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Exposed: Myths of Marvel's Silver Age - Part 1

BACK IN THE EARLY 1960s , Marvel comics was a small publishing house that no one really cared about. After some back luck and at least one disastrous business decision during the 1950s, owner-publisher Martin Goodman, who was married to Stan Lee's mother's niece, was presiding over a company that had definitely seen better days. But before I get too deeply into that, let's first pause to expose one of the minor myths of Marvel - that Stan Lee got his job because he was related to Martin Goodman.  It wasn't publisher Martin Goodman who got Stan Lee his job at Timely (later Marvel) in 1941, but Stan's Uncle Robbie Solomon, who was also Goodman's brother-in-law. In fact, Stanley Martin Leiber (I'm pretty sure the "Martin" was a coincidence) was largely unknown to Goodman. It was Stan's uncle, Robbie Solomon, who secured an interview for Stan with then-Timely editor Joe Simon - and probably pressured Simon to hire young Leiber - that resulted in S...
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Marvel's Weird One-Shots (or, Hey ... where's issue 2?)

THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1960s was a strange time for Marvel Comics. Stan Lee had established a strong line of comic books by 1966, and was less restricted by distributor Independent News' eight-titles-a-month rule. With a roster of 20 titles, many of them monthly, Martin Goodman was also sneaking in Annuals (which seemed to be exempt from the distributors' monthly limit) and some puzzling one-shots. I have no recollection of when I first saw Marvel Super-Heroes 1 (Oct 1966). And back when I was twelve, it never occurred to me to question why a comic was published. I'm sure I would have thought it was simply a companion magazine to the other giant comics I loved so much, Marvel Tales and Marvel Collectors' Item Classics . Expensive though they were at 1/6, almost double the price of a regular comic, they provided me and many other Marvel latecomers easy access to the earliest Marvel stories. I think at the time I had already picked up Avengers 2 and Daredevil 1 from...
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Some DC Comics of the 1960s I did like

BY THE BEGINNING OF 1968 , I was a confirmed Marvelite. I devoured every word Stan Lee wrote and had only contempt for the offerings of DC Comics, especially given the bad taste the Batman TV show had left. But as I approached my fourteenth birthday, some NEW comics appeared in the newsagents that caught my attention. And incredibly, they were DCs. As noted in an earlier blog entry, I had been a big fan of Steve Ditko's version of Spider-Man and had been hugely disappointed when he left the title and Marvel. At the time, I wasn't aware of his work at Charlton Comics on Captain Atom , though I do remember seeing reprints of some of those stories in Alan Class' British black and white reprint comics. So when I came across a copy of Showcase 73 (Apr 1968) in a local newsagent, with the instantly recognisable Ditko cover, I plonked down my shilling without a moment's hesitation. The first appearance of The Creeper in Showcase 73 (Apr 1968) marked the return of Steve Dit...
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I said, Don't Mess with the logo!

BACK IN THE LAST CENTURY I earned my living in the magazine business ... and the prevailing wisdom at the time was that you didn't ever - under any circumstances - mess with the magazine's logo. In fact, any kind of change to the magazine's masthead was frowned upon, and even re-branding exercises were viewed with much suspicion. In the last entry in this blog, I looked at the many times that Marvel Comics changed their magazine's logos during the 1960s ... it all seemed so much easier then. But even less acceptable was the idea that you could transform the comic's logo for just one issue for, oh I don't know ... Dramatic Effect. From a marketing perspective, that's an even bigger risk than changing the logo as part of the natural evolution of a magazine's masthead Strangely, though this blog focusses on Marvel Comics, and I've always maintained Stan Lee was far more willing to experiment with different approaches to comics and storytelling than his...
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Marvel Masterwork Pin-ups

AT THE DAWN OF MARVEL COMICS , back in 1961, Editor Stan Lee must have known he had a big hill to climb. He presided over a comic line that had once been the largest in the business, and was now one of the smallest. This wasn't due to Lee's poor handling of the comics, but a direct result of publisher Martin Goodman's unsound business decisions. In 1957, Goodman had decided to close down his own Atlas magazine distribution company and  strike a deal with the third party distributor American News to get his publications to the stands. Just months later, American News went out of business, leaving Goodman's magazines, including the comics, with no route to the newsstands. In the end, Goodman was able to do a deal with arch-rivals Independent News (distributors of DC Comics), but was forced to accept an eight titles per month cap on his comics line. At the beginning of 1959, the old Atlas Comics company was limping along, using the few artists who'd stuck with Stan thr...
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