BACK WHEN I was a kid, very few television or movie producers would have dreamed of looking to comic books for source material. Certainly, the old poverty row studios, poor in ideas and budgets, might have occasionally turned to comic book and comic strip characters, but that was about it. For obvious reasons, comic strip characters made it onto the screen first. Original comic book characters didn't really kick off in a big way until Superman showed just how viable heroes created specifically for comic books could be. The earliest live-action comic strip movie I have is Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). I know Tarzan wasn't originally a comic strip character, but I'd argue that the success of the Hal Foster daily comic strip running in hundreds of newspapers in the USA from January 1929 was almost certainly what caught the attention of the the great MGM Studios. Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) was a major movie from a Hollywood's biggest and most successful studio MGM. Olympic ...
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...