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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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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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Astonish: The Rise of Giant-Man

I HAVE A SPECIAL affection of the Marvel character Giant-Man, not least because he was the first ever Marvel character I came across in the winter of 1963/4. I was still in primary school and we'd been dragged off one cold morning to play football in Charlton Park, some distance from my school. I was never a fan of football, so I was more interested in a colourful American comic one of the kids had. The front cover showed a guy in a red costume trying to catch another green spinning guy, appropriately called the Human Top. The first Marvel Comic I ever saw back in the 1960s. Kirby's bird's-eye view of the action meant it wasn't immediately apparent to me that the guy in the red costume was a giant, but I figured it out once I opened the book. I leafed through the comic, noted that the red guy was called Giant-Man and could grow in size to about ten-foot tall, then handed the comic back. I pretty much immediately went back to my then-preferred DC comics - Flash , Green L...
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Messing with the Logo - A 2000AD Interlude

A COUPLE OF HUNDRED YEARS AGO, I was paid to interfere with the work of others, as member of the editorial team on 2000AD, a British weekly comic that featured mainly science-fiction oriented action stories. Later, I was briefly the Editor, a post I never sought but was rather thrust upon me - though that's a story for another time. The Galaxy's Greatest Comic has had a long tradition of both evolving and messing with the logo, much of it on my watch, but also stretching back to the dawn of time when 2000AD first began. The original dummy for the comic had the logo rendered as "AD2000", although there's no evidence to suggest that this was intended to be its final title. Dummies were produced as a matter of course for any new magazine back then as a way of demonstrating to interested parties - management, marketers, distributors - what the  final product might look like. In the US comics industry, they called them "ashcans". The final render of the log...
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