AS I NOTED in last month's blog entry, at the age of 12 I hadn't been much enamoured of John Romita's version of Spider-Man. I had been a die-hard Steve Ditko fan and, when he unceremoniously ditched the creation that had made him famous, in 1966, I struggled to warm to the new, sleek, decidedly un-nerdy version of Peter Parker. The whys and wherefores have been adequately covered in other blogs - mine and other people's. My reaction to this changing of the guard was to turn my attention firmly backwards and seek out the invaluable Marvel Tales reprints of the earlier Spider-Man stories. At first, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Stan Lee had just aped the classic DC Comics reprints of earlier stories. The cover formats of the DC 80-pagers and the early Marvel Tales were visually quite similar. Both took either panels from the stories they were reprinting or generic images of the characters and put them together in a kind of patchwork quilt of a cover -...
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...