor Roy Thomas at a party, and mentioned the problem. He told me to come over to Marvel and he would let me do my own coloring. I went over to Marvel's offices and made an appointment to see Marvel's founder, Stan Lee. I talked with him, and he said, 'Well, we like your work, but we will expect you to work in the Marvel style.' He explained that they liked things with thicker lines, big things in the foreground to draw you into the picture, lots of junk and facial expressions. He wanted me to take the type of facial expressions used in early silent movies and magnify that by twenty times. Again, it was a lot of smiles and back slapping and pep talk. I felt I was on a football team or something."
The extra money at Marvel was a little better, with the extra $3.50 or $4.00 a page for the coloring. The first story I did for them was a horror story, "Gargoyle Every Night". The second one was a Kull story, 'The Skull of Silence' ".
"I heard that Marvel was going to do CONAN, so I did some samples. They told me that was very nice, but not quite what they had in mind, not quite enough of the superhero. I was sitting there turning blue. What it all boiled down to was they just did not like my work on Conan. They gave me the excuse that they had promised the book to Barry Smith, but I found out later that the book hadn't been promised to him. He was getting the same runaround. They kind of threw me a bone and offered to let me do the King Kull story. I was not as excited about it as I was about doing Conan, because the character of Kull was not that clear. I never thought he was that great of a character. It was not my type of stuff with all the armies, royalty and palace intrigue and all. I was very much into the blood and guts thing at that time."
"But for some reason, I did the Kull story for them. I spent a lot of time on it, using all kinds of zip-a-tone, and leaving a lot of things in just rough outline, planning to do a lot of rendering with the color. I knew just exactly what I wanted to do with it. One of the features of the story was a skull which, when the door is opened, robs all sound. This thing drains everything of sound. How are you going to do this in a comic book? Since you cannot play with sound effects in a comic book, I figured out a way --slowly drain away the color until the scene ended up being black and white."
"I used a lot of craftint board on that job, especially the panels on pages 4 and 5. By the time the reader got over to page 5, the effect would be all black and white. The top panel on page 6 would be black and white, and then a large panel would explode into color. As the thing progresses, the whole point is that the color, symbolizing sound, slowly drains out. I thought it was a pretty good idea. Especially, since these were color comics, and the use of black and white would be very stark, very different. So, I colored the job that way until I was very pleased with it. It looked great."
"I took the completed job into Marvel and was told it was fine. Months later, the comic comes out, and everything has color on it. This despite my explanation to them of the purpose of black and white, and their complete agreement on the concept. After I complained, Roy Thomas said, 'Well, after all, these are color comics and we can't go on having black and white in color comics. We needed color in it, so we gave it to someone to color.' "
The whole job was printed badly, they must have colored and printed from poor photo-stats. I never got the originals back. I was told something happened to them. All the zip-a-tone and effects of the craftint board was cheapened and all my work was lost. All I ever received from Marvel was half-hearted apologies; that the whole thing would never happen again. It didn't, since all I did for them after that was a few covers. You couldn't get me to do another story for them."
